This isn't really feedback - it's a bug (a design bug)

@Chris

I was told by Attenwood this was feedback. I find it hard to believe this is by design. I know you guys are busy, but this is a huge issue if we ever want to have meaningful pvp.

 

The only way to work around this issue is to make the entrance/exit ship to be something you walk to without having to double click.

 

There's probably a lot of ways to fix this in the short term. That's certainly one of them.

Long term we need a comprehensive way to stop spawn camping.

 

Some games give you a few seconds after res where you can't be touched. I'm sure this would introduce other issues but in this situation you would then have time to click on the boat before getting killed again. I own an island that is not PvP but love you have to click the boat vs zoning like in other biomes and would hate for it to go away.

 

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos

Isn't there like an Ankh right next to the water?

Many releases ago (5+) someone tried to spawn camp me in the Brave Coast map. All I did was run straight through the Ankh into the water and onwards to the fade-to-dark exit.

 

The Island map has several Ankh's and technically it would be impossible for one group to spawn camp all of them with regularity. You could also choose to not respawn at an Ankh and reappear at the dock, this would allow you to click into the boat assuming it's not being spawn camped and you don't die immediately. Yes, you might also run out into the deepest area of the water in the hopes to get to the next scene, but that's problematic too as a it's a race against your ability to withstand attacks.

As you can see, it's not a very clean system and almost no thought has been given to spawn camping. Having been spawn camped in this game before, it's not very hard to see where someone would be killed and looted multiple times in a row, which is not something I believe should be intended for meaningful pvp. I'm not just concerned about the Island POT Template here, I'm concerned about how the death system works in its entirety. I had thought that what we have right now was just a first iteration and eventually we'd see more a more thoughtful system. But at the moment I'm a bit worried that is not the case and this is what we intend to go into the Final Wipe with.

 

Ah. Agreed on the spawn camping vulnerabilities in general. I was more curious on the specific example you gave.

Personally I think the worst thing though is the PvP shardfall entrypoint design where it is known where new arrivals will appear.

Here in the forums we have been proposing random distribution player spawning since forever. Just adding a random ± 15m on spawn for PvP flagged or PvP scenes would mitigate/solve a lot of this.

 

So for Rats Nest, I'm fine with buying guards or guard towers or guard houses (if they made them) or whatever to secure spawn points like docks or ankh's just so there's some kind of reasonable entry and exit into the scenes. I think that's ultimately going to be the best solution, guards that are essentially like Red Spiders stat wise, making players have to pay attention to them while giving other players a chance to run or join in on the side of the guards. But yeah, having a more random entry point to a PVP scene is a good bridge to a more robust solution.

 

Many solutions for this were put forth over 2 years ago, and Portalarium ignored them. /shrug
Yes, the players saw this coming, and offered many ideas, implementations, and designs to address it.
There's dozens of ways to mitigate/solve this issue, they just need to pick one and implement it.

The most widely iterated implementation involved having a subset of the hex area be flagged, with safe areas for resurrecting.
The consequence was two-fold; either you design zones so that the 'line' wasn't immersion breaking (natural features defined the line) or you didn't and just notified the via text and/or visual cues.
One element that was considered at length was once you had participated, or been flagged, if you egressed (while alive) you would continue to be flagged until you zoned or were killed. This prevented abusing the 'line'.

As far as a larger mechanic goes, an extremely simple and effective solution presented was: if you die, you are instantly teleported outside of and resurrect outside of the hex, and as a penalty, can't re-enter it for a period of time (minutes, hours, days). This implementation presumed two things, though. Either you didn't need to go back to your corpse, or there was no corpse to go back to, as the hex lock-out was considered death penalty enough, given the primary driver would be resource acquisition or attack/defense within the hex and a lack of presence was the 'stick'. Of course the carrot is, you can continue playing immediately anywhere else on any other hex you aren't temporarily locked-out of. The intent of this particular solution was pain-free PvP to attract more sheep to participate.

 

I'd like something like this, personally. Nothing more annoying than waiting for a loading screen to find out you've been killed while standing there helpless due to lag/connection/whatever.

 

why not have a spawn zone. an area where you can spawn in, semi-randomly... instead of the exact same spot eacxh time.

at least the spawn campers won't be able to stand in the same spot and autoattack you to death..

in a way, thats what everquest next tried to do with spawn zones for their mobs... if you were standing in the mobs spot when they spawn, they come running from another direction, or maybe even roam to an alternate 'home' point.

 

Would limiting the number of times you can be looted in quick succession help or are they spawn camping just to grief?

 

If each zone has at least two instances: Make so when you get killed in PvP you gets shifted to the other. That way can the one that killed you not camp your spawn point.

 

Sharing the wealth for the spawn campers. Instead of being camped at one location you get to move around to several different ones to be camped.

 

I d

Dont think you can use attacks while swimming can you? And if there's several ankhs i'd be just as hard to spawn camp as any other town would be

 

No you can't attack other people while swimming. But I believe you can now be attacked while swimming. I know the NPC's don't have a problem with it.

I'm not sure what your other comment means. Are you saying that as long as you can jump in the pool and swim out of the scene it's just like other templates? That may be true, but it's far from a good solution to spawn camping.

 

Why?

 

For one, when you enter a scene you don't want to be instantly ganked as you're still loading housing data.

There has to be a save way to enter and exit scenes. No one is going to sign up for multiple deaths being a part of every pvp engagement. No one likes spawn camping. So even when we look at something like exiting a scene after you're dead, my question would be if that's the way we're going to handle it, whey don't players simply automatically exit out of the scene when the die thus preventing any type of spawn camping at all? Let's cut out the middle man.

Now I say that with a bit of sarcasm because I'm looking for a deeper solution than that. I just want to make my point that the average player isn't going to be happy with a solution where once they die and get looted they also have to successfully avoid being camped. It really shouldn't be an active requirement. I mean if someone beat you in pvp once, they're almost certainly going to do it again once you respawn. So the act of spawn camping is not something we should be encouraging in any way. We should be making mechanics that prevent and minimize spawn camping as much as possible.

 

It is too bad that PvPers actually Spawn Kill, don't you think. A True PvPer isn't out to just kill and loot (wait there are some here that stated that is exactly what they want to do :-( )

As for Spawn Camping there was a suggestion that the Spawn / Res Area had a timer / area of affect the prevented res killing. This was tested once and guess what players sat outside it and res killed when player ran out so that doesn't work. (but might be the only solution)

What you are asking for is a much more random Entry / Spawn location which is an idea that payers who don't PvP do NOT want. They want to enter a scene and know where they are sooooo, that idea will not fly in they eyes of Most of the players.

Now if they can make it so that only in the PvP areas the locations are much more random, in a larger area, and have a no kill time limit then I am all for it but if it bleeds over to other towns sorry, another idea has to be thought out. And I can't think of one right now.

Of and this is NOT a bug it is just something you don't like, and wish to get changed so it is feedback.

Again it is truly sad that this even needs to be addressed since players will res kill which is very - weak :-( (( now as a POT owner and you find out who res kills you can ban them and yeah that 10 person limit will need to go up but if all those types are just plain out prevented from entering in the first place than Tada nothing to worry about.

Lastly this will also be a problem for PvP flagged players since there location to enter all the other areas leave them open to a gank - so perhaps the location ALL need to have a area with no Kill with a timer so players who enter it are safe for a time. And once the timer is up or they leave they are fair game ((reentering doe not prevent death (timer))

All in all since this is still a very minute group of players, really not to much of an issue for the developers at this time.

 

theres plenty of ways to exit most scenes. But you can also leave a scene whiel your dead. so repeated gankign is impossible unless the player beign ganekd allows it.

But having your entrance onto the scene be based on which direction you actually enter the scene from could be soemthign they might do later on down the line