Volendrung/Scroll Trolling Reduction Mechanics

Recremen

We've known for a long time that scrolls are prone to certain types of troll mechanics, and we are now seeing that Volendrung can fall to similar abuses. I don't have a fix for everything, but I've got a good idea for how to fix a specific subset of trolling mechanics involving slaughterfish and lava.

The change is simple. If someone holding a scroll or the Volendrung dies with slaughterfish or lava damage on their recap, they get an account-wide block on picking up the scroll or the Volendrung for a certain period of time.

There are extremely few situations in Cyrodiil where one could accidentally take either of these damage types, especially someone taking the typical amount of care used by people who want to authentically run a scroll or use the Volendrung. Overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, someone with a scroll or the Volendrung who takes these damage types has intentionally put themselves in that situation in order to troll people. The health of the game and the integrity of the scroll and artifact systems would be greatly boosted if such people were not able to continue picking up these objects on cooldown, especially since scroll runs are rare (occurring only a few times a day) and artifacts have an hours-long hard timer between spawns. We've got a limited amount of time to reasonably interact with those systems, so I think it's best to preserve their integrity to the greatest extent possible. And since we're only talking about a temporary ban on picking up those two interactables, then in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a legitimate runner/wielder gets a ban, they'll be able to bounce back.

My initial thought is to have the ban last for 1.5 weeks in order to prevent repeat offenders from doing a weekly troll, instead forcing them to disrupt their own schedule if they want to troll "on cooldown". I think we could open it up to even longer bans, however, depending on how much someone is a repeat offender. Getting progressively longer and longer bans would thin the troll herd pretty quickly, as few trolls have the stamina for that kind of extended payoff.

What do people think?

Urzigurumash

What about just having the scroll or hammer move to the nearest shoreline, or, a bubble of Slaughterfish/environmental lava immunity around the item when it's dropped in water/lava?

Recremen

Urzigurumash wrote: »

What about just having the scroll or hammer move to the nearest shoreline, or, a bubble of Slaughterfish/environmental lava immunity around the item when it's dropped in water/lava?

For your first idea, that would work but sounds harder to implement. It does not, however, serve well to remove repeat offenders. For the second, that sounds much much harder to implement for slaughterfish and pointless for lava, since once you're in the lava in Cyrodiil you're stuck there due to the terrain. The lava is totally survivable, the problem is that it's an inescapable hole. And again neither of those serves as a deterrent for trolling, so it's a slightly less useful toll in my book.

Kartalin

We tried dropping volendrung in the slaughterfish because one of the other factions had emp and a massive population advantage. It didn’t work though, volendrung popped back out of there pretty quickly, like a minute? It just reset to its original spawn location — behind the emp faction’s gates. 😕

Vlad9425

I've seen people pick up scrolls and run them straight to the other alliance's gates and I've seen people pick up Volendrung and hold it hostage behind the gates of the scroll temples until it despawns. I'm not sure if mechanically they could fix these issues but maybe they can temporarily ban people who decide to do these things if they are reported and found out to be guilty of it?

Recremen

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I've seen people pick up scrolls and run them straight to the other alliance's gates and I've seen people pick up Volendrung and hold it hostage behind the gates of the scroll temples until it despawns. I'm not sure if mechanically they could fix these issues but maybe they can temporarily ban people who decide to do these things if they are reported and found out to be guilty of it?

Yeah I don't have a solid fix idea for other trolling methods, but what you describe for Volendrung seems much more rare than the slaughterfish method simply because it takes so long for the payoff, whereas with the slaughterfish it goes back to the spawn location after two minutes and they can repeat the trolling cycle. Either way, yeah, not much to be done to fix that on the server side.

Recremen

Kartalin wrote: »

We tried dropping volendrung in the slaughterfish because one of the other factions had emp and a massive population advantage. It didn’t work though, volendrung popped back out of there pretty quickly, like a minute? It just reset to its original spawn location — behind the emp faction’s gates. 😕

Volendrung spawning behind the winning faction's gates is a bug and is fixable, though. That's not the kind of behavior that should be encouraged long-term.

Qbiken

If someone picks up scroll/hammer it's theirs to do whatever they want with. Deal with it or pick them up yourself.

ThePedge

Last night a group on DC had Volendrung and both EP scrolls, stolen from AD keeps. They ran around until finally destroying a bridge, while standing on it. This despawned the hammer and gave both scrolls back to AD.

I get that we need to allow people to have fun, but there should be penalties for doing things quite obviously trolling/griefing.

Recremen

Qbiken wrote: »

If someone picks up scroll/hammer it's theirs to do whatever they want with. Deal with it or pick them up yourself.

Alternatively, the devs could change the rules and then you have to learn to deal with it. I'm going to advocate for my position, thanks.

Mr_Walker

Recremen wrote: »

We've known for a long time that scrolls are prone to certain types of troll mechanics, and we are now seeing that Volendrung can fall to similar abuses. I don't have a fix for everything, but I've got a good idea for how to fix a specific subset of trolling mechanics involving slaughterfish and lava.

The change is simple. If someone holding a scroll or the Volendrung dies with slaughterfish or lava damage on their recap, they get an account-wide block on picking up the scroll or the Volendrung for a certain period of time.

There are extremely few situations in Cyrodiil where one could accidentally take either of these damage types, especially someone taking the typical amount of care used by people who want to authentically run a scroll or use the Volendrung. Overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, someone with a scroll or the Volendrung who takes these damage types has intentionally put themselves in that situation in order to troll people. The health of the game and the integrity of the scroll and artifact systems would be greatly boosted if such people were not able to continue picking up these objects on cooldown, especially since scroll runs are rare (occurring only a few times a day) and artifacts have an hours-long hard timer between spawns. We've got a limited amount of time to reasonably interact with those systems, so I think it's best to preserve their integrity to the greatest extent possible. And since we're only talking about a temporary ban on picking up those two interactables, then in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a legitimate runner/wielder gets a ban, they'll be able to bounce back.

My initial thought is to have the ban last for 1.5 weeks in order to prevent repeat offenders from doing a weekly troll, instead forcing them to disrupt their own schedule if they want to troll "on cooldown". I think we could open it up to even longer bans, however, depending on how much someone is a repeat offender. Getting progressively longer and longer bans would thin the troll herd pretty quickly, as few trolls have the stamina for that kind of extended payoff.

What do people think?

I think faction locking stopped these shenanigans!

Recremen

Mr_Walker wrote: »

show previous quotes

Recremen wrote: »

We've known for a long time that scrolls are prone to certain types of troll mechanics, and we are now seeing that Volendrung can fall to similar abuses. I don't have a fix for everything, but I've got a good idea for how to fix a specific subset of trolling mechanics involving slaughterfish and lava.

The change is simple. If someone holding a scroll or the Volendrung dies with slaughterfish or lava damage on their recap, they get an account-wide block on picking up the scroll or the Volendrung for a certain period of time.

There are extremely few situations in Cyrodiil where one could accidentally take either of these damage types, especially someone taking the typical amount of care used by people who want to authentically run a scroll or use the Volendrung. Overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, someone with a scroll or the Volendrung who takes these damage types has intentionally put themselves in that situation in order to troll people. The health of the game and the integrity of the scroll and artifact systems would be greatly boosted if such people were not able to continue picking up these objects on cooldown, especially since scroll runs are rare (occurring only a few times a day) and artifacts have an hours-long hard timer between spawns. We've got a limited amount of time to reasonably interact with those systems, so I think it's best to preserve their integrity to the greatest extent possible. And since we're only talking about a temporary ban on picking up those two interactables, then in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a legitimate runner/wielder gets a ban, they'll be able to bounce back.

My initial thought is to have the ban last for 1.5 weeks in order to prevent repeat offenders from doing a weekly troll, instead forcing them to disrupt their own schedule if they want to troll "on cooldown". I think we could open it up to even longer bans, however, depending on how much someone is a repeat offender. Getting progressively longer and longer bans would thin the troll herd pretty quickly, as few trolls have the stamina for that kind of extended payoff.

What do people think?

I think faction locking stopped these shenanigans!

That has not been observed. We're dealing regularly with the opposite, in fact. One thing you have to understand about trolls is that they're not doing it for a faction's benefit, but specifically for the purpose of annoying people. Factions locks have stopped nothing.

TriangularChicken

Qbiken wrote: »

If someone picks up scroll/hammer it's theirs to do whatever they want with. Deal with it or pick them up yourself.

this!


@ OP: you sound like a true zone chat zerg general..let me guess - you also support faction locks, right? Learn to create your own fights so you don't have to follow the toilet paper like a sheep.

Agrippa_Invisus

Frankly, anyone who throws the hammer into the slaughterfish is doing the game a service by breaking up the hammer zerg.

Mr_Walker

Recremen wrote: »

show previous quotes

Mr_Walker wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

We've known for a long time that scrolls are prone to certain types of troll mechanics, and we are now seeing that Volendrung can fall to similar abuses. I don't have a fix for everything, but I've got a good idea for how to fix a specific subset of trolling mechanics involving slaughterfish and lava.

The change is simple. If someone holding a scroll or the Volendrung dies with slaughterfish or lava damage on their recap, they get an account-wide block on picking up the scroll or the Volendrung for a certain period of time.

There are extremely few situations in Cyrodiil where one could accidentally take either of these damage types, especially someone taking the typical amount of care used by people who want to authentically run a scroll or use the Volendrung. Overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, someone with a scroll or the Volendrung who takes these damage types has intentionally put themselves in that situation in order to troll people. The health of the game and the integrity of the scroll and artifact systems would be greatly boosted if such people were not able to continue picking up these objects on cooldown, especially since scroll runs are rare (occurring only a few times a day) and artifacts have an hours-long hard timer between spawns. We've got a limited amount of time to reasonably interact with those systems, so I think it's best to preserve their integrity to the greatest extent possible. And since we're only talking about a temporary ban on picking up those two interactables, then in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a legitimate runner/wielder gets a ban, they'll be able to bounce back.

My initial thought is to have the ban last for 1.5 weeks in order to prevent repeat offenders from doing a weekly troll, instead forcing them to disrupt their own schedule if they want to troll "on cooldown". I think we could open it up to even longer bans, however, depending on how much someone is a repeat offender. Getting progressively longer and longer bans would thin the troll herd pretty quickly, as few trolls have the stamina for that kind of extended payoff.

What do people think?

I think faction locking stopped these shenanigans!

That has not been observed. We're dealing regularly with the opposite, in fact. One thing you have to understand about trolls is that they're not doing it for a faction's benefit, but specifically for the purpose of annoying people. Factions locks have stopped nothing.

Wha....? No way. Who would have ever predicted this? Oh, wait....

Recremen

TriangularChicken wrote: »

show previous quotes

Qbiken wrote: »

If someone picks up scroll/hammer it's theirs to do whatever they want with. Deal with it or pick them up yourself.

this!


@ OP: you sound like a true zone chat zerg general..let me guess - you also support faction locks, right? Learn to create your own fights so you don't have to follow the toilet paper like a sheep.

You are wrong on every count. I'm an officer in the best AD guild on the NA server and have even had the opportunity to lead the charge. The only "zone generalling" I do is to coordinate action with other guilds, either to split up and hit different targets or to coordinate a strike on a fortified position. I also do not support faction locks. I hate them. It does little to nothing to decrease trolling (which was the big reason people wanted them implemented in the first place) and it hurts people who like to play with friends on multiple factions. Our campaigns were also frequently more competitive when we didn't have faction lock, ironically enough. The whole thing is a wash.

So no, I'm fine with proposing a rules change. Trolling is bad, and if they go through with this sort of a system but you decide to troll anyway, then you get what's coming to you.