Game Development: Seated in Valhalla

[Granger]

My point: a character that didn't initiate combat shouldn't create any scent from combat - while initating should give red handed and outlaw (boils down to making Smell of Assault summonable). Should have worded that clearer in the first place, I admit that I was a bit confused from ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Scent stating (up to a few minutes ago, fixed that) that leaving any scent triggers red handed.

Assault should not cause Outlaw, that's stupid.

What would be the problem with that, apart from being inconvenient to players that attack everything that moves on sight?

So if your village is under siege, and you need to go out to defend yourself, your only choice is to get outlawed in order to fend them off?

For the case of being under siege your main objective should be to destroy any siege engines around and I would suspect that going outside your gate in that situation currently basically guarantees you being in combat within a few moments (even when not initiating it yourself). Am I wrong with that assumption?

I admit though that siege has several problems, the biggest in general being the binary outcome (either it fails completely or the target gets destroyed completely) which results in it being difficult to make it easier for the attackers as currently the potential destruction caused is (as far as I gathered) often game ending to the defenders - which in my view isn't a good thing for a MMO.

Or do you also propose that any combat actions initiated from your own claim should absolve you of your crimes?

So far I didn't, IIRC. I'm looking at it purely by who started it, not where it happens. Would there be a reasoning for such an argument?

I'm perfectly fine with making it more expensive to maintain claims, I'd just rather not see an unfortunate side effect of these changes be that it's also absurdly difficult to maintain quest tree claims.

My view on quest tree claims is that they should simply not be needed at all, this could easily be done by making the questgiver sprits move into another nearby vessel should the current one be destroyed or claimed.

You can have your prejudice against PvPers all you want, but not all of us want the community as a whole to suffer.

And you can have your prejudice against me to your liking, but I also don't intend that. I just try to spur discussions about mechanics that from my perspective result in negative consequences in the bottom line, in an attempt to come up with something with an overall better outcome - even when that at times ends im in some we have always done it this way changing (which might be inconvenient for some when their optimisation stategy employs these).

Granted, I (as everyone else) have blind spots but I try to reduce them through getting more information to integrate into my mental model of the game, which is a bit hard at times when the standard answer to my posts mainly consist of a predictable list of profanities aimed toward me.
Thank you for being more productive than that, please continue to do so.

Would that (Assault summonable, gates block red handed in combat, increased difficulty for remote claims) solve your problem with people getting away?

No, No, yes. Red handed blocking gate entry would require assault causing red handed and outlaw, and it's very biased for you to propose that as a solution because it doesn't effect you at all.

I fail to see how it dosn't affected me at all when it comes to mechanics that others can use (and have repeatedly, or tried to, in the past) on/against my character. Thus please, to repeat the question from above, explain to me what the problem(s) with assault giving red handed/outlaw would be? Apart from the inconvenience of not being able to port away directly after dropping combat when the raid/gank/siege you initiated goes south, which (as far as I got it) looks exactly like the outcome you asked for in the first place...

[VDZ]

Am I the only one who thinks that it only makes sense that forts provide safe havens in combat? In real life, forts were historically built to provide an overwhelming advantage in combat to the builder, not to provide a comfy home that becomes entirely useless when someone living/staying there gets attacked. Shouldn't the same apply to forts in Haven, then? It only makes sense that attacking someone near their fort would lead to disaster for the attacker.

The problem, then, if having forts everywhere is viable for combat nowadays, is that forts are too easy to create and maintain and/or too difficult to destroy. Nerfing all forts, including main base fortifications, would not make much sense in addition to not solving the primary problem - as others have pointed out, forts remain useful even without the visitor debuff. Then the idea of 'gate timers' is discussed, but to me it just seems like another ugly fix to address the symptoms rather than the root cause. It should be possible to build a safe haven, it just shouldn't be trivial to build safe havens all over the map. There will always be further symptoms as long as this problem persists.

I'm perfectly fine with making it more expensive to maintain claims, I'd just rather not see an unfortunate side effect of these changes be that it's also absurdly difficult to maintain quest tree claims.

Good. Questgivers should not be claimed; it's really annoying to have to leave trespassing scents every single time I want to access a questgiver. And yes, this will lead to more people destroying questgivers (though in my experience most unclaimed questgivers tend to survive anyways), but that's fine. The point of the quest system was to have things be dynamic rather than going to the same place every time. Sure, it would be less convenient for players - you suddenly have to actually find questgivers again rather than following the couple roads to the questgiver that have been there for months - but I don't think that the quest system was ever intended to be abused like that, and having things become more dynamic again is better for the game.

Remove visitor. It sucks.

Visitor debuff is the best thing that ever happened to this game. It allows for peaceful interactions without the constant risk of suddenly getting killed and has completely changed trading in a great way. Something like the Community Fair or earlier trading centers would have been impossible without the visitor debuff.

What's horribly complex there?

The complexity is not in the implementation but rather the design. It feels unintuitive when something usually has behavior A but under very specific circumstances has behavior B. This is also difficult to explain to people not already familiar with the feature. People will run up to their gates, find out it works like a wall despite being open, get killed and then post 'I DIED TO A BUG WTF DEVS'. It would lead to a very bad experience for a lot of players.

How existing gates would be handled is a question, of course. My natural inclination would be to let them be ordinary gates.

Speaking of very bad experiences, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Not everyone keeps up with the patch notes - and I'm talking about entire groups of players here - and there are plenty of people who have their gates open because you're protected by the visitor debuff anyways. People are going to get raided hard if this ever happens, and especially newbie victims will just straight up quit due to having all of their hard work taken from them sheerly by a game change without any fault of their own. If you're going ahead with the separate visitor gates plan (which I personally don't really see much merit in), at the very least don't suddenly remove base protections like this.

[Ardennesss]

What would be the problem with that, apart from being inconvenient to players that attack everything that moves on sight?

Let's say you and your merry band of friends are out foraging, and 3 outlaws run up to you and aggro your friend. But wait, your stats aren't horrible, you think you might be able to fend them off! But drat, if you defend your friend you become red-handed and an outlaw yourself because they didn't aggro you first. You would create an incentive for not being the one that initiated combat, regardless of the circumstances. Find someone stealing your stuff? You're an outlaw if you try to scare them off. Someone vandaling your roads? Outlaw if you fight them off. I just don't see a reason to add more things to the red-handed/outlaw mechanic, it's already clunky and cumbersome and only really affects developed players who use charters to travel everywhere. See also next point :

For the case of being under siege your main objective should be to destroy any siege engines around and I would suspect that going outside your gate in that situation currently basically guarantees you being in combat within a few moments (even when not initiating it yourself). Am I wrong with that assumption?

Every recent notable siege has been performed by a vandal alt using a wrecking ball. What you would create is the ability to bait underdeveloped players out of their base to "stop" a siege, in a way that forces them to red-hand and open themselves up to getting downed outside their base. The absolute easiest example I can think of, would be placing a wrecking ball and then surrounding it with fresh naked alts. Guy comes out and has to clear an alt so he can reach the wrecking ball to bash it, now he's red handed and you can freely potentially kill him because he can't run back into his base. Currently, he would still need to get red-handed to kill the alt so he can move it, but he would still be free to run back into his base even with red-handed. But yes, you are wrong in that assumption. Given that currently sieges are mostly performed by alts, removing the wrecking ball is usually not contested.

I admit though that siege has several problems, the biggest in general being the binary outcome (either it fails completely or the target gets destroyed completely) which results in it being difficult to make it easier for the attackers as currently the potential destruction caused is (as far as I gathered) often game ending to the defenders - which in my view isn't a good thing for a MMO.

This is the slippery slope that has a lot of players afraid of what changes will come for the shield/sieging system in general because it's a very delicately balanced system. Should sieging be possible? Sure. Should it require days of dedicated gameplay to successfully siege an active village? Arguably no. Legacy was extreme in that if you didn't perform twice daily ram checks you could wake up and your village was gone, not to mention palibashing. Current state is that attacking an active village that doesn't wish to be attacked will require a small army, or an obnoxious amount of brimstone to build catapults to counter their counter-catapults and it's basically a resource war. Oh, and around ~20 straight hours of sitting at the computer whittling down the shield that is regenerating during the siege. In the last 10 months, the only siege I can think of that wasn't done with a wrecking ball and "uncontested" was Aurora.

So far I didn't, IIRC. I'm looking at it purely by who started it, not where it happens. Would there be a reasoning for such an argument?

See above points, if you increase the punishment on the red-hand outlaw mechanic you will create a PvP meta where people trick hermits/casuals into getting outlawed outside their wall where they have nowhere to run. I don't understand how we ever ended up with the outlaw mechanic in the first place, given that it does nothing to actually discourage people from committing crimes. Nidbanes are the mechanic that was supposed to discourage that, by giving people an avenue of vengeance for crimes against the hearthlands. Personally I'd rather see a mechanic where a claim having a hearthfire on it that has outlaw worthy scents active no longer regenerates shield, making it possible to actually avenge crimes in a more permanent method. It's rather frustrating to track scents of people who get abused and find that they're behind an established wall, and having to tell that victim there's nothing you can do besides send a bunch of pointless nidbanes.

My view on quest tree claims is that they should simply not be needed at all, this could easily be done by making the questgiver sprits move into another nearby vessel should the current one be destroyed or claimed.

My understanding is that they do move, randomly in an uncontrolled method but that's a mechanic that would need confirmed by Jorb/Loftar. People claim/wall them so that their position is constant. You get a quest to visit tree X, you know that's it's 7 grids east and 3 grids south from you. And yes, people will always cut them down just for shits and giggles. Is making them indestructible the answer? Who knows. I'm sure there's pros/cons to that.

Granted, I (as everyone else) have blind spots but I try to reduce them through getting more information to integrate into my mental model of the game, which is a bit hard at times when the standard answer to my posts mainly consist of a predictable list of profanities aimed toward me.
Thank you for being more productive than that, please continue to do so.

As I've told Jorb before, a pretty sizable chunk of this "established" community does not invest time into posts like this because they're often just ignored and meaningless. It doesn't matter if you type a college tier dissertation as to why a mechanic should or shouldn't be changed, if the developers disagree it's meaningless. That is very discouraging, and I completely understand why the post quality devolves in such a fashion.

Thus please, to repeat the question from above, explain to me what the problem(s) with assault giving red handed/outlaw would be? Apart from the inconvenience of not being able to port away directly after dropping combat when the raid/gank/siege you initiated goes south, which (as far as I got it) looks exactly like the outcome you asked for in the first place.

Your original proposal of this concept was two fold, that first assault would have to cause outlaw, and secondly that gates would block outlaws from entering.

Just keep gates as they are and just make them block red-handed characters currently in combat, track by which character combat was initiated and skip scent generation from combat for characters that just defend themselves (thus no red-handed for characters that don't initiate combat - even if they win over, and possibly kill, the aggressor).

My opposition was mostly against the combined impact of these two interactions. People will find ways to lure people out and get them outlawed so they cannot run back inside.

[wonder-ass]

[Ardennes]See above points, if you increase the punishment on the red-hand outlaw mechanic you will create a PvP meta where people trick hermits/casuals into getting outlawed outside their wall where they have nowhere to run. I don't understand how we ever ended up with the outlaw mechanic in the first place, given that it does nothing to actually discourage people from committing crimes. Nidbanes are the mechanic that was supposed to discourage that, by giving people an avenue of vengeance for crimes against the hearthlands. Personally I'd rather see a mechanic where a claim having a hearthfire on it that has outlaw worthy scents active no longer regenerates shield, making it possible to actually avenge crimes in a more permanent method. It's rather frustrating to track scents of people who get abused and find that they're behind an established wall, and having to tell that victim there's nothing you can do besides send a bunch of pointless nidbanes.

this idea is actually really fucking good lol but only thing i see here is that outlawed people would remove their hf to prevent this from happening, or be a problem to people in his village that actually have nothing to do with it like Brodgar.

[Ardennesss]

this idea is actually really fucking good lol but only thing i see here is that outlawed people would remove their hf to prevent this from happening, or be a problem to people in his village that actually have nothing to do with it like Brodgar.

1. Bring back HF summoning, no HF, you get summoned and killed.
2. Maybe, punish villagers that commit crimes that put your village at risk?

[SaltyCrate]

Following that mindset: There is an argument that you're wrong with this (and everything else, naturally). And it is true.

Simply stating a 'fact' without providing the reasoning for the why is a ittle thin on the argument side of things, don't you think?

No, I don't think it was thin at all. It is pretty self-evident from what was writen in OP and in your post. Asking to provide more reasoning to it is akin asking to provide reasoning to "sky is blue" statement.

Personally I'd rather see a mechanic where a claim having a hearthfire on it that has outlaw worthy scents active no longer regenerates shield, making it possible to actually avenge crimes in a more permanent method. It's rather frustrating to track scents of people who get abused and find that they're behind an established wall, and having to tell that victim there's nothing you can do besides send a bunch of pointless nidbanes.

The heartfires would be simply moved to a separate claim. In the caves or into some pocket inside village claim. Other than that I strongly agree with most of what you said on this topic.

[ctopolon4]

if raid takes 20hrs of sitting near PC, than claim build should be the same...
20hrs siege vandal alt (who broke your road) , while new one already build new vault and broke another road...

[Ardennesss]

The heartfires would be simply moved to a separate claim. In the caves or into some pocket inside village claim. Other than that I strongly agree with most of what you said on this topic.

Then simply make hearthfires unable to be built by outlaws. Force them to put their HF in those presumably "less safe" areas before they commit the crimes, so they're forced to defend that area if they want to be protected from repercussions. This again, would require adding back in HF summoning to prevent them from simply putting their HF somewhere else, and camping their character in their village until outlaw expires. The only way you're truly going to punish outlaws is by their actions causing imminent risk to their villages and their characters. Nidbanes do not achieve that, nor does stopping charter teleportation. You can even justify this change with lore, given that the theory is already that the hearthlands themselves are offering you no protection while an outlaw. Just extend that logic to the claim that their HF is placed in and make it easier to siege it to summon.

[Granger]

For the case of being under siege your main objective should be to destroy any siege engines around and I would suspect that going outside your gate in that situation currently basically guarantees you being in combat within a few moments (even when not initiating it yourself). Am I wrong with that assumption?

Every recent notable siege has been performed by a vandal alt using a wrecking ball. What you would create is the ability to bait underdeveloped players out of their base to "stop" a siege, in a way that forces them to red-hand and open themselves up to getting downed outside their base. The absolute easiest example I can think of, would be placing a wrecking ball and then surrounding it with fresh naked alts. Guy comes out and has to clear an alt so he can reach the wrecking ball to bash it, now he's red handed and you can freely potentially kill him because he can't run back into his base. Currently, he would still need to get red-handed to kill the alt so he can move it, but he would still be free to run back into his base even with red-handed. But yes, you are wrong in that assumption. Given that currently sieges are mostly performed by alts, removing the wrecking ball is usually not contested.

Given that I wrote some pages back

And not being able to pass through a gate that would give visitor while being red handed and in combat would neither difficult to implement nor any bit more unrealistic than the visitor debuff is in the first place.

one could still enter the own place, as the gate wouldn't give visitor to a claim owner so it wouldn't block. Thus your fear of baiting people to get red handed outside their own claims wouldn't be an issue - but just brings us back the fact that such (likely village claimed, to have more than one character having visitor-less, non red-handed+combat blocking access) plots shouldn't be mass-maintainable over the world in the first place, a stance I fully agree with.

The rest I think can be summed up with: being able to alt away most of the game is problematic and in need of a solution.
Possibly some mechanic that allows you to move around other characters (without being in a combat relation) a bit to disable alt walls around stuff?

My view on quest tree claims is that they should simply not be needed at all, this could easily be done by making the questgiver sprits move into another nearby vessel should the current one be destroyed or claimed.

My understanding is that they do move, randomly in an uncontrolled method but that's a mechanic that would need confirmed by Jorb/Loftar. People claim/wall them so that their position is constant. You get a quest to visit tree X, you know that's it's 7 grids east and 3 grids south from you. And yes, people will always cut them down just for shits and giggles. Is making them indestructible the answer? Who knows. I'm sure there's pros/cons to that.

In case questgivers would move you couldn't fail quests (especially that of others) through destroying them.

As I've told Jorb before, a pretty sizable chunk of this "established" community does not invest time into posts like this because they're often just ignored and meaningless. It doesn't matter if you type a college tier dissertation as to why a mechanic should or shouldn't be changed, if the developers disagree it's meaningless. That is very discouraging, and I completely understand why the post quality devolves in such a fashion.

I agree with that assessment, more or less. I don't agree though with this being a valid reason to reduce post quality.

Though it looks like the devs listen and learn, as the request for comments regarding safe palisades in the OP proves: instead of surprising us with a completed new (and, as history hints, more or less broken) mechanic to live with they asked for opinions upfront, which in my book is a sign progress that gives hope for an improved future in regard to developer / user interaction.

[wonder-ass]

they could always test out new safe pali mechanics in valhalla where we would play out a couple safe pali scenarios and see what happens. try and find a way to abuse it etc.