October PVP Changes

Didn't see this before. I'm curious about what other work-arounds you can implement to prevent misc exploitation.

I'm still a fan of nerfing newly released story rewards, but eh.
 
I actually sort of like how you tried to differentiated the peace tags to change how players receive hits.

Perhaps certain numbers of days. Weeks, or even months of inactivity could reduce the number of buckets away that people can hit you from? Idk if this would be worth the effort to code, or how exploitable similar changes would be but I think people should be allowed vacations.
 
This system may make it so higher members are protected, but you end up making it so smaller members have no way to avoid being bully farmed unless they constantly peace tag. 100mcs more than the player they're hitting, like come-on. It's way unbalanced.
 
[ATA]Strange said:
Hi PIMDuper heroes.

Because we have an event with a PVP mechanic launching today, it's time to do a little sprucing up of PVP.


So is this why when the spinner lands on 5 DNs it rewards you a creepy doll? Had it happen twice

PVP Not-Spring Fall cleaning



broom.jpg

Getting ready to clean up PVP

You may remember in April/May we did some changes to PVP.

Back then, we..
  1. Capped Misc by a factor of 2x dormies + 4x tutors + 4x rs
  2. Added Peace Tags & Peace Prevention
  3. Made the matchmaking effect of misc unbounded
  4. Reduced hit ranges by 1 bucket
  5. Added the recent aggression buff that increases hit ranges
After gathering data from the last few months we're repealing changes 3, 4, and 5, effective immediately.

Why?


  • Why does Misc no longer contribute to your matchmaking rating past a certain amount? The misc cap alone serves the purpose we need it to - preventing misc from being the end-all and be-all of PVP. The big reason to remove this is that people were using misc to get into range to hit a target, then escape being hit back by jumping up and down buckets. This is pretty exploitative and very much against the spirit of PVP. It also became clear that PVP events didn't make sense when players could adjust their own matchmaking rating up or down so easily.

    The first 100m will still contribute, like before May. This is to prevent exploits where players use new accounts to grief other new players. At high level play the effect of this small amount will be irrelevant.

  • Why are we removing the recent aggression buff? The purpose of recent aggression was to prevent people from hitting, then bucket jumping so they couldn't be hit back, but after a while people figured it out, and jumped 2 buckets instead of 1. It was also confusing. Given that it's unnecessarily complicated and also didn't stop the bad behaviour anyway, it had to go.

  • Why are we returning the hit ranges to what they were originally? (Your own plus 2 up or 2 down). Together with the misc MMR, this change fragmented the community much more than we were hoping. We still do feel like this is too wide, but the other way was too narrow, leaving many people who wanted to fight each other, unable to do so. We'll have to come up with a better solution in the longer term, but until we do, this is the better of the options because it's more proven - PIMD existed for 9 years without this change, and only 5 months with it. So we'll see how it goes from here.
Also, we have disabled some PVP exploits that people were able to do by using old PIMD clients. I'd rather not give any more details here, but some people were purposely not updating because they were getting an advantage with an old client. That's patched now.

Finally, with regard to Peace Tags, or "shields"..
If you mosey on over to the event post you'll see that the current event includes a PVP mechanic where under certain conditions, Peace Tags don't stop hits. This is an experiment in a number of things. Our goal is to make it so that people can feel safe when they want to rest, but in order to maximize their efficiency they have to give up their safety sometimes.

Our theory is that balancing risk vs reward is a lot more fun than just being always safe or always unsafe. To meet this goal, we aimed to make this happen only sometimes and only to active players. These conditions won't be met by players who are on vacation, for example.

In this case, for the duration of this event, peace tags have no effect during a hit when the defender has 3 or more Lil' Cursey dolls. (You can see why this won't be a problem if you peace tag and go to sleep, but people who are trying to get as many drops as possible will have to open themselves up to danger.)

sharkpunch.gif

This shark thought his Peace Tag would protect him, but he had too many dolls


We're going to see how these changes work for a bit, but our next crack at making PVP more fun and rewarding will only be able to come with your feedback. So leave that feedback here!

[ATA]Strange
Click to expand...
 
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