Interdict

Cubey

Interdict makes it trivial to take out any mob - mobs can't outdo players in subsystem damage and eventually succumb to subsystem crash, it takes a lot of time but is basically 100% safe as long as the nanoseer interdicting isn't attacked. This was used to take out cosmpiercer guards back when cosmpiercers still had them. Now it's being used to take out faction guards.

I don't think that's the intended use, especially since the raiding party can bring along an unenemied nanoseer who will just interdict - and will never be targeted as a result. This means a single player can make all the faction guards pointless and very easy to kill, and the only real counter to that is to make sure player defenders are always available. Outburst was changed to prevent a situation where one player can easily mess with a faction's guards with no risk, but Interdict still allows it - and if anything is even worse, because outburst only moves them, but interdict allows any raiding force to easily and safely kill them.

I don't know how to change the ability to fix this problem, but it can't stay the way it is now. Right now, faction guards are pointless and require babysitting and protection rather than protecting anything themselves.

Soza

I also would like guards to be unkillable, Also your guards did focus me, I'm just better.

Nykara

Vibe check: I agree that method is crap, but so is Sherkarney. This is not your fault, it was part of an event, I know; but an invincible NPC loyal to your faction shouldn't sit at your station transfer. There's no counterplay to that, which is really uncomfortable. 

Azlyn

Agree with the problem. I'd maybe suggest that guard and boss mobs have like an AoE interrupt effect with each attack. (Then you can give us outburst moving mobs back )

Soza

Azlyn said:

Agree with the problem. I'd maybe suggest that guard and boss mobs have like an AoE interrupt effect with each attack. (Then you can give us outburst moving mobs back )

Yeah, lets take away nanoseers ability to kill guards very slowly, and give fury a way to seperate them and single them off easily!

Soza

also while we are at it we can point out a few other problems, In room 1 was the guard stack, 5 in total (plus sherkarney as a 6th who did try to help your guards kill me) Sherkarney is completely immune to damage, and had to be killed via subsystem damage, meanwhile no way of actually killing her. That is beside the point though. Your guards in room 1 were able to pull me from room 2 as depicted (which is 3 rooms away, and around a corner) back into room with them.

Cubey

Sherkaney should have been long gone. All she's doing now is hand out quests to kill mobs that no longer spawn, confusing newbies and returning players alike.

@ Soza: it's not about guards being unkillable, it's about them being more than just a minor speedbump for an experienced raider. If I paid out 125k for security, that security should be something more than just free kills. Investing in faction security is pointless if raiders can just waltz in regardless.

Between interdict being sustained even after a mob attack and guards pulling in people from 3 rooms away, the whole faction guard system seems pretty buggy right now.

Soza

Cubey said:

-snip-

They were way more than a minor speedbump, It takes forever to kill them via subsystem damage and any time all it takes is for someone to walk in and interrupt the interdict, and instantly they kill a player because their damage is so ridiculous. I have literally survived 5 song longer than 3 guards, Also the death woodro got was from him dying to subsystem damage. So they arent completely powerless to interdict. Woodro couldnt crash out of the room being constantly prone from them, and also when he did crash out they just yanked him back in.

Azlyn

Soza said:

Azlyn said:

Agree with the problem. I'd maybe suggest that guard and boss mobs have like an AoE interrupt effect with each attack. (Then you can give us outburst moving mobs back )

Yeah, lets take away nanoseers ability to kill guards very slowly, and give fury a way to seperate them and single them off easily!

I mean, outburst has a channel, so no, fury wouldn't be able to separate them. And nanos were pretty clearly not meant to use interdict like this, so, I have no sympathy.

Soza

For the record about allowing fury to outburst guards, it doesnt matter how you attempt to stop outburst via guards being able to interrupt, it will go back to the old way guards were killed which was, Fury enters tanks first round of hits, starts outburst, nano enters uses pax so guards cant interrupt outburst, outburst lands, fury and nano proceed to wipe the guards 1 by 1 in roughly 2-3 rounds of attacks.

Cubey

Dunno, I expect 175k worth of guards to do more than kill 1 person and then die in less than 15 minutes.

Mobs should remain immune to outburst though - or faction guards at least. Moving them around was fun but too abusable, both in offense (move them out of chokepoints so raiders can get in freely) and defense (stack guards to get around the 5/room limit).

Soza

Azlyn said:

-snip-

Dang, I predicted that one, Anyway that literally is the intended use of interdict. The description literally says it stops damage, and it does whats described on the tin. It doesnt say stops all non guard damage.

Nykara

Cubey said:

Dunno, I expect 175k worth of guards to do more than kill 1 person and then die in less than 15 minutes.

Mobs should remain immune to outburst though - or faction guards at least. Moving them around was fun but too abusable, both in offense (move them out of chokepoints so raiders can get in freely) and defense (stack guards to get around the 5/room limit).

While I don't exactly think that interdict working this way is the best thing in the world, it's also not the worst thing ever. Like Soza pointed out, it took us over 15 minutes and at least one reset in order to take out 5 guards. If anyone from Celestine had walked in and interrupted Soza, it would have meant all of us get wiped (guards won't let us get away -> you supplement their damage). They are still able to do their job, it just means when there is noone around, we can brute force the guards. Eventually. 

Cubey

"When there is no one around" is the key phrase here, because it means someone who knows what to do (so not a newbie or a total dedicated non-PvPer) has to be present at all times, just to prevent a raid from succeeding. Even games with larger populations have off times when there's barely anyone around: raiding during those times is basically easymode. I mean, so is a lot of other activities (caches for example), but these activities usually don't involve massive, unpreventable financial damage to other players.

Soza

This sounds more like "Give me free guards" than "I have a problem with interdict" Why is it titled interdict?

Cubey

Guards aren't free. Guards are expensive - that's the point, you pay for protection, to make sure people who are faction enemies actually stay outside of faction territory.

Guards are meant to be tough. You said players melt when attacked by guards without interdict. That's the intended behavior. Interdict turns that massive damage into a joke. That's clearly not intended behavior.

Nykara

Well I played Achaea for 15 years and yeah, if someone wanted to destroy your guards, they absolutely could do that when noone is around and cause serious financial harm to that faction. I've been on the receiving and giving end of that for years. It's part of what constitutes conflict. 

Cubey

Does Achaea have an ability that lets you ignore all guard damage and slowly kill them via chip damage? You'll have to enlighten me, because I didn't play any IRE MUD for almost a decade now - and let's say there are good reasons for that.

Soza

Cubey said:

-snip-

So then guards should just have no counterplay and a faction that wishes to limit your entrance to their faction should just be able to with no way to avoid it? Why do we even need guards then, why not just lock faction stations to anyone who is enemied, lock CAC rooms too. Don't want enemies going in there.

Nykara

Cubey said:

Does Achaea have an ability that lets you ignore all guard damage and slowly kill them via chip damage? You'll have to enlighten me, because I didn't play any IRE MUD for almost a decade now - and let's say there are good reasons for that.

actually, yeah. Little round-about, and a hard comparison because guards here are no-contest way better than guards there, but there are a number of common strategies for dealing with guards when you're low on people. Most common was adduction bashing - you set up an adduction vibe adjacent to the guards, then you (and anyone with you who wants to be) are constantly pulled out of the guard room, into the other. So you walk in, hit, adduction pulls you out. Slowly but surely you chip away at them. 

Cubey

Soza said:

Cubey said:

-snip-

So then guards should just have no counterplay and a faction that wishes to limit your entrance to their faction should just be able to with no way to avoid it? Why do we even need guards then, why not just lock faction stations to anyone who is enemied, lock CAC rooms too. Don't want enemies going in there.

They shouldn't have a hard counter that completely trivializes them. Interdict became the norm in cosmpiercers but you know how people cleared cosmpiercer guards before they figured out the interdict strategy? Zerg rush and acceptable losses. I'm not saying that is the only way to do it, but when everything else fails, you can always get more warm bodies (assuming you have willing players in the faction).

There's a reason why unlike Achaea (I assume), guards are capped at 5 per room. 5 guards in a room is supposed to be a massive roadblock that can put a stop even to a zerg rush of a raid. That you were able to clear up that roadblock with just 3-4 people and 1 death total just doesn't seem right.

Nykara

That is an assumption @Cubey! Guards ARE capped at 5 per room in Achaea. And again, unlike in Achaea, if literally ANYONE had been present, we couldn't have pulled it off. Guards, as they currently stand, are a near-impassable wall if they have any kind of competent support to go alongside them. 25k isn't a lot of money, I make that lazy-bashing daily. 125k I can do on my own, too, in a day or so. Assuming you don't have to do EVERYTHING yourself, because I am sure Ata and Grek are doing their best too, then it isn't the kind of loss you make it out to be.

Cubey

No matter who does it, and if it's spread across multiple people or not, it's still a day of work to undo damage done in 15 minutes.  Also I doubt just anyone would be able to prevent you - someone who knows they can disrupt interrupt, yes, but I doubt someone with no interest in PvP or a newbie would know what to do.

Do note that the devs are considering the idea to make attacks from several people on the same target less effective. If it applies to guards too, then they become less of an instant death scenario even without interdict.

Soza

Cubey said:

No matter who does it, and if it's spread across multiple people or not, it's still a day of work to undo damage done in 15 minutes.  Also I doubt just anyone would be able to prevent you - someone who knows they can disrupt interrupt, yes, but I doubt someone with no interest in PvP or a newbie would know what to do.

Do note that the devs are considering the idea to make attacks from several people on the same target less effective. If it applies to guards too, then they become less of an instant death scenario even without interdict.

Do you not teach your newbies that INTERRUPTING is important?

Ilyos

Thanks for pointing this out folks. I don’t have a solution right away but will look at guards actually being somewhat smarter in the near future. 

As a former player who single handedly used to take out guard stacks by using various mechanics, I agree it can feel rather unpleasant for the receiving faction.
So, short answer, I will look at this but would rather make guards smarter than nerf certain abilities

Rhindara

I personally agree that interdict (and outburst, and whatever other skills) is a lame tactic that feels like an exploit to overcome something that otherwise can feel insurmountable sans corpse rushing, which is an unfortunate hallmark of guard raiding in my experience. The problem is that even with multiple deaths for the raiders, guards can be too easily cleared considering the effort taken to clear them vs the cost to hire them.

Keeping this in mind, I feel like we should adopt a different process for guard employment. When we hire them, we should also sign them up for HETE treatments. This means that when they die, they'll reclone and return to their post - eventually. I'm not sure what a fair timer is for this, but I'm sure it can be sussed out. This would be bundled with some kind of appropriately increased upkeep cost, so that you're still paying good money to keep your areas protected, but it's not a repeated lump sum every time a group of raiders wants through your stack.

Once we have a system where guards are no longer a chore to replace and become a less prohibitively expensive obstacle for interested parties to overcome/stir shit, then I feel like it will be easier to talk about what's fair with regards to how strong/weak they are.

Nykara

Rhindara said:

I personally agree that interdict (and outburst, and whatever other skills) is a lame tactic that feels like an exploit to overcome something that otherwise can feel insurmountable sans corpse rushing, which is an unfortunate hallmark of guard raiding in my experience. The problem is that even with multiple deaths for the raiders, guards can be too easily cleared considering the effort taken to clear them vs the cost to hire them.

Keeping this in mind, I feel like we should adopt a different process for guard employment. When we hire them, we should also sign them up for HETE treatments. This means that when they die, they'll reclone and return to their post - eventually. I'm not sure what a fair timer is for this, but I'm sure it can be sussed out. This would be bundled with some kind of appropriately increased upkeep cost, so that you're still paying good money to keep your areas protected, but it's not a repeated lump sum every time a group of raiders wants through your stack.

Once we have a system where guards are no longer a chore to replace and become a less prohibitively expensive obstacle for interested parties to overcome/stir shit, then I feel like it will be easier to talk about what's fair with regards to how strong/weak they are.

I love the crap out of this. Even if it's 1875 marks per death or something like that. 

Cubey

That's a great idea. Have them pop back up the next IC day and the faction pays several thousand marks in cloning costs (possibly double for enhanced guards). It makes sense from an IC perspective because if INRs are available for almost everyone, why don't the guards eventually pop back up after they're killed? Maybe they're ragequit or something.

Perhaps faction leaders should have an option to turn autorespawning of guards on or off, in case they're worried that others will repeatedly farm their guards just to steal money from the faction. But nobody would do that, right?

Ilyos said:

Thanks for pointing this out folks. I don’t have a solution right away but will look at guards actually being somewhat smarter in the near future. 

As a former player who single handedly used to take out guard stacks by using various mechanics, I agree it can feel rather unpleasant for the receiving faction.
So, short answer, I will look at this but would rather make guards smarter than nerf certain abilities

Making guards smarter is a good solution, just keep in mind that the person interdicting will not always be enemied or aggressive towards the guards and sometimes may even be a defender. This consideration is what prevented me from suggesting "have the guards target opponents who channel first" as a solution.

Indi

I think the guards-with-HETE-contracts idea is the best one here. It allows raiding, along with raid defense, but the consequences are not permanent. The purpose of the raid then become access rather than financial damage. It should also be noted that this avoids the other annoying part about losing all guards: needing to spend time setting them back up again.

If that means there needs to be new reasons to raid (ie. places actually worth accessing) then I'm sure stuff could be dreamed up.

Regarding the idea of 'cheap' strategies, I've noticed over many years of IRE games, that guard killing tactics are only considered 'cheap' when the cost of losing guards or being raided is too high.

Ilyos

HETE solutions for guards will be coming soon.

Drop your comments here for what fair pricing would be. I'm currently thinking of 5000 per respawn, which would be about 20% of base price. Extra value as it drops to 10% of price if the guard is upgraded.

The INR upgrade would not take up the Upgrade slot, it's a separate feature, though accessible through the same syntax

Cubey

The 5k price tag is fine. I also suggest, if it's possible to implement, to allow manual respawning for guards even if their auto-respawn is set to off. That way if someone is concerned their faction's guards will get camped while the players are offline, then they can turn auto respawns off and just pop the missing guards back in at 5k whenever they log in. Perhaps give the faction leaders 24 hours to respawn a guard at a reduced price and if the opportunity isn't taken then it's gone?