by rye130 » Sun Sep 27, 2015 8:38 am
This thread turned into a massive cluster fuck of unrelated posts that the moderators should please clean up and separate into a different topic please.
The topic at hand in this thread is the auto-hearth added in custom clients and how it affects the game, and how it can be fixed.
A few points I saw cropping up that need to be addressed:
Auto-hearth is non-aggressive players' counter to auto-aggro
There is currently no functional auto-aggro that does anything a player couldn't normally and realistically do. In previous generations, aggro range matched render distance and thus, instantly aggroing a character as soon as it got on your screen was a possibility. Now, with aggro having a limited range, a player in render distance can be aggroed just as quickly manually as any bot could do it since getting in range to issue the "Attack!" command is the limiting factor, not reaction times.
Getting aggroed means you are dead
While most ganks do end with the gankers being victorious over the player being ganked, it is not a pre-defined outcome. There is skill, communication, luck, and many other variables involved on both sides of the interaction that decide the outcome. While the balance of these encounters may not be in the direction that most players wish it to be in, this is not the thread to discuss that balance. The main problem that the people opposing auto-hearth have with the mechanic is it entirely removes the skill, communication, luck, and other variables from the equation. The outcome of the encounter is pre-defined. If you have auto-hearth then, poof, you are gone with no interaction. I strongly believe that most players against auto-hearth are, at least to some extent, in favor of increasing the chances of the player being ganked surviving as long as their chances are improved based on skill or preparation or some other player controlled mechanic rather than just making the outcome predefined by if they're using a custom client because it makes these encounters more enjoyable and interesting.
Attacking a target should somehow be related to the previous actions of that target
The biggest way to hurt an aggressive player who is looking to kill others isn't to kill their combat-character who has left scents and done all sorts of dirty things in the past (in most cases). Its to kill their foragers, farmers, miners, or any other character important to the character development of the their combat characters who you manage to catch out. Any nerf to being able to harm these scent-less characters isn't nearly as balancing of a thing as you may think it is. Combat characters will just be left in vaults till their scents are expired to reduce the effect of any sort of negative penalty to having these scents out.
In conclusion, please take your efforts to fix the balance of PvP to another thread, because this thread has very little to do with it. I can't understand how anyone can stand here and argue that auto-hearth is a healthy mechanic in this game when it is clearly can be just as abusive and annoying for either end of the player-spectrum...