Great idea for the future of the island thing

[UkcsAlias]

I forgot you were representing anyone else...

There are only 2 groups here, those who want pvp, and those who dont.

And balance wise its very easy to guess who will benefit here:
Invaders: No risk (if you dont have a lot of resources, you cant lose a lot either), high reward (those who have a lot can be farmed)
Defenders: High risk (why gather when its easy to be stolen), no reward (because why bother with this if any potential reward is much easier to be taken away)

The first thing i do when such feature would exist is to instantly make my island private. And if it can still be invaded. My island will permanently have nothing. The animals will be freed, crops will be removed. And any structure demolished. I wont give a pvper anything.

[Payadopa]

It's not even bait at this point.

[dspguy]

I don't think it would fit in with the lore they already laid out. Isn't the whole point that the islands are no longer harried by pirates after they fell into the fold with Limsa Lominsa? It would seem that the notion of some raiding force (player or non-player alike) wouldn't be happening now that the islands are more or less patrolled by either the LL navy or the pirates that no longer pillage.

[Deveryn]

I don't think it would fit in with the lore they already laid out. Isn't the whole point that the islands are no longer harried by pirates after they fell into the fold with Limsa Lominsa? It would seem that the notion of some raiding force (player or non-player alike) wouldn't be happening now that the islands are more or less patrolled by either the LL navy or the pirates that no longer pillage.

There's also the fact that there's really only one of these islands. Being able to have people over is just a courtesy.

Oh, now I see who started this. Someone needs a real hobby.

[Packetdancer]

Given the revulsion a great deal of the playerbase have for the kind of gankfest OP envisions, the entire game is the wrong place for it.

See, I can actually see a place for it if it were specifically and solely PvP, and entirely optional. Something where it's like "to have a variety of training scenarios, we've decided to allow adventurers space on the unused coast of Hullbreaker Isle to set up fortified positions which can be assailed". Where the place you're fortifying and setting up is literally only for PvP.

The real problem with open-world PvP of any form is that PvP appeals to several different types of players. There are the players who like the challenge of 1v1 duelling. There are the players that like the added element of threat/danger to the game if they can be attacked by more than just overworld mobs; players, after all, are often smarter than mob AI is. There are players that like team PvP where you cooperate with folks to take down the opposition.

And there are PvPers who just like to roll folks less powerful than them and laugh about it. And sadly, that last group is often the loudest, and the ones who most vehemently insist that people should be forced to PvP.

To quote a post of my own from the New World forums roughly a year ago, when some folks were insisting that harvesting a resource node in a territory controlled by a different faction should force your PvP flag on so you could be 'punished' for 'stealing'...

I think if you want to brainstorm ways to encourage PvE folks to flag for PvP – beyond the existing XP benefit – you need to first brainstorm ways to keep folks from being trolls about it.

When you have level 30+ folks waiting outside the gates of the starting towns, prepared to gank lower-level players who step outside flagged for PvP, you’ve got behavior which discourages anyone from actually flagging. I know I tried during one of the betas to go flagged permanently, and I spent an entire evening being killed every time I stepped outside the gates, because I was level 10 and there were four level 25 folks waiting immediately outside, until I gave up and unflagged.

As a result, I’m definitely not flagging PvP when I actually want to get my main story progression done this time around.

And as long as there’s nothing working to stop trolls from doing that, scenarios that enforce PvP flagging are only going to earn resentment specifically because the people for whom PvP means “lol I can kill the babies” (as opposed to “this provides an element of challenge and strategy to actually operating in this game”) will deliberately work to take advantage of those situations.

Look at EVE Online, which is all-PvP-all-the-time, but has a concept of star systems with high security (hisec), low security (lowsec), and no security (nullsec). Attack someone in hisec (without paying off CONCORD to look the other way by buying a war declaration), and the NPC lawkeepers will almost certainly vaporize you. This means players who want a chance to build up resources and skills can do so by sticking to hisec, and those who try to PvP troll them there (waiting at the starting starbases to blow up people in their first ships or whatever) will quickly be nuked… but all the profit to be had is in losec or nullsec, so you can’t really excel if you just hide in hisec.

Anything where you have enforced PvP, you need some sort of buffer, some sort of limiting factor on PvP when it comes to power differential, that lets new players actually get their feet under them and get started. Otherwise, new players are just chum in the water for trollsharks.

And chum rarely sticks around long.

The idea proposed here gives incentive to the folks who want to PvP and raid other people's stuff; it gives no incentive to engage for the people who don't. Moreover, it has no built-in buffer; if someone is already a seasoned island raider and well-equipped to steamroller someone, if they start picking on low-rank islands, there's never a chance for a low-rank island to build up the resources necessary for an effective defense.

Meaning this system makes anyone just starting in island sanctuary effectively chum in the water, to reuse my own terminology from the above-quoted post.

Any PvP system, in order to have buy-in, needs to benefit all participants, at least in theory. Any that does not -- or which actively disincentivizes participation, as with this proposed idea -- will at best land flat. And if it's forced participation (or opt-out, rather than opt-in) it's likely to only cause resentment and frustration, and potentially harm player retention overall. Doubly so if there's no buffer that allows someone to build up the resources to participate in a meaningful manner, rather than just being cannon fodder for folks who are already established.

[TheMightyMollusk]

If it's opt-in only (and thus I can opt out), then I don't object to it, but it's not something I'd ever participate in. I got roped into a PVP server on WoW once, and it was pure hell.

[Zsolen]

As a pvper, bringing pvp to the island is really stupid.

I know I am a pvp mentor...

Oh boy...

Take your "wurld pee vee pee" cesspool back to WOW where it belongs.

oh boy 2.0...

[DiaDeem]

This is one of the worst ideas I've seen posted in this forum. Not as bad as that one time someone wanted to make the 1.0 tattoos buyable in Mog Station, but it's up there.

[VelKallor]

One of the problems we observed with this system was that some high level players were killing low level players, A LOT. Sometimes exclusively. This often led to solo or group griefing scenarios that created a toxic environment for many players. To be clear, this behavior was not shown by all PvP players, but enough to cause significant issues.

The "significant issues" were players saying the hell with this goodbye and never coming back

We set out to build a compelling world full of danger and opportunity that begs to be explored. The intended design was never to allow a small group of players to bully other players. Based on what we saw, we realized that we needed to make fundamental changes and not just incremental fixes, (which we tried several times during the Closed Alpha).

Back in WOW Legion we had an area, the Underbelly, where pvp was available..what we had were groups of 40 or 50 in raid setup ganking anyone for ingame currency...when Blizzard changed the currency so it was no longer available in raid groups, the gangs disappeared overnight.

Their vaunted 'world pee vee pee", as soon as they didnt have the comfort of a huge backup, ceased, they refused to 1v1 ..why?

Good GOD man, they might lose and we cant have THAT.....open world pvpers are little more than gankers, online sociopaths and sniveling, mewling cowards who attack lowbies / new players, and run like hell when a possible real fight turns up.

[Soge01]

That would be awesome! I think Yoshi-P said they'll be making more islands for us, so maybe one of those islands could be that! Also, it would be could if you could also use your caught minions, animals and mammets to defend your island base as well.