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Recently, there have been quite a few threads about the non-consensual PvP balance in Albion Online. There are a lot of complaints that due to recent changes, it is too hard to catch and kill potential ganking victims.
First of all, note that our balance goal is to maximize the amount of PvP that happens in the game in a sustainable way.
Non-consensual PvP in full loot games is extremely hard to do properly. The underlying issue is that it needs to be set up in such a way that it works in the long term, for both parties involved, the gankers, and the potential victims. Without potential victims, there is no non-consensual PvP.
What's not immediately obvious is that maximizing PvP is not achieved by making the game more and more deadly.
The amount of non-consensual PvP depends on the number N of possible targets in the zone, the chance E that you can engage them in a fight, and the chance K that you can score a kill in a fight, with the amount of non-consensual PvP kills = N*E*K.
Here is the thing: If E and K were, for example, 100%, N would drop to close to 0. No potential target will enter these zones if it means certain death (high K) without them being able try and avoid combat (high E).
There have been tons of different games that try this approach, and what usually happens is that their PvP levels go down drastically once the potential victims stop going to the PvP zones, are stop playing the game. The next stage is then that the players looking for non-consensual PvP only run into each other, which leads to them quitting, too. As far as we are aware, every open world PvP game taking this approach has suffered this fate.
Now let's look at Eve. Eve makes it very easy for people to avoid combat. You have local chat as a perfect intelligence tool, DSCAN with a huge range, the warp system that allows you to pretty much teleport away and is instant if you are aligned to your safespot, stations/bases that you can dock at, cloaking, gate guns, safe spots in the middle of nowhere. However, if you are caught (scrammed), you are pretty much done for.
All in all, Eve's non-consensual PvP balance is much much softer than what you have in Albion right now. The chance of dying if you play properly is very very low. While people used to the old ganking system will say that it's now "impossible to catch somebody", our killboards and the countless videos available on YouTube show that his is not the case.
We can still understand that gankers are upset. If you get used to a system that lets you easily gank players without them being able to do much about it, and this leads to you getting 5+ kills per hour, that of course is an insane amount of fun! However, it is also not sustainable.
Here is why: due to the game being full loot, each kill you score essentially destroys X hours of game time worth of gear/loot. Let's say the gatherer set takes the victim 2 hours to replace. If you score 5 solo kills per hour, 1 hour of your gameplay destroys 10 hours of gameplay of your victims. Said differently: it takes 10 players getting killed by you over and over again to sustain that. Unless we set up a gameplay center in a low wage country where we pay people to get killed over and over again, this won't work.
So what's the solution? Again, our goal is to maximize the amount of PvP that happens, including non-consensual PvP
First of all, note that our balance goal is to maximize the amount of PvP that happens in the game in a sustainable way.
Non-consensual PvP in full loot games is extremely hard to do properly. The underlying issue is that it needs to be set up in such a way that it works in the long term, for both parties involved, the gankers, and the potential victims. Without potential victims, there is no non-consensual PvP.
What's not immediately obvious is that maximizing PvP is not achieved by making the game more and more deadly.
The amount of non-consensual PvP depends on the number N of possible targets in the zone, the chance E that you can engage them in a fight, and the chance K that you can score a kill in a fight, with the amount of non-consensual PvP kills = N*E*K.
Here is the thing: If E and K were, for example, 100%, N would drop to close to 0. No potential target will enter these zones if it means certain death (high K) without them being able try and avoid combat (high E).
There have been tons of different games that try this approach, and what usually happens is that their PvP levels go down drastically once the potential victims stop going to the PvP zones, are stop playing the game. The next stage is then that the players looking for non-consensual PvP only run into each other, which leads to them quitting, too. As far as we are aware, every open world PvP game taking this approach has suffered this fate.
Now let's look at Eve. Eve makes it very easy for people to avoid combat. You have local chat as a perfect intelligence tool, DSCAN with a huge range, the warp system that allows you to pretty much teleport away and is instant if you are aligned to your safespot, stations/bases that you can dock at, cloaking, gate guns, safe spots in the middle of nowhere. However, if you are caught (scrammed), you are pretty much done for.
All in all, Eve's non-consensual PvP balance is much much softer than what you have in Albion right now. The chance of dying if you play properly is very very low. While people used to the old ganking system will say that it's now "impossible to catch somebody", our killboards and the countless videos available on YouTube show that his is not the case.
We can still understand that gankers are upset. If you get used to a system that lets you easily gank players without them being able to do much about it, and this leads to you getting 5+ kills per hour, that of course is an insane amount of fun! However, it is also not sustainable.
Here is why: due to the game being full loot, each kill you score essentially destroys X hours of game time worth of gear/loot. Let's say the gatherer set takes the victim 2 hours to replace. If you score 5 solo kills per hour, 1 hour of your gameplay destroys 10 hours of gameplay of your victims. Said differently: it takes 10 players getting killed by you over and over again to sustain that. Unless we set up a gameplay center in a low wage country where we pay people to get killed over and over again, this won't work.
So what's the solution? Again, our goal is to maximize the amount of PvP that happens, including non-consensual PvP
- We need to make sure that the full, no rules PvP zones (Outlands) are worth it for potential PvP targets to play in. This is achieved by making sure that rewards in these zones are much higher than in safer zones.
- We need to make sure that the average number of deaths that non-gankers will suffer is such that the zones are still worth it, despite them having to replace their gear now and then.
- The average number of deaths suffered per hour is a function of the chance E that an encounter leads to a fight, and the chance K that a fight leads to a kill. Eve has a very very low E, and a very high K. We are aiming for a medium E (our mounts are easier to catch than trying to get somebody in Eve who is constantly warping) and a medium K (escaping from combat in Albion is easier then getting away in Eve when you are already scrammed). We prefer this approach, as it leads to more action.
- The sweet spot to be reached is that the no rules PvP zones are worth it for both sides, the potential targets (as on average, their rewards for player there outweigh the risks compared to safe zones) and the gankers (even if they don't score 5+ kills per hour, they'll still get enough non-consensual PvP kills for this to be worth it, and then of course, encounter all sorts of consensual or semi-consensual open world PvP in between)