Disruption of Events in PvP POT's...

Our guild has recently had issues with events that we host being interrupted by "griefers". We enjoy having events every week, some of which require us holding them in our guilds PvP towns, as of late however people show up and try to disrupt them. Due to game mechanics there are currently no good ways of preventing these disruptions. As we know, players can't be banned from PvP towns. In addition, banning them from the lot is not foolproof. A lot ban only keeps them from opening doors and passing through doorways. The griefers are still able to walk on to the lot and in some cases jump over walls that are set up to keep them out. Plus there is the problem of spells with huge ranges (chain lightning) still being able to reach people on the lot.
I understand the reasoning behind not being able to ban people from a PvP town, but at this point I feel like it is causing more trouble than its worth. In the case of events that aren't being held on a lot there are absolutely no ways to keep them from disrupting activities. I know we have the option of using arena basements for some of the events, but not everything we do are just PvP matches. We also have things like siege wars, rescue the princess, and hide and seek that require the use of the entire town. In that case, if a person or group of people decide they want to destroy the event, we have no way of stopping it.
Long story short, I'd like to hear from a Dev if there are any plans or a way to prevent this type of behavior. Our guild has quite a bit of time and money invested in this game, and our events are a huge part of that. Not knowing what the future holds makes planning very difficult for us. What we would love to see, at the very least, is the ability to temporarily ban people from a PvP town (say a 4 hour ban).
I hope this post at least starts a discussion around the issue. We would love to hear thoughts or ideas on how to solve the problem. Or it would be great if Portalarium put in some type of mechanics to fix the issue. Sorry about the long post and thank you for taking the time to read it.

 

Is this not how a pvp town should be? I think the proper mechanic is to form a group and defeat the griefers. I think I understand that you want to hold events but if you want game protections in a pvp town then you essentially break pvp. Just my opinion though. Maybe you can go in friends online mode? Not sure if you can do that in a pvp town though.

 

I decided to edit this post rather than post another.
On the PoT submission form it says nothing about the PvP button removing the ability to ban people from the PoT.
So after a little research I think this maybe should be a bug report.
I see no reason that 1 out of my 3 towns should have different governor options.
I also think that in my PoT I should have the option to not play with someone else if the town is PvP or not. There are open PvP zones for that and I as a PoT owner should have the option.

So again I think this may be a bug...

Original post bellow:
I completely agree. PoTs should have some controls to stop complete anarchy. That is what PvP Zones like the shard-falls are for.
If you are trying to run a capture the flag event and someone not participating continually steals the flag, well that kills the event and basements are not large enough for 8X8 or even some of the 16X16 events I have been in.

It would be very nice to the ability to temp ban at the least upstarts that are destroying events. 45 people should not suffer because of the actions of 1-2 people. Some times days of planing and setup goes into said events and it is horrible that it can all be destroyed so easily.

Ash

 

1. You kill them and they just res and return to bother your event.
2. When event attendance is greater than 8 then friends mode will not work.

I personally would like to hold a bloody gustball event. I can not do this in a PvP town if there is someone killing the players other than the players.

Ash

 

I remember when I had my pvp town plans. There was a checkbox you had to check saying that you understood that a pvp town would flag everyone there to be freely attackable. Did they remove that? Otherwise if you do not want pvp in a pvp town, then I would personally change the town to a pve town.

 

That has not been removed. But the ability to BAN players has been removed from PvP towns.
I also was not talking about the warning button when selecting PvP. Both myself and the original poster are only bring up the point that without having the ability to remove people. Holding events in them is very difficult/impossible. If someone wants to ruin them.

 

I'm all about PvP. I love it. Its part of what I love about the game. I don't think that means people shouldn't be able to hold events in their PvP towns though. I'm not sure if you are part of the PvP scene in this game Ravicus, but I'm here to tell you, there isn't much of one. So we try to plan events and gather the community together to help promote it. Now, if all that work and planning can be completely screwed up by a couple of bad apples... That just doesn't seem right in my book. We would stop planning and holding the events, but the only people that's hurting are the active PvP'rs in the community. Its also giving the griefers exactly what they want. I think if a person invests thousands of dollars to own a town, and they want to host PvP activities there, they shouldn't be at the mercy of people that just want to destroy said events.
Otherwise your left with the prospect of no more events, which is only hurting the SotA community. That's just my two cents though.

 

There are issues w/moving things out of PvP towns for these types of events.

Parties arent big enough, there are no mechanics for Party v Party PvP (or even solo v. party in the case of duels)
Also holding most of these in PvE towns wont solve the issue of folks being able to completely disrupt them. One can steal a flag in PvE or PvP.

 

I agree 100% that griefers should be dealt with. Who has been griefing you? I think we should work as a community to just corpse camp the crap out of them so they quit the game. Griefers aren't welcome in SotA!

edit: I would release video of the actions and show the issue to the public. Let the public decide where they stand and I'm 99% sure you'll get the support you need ... that's what I did and I always got help from people.

p.s. grieving an event would require attempting to disrupt it maliciously and/or doing so with direct malicious actions or language. Killing someone in a PvP hasn't been seen as griefing in a long time. The devs responded to me with "it's in a pvp zone deal with it" and my issue was that there was NO penalties on PvP but there are now... they lose items and gold and the respawn times are longer than ever... so we as a community can handle this... the devs are no longer needed, imo, unless specific words were exchanged that break ToS.

 

But I can BAN them from a PvE town and then they only have access to the flag in single player and that should not cross over to multi.

 

I do understand your dilemma, I do. I am not trying to invalidate your argument, but instead trying to show you that there was a reason for a pvp town, and the reason for the check box. I have not been active lately as pvp and have no will to until persistence. I hope you understand that many people that pvp see and understand that if you have a pvp flag on you are attackable. You are in a pvp town with a pvp flag. If you want to hold a pve event in a pvp town then you should realize you might need protection. You could hire a guild like vengeance as they used to protect the bears tavern brawls when griefers attacked. but to use game mechanics to limit and diminish pvp in a pvp area, and ban people for wanting to pvp will IMO further ruin pvp in this game. The pvp will not grow and it probably will be nonexistent if stuff like bans happen in a pvp town. If there is something truly wrong, use the report button I guess.

 

Spot on, break out the pitchforks!!

@ashmaul Good point. Only ever owned PvP stuff, forgot about the banning from PvE towns being possible.

 

these issues should be addressed then.

 

nope no words, just event disruption like stealing flags, or fighting participants so the events can not happen.

I think the ultimate question here is: Will we have the ability to hold larger events in our PvP towns without people ruining them, will we have tools to do so?
If not then I can just not hold these types of events, but like Jar said that just hurts the community, and IMHO we should think out of the box and resolve the issues rather than stopping the events.

Ash

 

I'm going to make a few points for the devs when they get around to reading this thread. I'm going to ignore other comments in this thread because frankly, some of the people commenting (or that will eventually comment) are a distraction from finding a good solution to a real problem.

1. I'm not in favor of banning people from pvp towns. But I do understand that this doesn't help the current problems with uncontrollable griefing.
2. The failure of basic mechanics to function properly is a huge issue. Lot permissions allowing players to "jump over walls" or "cast spells through walls or on to lots" is also very troublesome and should be considered a top priority right behind overall game stability (i.e. crashes).

Even in a PVP zone, players that have housing should be afforded a safe place to rest, have a time out, and not have to look over their shoulder. This is crucial to creating an atmosphere where PVP is meaningful and players feel like PVP is less of an event and more of a lifestyle. People that say things like "Well it's open pvp so anything should go" have no idea what they're talking about and would make very poor game designers, don't listen to them, they are wrong.

PVP is a game, and games have rules. Games are better when everyone knows the rules and the rules are the same for everyone. That is why I dislike the idea of banning players from pvp towns. But that's also why I think PVP towns should have more tools to keep idiot morons that attack everything in sight just for the sake of it from having an easy path to achieve those goals. I'll give one example. Suppose you're playing a game of tag with 10 of your closest friends. Now suppose a new person shows up. You explain to the new person that the couch is base and you can't tag anyone that is sitting on the couch. That person ignores that rule and continues to tag people on the couch. Is that a fun game? No, it's not. But since in real life we can ignore that person and continue playing by ourselves, that's ok. In SOTA that's not possible in a PVP zone. Therefore, we need more tools to level the playing field. (No I don't play tag in real life. But it's an easy example for everyone to understand)

3. PVP is not the same for everyone. I'm not at all interested in scripted "events", but I understand that there are people who are interested in this. In my mind there should be a fair way to allow for "events" to function while still considering the spirit of PVP, which should allow for players to attempt to ruin those events.

4. The main tool we're missing at the moment is NPC guards. NPC guards should be deadly (15k hitpoints and do 600 points of damage a hit). NPC guards should have both melee and ranged weapons. NPC guards should essentially one hit kill anyone on their "kill on sight list". What this would do is create a quasi-zone where events can occur without having to worry about people that are just there to annoy everyone. This problem would be over.

This would just be a the first iteration of NPC guards, we could get more sophisticated than this. But for the interim this would allow pvp zones to have small pockets of "safe areas" that random griefing from unwanted "guests" would not be able to easily maneuver around, yet they still would not be outright banned.

 

Agreed, I've brought them up. Just laying low until the stability issues are worked out.

24 man parties for the win!

 

I agree, I brought up the idea of raid groups a couple yrs ago already hehe. It has been a problem for a long time.

 

I think we need to share names of griefers and target them as a community... work together here. I know OoV has a list of allies that have always answered the call and I'm 100% sure if you give me names I can help get those people camped. This game means a LOT to us and PvP is very fragile right now. My own brother and I are planning on staging fights and split guilds because our PK players are so bored they don't want to be in OoV anymore. We need a place for PKers but that is NOT something that should be allowed to be turned into grief. Let's handle this guys. Let's not wait on the devs. List some names and videos of the transgressions as evidence so you can get a group to help you split some skulls ^.^

 

I like simple solutions... just give us POT owners the ability to kick folks all the way out of town.

 

EVL has an event each week, that has a ranking system and cash prizes for people that come in 1st 2nd and 3rd place.
If the option for this event when people come and disrupt it is to just have an hour of open PvP. Then why dont we just change the event to an open PvP event with no prizes or ranking system.
Not only that, why doesnt every one have the same event since there are no other options currently in the game?
Or why dont we let the Devs know that we have identified that this is lacking, get some cool new tools so we can all have events they way we would like them?

Ash