I don’t think any developer can balance PVP and PVE in a game where you can mix and match half your loadout on a whim. Players will always find ways to break the intended balance. Throw in an ever growing repertoire of weapons, Armor class that modifies power potential and a variable dodge ability based on armor class and it grows very complex. Everyone thinks they have the silver bullet but very rarely do you find anyone with a big picture, take everything into account and be fair to everyone perspective on what should and how it should be fixed.
Every change invariable breaks or brings to light a secondary interrelated issue.
The legendries are the concern I believe. I don’t agree there are an absurd number of them. What is absurd is how many of them are utter absolute trash and how many of them are bind on pickup rather than bind on equip given how stupidly rare and difficult it is to actually get 3 good perks in combination with a good armor class and attribute setup.
VERY few PVE players are rolling around in full legendary sets even those of us who have been running mutations for MONTHS and farm M10s.
They definitely can. The problem is how that balance looks.
When skill is a driving factor (like in alpha), the game becomes more balanced when viewed through the lens of players of equal capability fighting each other, but creates a larger disparity when a more proficient player fights a less proficient player. Great for a competitive scene, bad for low-effort players, of which there are many if OPR and expeditions are any indicator.
AGS has done a great job creating accessibility to the game play, but they’ve also severely limited player potential so that combat appears more balanced when viewed across large groups of players. If there’s a limit to how good you can perform, then you minimize the gap between really good players and everyone else. Unfortunately, this method makes it far more important for the numerical values and systems that govern combat to be much tighter as you’ve taken power out of the player’s hands. The current disparities between armor classes perfectly demonstrates this.
You can clearly see this in games like MOBAs and fighting games. Areas where everyone starts on the same playing-field with the same options but the disparities between performance are immense.
As for the PvE-side of things, it’s always far easier to balance PvP first and then tune the PvE values to that rather than vice versa or even attempting separate balance styles. MUDs had this figured out decades ago.
Because of this, why PvP players are pushing or incentives at all is highly suspicious.
It is entirely possible they are NOT trying to get people to flag but they just want more loot and just give some BS reason for it.
For example,
With shell companies using territory revenue for RMT, it is likely all this begging for more loot is somehow related. 3x yield? 2x speed? 2x luck? All this can only help bots. Sure you can try to PvP the ones you see, but what about the ones that are elsewhere on the map and not engaged? And they won’t be there long enough for you to relaly kill them since the OP wants 2x gathering speed. Even if you do kill them, they had 3x gathering yield so it’s more than worthwhile.
Plus there’s no reason people running bots can’t have them stacked with muskets or use aimbots.
I dont know that I would necessarily be ok with 3x yield bones for being flagged. Though I know there is more risk so more reward, I just think that would give A LOT more financial advantage to PvP players, who already have the largest financial advantage (well the territory owners do anyway).
Just my opinion but I would rather see PvP areas, auto flag, with increased density of nodes.
Whatever the outcome though, I think resources need to be addressed in one way or another, so I hope some of what is being discussed here gets picked up by the devs.
Those systems existed for most of this game’s development though. They were removed less than a year from the final release, which was itself after 5 delays.
Many players still come to this game expecting PvP and skill-based combat to be a thing because that’s what it was known for, for a long time. AGS pivoted while keeping silent about their intentions while announcing changes with vague corporate speak.
Understand, this would have almost no bearing on PvE whatsoever.
EDIT: Also ironic since AGS ripped off LoL for a lot of abilities and even some OPR concepts.
I agree with the OP’s idea (posted similar a week or 2 ago). This will really cut down on bots and that is a huge improvement.
Yes it is an inconvenience to PvErs but the outcome will lead to much much cheaper resources on the TP. So even if PvErs gather unflagged, they can supplement with cheaper resource purchases on the TP. Overall it is better for everyone and worse for the bots.
And of course it further opens up world PvP
Don’t get caught up on PvE vs PvP. AGS is going to push players to do both in order to be effective, like it or not.
A game is not a game till its launched the point of alpha and beta is for developers to squash bugs and gauge metrics. They clearly saw something that showed them what the game was, wasnt going to be profitable or enjoyable to whatever metric they used.
And a game is still in development until the developers stop updating it. That’s what live services do. Hell, most people consider the current game still an early access version (which is really what it should have been dubbed).
They’ve already reverted some changes they’ve made, such as in the disastrous June 2021 patch that slowed everyone who used an attack. They were even told the moment that idea was announced that it was a bad idea.
They were also told Umbral Shards and gearscore cap raise were a mistake the moment they were announced, and they even admitted in a developer video.
They have yet to clearly see anything as we continue to see sweeping changes to the game in all sorts of directions.
But you are right, a lot of these changes are slanted based on what metric they’re looking for, which will obviously skew their decisions tremendously.
I love this idea, and maybe to add on it a little the amount you get farming in PVE would be nerfed a little from its current state (half at the most). Would really cut into the Bots profits and they may be forced to flag if they want to actually make anything worthwhile before being banned.
Even if it is early access it’s identity and genre is decided.
My point was in Alpha and Beta for most games the game isn’t widely available to the public. Your under NDA for a reason, because anything quite literally can change about the game. In this case a lot changed. What went live when the game was purchasable that’s the genre and the game. Like it, love it, hate it. It isn’t going to revert to a game from an entirely different genre that it might of been in Alpha or Beta.
Survival PVP <> PvX MMORPG.
The developers already made that decisions and now we live in it.
If they want to go back to a Survival PVP game the most logical business decision would actually be to rebrand and launch a new title in that genre using what they learned here and stealing assets as they feel appropriate to kick that off. They aren’t going to dramatically shift the design vision or genre of the game this late in the game’s life cycle.
It’s been made very clear the ship is steering away from the hardcore PVP experience that the vocal PVPers on the forums want or loved.
This is a misrepresentation. They said it wasn’t the right time for it, not that the increase itself was a bad idea. We will see more increases and we will see more whining when it happens but we won’t stay at 60 and 625 for much longer I would imagine. Even since that video was released we have data mining showing new increases to GS and Level that made their way into the live data.
It might not be this year but it is on the horizon in the next year I would bet my pay check on it.
It maters immensely in how you approach balance and what the vision for balance is based on the game genre and combat system.
A role based system isn’t meant to be balanced head to head but team vs team. So PVP balance will never function on a strictly 1v1 system which is what most PVP players from Moba want.
That’s incredibly hard to balance when there are no classes, no defined roles for weapons, and no weapon synergies to encourage pairing intended weapons together.
MOBAs are team-based games. No one expects them to be balanced 1v1.
They are, however, far more skill-based.
It’s not though, especially when you put more emphasis on the core combat mechanics rather than attempting to balance each weapon individually.
AGS is currently trying to balance each aspect individually instead of creating a coherent system to start with. Next month’s dodge changes mirror this.
MOBAs may be team oriented but you can plug an play literally any character into any of the team slots and it functionally can work. That is a lot different than a design where you expect the team to be composed of one healer, one tank, and three DPS which is how most MMORPGs function with few exceptions. What allows that to work is that the MOBAs are balanced individually with kit specific strengths and weaknesses.
In a role bases system you kind of can do the same thing.
In a game with no actual classes you can’t. Any ability interacts with every single other ability. You have a ripple effect you simply don’t have with pre balanced kits where for the most part you can elect to take whatever you want into combat as your team.
