How is the PvP?

This is, hands down, the most pvp-positive thread I've read in these forums. Ever. It's kinda nice.

 

you cannot rp a true evil in this game. People are very delicate here.

 

This really depends on how you spend your xp. The lowest level competitor to place in top 3 of tier 1 VL tournament this season was alvl 89, that is about 48 million xp total. If you farmed at 22k xp/hr 24/7 for 3 months you would achieve this. If you do 100k/hr it is 20 days of non-stop farming.

 

I agree. Dueling people who are better than you is an easy way to get better at PvP. Or even watching two experienced people fighting will teach you some things. Come by Owl Sky City. There are frequently people dueling at one of the three arenas around town (one designed for melee advantage).

If you think that you can't learn from dueling someone higher than you because you will get crushed, then try out one of the purple fog areas in Blood Bay:

The first area near the sand pits gives +300 to every attunement. This means that you hit hard and have high resists - skill and adventurer level matter less. This is a great place where you can fight someone higher level evenly (and have some epic hits and heals).

The second area is in a ruin next to the fire elementals near the entrance to K'rul. This fog effect causes negative attunement, so magic basically does nothing. This is a fun place to fight with physical damage and no heals.

 

dueling is not an option for a sneaky backstabber. If your into role play this game is not meant for you. There is no RP/PvP tools. Its just a free for all and RP is out the window.

 

Stealth + sneak attack + trip + torpid + air air air + earthquake + obsidian arrow makes a decent ambush. What do you mean 'tools for rp/pvp?' I don't see them as being mutually exclusive. Relentless does a great job i.m.o. If you ever frequent blood bay.

 

RP/PVP is playing a character. Maybe one only wants to be a fire mage. Or one only wants to be a bezerker warrior. Pure templates (I understand now that this is a classless game). IMO all skills should be competative against each other. Do you remember in UO having guild wars? In UO you could war another guild and the guild leaders (if they where RP guilds) would meet and discuss the terms of war. What weapons you could use and what gear you could wear depending on your class. With the guild war system in UO you could only be flagged against each other and not world flagged. This allowed you to have RP/PVP with (in UO we used gm only weapons, no enchants) specified gear. You had to play your class and was limited to your RP or the rules of engagement that you agreed upon when you warred some one. In sota you cannot do this. It is a free for all and there is no way to have a battle like this, hence you "do not have the tools to do rp/pvp." because you are flagged to open world pvp in addition to just warring another guild.

 

I personally think this will come one day.

 

I do remember guild wars in u.o.! That was a lot of fun! I bet we could do that in sota someday but that's up to atos. As for class balance, that is always the goal and obviously a w.i.p. I do wish melee or pure ice wizard was competetive vs. the flavour of the month at the moment, but don't expect the current most powerful builds to reign forever. I think we just challenged every guild listed on the server on our stone bitd. Was fun to fight at the banks without guard reprisal. I'll pass along the idea!

 

Overall I think the PVP in this game has been steadily increasing. I have seen it over the last 8 months for sure and with more and more new additions like the now infamous "Monkey room" in K'rul you get a lot of open world pvp interaction that was not there before. I mean there is even some thief guy that seems to ALWAYS be hanging out in Blood Bay, so PVP seems to be gaining more traction. Tournaments are a completely different beast, but I think overall require more skill then a lot of open world situations where initiative has the advantage.

 

Ice/Air/Moon/ Life mage and 100% immersive roleplayer.
I have the innates from Sun and Earth, but wont touch Fire and Death.
Still a lot of xp to get to be competetive around level 63 last time i checked.

Tournaments arent for me. I want to have a chance to stay alive when visiting Shardfalls and Ruins for the first time.

I know there isnt frequent and the scenes are often empty, but i cannot fight the Mobs in there

One day....

 

+10 for nearby player list in open pvp TOWNs work same way as normal

 

Love to get your thoughts on what "meaningful pvp" is. It was a phrase used in the kickstarter but rarely discussed by the developers since then.

RP and PVP should not be mutually exclusive, but they are more so that way in SOTA than not as of today. If you can't stop and talk to the people next to you without some kind of reasonable expectation of "protection" then it's hard for me to imagine RPing anything but constant action that looks more like an arena death match than anything we might call "meaningful".

 

I will have to think on my response to this.. there are MY thoughts on meaningful pvp in games just philosophically.. and then there is what the team has planned for the future in this game specifically(which is mostly @Chris ). I could barf out a 9 page diatribe right now but that wouldn't serve anyone =P

 

I personally think PVP and RP/PVP will get a boost when we have guilds being able to ally and declare war on each other. Then we can start with small skirmishes between guilds of which some will become multi-guild wars. Count me in when that happens which I hope is before episode 2 and hopefully prior to official launch. R/Boris/El Pirata

 

Open Sandbox PvP is pretty much dead. Crowfall is offering it, kinda. SoTA is more PvE centric. Honestly it's more an instanced multiplayer game than a true mmorpg. It's a great game, just do not expect any PvP outside of something preplanned or instanced. At least not now.

 

I appreciate that you've considered your answer may not be in line with the team's answer. Although your answer may be interesting, the real question remains what does the team hope to provide? I don't think that's been made clear and it often appears from my perspective that it changes from release to release, schedule to schedule. This has made me believe that there is no philosophy or roadmap for pvp, at least not in a formalized sense. Instead pvp has become "consensual" plus a collection of what Chris thinks would be cool based off his own personal experiences.

Chris has made a lot of comments over the years that explain some of these experiences. For example, "PVP is never fair", which I don't believe is a good design goal. In my opinion PVP is as fair as the design allows it to be.

Which brings up a related topic, as developers I believe it's probably very easy to lose sight of how pvp actually works since you have the ability to raise your stats up to whatever you want in the blink of an eye. For example, during the recent pvp hangout I watched as you raised all of your stats up to 200 and then began to clobber anything that was not in your group. Probably a lot of fun for you, but probably not much fun for people being clobbered. Not trying to call you out for that, just to call out that as a developer you don't have time to "level up" and "grind" the way it's required as a regular player and therefore I question if you (or even Chris that attempts to level up without dev cheats) will ever have a good perspective for what's fun and what's not.

For example, I've yet to read a forum post that reads "I got ganked and spawn camped and I loved it! I came here for the non-competitive pvp because I just love losing to people I have no chance of winning against!" Yet that's a large portion of what we currently offer.

But if you simply judge by the forums, you'll get all kinds of different answers about what "meaningful pvp" is and isn't. Many of the people here have very specific agenda's as to why they might answer one way or another. And like most game related design choices you can't make everyone happy.

My own personal feeling's aside, I would like to make it clear that in no way am I suggesting that pvp should be a "controlled environment". Only that currently we have two modes of play, consensual and non-consensual. Which is a very rigid choice to make if you are not someone that enjoys large amounts of predictably meaningless pvp. What I have compared this to in the past is a swimming pool. We currently have dry land and a 20 foot pool. For people just learning how to swim or those people that enjoy a nice 6 foot area where they're less likely to drown, we don't offer that. We tell everyone to jump into the deep end and enjoy drowning.

It's not a question of guild support or tiered arenas that only allow certain levels. It's a question of can people choose their own desired level of risk so that the sharks in the 20 foot end of the pool have to think about what they're doing and can't prey on the weakest or the tired or win by being annoyingly relentless because we only offer two modes of play PVP or no PVP.

Does this make sense? Do you at least understand what I'm saying?

I realize that this type of thoughtful design is far more problematic from an implementation standpoint because it will require more time and resources to get right. But I fail to see how the path that we're on results in anything more than extra 20 foot areas where pvp is meaningless for anyone that isn't 100% Killer on the Bartle Test. Which again, should not be the design goal in my opinion.

Thank you for your time.

 

Hmm...I guess that means I still have a long way to go then before I can be competitive (currently at level 75 - formerly level 78 before the point totals apparently changed? )

 

Are you sure you weren't wearing necklace of civility? Or maybe you had the +Adventurer level blessing on, or maybe someone was playing that instrument that gives +adventurer level.