Remove INR loss from caches/allied areas
As the title suggests: just as the mark cost for dying in open pk or allied areas is severely reduced, so should the exp loss. As such I think we shouldn't leave INRs behind if we die in those.
Every cache I ran and died in is at least half an hour of mobbing to get my exp back. I don't have this kind of time - maybe for fun activities, but not for boring drudgework that serves no purpose other than to recoup my losses. Players shouldn't be punished just because they participated in an organized pvp event and died.
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Something that comes to mind to do with INRs is like... a variation of shrine offering, maybe INRs have some form of value which factions want (corpses to essence elsewhere) and which can be turned into buffs or the like (shrine powers/buffs)?
There's a "farming" consideration but you could try setting it up so collect enemy and your own INRs after death are good things rather than not doing it being a bad thing?
Souls are closer to gold you drop on death than experience, which is also a thing here too. And PvP is kinda a joke there, don't want to deal with the loss? just make your internet connection drop when things are going badly.
The more relevant comparisons would be MMOs which have overwhelmingly moved to alternative death punishments, if they have any at all.
On a quick look around, the only one I found from the past decade with xp loss was Archeage, which it apparently doesn't happen if you die to a player and dying in open world PvE also gives you a buff with your 1% xp loss (after stopping quickly to pray your xp back)
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
There's a bunch of factors that can contribute to that and one of them is "being on the winning side" (one of the ways it flips is when people get bored and want to be on the losing side then lead that side to winning heh)
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
Also, I don't know how much you think an INR would sell for, but I think you're highly overestimating the amount. If you want marks, it's probably faster to do hard incursions than the way you suggest. But hey, feel free to have your character kill himself over and over to find out. Let us know how it turns out.
In the meantime, the mechanic can continue to promote disengagement and, in turn, get in the way of things becoming equal.
edit: i.e if a mechanic/system/etc is okay in a situation which doesn't currently exist, it very likely needs changing.
The issue is that we currently do not have the ability to do arena team events or to spar crews as a form of practice so that people who don't know what they are doing, have a safe place to do just that. Therefore leaving risk based pvp to people who need that aspect to give a shit about it.
If we don't lose exp for focusing on objectives that promote and help establish a pecking order for Factions, then there is no point in having the faction pvp to begin with because just 'throwing bodies' at the problem then becomes the superior tactic.
If no one loses xp, there is no reason for Song to not bring ever person we have so they get used to calls and learn from it. XP loss on death is the only reason the numbers in there are low, as they should be. You're free to disagree with me, bot allowing there to be no risk or cost to factional pvp does nothing in the long term except make people who actually like pvp go elsewhere, and the people who are just planning to dabble, will sink a toe in and then stop participating once they get bored of the initial spark of newness. Just like Cosmpiercers, just like everything else.
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
Arenas help sure, but as mentioned above, no exp loss on actual meaningful objectives appears to be shown to help more.
This is also flawed because it focuses on exp loss as the only mechanism to address these concerns.
Death timers, for example, are another mechanism to address the "throwing bodies" tactic. (i.e each time you die in a pvp objective your cloning time gets increased for til the end of that objective.)
It's not much of an issue if you have a couple of deaths but it slowly gets worse. If you go in a couple of times and don't succeed you haven't really lost anything other than the reward for winning.
And if you just keep throwing yourself at an unwinnable battle you'll just end up with such a long timer that you can't come back in time to stop the other side winning.
If the issue is large swarms, you can also look at addressing that on a pvp objective design level. A "hold the point" style map, for example, could have more and less valuable locations that are active simultaneously to split up the groups, you can add in a mechanism where a kill steals victory points (or w/e) which also would make people wary of bringing people that might feed the opposition.
tl;dr Exp loss is one tool to resolve the concerns, there are alternatives which apparently other games feel work better.
Death timers can be countered with heart-starting, and xp loss is the only reason heartstarting isn't constantly spammed. But if you want to turn pvp into a match of 'which faction has the most Engineers' which will end up with us being back on the forums arguing about how to get more people willing to go Engineer into other factions.
Which at that point if we have no xp loss, does that not mean the only solution would be to not have heartstart work in pvp situations?
The issue is not actually large swarms, the issue is that not everyone should be participating in every type of pvp. And if we have ways for people to learn and transition in a no xp loss way, then they will use that to go into xp loss pvp, IF they are truly interested.
There is no reason to not increase practice locations for people who are considering sinking their toes into pvp. Because there are far more than 'xp loss' reasons for why people are not participating. They may highly dislike how some classes work. They might not like how their class feels in pvp. They might not the speed of the pvp. There is far more going on that discourages pvping than just xp.
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
We need arenas for parties and tournaments for prizes! Saturday night Starmourn pvp tournaments! Think outside the box. Regulating things just cause you don’t like it is not fair. Rather focus on creating something you would like! Cosmpiercer powers revolve around caches. Cosmpiercer powers are strong so effort dictates that reward.
My two cents
A few months after this release there was also a change which enabled players to also buy immunity to xp loss on death.
If you're also looking for data, there is similarly people citing xp loss as a factor their reticence to participate.
The interaction between a death timer and heart-starting isn't actually known.
You'd realistically look at a full outline of a system without exp-loss and determine what abilities are broken within that context, maybe heart-starting is too powerful so you disable it, maybe you build in some consequences for heart starting that make it more of a tactical tool than a spammed one.
Then you build your systems around your theory.
Realistically though, that's also a significant and tricky time investment because, unless there's something to hold them back, the top tier PvPers are going to leap at opportunities to fight.
These are also all things that can be worked on lol, nothing about removing exp loss means not working on classes or introducing arenas. It's just about doing something to address a concern people are saying is stopping them from diving into PvP.
Also, to put it out there.
Fundamentally, the difference between exp loss and other mechanisms such as death timers is that exp loss is a negative mechanism that one player gets to inflict on someone else, typically with far less work than the other player will need to put in to recover from it.
Where a death timer or the like is a mechanism aimed at ensuring the "better" side wins by making it harder for the other side to recover from their losses, but you don't really lose anything other than your time and any consumables you used.
Also, in other games the difference between winning and losing mostly boils down to winning is more rewarding while losing is less rewarding.
GW2, FFXIV, Overwatch, and Destiny 2 all immediately come to mind. There's mechanical progress and/or currency rewards that you get just for participating it's just the winners get, often a lot, more.
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
edit: Or maybe even a modern successful MMO that does things the way you think works best?
I also pointed out the changes to Cosmpiercers and even making them more accessible did not increase participation numbers, it did decrease some complaints, but either way the core people participating in pvp did not change.
An example of an mmo where you didn't lose xp or death or items would be Tera Online where they PREVIOUSLY had open world pvp and you could pvp as long as you were level 1. The pvp servers were extremely active, and I played on them from launch. And then came the pvp nerfs because the pve servers were dying off and people wanted to be on the pvp servers but not get ganked when they were newbies. So they then changed it so that you had to be level 10 first. Fast forward over a few years later when I come to check back in after they stopped us from being able to pvp in cities during guild wars, and you can't open world pvp until end game ON the PVP servers. Needless to say, no one plays Tera for pvp anymore, at least not seriously and gvgs mean nothing.
Making pvp less competitive kills most incentive to even bother, and players who like pvp will then move to a different game.
So please, since the information on MUDs doing the no xp loss increased numbers helped so much, please give me some examples, and link a producer actually saying that.
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer