PvP
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iaeolan
Dalayan Elder
Arvistel said:
faction v faction v faction implies mass group pvp over all zones between all players in those factions.
I also suggest colored names (Yellow, Orange, .....) for the persons who are pvp flagged for those factions.
Seems all but 2 name colors from live (excluding GM green) are in use, is this a client limitation or can it be expanded?
Also, how will this interact with people who are red-flagged? red flags vs all pvp-flags seems the obvious answer.
Some ideas that might be interesting.
The most fun PvP battles were always with large groups vs large groups, so concentrated in one or a few zones with an objective that people really want to fight over. On live these objectives were always choke points or raid mobs. The drawback is how to handle xp loss and prevent griefing, because people will more often die by mobs than by players. Another bad thing is that buffing and running to each other were usually the major time wasters, and the actual fighting was small. Also res-dragging and zone-bumping was a large complaint.
If you have PvP anywhere it will be mostly small skirmishes where one has a relatively high number advantage to the other, so the outcome is not very exciting. Group PvP also balances out the strengths and weaknesses of each class.
So how can you accomplish large group PvP with as least downtime and with an objective? Its quite a complicated script.
Use a zone like PoWar or maybe another one. Two raids/guilds (of level 65 people with a minimum of 16 per raid) zone in and the zone is no-PvP flagged. Everyone is stripped of buffs upon zoning, and cannot cast spells like in portals. Each guild goes in their own corner and chooses an objective then presses a switch. This objective is somthing that a raiding guild would want but is not overpowered for example "Other guild is barred from inner prison for 1 week and your guild gets exclusive entry for 8 hours (and a chance for a full respawn depending on your fight)" or "Mega-mob with nice loot spawns in this zone once other guild is defeated". Each guild can only pick a specific objective each week, and if you have been defeated you cannot fight the same guild again that week (to prevent exploits). Then a counter starts to count down and no one can zone in or out of the zone anymore. Now, you can cast buffs but not go outside your own corner. After 10 minutes, you can move out of your own corner and the fight starts! From then on, most kills wins and there is a time limit of 30 minutes.
There can be mobs in the zone (charm bait!) but there is no xp loss.
Once the fight is over, the losers that remain are teleported out, and an exit appears for the winners. This exit leads to the objective that they chose. This way you create fun group PvP without any griefing and not too much downtime, an interesting reward (many alternative rewards can be thought of of course) and you concentrate the players in time and space.
Another idea would be something like in lords of the rings online, where a high level zone has mobs possessed by players that can fight against normal players. If you kill them, some reward will be given to your own player (xp or whatever). The difference with project M is that you concentrate players and monsters in one (high-level) area which is interesting especially in a small population.
Or maybe use the plane of war zone where blackscale and so on duke it out for rewards on your augs to concentrate the fight in one area instead of all over the world in small battles. These fights could be working in a similar way as described above for the guild/raid pvp idea. So until you form a small band there is no fight, and as soon as you are both ready the war starts after a countdown. The one who wins, gets their augs enhanced. Maybe these enhancement decay over time (or depending on how much xp you gain / mobs you kill in between PvP fights) so people will keep coming back and fight regularly.
The most fun PvP battles were always with large groups vs large groups, so concentrated in one or a few zones with an objective that people really want to fight over. On live these objectives were always choke points or raid mobs. The drawback is how to handle xp loss and prevent griefing, because people will more often die by mobs than by players. Another bad thing is that buffing and running to each other were usually the major time wasters, and the actual fighting was small. Also res-dragging and zone-bumping was a large complaint.
If you have PvP anywhere it will be mostly small skirmishes where one has a relatively high number advantage to the other, so the outcome is not very exciting. Group PvP also balances out the strengths and weaknesses of each class.
So how can you accomplish large group PvP with as least downtime and with an objective? Its quite a complicated script.
Use a zone like PoWar or maybe another one. Two raids/guilds (of level 65 people with a minimum of 16 per raid) zone in and the zone is no-PvP flagged. Everyone is stripped of buffs upon zoning, and cannot cast spells like in portals. Each guild goes in their own corner and chooses an objective then presses a switch. This objective is somthing that a raiding guild would want but is not overpowered for example "Other guild is barred from inner prison for 1 week and your guild gets exclusive entry for 8 hours (and a chance for a full respawn depending on your fight)" or "Mega-mob with nice loot spawns in this zone once other guild is defeated". Each guild can only pick a specific objective each week, and if you have been defeated you cannot fight the same guild again that week (to prevent exploits). Then a counter starts to count down and no one can zone in or out of the zone anymore. Now, you can cast buffs but not go outside your own corner. After 10 minutes, you can move out of your own corner and the fight starts! From then on, most kills wins and there is a time limit of 30 minutes.
There can be mobs in the zone (charm bait!) but there is no xp loss.
Once the fight is over, the losers that remain are teleported out, and an exit appears for the winners. This exit leads to the objective that they chose. This way you create fun group PvP without any griefing and not too much downtime, an interesting reward (many alternative rewards can be thought of of course) and you concentrate the players in time and space.
Another idea would be something like in lords of the rings online, where a high level zone has mobs possessed by players that can fight against normal players. If you kill them, some reward will be given to your own player (xp or whatever). The difference with project M is that you concentrate players and monsters in one (high-level) area which is interesting especially in a small population.
Or maybe use the plane of war zone where blackscale and so on duke it out for rewards on your augs to concentrate the fight in one area instead of all over the world in small battles. These fights could be working in a similar way as described above for the guild/raid pvp idea. So until you form a small band there is no fight, and as soon as you are both ready the war starts after a countdown. The one who wins, gets their augs enhanced. Maybe these enhancement decay over time (or depending on how much xp you gain / mobs you kill in between PvP fights) so people will keep coming back and fight regularly.
Some more thoughts on this idea:
- For the zone(s) make sure it is one without hills. On live, the z-axis sync went wrong or something and people appeared to walk in circles when they strafed there.
- The resists system on live was the biggest problem in PvP inbalance. When people have low resists all spells landed and casters were all-powerful and because of that all spell PvP damage was reduced to 60%. Heals were not changed however. When people were getting high resist stats, no spells landed and melees were all-powerful. Resist debuffs were increased by 50% to compensate for the latter, which only increased the inbalance because they had a great effect on low-resist players and still did not solve the problem for casting on high resist people.
The right solution is very simple though, and can be implemented in SoD PvP easily. Resists should have a soft-cap in PvP or resemble a logarithmic function like (chance of resisting spell) = normalisation * ln(1+(resist gear)), where the normalisation factor can be changed till the appropriate balance is reached. In this way the difference between high-resist people and low-resist people is lessened but more resists still mean something. On live a bard with resist song on was immune to all spells. Also, resist debuffs could remove a percentage of the resist stat instead of an absolute value.
- Speed imbalance. Selo and horses are for travel, not for combat. Those abilities give an overly unfair advantage. They should drop when "combat mode" is on, so once a spell is cast on you by another player or you cast a spell on the player. Only when the combat is over (maybe after 5 minutes of not being hit/cast on/casting/hitting) it should be usable again.
- For the rewards I thought about how to do this better so it is less exploitable. It could be implemented in a slightly different way, in steps:
1) There are several 'goals' that you can choose. For example 'exclusive inner prison access for 6 hours'. You state this goal near an NPC. The NPC repeats your goal and a time at which you want it to start, which is an hour from that time. No one can zone into the zone that you claimed from then on by normal zoning (they can with resses, so a raid in progress can not be thwarted) not even you. You can only state each specific goal once per week, and if you lose you are barred from the zone you chose for a longer time (a day?) than you would have gotten access if you won. You have to pay the NPC money for the claim to be registered as well (guild money sink).
2) You will all get a teleportation stone with 1 charge that teleports you to the PvP zone if you hail the NPC and you are in the raid that started the goal. A broadcast will say that guild X (or raid X) has claimed goal Y.
3) From then on, any other guild / raid (the attacking group) can challenge you once by zoning into the PvP zone and telling the NPC that you want to challenge the claiming group (the defending group). The attackers do not have to pay any money (this stimulates more fighting from lower-equipped guilds). The defenders get a notification that they are challenged and should then stop what they were doing and click their stones to zone in. They have 15 minutes to gather up and set their fight timer, otherwise the timer starts automatically or they lose if no one of the defending group shows up.
4) The fight starts as described above. No zoning, gating or ressing allowed during the fight. During the fight all in-combat rules apply like when fighting NPC's. So no meditation during the fight and no bandaging.
5) If the defenders win, they gain nothing yet but they do get a new teleportation stone to the PvP zone. If the defenders lose, they are barred from their goal zone for a day and they can not claim that goal for a week. If the attackers win, they become the new defenders however they cannot be attacked by the group that they have just won from. They have an hour again before their prize can be claimed. Of course any other guilds or raids can challenge them in the mean time.
6) Once the time is over that a guild can be challenged, they get half of the money that the original defenders had to pay to the NPC. They can now use the portal in the PvP zone to go to the raid zone. The normal zoneline is barred for 6 hours and you will get a message saying that guild X has won it as a prize.
Some more random thoughts about this:
- On guildwar people should become un-anon, otherwise the world is too big to find them.
- Perhaps ousting another guild from some raid zones by this PvP idea is not a bad idea after all.
So guild A is raiding inner prison, but guild B wants it too. They zone into the PvP zone and let the NPC know that they want the inner prison zone (and they pay the NPC a lot). Then guild A will have to fight them to keep the zone. The one who loses is barred from the zone for a day. There is no "reward" other than that for the winner (the fact that the loser loses the zone). A guild can only try to oust someone once per day and only specific high level raid zones are subject to this. If you lose you cannot start a fight with that guild on that day again for that zone.
- For the zone(s) make sure it is one without hills. On live, the z-axis sync went wrong or something and people appeared to walk in circles when they strafed there.
- The resists system on live was the biggest problem in PvP inbalance. When people have low resists all spells landed and casters were all-powerful and because of that all spell PvP damage was reduced to 60%. Heals were not changed however. When people were getting high resist stats, no spells landed and melees were all-powerful. Resist debuffs were increased by 50% to compensate for the latter, which only increased the inbalance because they had a great effect on low-resist players and still did not solve the problem for casting on high resist people.
The right solution is very simple though, and can be implemented in SoD PvP easily. Resists should have a soft-cap in PvP or resemble a logarithmic function like (chance of resisting spell) = normalisation * ln(1+(resist gear)), where the normalisation factor can be changed till the appropriate balance is reached. In this way the difference between high-resist people and low-resist people is lessened but more resists still mean something. On live a bard with resist song on was immune to all spells. Also, resist debuffs could remove a percentage of the resist stat instead of an absolute value.
- Speed imbalance. Selo and horses are for travel, not for combat. Those abilities give an overly unfair advantage. They should drop when "combat mode" is on, so once a spell is cast on you by another player or you cast a spell on the player. Only when the combat is over (maybe after 5 minutes of not being hit/cast on/casting/hitting) it should be usable again.
- For the rewards I thought about how to do this better so it is less exploitable. It could be implemented in a slightly different way, in steps:
1) There are several 'goals' that you can choose. For example 'exclusive inner prison access for 6 hours'. You state this goal near an NPC. The NPC repeats your goal and a time at which you want it to start, which is an hour from that time. No one can zone into the zone that you claimed from then on by normal zoning (they can with resses, so a raid in progress can not be thwarted) not even you. You can only state each specific goal once per week, and if you lose you are barred from the zone you chose for a longer time (a day?) than you would have gotten access if you won. You have to pay the NPC money for the claim to be registered as well (guild money sink).
2) You will all get a teleportation stone with 1 charge that teleports you to the PvP zone if you hail the NPC and you are in the raid that started the goal. A broadcast will say that guild X (or raid X) has claimed goal Y.
3) From then on, any other guild / raid (the attacking group) can challenge you once by zoning into the PvP zone and telling the NPC that you want to challenge the claiming group (the defending group). The attackers do not have to pay any money (this stimulates more fighting from lower-equipped guilds). The defenders get a notification that they are challenged and should then stop what they were doing and click their stones to zone in. They have 15 minutes to gather up and set their fight timer, otherwise the timer starts automatically or they lose if no one of the defending group shows up.
4) The fight starts as described above. No zoning, gating or ressing allowed during the fight. During the fight all in-combat rules apply like when fighting NPC's. So no meditation during the fight and no bandaging.
5) If the defenders win, they gain nothing yet but they do get a new teleportation stone to the PvP zone. If the defenders lose, they are barred from their goal zone for a day and they can not claim that goal for a week. If the attackers win, they become the new defenders however they cannot be attacked by the group that they have just won from. They have an hour again before their prize can be claimed. Of course any other guilds or raids can challenge them in the mean time.
6) Once the time is over that a guild can be challenged, they get half of the money that the original defenders had to pay to the NPC. They can now use the portal in the PvP zone to go to the raid zone. The normal zoneline is barred for 6 hours and you will get a message saying that guild X has won it as a prize.
Some more random thoughts about this:
- On guildwar people should become un-anon, otherwise the world is too big to find them.
- Perhaps ousting another guild from some raid zones by this PvP idea is not a bad idea after all.
So guild A is raiding inner prison, but guild B wants it too. They zone into the PvP zone and let the NPC know that they want the inner prison zone (and they pay the NPC a lot). Then guild A will have to fight them to keep the zone. The one who loses is barred from the zone for a day. There is no "reward" other than that for the winner (the fact that the loser loses the zone). A guild can only try to oust someone once per day and only specific high level raid zones are subject to this. If you lose you cannot start a fight with that guild on that day again for that zone.