Another cut-throat test

I played the cut-throat test last night for roughly two hours or so, i was only 30 minutes behind on the rest so i still stood a chance.

The things i loved about Cut-throat:

-The constant fear of danger
-The increased drop rates, making dying a little less bad when you lose your items since you might just find them back anyway.


A 'downside' for me was people waiting at instance spawns, so the moment you enter it you get bombarded by attacks, often by higher level players before my game's even completely loaded.

Another thing that personally annoyed me a little is high level player farming all the lower level maps for players there for their gems / orbs. While i understand it's cut-throat and things like these should be common, it makes it very, very hard for players who joined in 'late' to get started properly because you get slaughtered from terraces to mudflats.

A 'issue' i found was the /Whois function is still active in cut-throat, this function shows someone's class, level and location. I think this should be turned off because it makes it very, very easy to stalk people and kill them over and over and over again.

Another bug i found is that sometimes when a player dies, or leaves the instance, their red cross on your map remains, this is a little confusing and irritating when you're constantly looking at your map for enemies popping up.

Also, is it possible to 'hide' player's names from instances, so the 'hunters' only get a list of instances, but without any assurance there's actual players in? To balance this, you can remove the 'Someone has joined the instance' text to compensate. This would force people to actually hunt and look for prey without assurance it's there, on the other side, if they do find a instance with someone in it, they can sneak up on them a little more easily.

These were the things i noticed and thought of during the Cut-throat testing, some people may disagree with me but that always happens with personal opinions. :)

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napalm_89 wrote:

make lower leveled players (say 5 levels or less) invisible on the mini-map?

and notifiy players if a player of level 5 or more(just throwing 5 out there) joins that instance

I don't think this would work, again because it's level-based. Decked out PKs will likely be able to kill players 20-30 levels above them.

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Shoep wrote:

The things i loved about Cut-throat:
[...]
-The increased drop rates, making dying a little less bad when you lose your items since you might just find them back anyway.

I quite like most of your ideas Shoep. As for the above, drop rates are the same in cutthroat. You were likely just seeing the top end of variance, or extra drops due to the occasional extra player in your instance.

when is next test >?

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unsane wrote:

I don't think this would work, again because it's level-based. Decked out PKs will likely be able to kill players 20-30 levels above them.

Thanks for reading, dam thats a bummer.

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Shoep wrote:

Also, is it possible to 'hide' player's names from instances, so the 'hunters' only get a list of instances, but without any assurance there's actual players in? To balance this, you can remove the 'Someone has joined the instance' text to compensate. This would force people to actually hunt and look for prey without assurance it's there, on the other side, if they do find a instance with someone in it, they can sneak up on them a little more easily.

This would be very interesting to test, it would make people more safe off the main routes, to level up and loot, and heighten the feeling of suspense

There should also be PvP skill gems, like hide your location on the minimap once per instance, or decoys, stuff like that :P

Had tons of fun. This test gave me the kick in the ass i needed to donate. POE is the only dungeon crawler I will need for a very very long time.

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napalm_89 wrote:

I too think level caps in instances is the wrong way to go beacuse then you will only ever interact with a small percentage of the playing community.

What about suppressing player joining notifications while also implementing the following:

make lower leveled players (say 5 levels or less) invisible on the mini-map?

and notifiy players if a player of level 5 or more(just throwing 5 out there) joins that instance, as well as showing their level in the notification?

comnine that with no rewards for killing way lower levels, and you make it fustrating for people to try and grief

^ this

I don't like the whole name hiding idea for these type of events because the whole point of them is to kill the most unique accounts so in this last one I personally kept track of every person I killed so if I looked at the list and saw that there was no one left unkilled in an area's list I just moved on to the next. Without names I probably would have just ended up killing a lot of the same people countless times. Just like I know there were plenty of people keeping an eye out for my name to pop up on a list so they could take shots at me, it adds that option of really stalking down a well known player or getting a shot at revenge on the guy that just killed you. Hopefully it will get like D2 later on where people would offer bounties for whoever killed "the dirty bastard that killed me!". In D2 I used to make extra accounts and put bounties on myself just so I could kill the bounty hunters.

No rewards for killing someone much lower lvl would be a solid deterrent. Like the low lvl doesn't drop their items or lose XP on death. So they are barely inconvenienced at all, and the ganker gets no loot or XP.

But short of having a slow comp and dying during instance loading, I don't understand how anyone can die right now if they don't want to (past lvl 2 or something). As long as you have a TP scroll, you are effectively unkillable. I guess people didn't understand the importance of trading whetstones and ID scrolls for TPs in the early game.

Yea I got a good laugh everytime I killed someone and their loot dropped a TP, like really you could have gotten away at any time.


Town Portal Skill Gem > PvP.

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napalm_89 wrote:

"

unsane wrote:

I don't think this would work, again because it's level-based. Decked out PKs will likely be able to kill players 20-30 levels above them.

Thanks for reading, dam thats a bummer.

"

Shoep wrote:

Also, is it possible to 'hide' player's names from instances, so the 'hunters' only get a list of instances, but without any assurance there's actual players in? To balance this, you can remove the 'Someone has joined the instance' text to compensate. This would force people to actually hunt and look for prey without assurance it's there, on the other side, if they do find a instance with someone in it, they can sneak up on them a little more easily.

This would be very interesting to test, it would make people more safe off the main routes, to level up and loot, and heighten the feeling of suspense

There should also be PvP skill gems, like hide your location on the minimap once per instance, or decoys, stuff like that :P

I also find that this would be interesting to test.