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Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast!

The Fall Alpha has ended a couple days ago, and we’ve had a blast looking at your cities grow and city-to-city commerce flourish!

This time, we’ve decided not to publish a single roadmap to the next test, the Winter Alpha, which is planned to start in February. Instead, we’ll be splitting that into a series of spotlights covering all upcoming features in detail.

While a lot of city content is coming to the Winter Alpha, PvP is undoubtedly its main focus. Let’s start with it then, and see how Syndesia is finally getting its proper ruleset!

Alignment

The first choice you have to take regarding your PvP stance is your alignment: Good or Evil.

• The choice can only be taken at a Shrine in a city.
• Good characters can only attack and loot the corpses of Evil characters. They can’t take any criminal action, including stealing carts.
• Evil characters can attack and loot all other players and can perform any type of criminal action.

When flagging yourself as Evil, be aware you’re going to suffer several limitations, namely:

• You are clearly marked as Evil by your name being displayed in red.
• As mentioned before, everyone can attack you and loot your corpse with no penalty.
• You can’t be in the same party with Good-aligned players.
• You can be jailed if killed by a bounty hunter (more on this later).

By reading this you may be thinking: “damn, it’s punishing to be a PK on Syndesia”! Well, yes, it is. Syndesia is a lawful planet with a strong criminal system. The option to be an outlaw is there, but it’s not an easy path to take! 😉

Karma

Karma is an indicator that ranges from +10,000 to -10,000 and determines what alignment is available to your character. If positive, both Good and Evil alignment can be picked, otherwise Evil becomes the only choice.

By default, all Human characters start with a slightly positive karma, which can quickly be lost when performing the following actions:

• Flagging yourself as Evil (karma drops to 0 if higher).
• Attacking / looting Good players.
• Stealing from carts / stealing carts.
• Killing Good players (major loss).

Please note that a character that gets to 0 health isn’t dead – it just becomes knocked down for 30 seconds and loses a portion of its maximum health. Killing a player means knocking it down when its maximum health has been almost completely depleted, or (more likely) purposefully executing it.

As to how to gain Karma, that can be achieved in 2 ways – by doing PvE or by making a gold donation to Tyros at a city shrine. The first option is time consuming while the latter is immediate, but each gold coin raises your karma by 1 point only, so… it’s quite the expense!

Bounty Hunting

The jail is one of the many new buildings coming in the Winter Alpha, soon to be covered in a new blog post. It can be built only inside of a City (i.e. a high-rank player settlement).

If you have a character with very high karma and Good alignment, you can become a bounty hunter for a city by paying a small fee to the jail office. Your character will then be clearly marked as a bounty hunter and locked into its Good alignment until the contract is canceled.

As a bounty hunter, whenever you knock down an Evil character, you can choose to imprison it. If so, the latter is sent to the jail you have a contract with, leaving its equipment and inventory items behind.

Once a character is jailed, it can’t leave the prison building until its done serving its jail time, which is longer the lowest its Karma. A jailed character also has the option to pay gold to be freed immediately (this can be done by a third party, too). If so, the bail money is split between the bounty hunter and the treasury of the city!

Friendly Fire

Whether you are Good or Evil, you can’t target other players and your AOE attacks won’t damage them unless you turn Aggressive (default hotkey: P). As soon as you do that, you will start taking damage from any AOE ability – including the ones cast by your part members or… yourself!

The introduction of friendly fire adds a new layer of complexity to PvP in Fractured and is extremely helpful to balance “zerg” tactics. Do note however that it applies only to AOE effects. Directional attacks and abilities (such as arrows or spells like firebolt) do not collide with friendly players!

Please also note that the Aggressive flag exists only to avoid damaging potential targets accidentally with directional abilities / projectiles and AOE effects. Once you attack someone, your victim will become Aggressive as well. Whether a player is a potential target or not depends only on your alignment and the other player’s alignment, as explained in the first paragraph of this article.

That’s it for today. Ready for some PvP action?

Next in line: a spotlight on the tech tree and the huge changes coming to city maintenance and ranks. Make sure you don’t miss it!

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