So, you can't do PVP and won't take PVP damage until you're Level 5, effectively protecting the noobiest of noobs until they get their bearings. After that, PVP is essentially opt-in. To engage in PVP, someone shoots at you and it does a small amount of damage and only when you fire back do weapons do full damage. This essentially makes you a bullet sponge until you return fire, so you can't be killed quickly. Just ignore people to not engage in combat. Additionally, weapons damage is normalized among players, so a low-level player with some crappy pistol or shotgun can still fight toe to toe with a high-level player in power armor. If they whittle you down and kill you anyways without you returning fire, they become wanted and are visible to everyone on the map, while everyone else is not visible to them.
And if all that isn't enough, you can ignore and block players and prevent them from interacting with you at all, including PVP, so they cannot kill you at all. You can also flag yourself as a pacifist to prevent your bullets doing damage to other players, so that you don't accidentally engage in PVP. You also get a pacifist flag while fighting PVE so no one can jump in front of your bullets and accidentally trigger PVP.
I think they have sufficient safeguards to prevent PVP trolling, considering you can block players from interacting with you, and thus, killing you. At worst, you might take a little damage from someone trying to kill you, and if you don't return fire to engage full weapon damage, that should be plenty of time to block them. Maybe you die once, and block them right after.
All that said, I'm not going to discount the craftiness of trolls, but I think Bethesda has good systems in place to prevent all but the most egregious trolls from ruining your play.
Hoo boy what a garbage fest. They're opting to go little too snow-flakey with this, which is a pretty terrible idea given it's a survival game. Often the only real threat is other humans. Especially given it's Bethesda, and no monster they've ever created has been very threatening.
I imagine level 5 is almost nothing. That'll soon be removed though, since it's absurdly easy to exploit and just grief people while avoiding leveling up.
Having to return fire is incredibly silly. Very mediocre system that heavily discourages PvP. Depending on just how spongey you are, it means you can very easily line up an easy kill with your first shot of return fire, which will guaranteed frustrate many people. If it doesn't make you that spongey, well then it's effectively useless and you'll just die anyway.
Just "ignoring" someone is very difficult if they're constantly jumping around you, and running in front of your bullets should you be shooting an NPC. Thus using the sponge system to effectively make this method of griefing oh so easy. Sure you can just give up and run home, but in essence you've still lost to the troll.
Weapon damage being normalized is an odd choice but it does make sense. Sort of. Likely perks will make a large difference regardless though I would imagine.
The wanted system sounds a lot more mediocre when you explain it like that. But i've really already explained how to easily avoid it if you just want to grief.
If you can actually ignore and block players, this game will be dead before the month ends. Every single player I would interact with I would simply block to prevent PvP. Once i'm well established i might unblock and go wreck them. I assume being wanted would ignore the block system, though this is such a carebear snowflake fest it's actually possible the devs are too stupid to have thought that far.
Interesting. It sounds like Bethesda has no actual idea how to make a game. I could deal with the snowflakey bullshit but if you can actually just block players, all hype i've got for this game is dead, and it will be too. Making a survival game and removing such a key aspect of it is retarded.
I suppose the only saving grace would be private servers, which i'm sure would throw all that carebear bullshit out the window immediately. But a lot of people play the official servers in survival games, and guaranteed a majority of them will quit when they see how much of a garbage fest it is.
My prediction is that almost none of that will actually make it past beta. If it does, Bethesda has failed as a game developer. Luckily the community can actually save it if private servers are truly a thing at launch.
But. Wow. Just wow. I've never read such a bad list of design choices in my entire life. If I didn't know you, i'd just have ignored it as obvious parody and bait.
