This is starting to crop up, and I suspect it’s going to get worse as the player population levels up, but I’d like to ask the devs for what the official policy is for players competing over spawns in a given area. I know many games have tried many different approaches (“play nice” policies, etc), and they all have pros and cons, but the key thing is that everyone knows what the guidelines are.
To be more specific the types of scenarios that I’m curious about are along the lines; What happens if person/group A is hunting in an area, and person/group B comes up and starts hunting in that area too? Does it matter if one person/group is attacking the other’s mobs after they engage? Does it matter if either do or don’t have enough DPS to completely clear the area? Does it matter how long either side has been there? If one side wipes, does that make it free game or is there a grace period? What if it’s a world boss being engaged, can players jump in on the attempt without being invited?
Obviously things like verbal harassment and grief-porting are already violations of the rules, but I think the above scenarios are going to continue and escalate. If there aren’t guidelines in place, it will likely result in increasingly toxic behavior.
I have seen from experience there is definitely a fractional reward of experience for having your currently engaged mob poached and also a fractional experience reward for poaching a mob.
I think you lose less when your poached and earn little when you do the poaching: feels like 80/20% for poachee and poacher, but it could also be based on fractional damage vs. total damage done (I.e. critter had 100hp, you started combat and did about 60 points, then a poacher lit into it and does 20 while you do 20 more; mob took 80 from you and 20 from poacher, so you get 80% of the experience reward and the poacher gets 20%. Equal opportunity for loot potential, however. At least this is sort-of what I’ve seen.
Yeah, I do believe the devs have said it’s based on damage done when not in the same group, but that means that if someone comes in with more firepower, they can really take close to everything. Conversely, it means that if a lower level player is looking to leech, it will likely not really be very worthwhile for them, which is good.
Since the XP reward and the loot reward both scale according to the contribution of the kill, I don’t really see this being a major concern in most instances. Like, if you’re just a group of 5 farming wolves and a random person comes up and starts killing the same wolves, they are only getting an XP reward proportional to their contribution in terms of helping you kill it faster. Just getting “one shot in” on the wolf does nothing really since that would be like <1% of the XP. The same rules apply to loot – your personal chance to get something from a monster scales with your contribution toward killing it. If someone comes and helps you kill something, they would get a small chance to get loot only if they were actually helping you kill it faster.
So I guess in my mind, a 6th-person-tagging-along is either doing nothing really to help you, in which case they will get very little reward and not really affect you at all, or they will be adding on 10% extra help, in which case you are killing things 10% faster, so I’m not really sure that’s a disadvantage.
To answer the social side of the question, there is no “claiming spots” or anything like that in the game. If it’s a safe area, then it’s all shared. You should be open to other people participating in what you’re doing. It’s not “your hunting spot.” If you are harassing people who are near you or portaling them away, you are the one breaking the rules, not them.
In the Wilds zones, obviously PvP is enabled so at that point if you want to claim a territory as yours, you can fight for it, and that’s fair game.
Once the dungeons are in the game and people are spending more time in there because that’s where the best gear is located, my guess is that this is going to be less of an issue. That’s why they’re instanced.
Great, makes sense! It should help just knowing the dev call on the issue, as every game is different and people often bring in expectations from them. Thanks!
Is there anything added in dungeons or groups for healers xp/loot gain? The first two times I ran the lvl 8 dungeon I didn’t get a single drop but I also was healing everyone. I’m not set up to do damage when in a group setting so more than likely I will be doing the least amount of damage to the mob.
When you are in a party you get credit for everything everyone else in the party does. So you have as much chance as anyone. Also healing does generate aggro so even if you’re not doing damage you are still contributing from the game’s perspective.