PvP Feedback

[SG_Calculated]

Hello Explorers!

Let’s talk about PvP. PixARK has both Fury and Chaos servers now, and you guys have had the chance to go toe to toe with rival tribes. What works in PvP? What doesn’t? Keep in mind try to keep bug reports separate; we want to know how the overall meta of PvP feels in PixARK. Do you have any suggestions to improve it? Let us know!

[Siklus]

When everyone is max level it kinda-sorta works. It's a mad dash to get to steel and auto turrets to even stand a chance. If all the defences worked as intended (totems killing themselves), lower tier defences would be possible.
The best defence is not being found.
Look at a game like EVE-Online and their tower defences. It takes some planning and resources to bring down a base's defences and even then there is the shield.
Currently in PIXArk it takes a guy with a wand to destroy a base.
Suggestions to spice up the meta:
Mechanical torpor dart/arrow turrets
Gas traps players can build
Reinforcements for structures(using gems maybe for different types of reinfomrcements) as an upgrade to walls, foundations and ceilings (e.g. wood, inplace upgrade to reinforced wood needing say dark wood, or dark gems)
Self healing shields for bases
Smaller mobile shields for attackers/platform dinos
Dino disorientating turrets - lets attacking dinos run around randomly when in range
Siege Towers - big heavy expensive machines to attack bases
Generators v2 - more power output
Auto cannons for attack needing generators

[Icy]

Suggestions:

• 1 original default seed map for the balance on every PVP servers and for other players.
  
• Regenerable resources but with long time cooldown. \This and default seed map will make PVP more viable in long run.
  
• Increase the range where you can put foundation from enemy's foundation.
  
• Unable to build in ruins.
  
• Rework the HP of ceiling, wall, foundation, etc,... \ Wall is useless when you can make gate instead, why make ceiling when you can have foundation with a lot more HP.
  
• Rework the DMG of grenade, rocket on buildings. \ Take tons of grenade/rocket and materials just to destroy 1 steel foundation which cost only 1 steel to make.
  
• Unable to place block near enemy's defense like turrets, plants. \ Raider will try to place block in front of the turret, turret will lose line of sight and it will be useless.
  
• Player lose all their items (in inventory, hotbar, equipped armor) when being kill by enemy player.
  
• Player keep everything except items in the inventory when being killed by wild creatures, died from falling, drowning... Only when they're out of raiding zone for certain amount of time.
  
• Adding the physic to building, collapse if there are no foudations support. \ This help avoid exploiting that put floating turrets.

[Possible/Own opinion] Make it unable to build underground, can only build from sea level and up. Why?

• Without using exploit or hack/cheat, it is nearly impossible to find enemy bases. The map is fairly huge, if your enemy play hide and seek, how can you find them? Digging the whole map? Spend a whole day follow their path back to their base?
  
• Before raiding underground base, you need to dig out a big space so you can make some actions. Without dig out some space, the raider are at disadvantage against the defender's defense (turrets, plants, etc).

[Unravel]

What does not work is accidentally killing your own tames or friends by smacking them with a steel bone sword because they get in the way. how about an option to disable team damage?

I also think the rush to end game / steel / lv 80 is being massively hindered by people going straight for the boxes in the ice castles, as soon as you get a pteranadon you can go get a steel bone sword and other gear from those. that needs to be removed, or hidden much better so you cant just go to the window and get free end game items.

The biggest complaint your going to get is bases loading before terrain. The best defense is being well hidden but you cant really be hidden when you can get found so easy at the moment (jump on a gargoyle on a slow computer and you will see all bases rendered before terrain)

[Chocbomb]

I enjoyed the PVP, it is fun, the only issue was defending your home.

We played with magic and guns, and seemed that guns were the better option, with the delayed travel time of magic.
We got to PVP before hte wand nerf and that was pretty fun, i remember someone shouting harry potter quotes, it was bad after the nerf though, we all went back to guns after that, was like everyone was pretty annoyed that got nerfed so hard.
Armor was mostly steel bone that we used, but we majority of the time swapped that out for lava and magician armor during the weather changes and lightning storms.
We didn't really carry anything around we didn't want to lose, or if we did it was small amounts.
Being able to die and keep all our stuff seemed a bit crazy, the pvp was just a massive amounts of bed spamming and rushing back over and over until 1 side got bored or ran out of ammo, but mostly boredom was the reason the fights stopped.
Turrets and Plants seemed to be good defense for the bases, even if they could be tanked by a rock golem and a team mate using white magic to heal them or use blocks to line of sight them to place blocks around them.
Lots of people built in ruins, that feels bad having those locked down from pvp, since i knew people who went there to hunt people doing them, but then they started putting steel foundations and gates over everything.
The official server we were on seemed good, but we suffered from some glitches that needed a restart and had to wait until a patch day for that to happen, seems all official servers could benefit from problems with regular reboots.

I think mostly the only thing i would like to see on Chaos servers, is hte loss of all gear on death, that has got to be the biggest draw back for the bed spamming people, it's chaos after all, fury doesn't really need that kind of thing.


Would be nice if placing blocks was also hindered by gates and foundations asif they were considered foundations themself, people abuse the blocks placing them infront creeping up to bases.


Some other things?:

Earth Magic going through walls/foundations/ceilings and breaking structures on the other side.

Chaos server feels like you should lose everything equipped on death any kind of death, no exceptions and needing to retrieve your gear instead of always keeping it on death.

Fall damage and any form of Suicide should also get the spawn delay asif killed by a player, too easy to fast revive and spam rush a base.

Structures not having similar Health than Foundations feels wrong, each tier should have the same HP across all types like ceilings and walls to foundations.

Raptor Generator seems like it should be way lower in the levels of engram, it generates bugger all power.

[Incursus]

I'm only familiar with the Chaos type, so my PoV will be from that of a Chaos setting. I'll be stating the current state of things, then attempting to explain it, and ending with suggestions. Alas, essay time:

The Gear War

Gear in PixARK is everything. Just like dinos, Gear in PvP appears to be tiered. The player with the better gear wins the battle. The guy with an iron sword just doesn't stand a chance against the guy with bone steel. Success in lower level PvP revolves around finding the best gear. Higher Level PvP revolves around maintaining your gear and ammo for your guns / magic. Ranged weapons simply serve as a weapon tier higher than the melee weapons. The endgame Bone Steel sword can do absurd damage to a player, but I've yet to see one successfully used against a gun user. Swords just can't get close enough without getting gunned down or obliterated by magic.

Why is gear so important?
In the current state of things, there is a massive difference in damage output between the weapon tiers. Stone deals 2 damage to an unarmored player, copper deals 10, iron deals 20... Bone steel just one shots. The difference in damage between the weapons is so great that having the better gear far outweighs any amount of dodging or blocking. Ranged weapons further increase the damage dealt, enabling massive damage at range. Magic attacks have AOE, making them fairly easy to hit and great against melee users. Late game 1 on 1 PvP becomes a typical shooter, usually sniper duels due to ammo costs, and tribe warfare becomes an ammunition management game. PvP is heavily tied to resource management and progression, so

The PvE Progresson Skip

With ammunition and resources being the deciding factor of tribal PvP, and even solo PvP, the PvE aspect is incredibly important. At first, there was a rush to mine all the iron and coal outcrops, then a constant fight for control over the ruins. Players are skipping base and infrastructure building to raid and control ruins. The ruins are blocked off with steel, inside, outside, and around every corner. Every ruin, even the grasslands coyote ruins.

Why are Ruins so important?
In the current state of the PvE, mining and infrastructure are generally far outclassed by the available resources in Ruins. Bullets are far too expensive to craft with any net value, Quality+ armor and weapons literally cannot be obtained outside of Ruins (or the very very rare airdrop chance, in some cases), and expensive crafting resources can be found en masse in ruins. Most potions require crops that can't be sustainably farmed. And so the current PvE meta dictates that players need to raid Ruins as often as possible if they intend to stay relevant to the PvP. This is a massive motivator for tribes to control as many ruins as possible, and deny them to the other players. Structures become important here, so

Bases and Steel

The only structure block that gets used is steel. Bases are non-existent, players store all their belongings in chests scattered about the world. Everything is about hiding. Even steel bases with passive defenses are raided within minutes. The most common use of structure blocks is to seal off ruins from players who don't have the resources to break in, and preventing players from building on the inside. A successful defense of any base requires an active player defense.

Why are bases so bad?
Anything other than steel can be destroyed by direct mining with a sword or tame and a couple minutes. Passive defenses are easily circumvented using basic blocks. Players have no means of defending their gear or infrastructure before accessing steel, forcing them to hide and hope. Steel grants some measure of safety from the lower level players, but is still vulnerable to even a single siege turret. The X-Ray render glitch doesn't help, nor does the massive FPS lag when a hidden base is rendered.

Tames and Wild Combat

Tames are in a strange place right now. Land based mounts are near entirely forgotten, everyone is riding their flying mounts. Flying mounts are high risk and high reward, as they die easily to everything, but can kill any player just by picking them up and dropping them. The gargoyle is the exception to this, but is still widely used for its PvE value. Mounts are always carried on a person's hotbar, to avoid loss on death. Most players attack on sight, targeting the flying mount first if possible, or the player if they are exceptionally vulnerable.

Why are flying mounts so prevalent?
Gravity hurts. Dropping a player from a few blocks height is lethal, with gear not able to help. A fully geared, max level, player can still get killed in under 3 seconds by a passing lvl 25 player on a pteredon. For this reason, spring boots and parachutes are a requirement to survive. Because of the effectiveness of this tactic, the pteredon's grab ability is the nearly the sole weapon that players use in PvP before they obtain a Bone Steel sword. The bone steel sword shuts down flying mounts of all kinds, if you can get close to them. Moreover, flying mounts are required to compete in the PvE aspect of the game. To stay on a competitive pace, flight is needed, meaning that random encounters in the world are between flying players. Due to the massive damage of gravity, leaving a nearby player alive is an extremely high risk, so every encounter ends in battle or fleeing. For the same reason, players will kill any unattended flying mount, which enforces the practice of always keeping the mount on the hotbar. Guns work pretty well in fending off flying players, which further motivates the 'Attack first, ask questions later' policy. I once saw someone riding an elemental golem... They got grabbed off of it by a gryphon, and thrown to their death.

How it all feels?

Spoiler alert, this section is going to be largely subjective. Early game feels oppressive. Nothing can be done to defend yourself from higher level players, the only option is the run and hide. Pteredon riders are faster than you and will kill you, leaving you with no recourse but to dig into the ground. Max level players get bored and spawn camp for fun, which is worse than the pteredon riders. After gaining a flying mount of your own, you're free to find out that all the ruins and sources of gear are locked behind steel. Grinding up through the PvE progression is long and a constant game of hide and seek against players who already have gear. Being unable to build a base, I have to play like a vulture, just picking up the scraps and hoping to get something that I can use to progress myself. Hitting midgame is nice, but feels extremely grindy and leaves me in a place where I have lots to lose. Getting wiped is a horrible experience, resetting IRL days or a week's worth of vulture and scavenging. After getting a steel pick, I can spend a few hours going through a single ruin, and hope that the chests are there, but all of my digging will be undone by the next day. The midgame grind is real. But the endgame is NICE. PvP on relatively even gear, with all the endgame options available, is extremely fun. So much fun, that I actively search for players to fight. There is even a battle arena in Chaos 3, just for this. There really isn't much else to do in PixARK after reaching level 80, but thankfully the PvP at this level is satisfying.

The Things that aren't Fun

► Spending days scavenging for gear, only to lose it overnight.
► Getting killed by a pteredon rider, especially when grabbed while riding a mount.
► Spending hours digging through ruins blocks, only to grab the 1 or 2 chests that the 'owner' of the ruins didn't collect.
► The lack of viability to build or defend a base.
► The frame lag whenever a base is loaded.
► The pointlessness of building infrastructure.
► The PvE in general.

Suggestions

Disable the grabbing of players that are riding a mount.
I love the flying mount grab abilities, but they entirely overpower other mounts. There is an early-game personal countermeasure to grab attacks in the form of spring boots and parachutes, but neither of these help your mount. Separation from your mount is as good as losing your mount. I doubt land mounts would be used anyways, just due to their lack of usefulness in PvE, but their extreme vulnerability to airborn grab attacks makes them too much of a risk to carry around. Nothing about being grabbed off your mount is fun.

Give us a reason to build infrastructure
Currently, the magical crops can't be sustainably farmed, so farming for potions just isn't done.
Craftable gear is far inferior to quality+ ruins gear, so crafting gear and gathering the supplies to craft gear, just isn't done.
Crafting bullets is extremely expensive, 40 iron per Assault Rifle magazine is not worth it except in extreme cases, so players just don't build bullets.

Replace the current base protection system
This one is not so simple to accomplish, but the current base system is not designed for a voxel sandbox game. The system wasn't designed to accommodate cubeworld style game play, there just isn't a set of configurations that can account for this. It works nicely for Ark where the terrain can't be so simply modified, but here all the systems become invalidated by block placing and breaking. Minecraft has many examples of base protection systems that work well with these kinds of games, from Towny to Factions.
This alone would fix most of the issues brought up by players, as it would enable the safe-ish keeping of items throughout the game.

Fix the PvE
This one is probably the most important point in fixing the PvP, maybe second only to the base building mechanics. I'm going to use Ruins as the example, but the same holds true for all PvE combat.
The current situation: The Ruins are hard... so much so that 'cheesing' it with blocks is the answer to everything. And 'cheesing' ruins with blocks is so easy that a level 1 with 200 dirt can full clear an Ice Castle. There's nothing fun or engaging about it, even the level 80's that run the Ruins every day on Chaos 3 don't kill things, they just run past and block things off. The current mob design, like the base building system, doesn't seem to account for placeable blocks. The current 'solution' just cranks up some variables(Damage, HP, armor, etc), but that doesn't actually effect anything aside from the noob who tries to attack a raptor with a stone spear. There's no penalty to sitting outside the Behemoth or Ice Fairy room and launching ranged attacks at it. There's no danger to blocking up to the ice fairy and stabbing its toes until it dies.
The bosses and most wild dinos need to be redesigned. Bosses need attacks and abilities to counteract player's cubeworld abilities. Ruins mobs need the ability to counteract block placement, but also need to be realistically killable in combat. There's no single or correct solution to this, but I'll post a few ideas that could work.

► Elite Ice Fairy
Reduce the Armor of the Elite Ice Fairy. Make it more vulnerable to attacks, even from lower tier weapons.
Reduce the effectiveness of the Elite Ice Fairy's basic attacks vs the Ice Shield. This should make the Ice Shield a critical item in preparation for an Ice Castle raid.
Give it a 'Blizzard' passive that activates a few seconds after combat begins. It damages players who are outside the castle, or too far away from the Ice Fairy.
Give it a 'Permafrost Nova' ability that converts nearby non-ruins blocks into ice blocks.
Give its basic attack a chance to convert hit non-ruins blocks into ice blocks.
Give it an 'Ice Absorption' passive that absorbs nearby ice blocks and heals a small amount per ice block absorbed. I suggest making it exponential, such that small quantities of ice blocks don't appreciably heal it, but larger quantities heal larger chunks of health.
Give it a 'Frost Snap' ability that visibly targets a player's position, then after a few seconds, deals massive damage (or freezes/stuns?) to that location.

The idea here is to reduce the effectiveness of placed blocks and 'cheese' tactics, while providing an exploitable weakness. The 'Blizzard' ability exists to keep players committed to the battle. The 'Permafrost Nova' and 'Ice Absorption' powers exist to counteract placed blocks, without completely invalidating them. 'Frost Snap' exists to keep players moving, I should stress here that this is designed to NOT hit players, but to forcefully encourage them to move. The reduced armor of the Elite Ice Fairy should make it much more vulnerable to attack, but much more deadly to those without preparation.

► Ruins Werewolf
Give the attacks a high chance to break 1 non-ruins block.
Give it a jumping uppercut attack.
Heavily reduce the Armor and HP of this monster.
Mildly reduce the Damage of this monster.
Give it a weakness to sniper bullets. (Silver bullets, perhaps?)

The idea here is to keep the theme of it being a powerful, hard hitting, aggressive, and nimble attacker, while giving a reasonable option to deal with it. Currently, not even the level 80's and their ghost dragons want to deal with them.

► Elite Ice Elemental
Give its basic attack a chance to convert hit non-ruins blocks into ice blocks.
Give it an 'Ice Absorption' passive that absorbs nearby ice blocks and heals a small amount per ice block absorbed. I suggest making it exponential, such that small quantities of ice blocks don't appreciably heal it, but larger quantities heal larger chunks of health.
Give it a weakness to Fire Magic.

The Elite Ice Elementals actually aren't in a bad place to start with, but still suffer the problem of being blocked off. This should keep them manageable, but also enable them to attack the player.

► Icicle Dragon (Ruins)
Slightly Reduce the health pool.
Increase jump height by .5 blocks.
Give them a jumping attack. As in, a leaping bite.
Make them spawn, wander, and attack in small packs.

The idea here is to make them a nimble, yet counter-intuitively hard hitting swarm type enemy. They shouldn't be able to jump over a 2 block high wall, but they can hit a player who stands on a 2 block high wall. They can be easily stopped by blocks, but not a 2 block pillar. The reduced health pool should enable easy clean up, after blocks have been used to defend. Or just outright slain with a powerful sword / magic.

[DaOpa]

Suggestions from a player whos played on NA CHAOS 1 for a very long time for many many hours.

CHANGES FOR RULESET on CHAOS SERVERS

• UPON Dealth ALL ITEMS/All Equipped Gear are dropped and are lootable by other players

CHANGES for BOTH FURY / CHAOS Servers

• Prevent any form of Building ON or Near RUIN BLOCKS + the tribute area platforms in the sky
  
• Prevent any form of Building ON or Near NOVICE GRASSLANDS CENTER Locations
  
• Bring more Balance to structure blocks, when all bases i see on CHAOS are made of FOUNDATION BLOCKS Stacking and Door Spamming, there is a issue here and it shouldnt be like this and or prevented from occuring.
  
• Prevent any Tammed Creature the ability to do damage to Steel Blocks, IE Shadow Leopard currently can do damage to steel.
  
• Review the Map Seeds, make sure there is a good supply of all BIOMES, some of the servers have a really poor mix
  
• (low priority)Add a Portal that allows you to go to other CHAOS or FURY Servers
  
• (low priority)Add a Portal that Generates a new game world so players can go in and farm blocks, resources etc and then bring back to their home server location, make this portal shared across all CHAOS / Fury servers, and it resets / regenerates weekly.

When the changes are made, annouce to the player base all PVP servers will be wiped, new maps regenerated that are more balanced and list all the additional changes made.

[Boxcarwilly]

Many may disagree but I dont feel you should lose the armor you wear, reason being some people know the spawn points and camp you over and over, this atleast gives you a chance, many people have posted great ideas and having 500 hours in pve/pvp one thing that really needs to be address on pve and pvp. Rocks and minerals need to be refreshed. Tribes build big holes at teleports and when u tp in you fall into pits and other tribes wait for you and shoot, you have no chance with lag and falling in those pits you have no chance.

Need to be refreshed like dinos there are holes on pvp and pve is a huge huge mess it makes people build and leave. Which brings up there needs to be a decay timer. People play and quit, we could use those areas to defend our bases as well to build. People see the word ark and they dont even want to play we all know snail is differnt then wild card and people need to know this it will bring in players both pvp and to pve.

Please make a engram for portals we can make, have them supplied by electricity allows us to go from our bases on the map and is exciting way better then beds, we need to think outside the box. Daopa makes alot of good ideas but if you dont allow refreshing of stone, dirt etc people will just go to other maps and wreck peoples lands as well and that causes more people to angry same issue in ark people use differnt maps as storage allow refreshing stops this.

[SG_Calculated]

These are wonderfully well thought out posts. Thank you all!

[Noodle]

Originally posted by SG_Calculated:

These are wonderfully well thought out posts. Thank you all!

I beg that in your further development to balance the aspects of PvP that the pattern of continually affecting PvE be factored into the future changes.

Please learn from Ark's failure to differentiate PvE and PvP in their patch balancing and focusing solely on finding an optimal PvP balance only while leaving PvE to simply exist with whatever changes were made and were not applicable as valid balance fixes being an entirely different game mode.

While PvP is a large aspect of survival games, PvE players comprise a large part of a game's longevity for a more creative and laid back approach to the game. Alienating this entire faction of the playerbase with each patch update is becoming discouraging and causing pve servers to slowly die out of frustration. Soon we'll face the same issue on ark where it's no longer economically viable to continue hosting PvE servers for 1-2 players each and have to condense them into low pop servers that leave the rest as Legacy to sustain your Nitrado costs.

[BoneBreakerr]

oh wow never expect it .Devs talk with the community.GJ
so
-you should never lose your armor or weapons if you die offline
-you should drop 1 pice of armor when you die to a player (random)
this will make pvp inresting
-we need damage numbers but make them so you are the only 1 who can see them
did you sow the video with the blind kid who is playing football?
because that is how this game feels when trying weapons and magic
you got no clue witch dose more dmg
-walls and ceilings must have the same hp as foundations
-reduce the level requerd for defence plants
-change the method of raiding(no more sword raiding or staff) add c4
-balance materials wight
its simple a pain to get iron sulf and other mataerials that have a mine
-respawn Mines!
add a feature to repair the map like a vulcano that erupts every 7 days and puts back all destroyed blocks posible changes the map
- weapon upgrade max and minimum stats just so you when to stop

Sory for changing the subject from pvp but i dont know when il get another chanse to talk with devs.your company is know for ignoring the community.

[Unravel]

I think you should only lose your weapons/armor equipped if you die from another player, whilst you are online. if you are offline or get killed from a monster / fall damage, you should keep the gear.

[Enchantress]

9 different PVE servers I have played on since launch are no longer hosting PixArk. The player base from 50 to 0-1 won't cut the cost of running one. Please Please focus some attention on PVE changes and re-balance that work w i t h that of PVP. I am one of many losing interest as a PVE player, while all updates seem to cater to PVP. (nothing against pvp players)

Potato posted a great thread about PVE feedback, it would be nice to see it pinned like this one. So us PVE'ers at least feel like you guys care to keep us as a player base.

[GimpKong]

Why have a topic about pvp when acording to polls only maround 20% of the players in pixark do it? Why not have a PVE thread?
Why not make a topic that the majority of the players care about?
I'm guessing you are looking at the numbers on official servers... No pve player in their right mind are playing official servers since they are not moderated. They play on private servers or singleplayer

[Siklus]

Some additional points:

• We don't have blueprints. Together with hotbar items not dropping on death (I like this btw) means you won't raid for better gear or blueprints.
  
• No breeding means you won't raid for eggs (better dino's) either.
  
• Better digging dinos (fix the mole and rock dragon to dig to the cursor or just forward would be
  a win) or better digging tools like a T2 drill that runs on fuel, drills 3 high x3 wide x2 deep and collects crystals and ore. I'll use this to find hidden bases as well if I have to.

[DidYouFartOnMe]

armor durabilty weapon and tolld durability = no more zerg running

we have to go to extreeme length and borderline exploit game mechanics to keep our bases safe from people who will jsut abuse inbalance to wreck your base

make a new item taht you can only get fuel from ruins that protects chunk from being built on by players allow player to destroy ect ect but building or placing blocks on the chunk is a no no

or make it so when you place a foundation that there is a 50-100 block radius square or sphere where no one can place normal or crafted objects or blocks on cause the meta is just place dirt down untill you reach there base blow in ez loot