The Plan for Cut-Throat Mode

Well that's great and all.... but now can you remove the PK ability on bandits?

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PoppaGrim wrote:

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I personally love Cutthroat not to invade other players, but to get invaded and beat the crap out of would-be PKers. The only time I invade an instance is when it's empty so I can just run through to the next area when I don't have the waypoint.

While I do believe that you personally are telling the truth, I've played way too many games over the years--including past PoE cutthroat events--to believe that even 1% of the people who want cutthroat are after anything but a robbery fantasy.

Personally, I love PVP... I have an insane LoL/DOTA2 addiction and a console fighter library that would make a Capcom executive jealous. But cutthroat mode is not PVP, it is PK. I'm a bit upset to hear everyone calling it PVP because that is misleading players about what is being offered. [Kudos to GGG for being brutally honest and calling it cutthroat].

Good PVP has one thing in common: it finds a way to eliminate gear level differentials and force players to compete using strategy and skill. Note too, that eliminating gear level differentials doesn't mean you can't still have gear diversity.

PKing is a type of PVP isn't it not?

If I used Detonate Dead with cast on death would my corpse explode?

ok, this is the real man mode!

Will we see a post like this for competitive PvP at some point?

I think you really should try having a player drop a single random item on death as well as their inventory.

This will make the swings of cut-throat much slower, and keep people invested in taking revenge. Losing a single item can still be devastating but this allows for a much stronger back-and-forth between players. Losing all your items is simply too catastrophic to continue to meaningfully play for some time.

I think this would make cut-throat much more viable at higher level, and generally keep people 'in the game' while still keeping the tension and risk of cut-throat.

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Chris wrote:

We're expecting to run some shorter duration events next week (2 hour, 4 hour, 8 hour, for example) and to experiment with longer ones (1 day, 3 day, one week) as we get feedback.

Please, please mostly avoid 5 hour lengths and under, as we've had dozens of tests of those lengths already. Stick mainly to 8 hours and up, rather than wasting too much time rehashing what's already been tested with hardly any changes.

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Chris wrote:

Eventually we'd love to run multi-week (or even multi-month) cut-throat leagues if people like that duration!

What about permanent? The above implies that CT will feed Standard, which... *do not want*. Start with a permanent CT, then e.g. each 4 month cycle you could start up a fresh CT (nothing special needed, just the same timing) that feeds the parent CT league, the same way Standard and HC are fed.

GGG what you have to acknowledge for the successful creation of CT events is that people interested in CT events/leagues are not interested in INFINITE UNREWARDING PVE GRINDING you have got going on other leagues, is interested in killing other players.

You have to detach PvE leagues economic design (a failure itself, but that's an other topic) from PvP leagues economic design. If you want to get an idea of how this works you can look at successful full-loot open world PvP games. PvP is the goal, not PvE. You can leave RMT/BiS "pvp" to permanent leagues and endless hours of empty queues.

What this means is that mid-tier to high-tier gear should be relatively easy to get, while punishing to lose, that PvP itself should function as an ITEM SINK (not all loot should drop, a percentage should be destroyed on kill), that you can have real production (crafting, not gambling) in the game to upgrade gear through constant farming and have enough gear sets to replace loses. That way incentives (loot & XP acquisition) make the risk worth it.

Given how itemization & loot works right now, the longer the leagues are set, the biggest the failure will be to keep interest up, as the risk will always offset the reward waaaay too much, and people will refuse to engage in combat.


Along that you will need to have pvp skill modulators for certain mechanics, from resist penetration to damage output, so easy ganking through stupid skills and combos is hard, and fun tactical combat is a possibility but at the same time there must be a viable window of time to kill targets before log outs; in this aspect you have it way easier than other pvp games cause instances are limited to 12 players, so is easier to balance potential damage outputs vs. defences & utility in a given period of time. But I'm sure you are aware of that.

Awesome news! :)

I would love to see a cut throat league in which you cant progress farther than the first difficulty and that lasts for a few days or one week.

Might also be fun to put a chest in the a3 pvp area (infinity ppl can join) that drops items every hour and you can enter the area as a party defending the chest king of the hill style. I'm thinking about a flag you have to tap and when the time runs out the party that tapped it gets the loot.

I agree with dropping only 1-2 items from your gear on death sounds reasonable but i somehow dislike the softcore idea. maybe you should go to town after being pked and go to standard after being killed by monsters.