devtrackers.gg
In this deep dive into the corruption system, I attempt to give a model of behavior for the decision to become corrupt. This model won't be perfect since people aren't purely rational beings and there are factors that we find out experimentally that we could never expect theoretically. Then, I go over another model for a loophole in the corruption system that has been often discussed in the past, to see if the worries are justified. No matter the conclusions here, it is worthwhile to see how the corruption system plays out in alpha 2, before deciding it needs any changes.
What is the point of corruption in Ashes of Creation? Is it to prevent all unwanted PvP as some seem to believe? No, it has three express purposes:
1) To prevent players who mindlessly kill and grief other players for no express purpose other than their own enjoyment. This applies especially to protecting lower leveled players from higher leveled players.
2) To add risk, and therefore meaning, to PKing in Ashes of Creation. It is not meant to prevent all unwanted open world PvP in Ashes, as a toggle would serve that purpose far better than corruption would. It isn't even meant as a pure punishment. From Steven in 2017: "It's not punishment. It's risk. Reward without risk is meaningless." https://ashesofcreation.wiki/images/thumb/e/e7/corruption2.jpg/350px-corruption2.jpg
3) To propel the bounty hunter system, one of the main perks of a military node. This is an odd thing to consider, but the bounty hunter system is pointless without corrupt players and needs a healthy population of corrupt players to stay relevant.
So, when analyzing the corruption system we have to have these three design goals in mind and see if the current mechanic achieves these goals. Let's consider a simple situation. You are attacking an unflagged person, and are certain that just one more attack will kill him. Should you kill that player and go corrupt? Let's list the most essential benefits and risks.
One benefit is the items that the PKer will be able to loot from their victim, and we can assign a value to whatever our PKer expects that to be. Often when talking about corruption, people have stated that nobody is going to kill other players for some iron ore they have on them. This is true, but remember that the gathering and crafting systems in Ashes are based on Star Wars Galaxies. In Star Wars Galaxies, there were different qualities of materials, and they would spawn randomly. So, the price of a high-quality material gathered in just an hour could be worth many times the normal gathering amount.
The other benefit is the psychological value generated from going corrupt. Some people like going red in games with karma systems. It's a cool aesthetic and it adds a challenge to the game. Can you survive while being chased by others? There is also just the simple joy of killing someone in a MMO and ruining their day.
The costs for corrupt players are as follows:
- Respawn at random spawn points instead of the closest spawn point.
- A chance to drop gear upon death while corrupt
- Stat dampening that reduces your ability to PvP
- Your location is given out to bounty hunters
- Incapable of player to player trading
- Suffer four times the player death penalties a non-combatant would, which include:
- Higher chance to drop materials
- Stat dampening from experience debt
- Durability loss
- Lower gear proficiency
- Reduced drop rates from mobs from experience debt
Consider the items a PKer may drop if he is killed while corrupt. Corrupt players drop 4x the number of materials and processed goods a non-flagged player would normally drop, so essentially say goodbye to whatever mats and processed goods you have on you. Corrupt players will also have a chance to drop their equipped gear. There is the chance there will be different levels of corruption, and only at higher levels of corruption will you have the chance to drop gear. But for the sake of our analysis, we'll just assume you have a 25% chance of dropping a random gear piece if you die under any corruption.
Next, we have the opportunity cost of having to grind off corruption and the potential experience debt. The opportunity cost is the next best activity a person would do if he were not doing the current activity. If you're stuck grinding off experience debt for an hour, you weren't able to spend that hour mining, or playing in the arena, or whatever a player would have done with that time if he hadn't died while corrupt. This opportunity cost will be considered under both the amount of time it takes to work off corruption, as well as the amount of time it takes to work off the extra player death penalties if one were to die corrupt. It also seems that one will not be able to gain much while grinding off this experience debt, "Another point, experience debt can significantly reduce your drop rate for monsters. The more debt you own the greater the drop in % for loot tables. These modifiers are applied in a divisible manner for parties." https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/233161/#Comment_233161
For our analysis, we'll consider grinding off experience debt to provide no gold income.
We don't know if corruption will work as a tiered system or a spectrum. If I die after working off 90% of my corruption from 1 PK, do I still maintain the full corruption penalty of 4x the amount a non-flagged player would? Or do I only get 10% of that corruption penalty since I worked off 90% of the corruption? If the latter, the expected cost of going corrupt will go down, but we'll assume it's the former.
Bounty hunters are looking to kill corrupt players for their benefit, whether that be some form of honor points system or the materials/gear the corrupt player has on them. When going corrupt, each player has to consider the risk of dying to a bounty hunter / non-friendly player.
Durability loss damages the gear you have equipped. If your gear breaks, it will require considerably more materials to repair it than if you were to maintain your gear. The repair system is not just a gold sink, but a material sink, and we don't know how close in quality materials have to be to repair gear. If my Orichalcum sword has 100% quality orichalcum ore, do I need 100% quality ore to repair it, or less? 90%? Just any orichalcum ore? We don't know. We'll just assume the value of materials to repair an item is 1/4th the cost it took to create the item. Why so low? Let's say you get a full set of BiS gear, and it took you 500 hours to get all the materials to craft it. We are saying it'll take you 125 hours to fully repair your gear, I think that's already pretty harsh. We'll have to see how harsh the item durability cost is in Ashes of Creation, but I believe Intrepid isn't trying to make us throw our keyboards across the room every time we die in our best gear. Fingers crossed. There's also however a concern, that to evade this all a corrupt player would have to do is switch the gear they are wearing after they go corrupt, since gear in your inventory won't take a hit from durability loss.
Putting this all together we get an expected value equation for the decision to go corrupt:
E(v) = (W*π+P) - (L*(1-π)*g + D*d*(1-π) + C*π + X*(1-π))
E(v) is expected value
W is the loot value a PKer expects to gain
P is the psychological value of going corrupt
L is the value of the items you may lose upon death
g is the percentage chance of dropping a gear piece while corrupt
C is the opportunity cost of grinding off corruption
D is the value of materials it takes to fully repair your gear
d is the % durability loss your items take upon death while corrupt
X is the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt
π is our chance of total survival while we work off all our corruption
1-π represents our chance of dying while corrupt
Let's use our equation to look at an example now.
You are a master herbalist, and it is currently winter. Normally you would be making a killing off gathering rare herbs, but during winter you make only 500 gold per hour gathering and have nothing else you'd currently rather do. You know that mining is still quite profitable during winter, with master miners having the chance to get high-quality ore. And you know that a rare ore vein has finally spawned in the local mine. You believe that this ore is currently worth 6,000 gold for an hour's worth of mined materials by a master miner. You then see that a player you know is a master miner, is exiting the said mine. You are on the same level. You decide to attack this player, but they refuse to fight back, baiting you to kill them and go corrupt. You also do not have your best gear set on you. It's silly in a game with such high item durability costs to use it outside of raids, wars, world bosses, caravans, and generally the highest content. The gear you are wearing has the value of 2,000 gold a gear slot, with 10 gear slots. You have a 25% chance to drop one gear piece if you die. You don't have any other materials or processed goods on you. The time to work off corruption for one PK will take 15 minutes, and the time to work off experience debt if you die while corrupt is an hour. Durability loss for a non-combatant is 3% per death, so for you, it is 12% if you die corrupt. And the value of materials it takes to fully repair an item is 1/10 the value of the item. Assume that your chance of getting caught is 30%, as you're an assassin and quite capable of escaping bounty hunters. You're not the biggest fan of going corrupt, but find it somewhat enjoyable, valuing the experience at 100 gold. A non-flagged player who dies drops half of their materials. Do you kill the miner and go corrupt?
Let's check. E(v) = (3,000*0.7 + 100) - (2,000*0.3*0.25) + (5,000*0.3*0.12) + (125*0.7) + (500*0.3)
E(v) = (2,100+100) - (150+180+87.5+150) = 1632.5 gold
You will make a large economic profit by killing the miner and going corrupt in this case. Now, if we were to imagine that the miner was a lower leveled player and gave double the amount of corruption, then the opportunity cost to work off the corruption would rise, which is important, but also the chance of escape would go down, dramatically lowering the chance of keeping your stolen materials, and increasing the chance of you losing a gear piece, taking item decay, and having to grind off experience debt.
The important takeaway is that the equation as described above would entail a large cost for players who just want to kill others for no other reason than their own enjoyment. If you're killing lower leveled players, these costs increase dramatically. There is still an incentive for players to try and steal resources and go corrupt, meaning that the bounty hunter system will come into play as players will be going corrupt and trying to avoid them. There will be open world PvP over the rarest materials in the game, which I'm personally happy about. This scenario fulfills all three of our design goals, and the corruption system is a success.
But, what about a special loophole? A player wants to steal another's materials, but they don't want to risk dropping their gear or the chance of losing their stolen materials. So, they have an alt or friend kill them right after they go corrupt. Assume the same conditions in our situation above, except in this scenario. You will certainly die, so you will undergo the full penalty of experience debt and item durability loss, but otherwise, you are lowering the chance of losing your stolen materials to zero, as well as the possibility of losing the materials/gear on your person. We'll keep the psychological enjoyment, as there's two parts to it. The joy of killing another player, and the joy of escaping bounty hunters. So, the equation we get is now:
E(x) = (W + P) - (X + D*d)
A much simpler equation, it is only the materials you steal and the psychological enjoyment of killing another player subtracted by the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt and item durability loss. So, to plug in the numbers from our previous example:
E(x) = (3,000 + 100) - (500 + 600) = 2,000 gold
A gain in profit of close to 400 gold from our normal scenario. So, this special circumstance is more profitable, but thanks to the high item durability loss and high experience debt penalty, the profit isn't much higher. Everything is good, right? The system is working as intended, the high durability and experience debt is preventing players from going corrupt.
Let's assume that bounty hunters are especially effective at catching corrupt players. They catch corrupt players at a rate of 70%. Then, the profit in the scenario where we try to kill our innocent miner and evade bounty hunters goes down to -157.5 gold, we're now going corrupt at a loss. It doesn't make sense to go corrupt now. But, what about our special loophole? That profit stays the same, you make 2,000 gold.
This makes sense, when bounty hunters are successful, it's less profitable to go corrupt. But, when bounty hunters are good at their job, it makes more and more sense to have a friend kill you instead of dying to bounty hunters. The only prevention is the cost of experience debt and item decay. And the opposite is true as well, when bounty hunters are bad at catching corrupt players, it makes less sense to use the loophole.
I believe the loophole will be a well-known method and popular. These aren't the days of old, people have been playing MMORPGs for a long time, and are more likely than ever to abuse any system they can. Even when talking to players from Lineage 2, it was fairly common for red players to have a friend kill them to protect their gear. And Lineage 2 didn't have a bounty hunter system like Ashes of Creation, so that's a big change to the system. Although, they didn't have an item decay system either, which seems like a very burdensome cost. What if the loophole becomes standard in Ashes of Creation's Alpha two? Is there any way to keep bounty hunters involved?
Well, I have a solution from a while ago. My solution is that the items that you would have dropped had you died while corrupt, become corrupt as well. Those items are now "blood-stained" or whatever you want to call it, but the point is that the corruption is on both the players and their items. You can't trade or process blood-stained items. Blood-stained items mark you for bounty hunters, automatically flag you, and drop 100% of the time if you die. Player death doesn't remove the blood-stained quality, the only way to remove it would be:
1) To go to a shrine and cleanse the items. There would have to be several shrines to prevent bounty hunters from camping the shrines.
2) Return the blood-stained items to their original owner
3) A bounty hunter claims them and then those items fall under the bounty hunter system.
Now even if you purposefully kill your toon and give the items to your main / friend, the materials are still at risk by bounty hunters or other players. So now the risk of getting caught by a bounty hunter still exists, and the loophole is closed.
Hopefully this post helped you understand when you should be going corrupt, and how to think about the many costs of corruption vs the benefits. I think in practice, players will overestimate their chance of grinding off all their corruption before getting caught. There are plenty of other questions about the bounty hunting system such as how many people can become bounty hunters, do bounty hunters get honor points or get to keep the dropped items from corrupt players? Is the only risk to being a bounty hunter the experience debt accrued upon death? There's also a question of monopolization of rare resources by controlling the areas where they spawn, and whether a guild trying to monopolize an area at the risk of corruption is worth the cost. Plenty of interesting systems to see play out in Alpha 2. I hope to make an updated post well into Alpha 2, to see whether my prediction came true, as well as have better numbers/examples for when it's viable to go corrupt in practice.
Some links:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_corruption
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_durability
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting
What is the point of corruption in Ashes of Creation? Is it to prevent all unwanted PvP as some seem to believe? No, it has three express purposes:
1) To prevent players who mindlessly kill and grief other players for no express purpose other than their own enjoyment. This applies especially to protecting lower leveled players from higher leveled players.
2) To add risk, and therefore meaning, to PKing in Ashes of Creation. It is not meant to prevent all unwanted open world PvP in Ashes, as a toggle would serve that purpose far better than corruption would. It isn't even meant as a pure punishment. From Steven in 2017: "It's not punishment. It's risk. Reward without risk is meaningless." https://ashesofcreation.wiki/images/thumb/e/e7/corruption2.jpg/350px-corruption2.jpg
3) To propel the bounty hunter system, one of the main perks of a military node. This is an odd thing to consider, but the bounty hunter system is pointless without corrupt players and needs a healthy population of corrupt players to stay relevant.
So, when analyzing the corruption system we have to have these three design goals in mind and see if the current mechanic achieves these goals. Let's consider a simple situation. You are attacking an unflagged person, and are certain that just one more attack will kill him. Should you kill that player and go corrupt? Let's list the most essential benefits and risks.
One benefit is the items that the PKer will be able to loot from their victim, and we can assign a value to whatever our PKer expects that to be. Often when talking about corruption, people have stated that nobody is going to kill other players for some iron ore they have on them. This is true, but remember that the gathering and crafting systems in Ashes are based on Star Wars Galaxies. In Star Wars Galaxies, there were different qualities of materials, and they would spawn randomly. So, the price of a high-quality material gathered in just an hour could be worth many times the normal gathering amount.
The other benefit is the psychological value generated from going corrupt. Some people like going red in games with karma systems. It's a cool aesthetic and it adds a challenge to the game. Can you survive while being chased by others? There is also just the simple joy of killing someone in a MMO and ruining their day.
The costs for corrupt players are as follows:
- Respawn at random spawn points instead of the closest spawn point.
- A chance to drop gear upon death while corrupt
- Stat dampening that reduces your ability to PvP
- Your location is given out to bounty hunters
- Incapable of player to player trading
- Suffer four times the player death penalties a non-combatant would, which include:
- Higher chance to drop materials
- Stat dampening from experience debt
- Durability loss
- Lower gear proficiency
- Reduced drop rates from mobs from experience debt
Consider the items a PKer may drop if he is killed while corrupt. Corrupt players drop 4x the number of materials and processed goods a non-flagged player would normally drop, so essentially say goodbye to whatever mats and processed goods you have on you. Corrupt players will also have a chance to drop their equipped gear. There is the chance there will be different levels of corruption, and only at higher levels of corruption will you have the chance to drop gear. But for the sake of our analysis, we'll just assume you have a 25% chance of dropping a random gear piece if you die under any corruption.
Next, we have the opportunity cost of having to grind off corruption and the potential experience debt. The opportunity cost is the next best activity a person would do if he were not doing the current activity. If you're stuck grinding off experience debt for an hour, you weren't able to spend that hour mining, or playing in the arena, or whatever a player would have done with that time if he hadn't died while corrupt. This opportunity cost will be considered under both the amount of time it takes to work off corruption, as well as the amount of time it takes to work off the extra player death penalties if one were to die corrupt. It also seems that one will not be able to gain much while grinding off this experience debt, "Another point, experience debt can significantly reduce your drop rate for monsters. The more debt you own the greater the drop in % for loot tables. These modifiers are applied in a divisible manner for parties." https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/233161/#Comment_233161
For our analysis, we'll consider grinding off experience debt to provide no gold income.
We don't know if corruption will work as a tiered system or a spectrum. If I die after working off 90% of my corruption from 1 PK, do I still maintain the full corruption penalty of 4x the amount a non-flagged player would? Or do I only get 10% of that corruption penalty since I worked off 90% of the corruption? If the latter, the expected cost of going corrupt will go down, but we'll assume it's the former.
Bounty hunters are looking to kill corrupt players for their benefit, whether that be some form of honor points system or the materials/gear the corrupt player has on them. When going corrupt, each player has to consider the risk of dying to a bounty hunter / non-friendly player.
Durability loss damages the gear you have equipped. If your gear breaks, it will require considerably more materials to repair it than if you were to maintain your gear. The repair system is not just a gold sink, but a material sink, and we don't know how close in quality materials have to be to repair gear. If my Orichalcum sword has 100% quality orichalcum ore, do I need 100% quality ore to repair it, or less? 90%? Just any orichalcum ore? We don't know. We'll just assume the value of materials to repair an item is 1/4th the cost it took to create the item. Why so low? Let's say you get a full set of BiS gear, and it took you 500 hours to get all the materials to craft it. We are saying it'll take you 125 hours to fully repair your gear, I think that's already pretty harsh. We'll have to see how harsh the item durability cost is in Ashes of Creation, but I believe Intrepid isn't trying to make us throw our keyboards across the room every time we die in our best gear. Fingers crossed. There's also however a concern, that to evade this all a corrupt player would have to do is switch the gear they are wearing after they go corrupt, since gear in your inventory won't take a hit from durability loss.
Putting this all together we get an expected value equation for the decision to go corrupt:
E(v) = (W*π+P) - (L*(1-π)*g + D*d*(1-π) + C*π + X*(1-π))
E(v) is expected value
W is the loot value a PKer expects to gain
P is the psychological value of going corrupt
L is the value of the items you may lose upon death
g is the percentage chance of dropping a gear piece while corrupt
C is the opportunity cost of grinding off corruption
D is the value of materials it takes to fully repair your gear
d is the % durability loss your items take upon death while corrupt
X is the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt
π is our chance of total survival while we work off all our corruption
1-π represents our chance of dying while corrupt
Let's use our equation to look at an example now.
You are a master herbalist, and it is currently winter. Normally you would be making a killing off gathering rare herbs, but during winter you make only 500 gold per hour gathering and have nothing else you'd currently rather do. You know that mining is still quite profitable during winter, with master miners having the chance to get high-quality ore. And you know that a rare ore vein has finally spawned in the local mine. You believe that this ore is currently worth 6,000 gold for an hour's worth of mined materials by a master miner. You then see that a player you know is a master miner, is exiting the said mine. You are on the same level. You decide to attack this player, but they refuse to fight back, baiting you to kill them and go corrupt. You also do not have your best gear set on you. It's silly in a game with such high item durability costs to use it outside of raids, wars, world bosses, caravans, and generally the highest content. The gear you are wearing has the value of 2,000 gold a gear slot, with 10 gear slots. You have a 25% chance to drop one gear piece if you die. You don't have any other materials or processed goods on you. The time to work off corruption for one PK will take 15 minutes, and the time to work off experience debt if you die while corrupt is an hour. Durability loss for a non-combatant is 3% per death, so for you, it is 12% if you die corrupt. And the value of materials it takes to fully repair an item is 1/10 the value of the item. Assume that your chance of getting caught is 30%, as you're an assassin and quite capable of escaping bounty hunters. You're not the biggest fan of going corrupt, but find it somewhat enjoyable, valuing the experience at 100 gold. A non-flagged player who dies drops half of their materials. Do you kill the miner and go corrupt?
Let's check. E(v) = (3,000*0.7 + 100) - (2,000*0.3*0.25) + (5,000*0.3*0.12) + (125*0.7) + (500*0.3)
E(v) = (2,100+100) - (150+180+87.5+150) = 1632.5 gold
You will make a large economic profit by killing the miner and going corrupt in this case. Now, if we were to imagine that the miner was a lower leveled player and gave double the amount of corruption, then the opportunity cost to work off the corruption would rise, which is important, but also the chance of escape would go down, dramatically lowering the chance of keeping your stolen materials, and increasing the chance of you losing a gear piece, taking item decay, and having to grind off experience debt.
The important takeaway is that the equation as described above would entail a large cost for players who just want to kill others for no other reason than their own enjoyment. If you're killing lower leveled players, these costs increase dramatically. There is still an incentive for players to try and steal resources and go corrupt, meaning that the bounty hunter system will come into play as players will be going corrupt and trying to avoid them. There will be open world PvP over the rarest materials in the game, which I'm personally happy about. This scenario fulfills all three of our design goals, and the corruption system is a success.
But, what about a special loophole? A player wants to steal another's materials, but they don't want to risk dropping their gear or the chance of losing their stolen materials. So, they have an alt or friend kill them right after they go corrupt. Assume the same conditions in our situation above, except in this scenario. You will certainly die, so you will undergo the full penalty of experience debt and item durability loss, but otherwise, you are lowering the chance of losing your stolen materials to zero, as well as the possibility of losing the materials/gear on your person. We'll keep the psychological enjoyment, as there's two parts to it. The joy of killing another player, and the joy of escaping bounty hunters. So, the equation we get is now:
E(x) = (W + P) - (X + D*d)
A much simpler equation, it is only the materials you steal and the psychological enjoyment of killing another player subtracted by the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt and item durability loss. So, to plug in the numbers from our previous example:
E(x) = (3,000 + 100) - (500 + 600) = 2,000 gold
A gain in profit of close to 400 gold from our normal scenario. So, this special circumstance is more profitable, but thanks to the high item durability loss and high experience debt penalty, the profit isn't much higher. Everything is good, right? The system is working as intended, the high durability and experience debt is preventing players from going corrupt.
Let's assume that bounty hunters are especially effective at catching corrupt players. They catch corrupt players at a rate of 70%. Then, the profit in the scenario where we try to kill our innocent miner and evade bounty hunters goes down to -157.5 gold, we're now going corrupt at a loss. It doesn't make sense to go corrupt now. But, what about our special loophole? That profit stays the same, you make 2,000 gold.
This makes sense, when bounty hunters are successful, it's less profitable to go corrupt. But, when bounty hunters are good at their job, it makes more and more sense to have a friend kill you instead of dying to bounty hunters. The only prevention is the cost of experience debt and item decay. And the opposite is true as well, when bounty hunters are bad at catching corrupt players, it makes less sense to use the loophole.
I believe the loophole will be a well-known method and popular. These aren't the days of old, people have been playing MMORPGs for a long time, and are more likely than ever to abuse any system they can. Even when talking to players from Lineage 2, it was fairly common for red players to have a friend kill them to protect their gear. And Lineage 2 didn't have a bounty hunter system like Ashes of Creation, so that's a big change to the system. Although, they didn't have an item decay system either, which seems like a very burdensome cost. What if the loophole becomes standard in Ashes of Creation's Alpha two? Is there any way to keep bounty hunters involved?
Well, I have a solution from a while ago. My solution is that the items that you would have dropped had you died while corrupt, become corrupt as well. Those items are now "blood-stained" or whatever you want to call it, but the point is that the corruption is on both the players and their items. You can't trade or process blood-stained items. Blood-stained items mark you for bounty hunters, automatically flag you, and drop 100% of the time if you die. Player death doesn't remove the blood-stained quality, the only way to remove it would be:
1) To go to a shrine and cleanse the items. There would have to be several shrines to prevent bounty hunters from camping the shrines.
2) Return the blood-stained items to their original owner
3) A bounty hunter claims them and then those items fall under the bounty hunter system.
Now even if you purposefully kill your toon and give the items to your main / friend, the materials are still at risk by bounty hunters or other players. So now the risk of getting caught by a bounty hunter still exists, and the loophole is closed.
Hopefully this post helped you understand when you should be going corrupt, and how to think about the many costs of corruption vs the benefits. I think in practice, players will overestimate their chance of grinding off all their corruption before getting caught. There are plenty of other questions about the bounty hunting system such as how many people can become bounty hunters, do bounty hunters get honor points or get to keep the dropped items from corrupt players? Is the only risk to being a bounty hunter the experience debt accrued upon death? There's also a question of monopolization of rare resources by controlling the areas where they spawn, and whether a guild trying to monopolize an area at the risk of corruption is worth the cost. Plenty of interesting systems to see play out in Alpha 2. I hope to make an updated post well into Alpha 2, to see whether my prediction came true, as well as have better numbers/examples for when it's viable to go corrupt in practice.
Some links:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_corruption
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_durability
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting