Idea for group PvP

I was talking with my guild about PvP in this game. I said i would like to see more group PvP.
I personally am not much of PvPer, I don't solo PvP and rarely flag in this game. But I am an advocate of PvP, i played Eve Online with non-consensual PvP for over decade, I enjoy the risk. Playing the cat and mouse game, even playing the role of the mouse is fun. However in this game the incentive is not there, and that is fine.

I would however like an incentive for group PvP, as many non PvPer will join friends and group PvP for fun assuming the incentive is there for doing it.

So what I was thinking of as a fledgling idea was some type of Guild level PvP. Note i'm not expecting anything like this in the short term, but as raid system will come after release allowing larger parties then something like im going suggest becomes viable.

Below I have outlined some of what I think should be in the design goals for group PvP. Obviously if you disagree with these, you probably won't like my idea.

Design goals for Guild level PVP.

1. Should be more rewarding per player than most PvE. This give an incentive for non PvPer to group with their guild for some fun PvP without feeling they are wasting their time.
2. Should NOT be designed where blobing/zerging is always be best strategy. If this is true, then group PvP gets boring and are usually just huge lag fest.
3. Should NOT force players to join group PvP. IE it should not have exclusive items/gear that can not be gained any other way.
4. Should help not hinder the player run economy.
5. Should be open to casuals. It should not take like 5 hours to play a group PvP session. A group should be able to schedule a group PvP session so it can be planned and casuals can know when they have a guild group PvP event available to join.

Using the above I came up with an idea for Guild Castle war/seige type mechanic.
Note this "guild castle" does not need to castle, could be a alchemist tower or something. I'll let someone more creative than me to design the RP/lore stuff. But for this post i will call it a guild castle from now on.

The idea of this castle is that it is place where the guild can transfer loot to and convert that loot into artefacts.
The way it would work is that you can send items to your guild castle and that goes into a vault. This vault effectively converts the items into their NPC value. Note this is the actual value not the value an NPC vendor would give you. This gives you an incentive to "feed" the castle rather than just sell to an NPC vendor. Stolen good have a vlaue of 0, so you cant steal loads of stuff and feed your castle.
Then using some interface you can spend the guild castle gold to create an artifact. I know that Port keeps the vendor averages for items, so what the cost should be is something like 150% of the vendor average. I suggest it should duplicate an artifact, so you have already as a guild have got an example before you can create another. New artifacts should not be available for replication until 2 or 3 releases after their intial release.

what does this have to do with group PvP?
Well my idea is that when you start the guild castle creating an artefact then it will take a minimum of 30 mins to create the artefact. Starting up the guild castle take 30 mins that is published to everyone. Then when the 30 mins start up time if complete an instance is spawned of your guild castle.

Your guild castle them starts making the artefact and it takes 30mins to create, but the instance is up for 1 hour. Anyone can join that instance that is flagged PvP and disrupt the production. Disrupting the production will involve stopping multiple mechanisms working. The defending guild can defend their mechanisms and the attacking guild can halt production. If you get to the end of the hour and have only been producing for 20 mins then you have 66% build the artefact. This stays and can be continued later with more castle resources and another guild castle run. The left over 34% of the resources are transferred to attacking guild castle for them to spend.

Attacking the mechanisms should have a maximum dps they can have done to them, so once you cap out the dps on a single mechanism there is no advantage to more players attacking that mechanism. This should be set so that it would take a minimum of 10 mins to halt that mechanism.

This PvP zone should be like PoTs where no xp decay is charged at death.

Assuming most vendors give you like 75% of the npc value, some even less, it means you are buying an artifact for

cost for 1 run = artifact player vendor sell average * 1.5 * 0.75 = 1.125 * artifact player vendor sell average

But t could take 2 or 3 attempts so this does not make it cheap way to generate artefacts into the game.

How does this achieve the above design goals.

1. Being able to pick the artifact makes it more productive that jut grouping and grinding PvE in the hope fo getting what you need. Even if you loss you will have created a minimum of 33% of the artifact (due to a minimum of 10 mins needed to halt to mechanism). The lack of death decay gives any player that wants to join no reason to not join.
2. As the mechanism has a max dps it can absorb the best tactic is unlikely to be zerg each mechaism one after the other.
3. It is duplicating an artifact, therefore there MUST already be a way to acquire that artifact.
4. This takes vendor junk out of the system without injecting more gold into the game, there by slowing one of the gold faucets. The castle gold can just be converted to artefacts, not into gold. Would give interesting info into how right/wrong npc values are by which item are sent to castles and which are sold to NPCs and which are sold to players. As artefact duplication would not be until 2-3 releases after they are first introduced the price will be stabilised and allow traders to still take advantage of low supply early on.
5. As the entire process is only 1.5 hours and the time is set by the defender so they can schedule it with their guild.

So that was the initial idea.

Next step - Ask myself how I would exploit/game this system and adjust. We are after all gamers and will generally find ways to game systems.

So here what i though of

Flood the instance with friendly alternative guild members to stop real attackers from joining.
A change to fix this is that only one guild can oppose you and in that 30 mins of set up it tells all guilds what your castle gold investment is (cost of the artefact). They then bid their castle gold to oppose you, giving them a chance to get some your castle resources (if they can halt the production enough).
This does not stop this, but makes the artifact very expensive if you are paying for the artifact as a defender and being highest bidder to attack.

Make multiple guild and do 20 guild castle artefacts at once and hope no one can stop them all.
Limit the ammount of concurrent guild castle duplications that can globally running at one time, this exact number would change with game population.

Build only when player population is very low, meaning you don't have actually defend the duplication process.
Have NPC attackers as well, like the sieges have catapults that attack the mechanisms forcing you to defend the castle even if no player want attack. These should be low damage output but high hit points to it is open to all, but still takes a while to stop them. If left undefended the catapult will halt the mechanisms and you will only get like 60% done.

Interested in people thoughts of a mechanic like this, agree/disagree with the design goals and also if you can see any way to "game the process" that i missed.

Regards
Spung

 

Like the idea. However I think this game needs a more global approach to PVP at the moment due to the small playerbase. Restriction to guilds fighting might spoil it for most users.
In the 2 year outline they said it might also be virtue etc determining the side you fight on. I would prefer that actually. But I like the mechanic you described!

 

I don't think pvp group scenarios will find balance through rewards/incentives alone.

We should focus on a system which attempts to create balanced group composition if we want to attract more players.

If a single pvp ransom can be 38k, the entire value proposition of this hour-long ordeal could be eliminated in 5 seconds.

 

Maybe some items arent meant to be used in PVP... if someone cannot afford to pay such a ransom he shouldn't bring the item. No one is forcing them.

 

I'm looking for a simpler non guild approach for PvP incentive. More like a king of the hill type of incentives. Little instances or opportunities to get into fights with other players over resources in a scene or something. I just mentioned in another thread how cool uo treasure maps would have been if there were other people looking to dig your same treasure and you had to kill them to get it.