Hey all!
Bit of a behemoth blog, we'd really appreciate you taking the time to look through it and fill out the survey at the end to help us refine and shape BH's return.
Hope you're all having a great week so far!
FYI one of the survey questions is bugged:
For the emblem section: "How do you feel about each of these approaches?"
You can't put the same type of answer, ie "Dislike" for both.
Thanks for raising, we've realised what the issue is now and making changes to all of the questions with similar formatting!
The crater section of the survey has its radio buttons messed up. I can select all five of "Extremely like, like, neutral, dislike, and extremely dislike" for one crater, and can't select the same option for multiple craters.
I'm hoping that we've been able to sort it, I hate matrices :( Appreciate you (and others) for raising
- If a player is eligible to gain EP, they'll gain 2.5% EP every 2 minutes.
- Dying to your target increases your EP by 10%.
- Killing your target means your EP depletes back to 0%.
- Depending on how much EP you had, you’ll receive some kind of reward crate, and the average value increases with higher EP.
So the obvious meta will be to afk/die to boost your EP to 100% and then kill someone
If you omit the parts regarding time-gating EP gain on death, requiring a minimum risk to opt into EP (i.e. losing GP on death and/or risking GP) and the fact that it's a confined crater where you won't be safe to freely AFK then yes, that would be the meta. Though I think the parts mentioned as well as other aspects of the design would make it extremely difficult to do anything but lose GP doing what you've described.
So for the EP system what you're trying to encourage is staying in the arena for as long as possible without fighting to get high EP, or suiciding to an alt to boost EP before cashing out.
Real players will be trying to fight/kill/die as fast as possible, which will limit the impact EP will have except for players that die a lot. The amount you'd have to be rewarded for dying a lot to offset the costs would either be worthless or far more beneficial to boost.
If its untradable rewards, that would make boosting pointless, but if its the 'sole source of monetary gain from Bounty Hunter', then that's not great.
Completely get your point - suiciding/staying in the area for as long as people don't really work with a confined crater space alongside time-limiting how frequently you'd be able to gain EP from a target death.
Real players will be trying to have as many fights as possible, but the reset-heavy nature of Edge-style PvP doesn't mean they'll be stacking up kills or dying at a proportional rate! The player's suggestion also notes that something else it does really well is help offset costs for people who are just starting to get comfortable with risk. With supply costs and the sheer number of resets possible these days, especially if you're fighting other learners, you need a very high K/D ratio to be able to even break even.
Whole purpose of this blog is to gather feedback though, appreciate you sharing your thoughts!
Serious thought: *level* needs to not be the only consideration when determining your BH opponent. There needs to be (at least soft) MMR that contributes to the pairings-- otherwise noobs will continue to be disincentivized to do the activity.
Baking in MMR to something with extra variables that have significant impacts on the outcome (combat level and risk) doesn't really come out with a useful MMR compared to what you might get in other competitive titles like LoL, CS, Valorant etc.
Similarly, if you're trying to find a match based on combat, risk and some extra measure that might represent your rough 'skill level', you risk matchmaking being so cumbersome and taking so long that it's not worth hanging around for.
I tend to try and shy away from injecting myself on here but I'll say that I take a whole lot of issue with 'noobs will continue to be disincentivised'. Older variations of BH were absolutely fantastic pipelines for players newer to PvP (including me) and never relied on any extra systems. They were appealing because Edge-style is so simple compared to NH, and the reduced cognitive load makes it way more approachable to feel like you're learning, spot patterns, places to improve etc. as well as being easy to engage with in super low amounts of risk.
Think it's a cool suggestion but I'm not sure how it would shake out in practise and it's not been needed to get people to get their feet wet in the past. Will pass it on to the team to gauge their thoughts in any case and appreciate you sharing!
Why not have a third option regarding skulling? Lets not skull at all while participating in this minigame. Or only skull if you go rogue.
Having the regular skulling mechanic in this context just feels out of place because the whole minigame is designed around having to kill a dedicated target so someone has to make the first hit.
This is the perfect opportunity to ease in less experienced players into pvp without forcing them to bring just a single valuable item.
Worth noting that the NPC inside the lobby area could likely just bestow a skull upon you (same as the one in Edgeville).
Completely understand the place this suggestion's coming from, but wanted to offer an alternate perspective from somebody who got their first start in BH. Skulling's an important part of PvP - even for newer players, the chance of getting a big-ticket item is exciting. Snagging something like an AGS or claws or even your first ever Ornate Gmaul cash feels good and I think a lot of players would be depriving themselves of a hell of a dopamine hit if skulling were altogether removed.
There's a fine line to walk between getting less-experienced players involved and potentially depriving them of some of the experiences likely to retain them, but I think you raise an interesting suggestion/topic!
That's what they said in RS2 but then the afk EP buildup meta was discovered.
Are you going to risk your entire system imploding because people AFK with 1 magic seed and 3 rune darts?
We did address exactly this in the blog, and the reasons we'd prefer a coffer system than using gear. Will paste here for easier reference:
'This risk would be deposited in a coffer. It's easy enough for us to make a coffer work for something like this, but it's much more difficult to use your equipped or held gear. EP systems in the past ran into issues with players using low-trade volume items with inflated Grand Exchange values to artificially increase their 'risk'. Adding in a whitelist of included items or a blacklist of excluded items is difficult to do and results in potentially endless maintaining to try and avoid loopholes being used to 'game' the system'
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