Base defense / raid ?

Forgive my not knowing. From what I can gather there is no base raiding or pvping of any sort within a base, right? If so, why was this removed, or can you point me to where I can learn more about the history of raiding? Is it coming back? Is there any reason to put defensive stuff in your base, other than cosmetic appeal?

Sorry if I'm beating an old horse, just trying to learn more

Thanks.

Base Raiding (and the restrictions on base building due to raid pathing issues) was removed in Issue 13, IIRC.

That was a part of the PvP revamp that is on-going. It will likely be back sooner or later, but the Devs have not given details as to when that might be.

So it seems that there may be a future use for defensive items.

Main reason for it being removed was people kept finding creative ways to use base items as barriers.

So you'd zone in to an enemy base only to find walls made of indestructible desks trapping you, or protecting an object you had to destroy.

So they disabled it all to try and figure out how to prevent this. This happened a good while ago.

Since issue 13 came out and made it EASIER to actually make walls and structures, I suspect they've privately given up on trying to fix the problem, assuming they ever really spent any time trying in the first place.

Personally, I much prefer the flexibility i13 gave the base builders and don't miss the base raids.


-np

It was taken down i13, when PvP2 was brought in... The new PvP as I understand it was brought in for the new Raiding system they are "working" on, as the old PvP could not function with it... It's been 3 issues now and no news on the New and improved Base Raiding, I think they forgot

Not quite.

The way I understand it...

Base raiding on the live forums was very short lived due to exploitation. I've been playing since about i7, and there have not been base raids on the live servers in all that time. While they disabled the raiding mechanics on the live servers, they did leave raid pathing as part of the base editor's functionality. This was a bit of a thorn in many base architects' sides.

Base raiding did continue on the Training Server, however, and there was a healthy community of PvPers that staged raids over there.... until i13.

When they instigated various changes to the PvP game, they tried to make base raiding viable again, while also addressing some of the architect/editor's desires for more pathing flexibility. The results were.... less than optimal (read "disastrous"). Therefore, they decided to simply disable raid pathing and base raids altogether on all servers, live and training.

I suspect Base Raids will remain on the back burner until they can devise a way to make them viable for PvP as well as for the Architectural Artists.

We did regular base raids on live servers up until i13 also??

I wouldn't be able to find it now, but I am sure I read something in these forums about the devs talking about revamping Raids, and the new PvP system catering for the new raid system. It was the speculation in the PvP base raid section of the forum... until it got removed with the new forum.

Nope.

The raids were disabled on the LIVE servers, but were active on the TRAINING servers.

What remained on the live servers was RAID PATHING, which was part of the base editor and did not effect the mechanics of the actual raiding.

There was an ATTEMPT to re-vamp the raid system so they could bring them back to the live servers for i13, but it FAILED miserably. The result being that RAID PATHING was finally disabled on the live servers, since there was no real need for it. And raids were completely disabled on the training servers as well, since it was apparently borked beyond repair.

So, to summarize, we did not lose RAIDS on the live servers with i13 (they had been long disabled), we lost RAID PATHING (which, honestly, didn't really break too many hearts in these forums). You might consider that we "lost" raids because they were disabled on the training servers, but technically nothing is guaranteed to stay the same over there anyway (their doom was inevitable).

Kat, I'm also unsure of when they were removed but I know it wasn't in I7... you're right about pathing, but wrong about the time-table for when they removed raids in general, but I'm pretty sure it was in the i10-13 range.... not i7

link to an article from August of 2008. Issue 7 was around january of 06, right?
http://help.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/ncsof...ted=1130343825

ahhh... yes, my memory is a bit faulty on the timeline... Hubby started playing during i8, and I came in during i9. He does not remember raids being active on the live servers, either...

However, in looking through P-wiki, I see it may have just been a mistaken impression that they weren't active. Cathedral of Pain was disabled, therefore many SG's simply didn't bother with raiding... except on the training servers.

I see, I see... mia culpa.

The real experts on the subject would of course be Azrhiaz and MCG Warface

It sounds like they're trying to overthink what a raid is too much.

Just let everything decorative be destructible. A certain number of points of damage and it blasts away as if flung by a kin or whoever throws desks and car shells and fork lifts.

Then it disappears after x seconds.

Then you can only slow people, not stop them since there is nothing indestructible anymore.


After the raid is over, all the decorative items go back to where they were, end of story.

I would agree with that if we got an indestructible floor item to replace all the destructible desks that are currently used as floors.

Maybe don't reply if you aren't sure about the information you impart? Just a thought.... ;P

I corrected myself and apologized.

Skinning the cat is redundant.

Been off-line for a few days, but thank you all for the replies and the information. Nice to learn more on what happened.

Hopefully NCSoft finds a way to bring it back in. I would love to go base raiding one of these days

I am a member of a SG on Guardian that has done a large number of Base Raids, so I'd like to chime in as to the timeline of events.

Before I begin, it is important for me to clarify -- there are two types of base raids. These are Real Base Raids and Instant Base Raids.

Real Base Raids were turned off (disabled) very soon after they were released due to major problems with the Cathedral of Pain Trial and Item-of-Power system (I have heard all sorts of rumors, ranging from exploits to major crash issues to people getting REALLY upset that actual items were getting destroyed in their Bases during raids in exchange for a measly +1% damage buff, etc).

However, although Real Raids were turned off, Instant Base Raids (i.e., "Practice" raids) remained available, and were thoroughly enjoyed by many SG's and VG's all the way up to Issue 13, when they were also turned off.

After a Real Base Raid, objects and items that were destroyed in the course of the Raid very often stayed that way. You would come back to a partially trashed base. Telepads, Dimensional Anchors, Generators, Weapons and more would need to be rebuilt. You could purchase extremely expensive Robo-Fabricators, which would attach to Worktables and gave an additional base 5% chance that destroyed items would be automatically re-built, but needless to say, once the novelty wore off, the +1% buff of an Item of Power very quickly lost its appeal in that it would open your base up to being partly wrecked by Hero or Villain Group attackers who were trying to steal your Item of Power -- especially since, before the base repricing of Issue 13, everything quite literally cost 10-100x more Prestige than they do now, and most "Elite" class base weapons required large numbers of items that were very annoying to get, such as Unstable Rad Pistols. To come back to a base and see those very hard-to-build items wrecked didn't make anyone happy.

After an Instant Base Raid, any and all destroyed items are automatically restored back to the way they were before the start of the raid. That lack of risk, combined with the fact that there is no debt in an Instant Base Raid and that all participants are auto-SK'd to Level 50 made them a lot of fun and widely enjoyed -- they represented one of the most strategic, exciting and delightful forms of PvP to be had anywhere in the game.

The originally-stated reason for the taking of Base Raids offline in Issue 13 was that the Devs were revamping Raid Pathing, which was an automatic system in the Base Editor to ensure (a) a clear path existed connecting all rooms with no wall-to-wall obstructions, (b) no items overlapped one another's bounding boxes, and (c) no Active Objects (Anchorpoint, Generator, Computer, IoP Ring, etc., etc., etc) were blocked by too-close proximity to other objects, so that they could be reached and attacked during a raid. With Raid Pathing turned off, objects can be placed inside one another, or even half-way through walls. There is no restriction on placement from the bounding box, and no concern if you want to entirely wall objects off and make them unreachable. An added "bonus" from this for most Base Architects was that once they were freed from the restrictions of the Raid Pathing Bounding Boxes, they had a much greater freedom in placing and stacking items to create innovative base elements and areas.

I remember reading a Dev post before Issue 13 (that I can't find anymore) that a new programmer had come on board, and that they were revamping the Base Raid system, which is why Raids had to be disabled for Issue 13.

Mistakenly, I assumed this to mean that the IoP system and Cathedral of Pain would return after Issue 13. Although I do remember wondering to myself, how on earth they were going to turn Raids back on after people had been revamping their bases with overlapping items? Raid Pathing was a necessary component to ensuring Base Raids could be performed.

However, as Base Raids remained disabled in Issue 14 and 15, I could only hypothesize that the new programmer had been pulled onto more urgent, major tasks for the upcoming Issues (like the AE system, Power Customization and the next major, major release -- Going Rogue, in Issue 17), and that Base Raids, which were only ever done regularly by a relatively small segment of the CoX population, were placed on the back burner.

I am highly confident that Base Raids and Items of Power will return to CoX in due course. We just need to wait. Once all of these major projects get completed, and possibly others that even now are just on the drawing boards and percolating in the fertile imaginations of the Dev Team, Back-Burner items like Base Raids will get around to being fixed.

The question as to how the Devs will be able to make Raids once again possible after people have been allowed for so much time to build Bases without Raid Pathing will have to wait until then to be answered.

However, to be realistic, given what's already been announced as being in the works, I would not expect Base Raids to return to CoX until Issue 19-20.