The latest patch introduced overall luck increase and gathering luck increase when PVP is enabled, which is an excellent approach to incentivise open world PVP. Gathering and crafting are a very important part of the game and should be adequately tied to the PVP element of the game. Meanwhile the gatherers, who are not interested in PVP, may continue doing what they have been doing so far without any major effect onto them. So to take it a step further and:
- Completely revitalize open world PVP
- Bring PVP hungry people back to the game by providing a new stimulating PVP Activity
- Make gathering exciting and rewarding for adrenaline junkies
I hereby present you two ideas – addons/changes to PVP enabled gathering and stockpiles. The main principle of these two ideas is to incentivise people to turn on PVP for gathering activities and bring PVP play to all over the Aeternum, absolutely everywhere, not just around the cities and PVP quest areas. This would breathe life back into empty, yet beautiful landscapes that go to waste if players have little to no interest in visiting them except when passing by when moving from point A to point B.
Without further ado, here are the details:
PVP gathering and applied changes/adjustments/addons
*when the PVP enabled gatherer is killed by an enemy player, a single full stack of any gatherable material will be dropped from the players bag, for the enemy player to loot. The dropped stack is randomly selected from the dead gatherers inventory and put to the ground for the enemy to take. If there are multiple enemy players, the dropper material amounts are divided between the kill contributing enemy players equally. This way the dead gatherer has incentive to stay alive as in case of death they will lose a small or big part of their gathering produce and the PVP enabled gatherer hunters have incentive to hunt for these gatherers out in the wild, at any part of the map, at any point of time. Gatherers may attempt to counter this by taking a stack of 1 material from different materials, so that upon death, there would be high chances of the stack of 1 material to drop. In order to counter this, a randomized drop principle can be followed:
-take the smallest material stack amount that player has in the inventory
-add the largest material stack amount to the value
-divide the number by two
-have 50% of chances of any stack below the resulting value dropping and have 50% of chances of any stack above the resulting value dropping.
For example, lets say player stacked multiple 1 size resources into the inventory (for example 1 iron ore, 1 fiber, 1 stone, 1 air mote etc) and then goes to gather raw hides. Player then gathers 100 raw hides. Lets say that player has now resource stacks as such: 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,100. If overall randomization would be applied, then user has 90% to drop any of the resource stacks of 1, thus „cheating“ the system. However, by appling the proposed formula, the minimum stack, which is 1, and the maximum stack which is 100 should be added together and then divided by 2, which will give us (1+100)/2=50,5. So now we apply there being a 50% chance of any resource stack, that is below 50,5, to drop upon death and 50% of any resource stack, that is above 50,5, to drop upon death. Thus player has 50% chances to drop the 100 rawhides, because there is only one stack of resources that is above 50,5 and 50% chances droppping of any of the nine 1 stack resources. This would also incentivise players to gather different types of resources to potentially even out the resources they are holding, which would create variance in resource drops upon death.
*you have already boosted gathering luck when PVP enabled. Another thing that should be boosted is the gathering material yield, which scales with how far the player is from any safe spot (town, shrine). The scale should fall somewhere between 20-50%. So for an example, user turns on PVP, leaves the city for gathering, the material nodes close to the town would only have a 20% yield boost and this yield boost is gradually increasing the more the player travels away from the safe spot. Over time the players get further away from the safe spot, thus the risk increases, as well as the yield they get from their gathering activities. At one point, when passing a certain threshold of inventory capacity, the gathering player can be marked as „loaded“ to the enemy players so they would know which player may be worth hunting down.
*teleporting/fast travelling loading time ,when PVP enabled, should be adjusted based on the weight of the inventory. So PVP enabled players who attempt to recall to the inn for example and whose inventory is rather empty (ie not much gathered materials) can finish the recall animation with nearly the standard 10second animation. PVP enabled gatherers, whose inventory is rather full, would need to spend lets say 1min in the recall animation in order to finish the process. This would give the PVP enabled players time to hunt down the teleporting player. Teleporting would be considered the „easy way out“ (in terms of time and effort) for the gatherers and at the same time should be riskier, the more they carry. High risk high reward. The teleporter should have a clearly visible beam above them to indicate their position so the hunters would be able to track them from further away. The gatherer may thus choose to be sneaky, and run back to town by avoiding all enemy players and delivering the materials to the town that may potentially be guarded by enemy PVP enabled players, or take the „easy way out“ approach that poses a different threat, ie luring the enemy players, who are hunting gatherers in the wilderness, closer and potentially suffering the dire consequences.
Stockpiles
*enable building of stockpiles by players (belonging into the same faction) to any part of flat terrain (similarly like building a camp for respawning) as a combined effort. These stockpiles would be similar in size to the trading post in the city (size of the structure could potentially be dynamic and depend on how much the resources the players are planning to stockpile). The function of these stockpiles would be, once established and built (should require considerable amount of wood, stone, metals), to allow players to deliver and stockpile the gathered materials from nearby nodes into the structure for „safe keeping“ once their inventory is full.
*the stockpiles boost the nearby (within 500m for example) resource node respawn times by 100%-300% for example, to allow certain resource gather routes to be established by participating players. This promotes strategic placement of the stockpile and it should not be a thing done lightheartedly. Only a single stockpile should be allowed within X meters to prevent stacking of these structures.
*when full, or upon desire, the resources that have been deposited into the stockpiles can be teleported/transferred to the town inventories of the contributing/depositing players. This process will take tens of minutes of time (depending of the size of the stockpile built) to give enemy factions time to attack the stockpile. If an enemy faction has been able to destroy the stockpile at any point of time during the gathering process or the teleporting process, the resources will be dropped to the ground for anyone to pick up for their own leisure.
*it can be made, that the stockpiles can only be built on territory that the same faction owns, thus incentivising factions to acquire more territory just to allow more of these stockpiles to be built near various resource node locations.
*stockpiles can only be operated and interacted with by PVP enabled players
*stockpile resource transportation activity can only be activated when X amount of players are nearby defending, the amount of players required should depend on the size of the stockpile
I sincerely believe that the above addons/changes would significantly boost the PVP activities that would take place everywhere on the Aeternum island and would once again inject life and joy into open world PVP in New World.
Please let me know your thoughts and if you have any more ideas that could be built onto of these two. Before posting, though, please thing through whether you REALLY have any valuable thoughts to share to prevent another whine-fest from happening.
Sincerely,
5m4rt4ss