Solving Perma-Cutthroat Problems - Revenge, History, Titles, Reputation, Ratings

From the Raptr Q & A:

"

Q) You mentioned in one video that creating a complete "cut-throat league" is one of your long time goals/dreams. Where do you see the main problems/difficulties with this?

A) For cut-throat, the challenge is making griefing fun rather than annoying.

I don't promise any solutions, just throwing a few ideas out there and hope something sticks.

At first glance i balked at Chris's answer and thought it intractable. But it got me thinking - how do you make getting killed/griefed fun? Revenge is fun. I believe most/all humans feel that way deep down. So perhaps the question becomes: how do we integrate revenge and Cutthroat? What initially springs to my mind is a system of historical records, and titles.


Revenge

Any time you are killed, the killer is added to your "hit-list". You'd be limited to, say, 10 on your hit list, so you'd have to keep it pruned to the most important targets for revenge. When your slayer is visible on your minimap, you are enraged and gain Onslaught (move, cast and attack 20% faster). You are frothing at the mouth for revenge. What better way to motivate a little payback than such a bonus? Not to mention instill a little bit of fear in griefers, knowing that they are birthing armies of more deadly opponents out for revenge.

If you/your group kill someone on your hit list, perhaps you gain a title. "unsane, Revenge Slayer of Leeroy the Dishonorable" (see Reputation below). Or an orange message posted to global, "unsane avenged a death by slaying Covert". I think the latter in some more permanent form is better. A historical record is preferable to a long ass title for this idea.

If tracking all of this in real time is infeasible, making it guild-based instead should be viable. If someone from Paladins Guild gets killed by someone from Assassins Guild, all PG players gain Onslaught when near AG players, until they kill an AG player. Then 'the bloodthirst' resets to zero. Yeah, there could be a bloodthirst counter, say if the AG keeps killing more PG players without PG killing any AG players. I don't think that should increase the Onslaught percentages though.


Titles

Players could have a title based on their pvp kills. Say Covert has killed 5500 players. There would be a list of titles based on number of kills (or honor level, see reputation section). You'd automatically be upgraded to the next title when you reach the number of kills. I'm terrible at coming up with relevant words, but to give you an idea:

#Kills - Title
5 - Apprentice Covert
10 - ...
25 - ...
50 - ...
100 - ...
250 - ...
500 - Assassin Covert
1000 - ...
2500 - ...
5000 - Grandmaster Covert
10000 - Legendary Covert
25000 - Godly Covert
50000 - Ascended Covert

Then, say i killed Covert, i would get a (presumably selectable) title of: unsane, Slayer of Grandmaster Covert. Again, to keep it manageable, you'd probably have to cap the list of selectable titles to 10, so we'd have to prune it to our most prideful kills.


Reputation/Ratings

Another, possibly mutually exclusive idea: you have sa running "count" of your reputation. For every lower level character you kill your count goes down by the level difference. For every higher level character you kill, your count goes up by the level difference. Over time, some players would amass enormously low negative numbers, some would stay around zero but gain high kill numbers. And some "honorable" (and/or expert) killers would maintain higher numbers.

What this number would be used for, i can't fully envision. You could use it as part of a system to make lower level players invulnerable to dishonorable killers, while at the same time leaving the dishonorable killer vulnerable to damage from these players.

An alternate option to think about is giving every account in the league a Trueskill/ELO/?? rating based on all the cutthroat characters he's had and their wins/losses. Based on the rating differential, players with too large of a Trueskill delta would not be able to damage each other. If the league were Default Cutthroat, you could base the rating on current character only.


Improvements/related ideas welcome!

Reputation is a lukewarm idea at best, and Titles as you have it would actually be a bad thing: it encourages farming players much lower level than you.

Technically, Revenge wouldn't work under the current version of Cutthroat, as Cutthroat is a hardcore league — your character is moved to Standard afterwards. However, let's imagine a different Cutthroat, where this doesn't happen; instead, you just lose all your gear. This has been done before in the BroTeam Cutthroat race (Season 2).

Under those conditions, I think the Revenge idea is genius. One of the biggest problems with losing all of your gear is that you are essentially gimped, but if you're smart in the BroTeam version you have backup gear stashed away for just such a rainy day. This gear won't be as good as your primary... but that's what makes the Onslaught bonus so great, making up for that lost power. (Although perhaps numbers larger than 20% should be considered; mechanic is subject to balance testing.)

Even better would be the ability to track your prey. Perhaps there could be a "Revenge" tab similar to the "Party" tab, allowing you to know which instance your targets are in, allowing you to track them down with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps their name would appear in red in Instance Management and be sorted to the top of the list, so that you could easily invade them. This encourages back-and-forth kills between players.

In all seriousness, I'd much rather play Revenge League as a permanent league than (hardcore) Cutthroat, given both options. Which means you've designed a very potent mechanic. Great job, seriously.

As already pointed out Titles/Reputation always lead to aimed and "rewarded" griefing.

The Revenge idea is indeed awesome. Kinda reminds me also about the EvE Online system on being allowed to legitimate kill someone without being punished. In EvE Online you were able to share this status with friends or guild members or even sell it to headhunters.

Isn't this topic more appropriate for the Beta PvP Feedback?
Just asking, it is kinda of a mixture, I know.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Technically, Revenge wouldn't work under the current version of Cutthroat, as Cutthroat is a hardcore league — your character is moved to Standard afterwards.

Right, for that reason i envisioned revenge as account-wide, perhaps i wasn't clear about that. [edit: yeah, during editing i rearranged the order and it's now completely non-obvious.]

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Even better would be the ability to track your prey. Perhaps there could be a "Revenge" tab similar to the "Party" tab, allowing you to know which instance your targets are in, allowing you to track them down with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps their name would appear in red in Instance Management and be sorted to the top of the list, so that you could easily invade them. This encourages back-and-forth kills between players.

Nice, i like this. I'd considered tracking but thought perhaps it'd be abusable. You could get killed then send in a bunch of high level buddies. Not sure it's an issue though. You killed me, if me and my friends come after you, what of it, really?

"

Nightmare90 wrote:

Isn't this topic more appropriate for the Beta PvP Feedback?
Just asking, it is kinda of a mixture, I know.

Oh, whoops, you're right. Can a mod move it please?

The "softcore Cutthroat" race had friendly fire on. I thought that was a really cool idea for making "death squads" of several players quite a bit more interesting, as the group could decide to gang up on one of their own in an instant. Plus, if you're alone being hunted by a group, at least the group needs to be careful or they'll end up hurting themselves instead of you.

Why stop there? Disable partying entirely.

Curious to hear anyone's thoughts on perma cutthroat now, after the pre-release races.

There's a decent compilation on how perma-cutthroat could work here:

http://4x.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1owh3o/how_to_make_long_term_cutthroat_work/

Very shortly, from an in-game economy point of view, just make a CT league more like a full-loot open pvp MMO:

1) Increase drop ratios and mod bias A LOT, being able to 'produce' medium-tier gear to replace loses and keep going is VERY important if you want to have active pvp and not just care-bearing and avoiding combat all the time.
2) Increase death penalty (harsh XP loses, maybe possible to de-level) BUT at the same time increase the reward of killing someone.
3) Destroy a percentage of items on kill, and the other percentage will drop (random selection). Must be fine tuned along with the rest of the loot system to keep the economy and valuation of items fresh but not feel excessively grinding.


OFC you will need other mechanics in place to make it interesting, but from an 'economic' perspective this is the bare minimum IMO.