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Comments
There are plenty of other places to bash that aren't villages, and I'd be totally behind adding a whole lot more as well. Especially on the high end, we could really use more places that are on the same level as say, Sirocco or Prin, but are animals only. Yggdrasil actually has a couple, but getting there is too much of a pain for how small the bashing areas there are.
I'd even agree with making village contracts a system predicated on the addition of non-village bashing areas as well.
And I'd disagree with whether this would "enhance this game's selling point". I'll say it again - bashing is a core mechanic of the game. It's central to your character. You can have niche characters who only gain experience via non-violent methods, people have in the past, but that's like the guy in WoW who only levels by using harvest points and never leaving the Pandaren start point - quirky, yet far outside normal function of the game. You can't do combat without hunting up to a decent level. A lot of the interesting content can only be done with a sufficiently high level. Hell, outside of a House, you can't even access all your skills without bashing some. Beyond nearly everything else, excepting for a character who never levels, never uses their skills, and exists solely as a social creature, bashing is the single most important and core piece of this game. And you want to make it punishing for people to have to do it.
Any new person who picks up the game and says "so I have to bash, but I'm going to get punished for doing so?" is not going to stay long.
As others have said, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if we had a bunch of new areas. But we'd need areas all along the level scale that this system would not apply to, almost to the point that you'd have to add an equal number of denizens and experience (and possibly gold) that already exist, before such a system would be acceptable.
And it shouldn't be in small villages but more larger denizen cities where they already have some security forces/military. It makes no sense for the elites of Shastaan to come hunting for people because well, there is no bloody elites in that area (Maybe if they were allied to a player city they could have some denizen elites of that city go searching, allied villages would be protected!). And the elites should fit to the areas strength wise so they could be slightly stronger than the rest, enough to give those who are level appropriate a challenge when fighting there. But if you over level it you over level it, and it makes no bloody difference for the Dragon that some slightly bigger morsels came out. Have the elites give more xp/drops if you're level appropriate and nada if you over level it (No reason for Dragons to farm elites of a lower level area then).
The problem, as I said, is that it cannot be applied to areas where people will be leveling up to Dragon. A system like this should be reserved for areas where you wouldn't be hunting if you weren't a Dragon already (say, Istarion, Sirocco, etc). At that point, a death doesn't sting as much. I'm still against the Mark idea - keep PvE and PvP separated as much as possible, please. But a dangerous entity that may even stalk you outside of that area for a period of a few months in revenge? Sure, why not? Just keep it to the people who aren't going to really feel the loss - Dragons.
If you can come up with a fun way for this for smaller places, so where it's not punishing but instead challenging (there's a difference!), it could even work in lower level areas. The problem is saying "something so big it'll kill you if you're alone comes after you, and even if you kill it somehow, lolmark". That's bad - it's not fun, and actively dissuades against hunting and the leveling process in general. But there is definitely room to refine the idea into something fun, challenging, and possibly rewarding (doesn't have to be, though).
If we can move this thread more in that direction, I think it'll be more productive than saying "my way only!" and have a better chance at the admin adopting the idea. I'm all for better immersion, I just want it to be fun immersion.
I like @Atalkez idea on having assassin tiers.
I also think not all areas should have this mechanic simply because we have to suit demographic of people hunting there. I also think some areas like Annwyn can have tougher assassin while places like moghedu should not be too tough.
I also think the denizens assassin should actually be killable with some work. It is ridiculous to face stuffs like dreadpillar. I don't need autodie to remind me I have killed x number of them.
I still have reservation about marks involved in this cos even though I am a mark I will hate picking up a contract just because someone enjoyed hunting a place. I also hate it if someone's going to use a contract to disturb my hunting eventho I am competent to face that contract.
Personally I think don't touch the old areas with this change. I am fine with future new areas having this mechanism.
As a mark, I'm not too sure about full blown contracts and the 30 days of fear associated with it, and I can respect people bucking on this. I would rather see a village denizen spaz out noticeably and personally ask a random mark to stop the incursion(maybe mention that mark head directed them to you). This limits the time and area window, while giving a lot of leeway to people being able to nope out if they like. If the mark completes: give them credit, if they don't: too bad better luck next time(no rank loss), if basher kills mark: yayfreexp.
Also, a single death, while annoying, really isn't that bad. It provides an opportunity to interact and stick it to the man: 'let's stick it to Ashtan and murder Therans until the <whatever> shows up and we can murder it!' For example.
If they add spots where you can afk-bash, what's the problem? Risk for people who want it, safety for people who don't.
The people who've posted about this 'ending Achaea' really need to take a step back, because no one's suggested this be made the norm for every single area.
Ultimately, Achaea is a game that revolves around taking opportunities and running with them. If you're the kind of person who wants to make something out of some big monster coming to kick your ass, great! If you're not, then stick to a safe spot.
I don't agree with adding exclusively dragon-level, end-game content either. I think it'd be much better to implement areas like this across the spectrum so that you don't have to have already bashed a ton to participate, personally.
Clearly sentient denizen kills would impact that more.
Maybe a couple of denizens that could black-market haggle down your level of PvE-Infamy with gold (whaddup gold sink).
What about factional swings? What if your repeated bashing of Village Y leads to a high PvE-Infamy but when you visit Village X (sworn enemies of Village Y), the villagers cheer you like a hero (but then you mow them down as well).
edit: sorry, forgot the actual implementation: a high level of PvE Infamy could cause denizens to hit you harder, have access to special abilities (but also give better experience, maybe). plus/minus special access to bashing areas for PvE-Infamous. plus/minus this system only being active for Level 94+.
sorry just spitballing
plus/minus weekly random item (mayan crown, low level talisman piece, delosian eagle) for being the #1 PvE-Infamous.
And I really am trying to understand here, how many sentient areas on average is a hunter going to hit between 80 and dragon? I don't have a good feel for it, since I've almost solely stuck to non-sentients as is.
Also, let's not kid ourselves. The moment this gets added in, there will be people camping the areas and then killing hunters like clockwork the moment they hit the contract threshold. It won't be a single death -- it would make it so that hunting the sentient (read: good) areas will be a PvPers-only affair, especially if experience gain won't be bumped up vastly to compensate.
And it'd be easy to be smart about how contracts are generated, too. Only at a certain threshold, and then give a timer before another can be generated, and a timer before the contract is actually created (so that you aren't interrupted by a contract the moment you hit a threshold).
Honestly, it feels like a lot of the criticism to this idea goes something like "assuming it was implemented in a bad way, it would be bad." Yes, there's a ton of ways that something like this could be done where it's awful, but that's not really engaging with the idea itself. I don't think anyone who's posted in support of the idea would say it would be a good idea to effect every sentient area, or for there to be no reward to balance out the death, or for the system to spam you with contracts if you kept hunting.
Let's say Moghedu, having been repeatedly hunted by Targossas, finally snaps and declares a temporary state of formal hostility against the city. For the duration of this period, those city's guards cannot be relocated since they have to remain at their given post to watch for any mhun incursions.
Mechanics-wise, every citizen that kills a sentient denizen would add to a counter for that city in that particular area. When the threshold (let's say 10k) is reached, the village 'raids' the city and distracts the guards in such a way that they can't be moved for a period (maybe 12 IG days or 1 whole IG month?). This allows other cities to also raid and not have to worry about guards being called on top of them. Hello, conflict.
To compensate somewhat, maybe citizens get a small experience boost during the village raid period, as well. Village raids will be shouted by whoever their leader is or something so that others know they can raid sans guard movement, and again when the village raid period ends. Thematically, maybe you can even randomly spawn denizens of the village inside the city much like rats.
Note, the 10k threshold could be changed. I hunt around 500 things on a casual day, so I based it off that. The idea is that village raids happen noticeably, but not all the time.
Not having players kill the avid hunters, but have stronger and stronger assassins from the sentient hunting areas sent to kill them.
Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM
I like the idea of bribing villages to leave you alone!
I'm not sure that trying to make denizens "people" to everyone isn't already a lost cause. The game was designed for players to need to bash massive numbers of denizens. And when villages forget that you killed them in a matter of months, it certainly makes them seem like not-people. If you killed another player, he'd probably remember it for Achaean decades. But as it is, you can just wait for Feelings Villages to drop a little and then Joe the Villager still wants you to fix his spear for him. Denizens will even accept quest items and kindly say "Thank you so much!" while simultaneously angrily attacking you.
Perhaps if villages enemied you... refused to sell to you while you were enemied, and were constantly at "disgust" towards you - snarling and refusing to have anything to do with you, including quests and stuff- I don't think they should be permanently aggro, that would be annoying. You could pay a minor fine (I don't like the idea of a gold sink, I hunt for gold as well as xp*) to get unenemied, or you could just be like "pssh I didn't want to buy your fur blanket or fix your spear anyway, muahahahaha." It would make them seem a LITTLE more real. But perhaps that's a little too complicated to implement, I don't have any idea what is doable.
And as far as "it's just one death", deaths hurt a LOT for me right now at about level 80. It takes hours of bashing to recover one death, and I don't have hours of extra time. Of course, I don't hunt sentient denizens, either, but if I did, I would not want the "denizen assassin" system to be too hurty. As long as one could rotate areas often enough, and there were plenty of good areas to hunt, it would be all right. This is more about flavor, and RP, than it is about mechanics, I think. I like Atalkez' tier idea.
* and this is not something I would ENJOY sinking my gold into... gold sinks should be enjoyable, I think, like ships or mining. A rare mineral costs a lot, but it has an enjoyable reward. Having to pay to hunt stinks.
Honestly, I feel like it is impossible to properly address the "villages feel like meaningless bashing zones instead of villages full of actual people" problem until they make enough non-sentient bashing areas to give people competitive options across the level ranges.
Once there are enough competitive alternatives for areas like Qurnok/Moghedu/Arcadia/Istarion/etc, you can start adding penalties/dangers/etc for bashing villages. Without those alternatives in place, you can't really do that because bashing is too central to the game to mess around with it and add penalties for it for something as meaningless as trying to make people value Moghedu denizens as people after more than a decade of seeing them as a bashing area.
I did say, caveat: I don't know how hard this would be to implement. I'm just throwing ideas out there, other people can tell me if they're viable or not.
I'm also trying to point out how difficult it would be to make denizens "people" due to the fact that they've been xp/gold fodder for yeeeears. If someone doesn't care about the RP side of it, they're not likely to start caring, I think.