Don't loot my armor and you might just stimulate the economy!

why in the world should anyone hold onto trash just to game a system in the first place?
fix it so it works, instead.

 

I'm actually hitting walls in my skill progression right now. I've had to lock all of my glyphs less one or two just to add a few points to my pool during a solo grind. I'll be shifting out of protected gear very soon... but don't forget, I'm the guy that got pinched for a 54k Oracle ransom. I understand the risks of losing in PVP. Losing a house deed, losing anything purchased from a COTO vendor - and losing it all. Honestly, 25k-100k worth of armor is going to be chump change compared to the firsts guy that loses a stack of Obsidian City Homes. haha

For the perception to change, everyone has to make the effort... I can blow through armor and stacks of reagents and it won't matter a bit unless people feel confidence in the PVP mechanic. That safe feeling a player gets from knowing their armor won't be stripped goes a long way to generating player confidence in the PVP game mechanic. I still think locking equipped items out of the Oracle ransom mechanic would be a great step forward in getting people wearing crafted gear, breaking/buying crafted gear and participating in honorable Open PVP.

 

I'm just trying to help. Just some advice on how the game is currently working. Of course I want them to make changes and fix the problem. Take the advice, or don't, I really don't care.

Edit: to answer your question - you lose less gold if you're flagged and you get killed. That's why you carry trash.

 

Shouldnt the Devs had anticipated this? I cant understand how a borked system like this had been put into place in the first place. Its too complicated and plainly doesnt work. While at the same time introducing more inventory management tasks. Which is contraproductiv for the game and gameflow.

May i ask everyone here whats so bad about everything not on your boddy is lootable? For me thats already a big compromise because i am a friend of full-looting. But most people cant seem to live the concept. What is left to loose if you keep everything on your boddy? Its just what you acquired during grinding or your PvP "session" from other players. Thats a very small risk. Still, most players think thats too much and rather live with borked system forcing them to micro manage their invenrtory to circiumvent poorly designed game mechanics? Way to go.

Agreed

See above. Make everything not on the body lootable.

Ive heard this one a lot around here. Could you give some examples of "purposefull PvP"? Is it "purposefull" if the other player belongs to a guild you are at war with? Is it enough that one person supports the oracle and the other is against it? All artificial, empty reasons to have a fight.

"Purposefull PvP" in MMOs evolves around resource control not around some artificially designed lore. You can create lore to create a background for this fights but lore is not enough to create the conflict. I mean "Hey, you there, Elf, prepare to die because i am a mighty Dwarf and our races are at war.", or. "Hey you SIr, i see you support he oracle?! Prepare to die you disgusting example of an Oracle Slave".. i mean ... really?

Then i wouldnt expect any conflict creating content from the Devs, from the planed "epic story line" within the next 2 years. They just dont seem to have the resources.

// Armar

 

Yep.

Ecactly. "Problem here" is that the player base is too low and maybe the cost of running a second server are too high atm. But IMO having a PvP+ and PvP- server seems to be the only solutions to maybe make this game fly. This might even be a chance to get some of the old UO fanbase back into the game! Too much time and resources are beeing spend into catering to too different playstyles. Which in the end, doesnt seem to work at all.

// Armar

 

Thats a genious solution and surely a lot of fun time spent splitting those stacks. Maximizing inventory management time is crucial ingredient to every successfull game.....

// Armar

 

There have been posts for years since the initial announcement of the ransom system. I don't think there has ever been public support for it. The dev's seem to have an attachment to it for some unknown reason.

Simple. The cost of PvP.

Too much cost and people do not cross over into PvP. One time in the history of SotA the dev's believed that removing barriers to crossing from PvE to PvP and back to PvE was a major design goal. Not sure they believe that now.

SotA is a story driven game. The 40ish hours of content is not the end of the story for the episode. The delivery of content on a regular basis is... or was because SotA so far has gone the way of UO (Unable to deliver the story and settles for a lesser form of life)

The story, the moral system, the civil way of life with less than civil cultures breaking the peace when it gets a chance. This is where PvP must live. If not for ties to the story PvP has nothing.

 

Did you ever play a full loot MMO? As soon as you are competitive you dont have a lot of costs/spend too much in-game time to support PvP. You win and you loose. If you win you get the other parties loot, you loose, you loose your stuff. Now, if you do a compromise and your basic equipment like readied weapons and your armor/cloth are not lootable, there is not a lot to loose. Just what you acquired during your PvP or PvE session. And you can always "run back home" to secure your stuff at the bank or in your home. In SotA you even cant get attacked most of the way because of the overland map.

The system is hard for newcomers but a guild can usually protect you from beeing killed and looted as a n00b too often. It will happen, off course....

IMO it plainly doesnt work. Everyone should see this.

We can consider us lucky if they deliver the promised single player content. I wouldnt count on any real multiplayer/PvP content coming in the foreseeable future.

Like i stated in another post: PvP conflict usually evolves around resources. You can create a story setting to support this and add to it by having "actor" driven content but this is difficult and requires a lot of resources. I cant say i liked the player events in Shadowbane a lot. Especially because someone would get an item of awesomeness at the end of the event. Then, think of the timezones.With only one server and players coming from a lot of different timezones its hard to place those events.

// Armar

 

oh i know, we all are here for that very thing, i'd like to believe. i'm of the opinion that if it shouldn't have to happen, you do it a couple times to test, then do what is right regardless of the outcome, so they can collect the data on it. posting about it, stating dates/times you held the trash vs dates/times you didn't, would give them a range of times to pull data on your avatar, and maybe figure out what the heck went wrong so they can fix it, too.

 

One has to expect losing quite a lot battles in order to learn, adapt and win a few in return. This is PvP 101.

If losing gold and/or equipment is a recurring cost, it will eventually:

• discourage experimentation.
• raise the entry level for participation.
• encourage exploits that directly and negatively influence other players.
• encourage farming and grinding in order to participate.
• encourage ganking and/or fighting in larger numbers.
• discourage solo players or players with smaller groups.
• paint this picture that the poor stays poor and the rich get richer.
• prevent you from participating at all if you end up losing too much.

So while I have my own opinion(s) on the matter, I can totally understand why others would be squeamish to flag PvP.

For example, if you lose your weapon, you can no longer fight.

 

Yup, good post. Cost includes the cost of lost time. Speaking for myself, I PVP as a solo player in other games all the time where PVP is about the sheer fun of the fight, not about lost time, which as a working professional is precious to me. SOTAs system makes PVP be about gear, and lost gear means lost time. As a solo player, why PVP here knowing that gank squads will regularly roll me just for the hope of gear? The risk of time lost backtracking to regularly replace gear outweighs any reward a solo player can receive in this scenario. For that reason, I probably wont bother with SOTA PVP until I GM many skills. I appreciate that others have more time and are less worried about losing it, and see looting as creating purpose. But it does reduce PVP participants, as you said.

 

Yes, but these seem to be hypothetical situations. Have you actually tried pvp? Because as long as you have a decent supply of gold you can NEVER lose your gear. And if you set up your inventory to game the system (which in my opinion you should be doing if you're flagged) there is hardly any risk... as for lost time, I enjoy pvp and any action i get is just adding to my fun factor, so I would never consider it lost time. Even when I get killed and lose gold... it's still exciting and my heart is actually beating faster!

 

I have, actually. My personal take on PvP has nothing to do with gear and this is why I'm pointing out likely outcomes rather than personal experiences.

Food for thought: Ever tried to convince people to play a board game but they didn't really seem all that interested in playing? It could be a really good game but if:

• There's too many pieces.
• The rules are a bit vague and/or complicated.
• Or it takes too long to set up and play.

... it can turn off a lot of players, even before they start playing.

With that said, you don't have to experience something to know that you won't like it. I don't like survival games that focus too much on crafting so I already know that "Don't Starve Together" isn't my thing.

You know my stance on the whole "inventory management" ordeal and this is why I'm in full support of any discussions that would eliminate design flaws such as these.

You mentioned gold as being a trivial cost to losing in PvP and I would tend to agree on that sentiment. However, consider this: Portalarium added a daily quest at the Oracle giving players 500 gold (which is on par to a single "full encumbrance" run I do) and they did it because they got enough feedback stating that people weren't getting enough gold. Not only am I not a fan of patchwork solutions such as these, but that seems to tell me that people don't have the gold to spare; much less for PvP.

So, no matter how you look at it, PvP has a entry barrier and that's not healthy for PvP.

So I'm more along the lines of "Yes, there's a problem; lets fix it" rather than "It's fine as it is; we just need to motivate more people!". If you fix the problem(s), players will gradually join in on their own.

 

Gear breaking is sufficient to meet the goal of stimulating the armor and weapons economy. Gear does not need to be lootable, nor does starter gear need to be. Conflating the two suggests the real desire is not to stimulate the economy, but to keep lootable worn gear as a game mechanic and to allow looting of starter items.

 

Hi, Duke Avery is spot on in this thread, not wanting to lose my armor is exactly why I'm not flagged. And unstacking your 100+stack of reagents is exactly because you don't want to lose your 100+stack of Reagents.

Therefore > The loot system is |something that must be overcome| in order to participate in PvP, and is therefore a barrier.

 

How does a ransom system help the economy? People get their items back. Only if they dont get their items back and have to get new stuff is it really going to help the economy.

I say no random. You lose your stuff its gone. If you make all equipped gear unlootable, then you need to make it lose a ton of durability when you die.

I played a game once... many many years ago... before eq... before wow... a little sandbox pvp game called meridian 59. I think it was the first 3d mmo to ever exist.

In that game, gear only dropped from creatures, but it was fairly common, thus easy to replace. Items degraded from use, an could either just be replaced when broken or repaired by certain spellcaster class with a spell. But even if repaired the max durability would drop so you would still eventually need a new one. There was only 5 banks(linked) in the entire game, and you could only respawn at the nearest inn. In this game if you "pked" someone your name would turn red, permanently. Anyone could then kill you forever without penalty. The game had full looting. But, losing all your carried items was not so tragic unless you didnt have anything stored away in your bank. People would store extra suits of armor and weapons in case they lost everything, or if what they were wearing decayed. Of course in this game there were not alot of items. You had pkers and pk hunters. There were several people in the game who were red named but were not pkers though. They were red from killing guild enemies. In this game, guilds could own guildhalls that could be stolen, and thus some guilds had to fright to take a guild hall if they wanted one, or defend what they had. All magic in the game required reagents. This way you couldnt just play naked and still be powerful in combat. You stored reagents, weapons and armor, and other rare magic items (and your gold) bank as backups. I played and pvped alot, and I would break swords and armor several time a day, and my name was red. But people didnt just randomly attack me because I was red. People knew me. They knew I wasnt a pker. In fact I hunted pkers. It was the most fun thing to do in that game. Some people would build up a really strong charactr, then they would go pk and then all the pk hunters would chase them around the game and try to kill them. Every time you died you lost points in yoru skills and you lost max health. Eventually a strong pker would become weak and irrelevant again. But tat was the thrill of it. If you were a pker it was a thrill to avoid getting caught, and a thrill for the pk hunter to catch pkers. you never worried about equipment because it wasnt a big loss if you lost it.

Now... the point here is... if this game is going to make the best gear so hard to get and so expensive, its not gonna be any fun to pvp because all you will be worried about is losing your stuff. And ransoming it is not helping. Nor is not having linked banking.

 

That's the conundrum. Case and point, I've been out shopping for armor - and I'm looking for a particular chest piece so I asked a friend to help me out. He's a properly skilled and dialed in master craftsman and was confident he could help me out with what I was looking for - well, after blowing up a couple meteoric chainmail chest pieces he ran out of mats. That's one piece of the economy.

Another piece of the economy is that crafted armor decays and looses max durability pretty quickly when you're out mixing it up (imo), so it's already on a timer so to speak.

Add the add-on store, telethon, bundle armor into the conversation and now you've got players (like me) that aren't lootable. This is by Portalarium's design.

Very few people are willing to risk their crafted armor to PVP.

It's an awful mess and I don't envy the developers that try to find a solution... which is why I offered that maybe equipped armor should just be taken out of the ransom equation altogether. My sense is that more people would flag if their already precious armor wasn't at risk - they'd also feel some fairness headed into a fight against a player wearing add-on store armor that can't be looted to begin with. And if more people are wearing crafted armor - more crafted armor will be made, purchased, repaired, and now there's a PVP cycle for the economy to vibe off.

It's a big mess - and one that is a real barrier to entry into PVP right now.

 

What about having 3 Levels of PvP...

PvP1 → No PvP XP Bonus, can't be looted when killed and can't loot from kills
PvP2 → Current PvP with 10% XP Bonus, can be looted when killed and can loot from kills (1 skeleton, 1 from equipped, 1 from inventory)
PvP3 → 20% XP Bonus and Full Loot

Still haven't figure out how it will work though... anyway, just a thought that might get more people into PvP...

@Chris @DarkStarr

 

The simplest answer then, is that the crafting system is too complicated and expensive, and items do not decay fast enough.

If players are more worried about how they are going to replace gear, then pvp is not fun.

 

it all just seems like a pain in the ass to min max manage my inventory.

but to feel like a total ass ill head to blood bay asap in vendor gear lol and see whats up