2:16 pm, February 13, 2014
703
Friendly fire
I know I have brought this up before but I have a new take on it and was wondering what people think of it.
So friendly fire is when an attack you make damages characters on your own side. Nothing too hard to understand there. Whether this happens only for explicit AoE, or also for cleaves and even single target attacks, is open to discussion. Naturally whatever happens for negative effects should also apply to positive effects, so that just as if friendlies are damaged by a condition AoE, enemies should also be buffed by a boon AoE.
This has a number of benefits. It makes combat a lot more challenging as you need to consider the position of your allies with respect to your enemies, as well as your own position. It's much more realistic. And it prevents the cheesy zerg behavior that's currently dumbing down the game and forces people to communicate with one another and work together.
The disadvantage that has been noted is that it's a mechanic which can easily be abused to grief other players, which is an extremely important consideration. If people can think of other disadvantages I would love to hear them (not just that some professions use more AoE than others, since it's about using the skills you have judiciously). My first position on this was that griefing using other measures already has a way to be penalized (by reporting), but I concede that it might be hard to prove intent in many cases.
I thought of another way that griefing using friendly fire could be penalized, and that is to do it automatically using XP. That is, if you **** an ally, you lose a significant amount of XP, maybe something like ten or fifty times as much as you would gain by killing an enemy.
Firstly, this means that the would-be griefer rapidly loses his ability to harass others since they will quickly become a lower level than their targets. Also there is a risk that by killing friendlies they will lose their own survivability in an area (higher level mobs will wipe the floor with them).
Secondly, they may not be able to equip their own gear that they worked hard to obtain since the gear exceeds their level (I'm not saying they should become naked visually but any stats on the gear, including armor, shouldn't be applied). Also they may lose skill slots. This would be a major concern for the would-be griefer.
With respect to characters at max level: if you lose a level at this point on your XP bar, you will go down to 79 no matter how many times you have "hit 80 again" and it transferred into a skill point. This prevents extremely experienced characters from abusing the system.
Possible problem with this solution: at the bottom end of the level scale a determined PITA could try to camp newbie grounds waiting for level 1 characters to spawn and gank them since they wouldn't be able to be penalized lower than level 1. I propose that their gear would be damaged at this point and they wouldn't have any skills to harm others. They could repair, but it would slow them down at least enough for them to get reported and banned since it would be pretty obviously griefing at that point.
Are there other problems with this I haven't thought of?
So friendly fire is when an attack you make damages characters on your own side. Nothing too hard to understand there. Whether this happens only for explicit AoE, or also for cleaves and even single target attacks, is open to discussion. Naturally whatever happens for negative effects should also apply to positive effects, so that just as if friendlies are damaged by a condition AoE, enemies should also be buffed by a boon AoE.
This has a number of benefits. It makes combat a lot more challenging as you need to consider the position of your allies with respect to your enemies, as well as your own position. It's much more realistic. And it prevents the cheesy zerg behavior that's currently dumbing down the game and forces people to communicate with one another and work together.
The disadvantage that has been noted is that it's a mechanic which can easily be abused to grief other players, which is an extremely important consideration. If people can think of other disadvantages I would love to hear them (not just that some professions use more AoE than others, since it's about using the skills you have judiciously). My first position on this was that griefing using other measures already has a way to be penalized (by reporting), but I concede that it might be hard to prove intent in many cases.
I thought of another way that griefing using friendly fire could be penalized, and that is to do it automatically using XP. That is, if you **** an ally, you lose a significant amount of XP, maybe something like ten or fifty times as much as you would gain by killing an enemy.
Firstly, this means that the would-be griefer rapidly loses his ability to harass others since they will quickly become a lower level than their targets. Also there is a risk that by killing friendlies they will lose their own survivability in an area (higher level mobs will wipe the floor with them).
Secondly, they may not be able to equip their own gear that they worked hard to obtain since the gear exceeds their level (I'm not saying they should become naked visually but any stats on the gear, including armor, shouldn't be applied). Also they may lose skill slots. This would be a major concern for the would-be griefer.
With respect to characters at max level: if you lose a level at this point on your XP bar, you will go down to 79 no matter how many times you have "hit 80 again" and it transferred into a skill point. This prevents extremely experienced characters from abusing the system.
Possible problem with this solution: at the bottom end of the level scale a determined PITA could try to camp newbie grounds waiting for level 1 characters to spawn and gank them since they wouldn't be able to be penalized lower than level 1. I propose that their gear would be damaged at this point and they wouldn't have any skills to harm others. They could repair, but it would slow them down at least enough for them to get reported and banned since it would be pretty obviously griefing at that point.
Are there other problems with this I haven't thought of?