Giving this a bit more thought, I think it needs to be taken further in a direction.

In all the times I’ve raided someone, I’ve actually never done it for loot. Its always been because of one of two things. Either in retaliation to someone acting in a manner that we felt we needed to raid them for. Such as attacking a clanmate or building in an area we didn’t want them to or participating in a raid that is already in progress to see one side win over another. Or for some sort of RP reason on a PVP-RP server. Such as raiding a clan for slaves (player slaves for selling or for using for work, not thralls), enforcing tribute and protection rackets, or whatever reason.

Raiding for supplies is just a waste of time and usually results in massive drama in most cases. Now my time in raiding is entirely on servers with set guidelines for raiding. Offline raiding isn’t allowed. Usually some form of declaration is needed so that the one’s being raided have some chance to get some folks online (so its not 1v30). And under most cases you’re not raiding someone to the ground. Though in some cases (such as raiding to take a spot of land) you kind of have to.

Think about it like this. Why spend all this time getting stuff together to blow up some buildings, potentially have a fight on your hands (even if offlining, there is a chance one person may login, and then call the rest in), just to grab a bit of what? Alchemical Base, gold, silver, and maybe some swag chest/vault with legandaries or some thralls?

None of that requires raiding. None of that is easier to get by raiding in most cases. And most importantly, its not sustainable. Wipe someone down and take everything, and they’re out of there. You can’t come back in a few days and do it again.

So the purpose of raiding isn’t really to gain resources. Its not about the steal. The steal is just icing on the cake. You raid because you want to kick someone in the dick. But if you want to PVP outside of some silly duel in an arena. This is how you have to do it.

If the server has rules on how you raid, then you follow those rules, but at the end of the day. You’re raiding to send a message or as a display of your ability. But if its an open server (like FC PVP servers) then the amount of force you have to show to get the point across is usually apocalyptic.

When you can raid someone to the ground. But choose not to. The ones who were raided aren’t going to take it seriously. They’re not. If you break down a wall, steal some stuff out of a few chests. They’ll think they’ve repelled you. Because anything short of raiding them to sand, is a failed raid.

Think about that for a moment. If you play on one of these open PVP servers and you login. See a breached wall, and only a few things taken. Do you feel like you got hurt? Or do you laugh at the raiders who couldn’t get to your real treasure and think you’re hot stuff because you didn’t login to an empty plot? (for the sake of argument, on this subject in these two paragraphs, lets not go into the issues with offline raiding, since this can be applied to online raiding too).

What I am trying to say here is I don’t think that taking away the loot incentive would make a large enough impact to be noticed. People are still going to raid others into the dirt to either send a message, or to show their dominance on the server.

With how the game is now, (DBD on or not) and the culture behind PVP, that’s not going to change with some minor changes. And it sucks because I’m not posting this to shoot down the idea. Its not an idea coming from bad reasoning and its not one that I disagree with. I just hope some more people can give some insight and maybe throw some proverbial darts at the board so we can get a little more inspiration.

CE isn’t the only game suffering from this, so this is definitely not an issue that’s going to have an easy fix. But I think it can. We have games where people PVP all the time in. All competitive first person shooters, all MOBAS, and various other games utilizing either first person, third person, or both combat can do PVP as the entire game just fine.

Just writing this coupled with the idea I mentioned before kinda drives home the point. The biggest problem IMO with PVP and raiding is the amount of PVE the PVPers has to do. For every wall, every armor piece, every weapon, and every bomb you make… you have to PVE for. Clicking stone is PVE. Skinning dragons for leather and other materials is PVE. Getting legendaries or star metal is PVE. Knocking out thralls and wheeling them, only to have them follow to level up… again PVE.

All of those PVE actions have a ton of time and effort attached. So when you lose in PVP and have consequences, the consequences is losing that time and effort spent in PVE. And if you get soundly beaten or offlined, you tend to have NOTHING to show for it. In PVE when a boss kicks your ass you can have something you learn from it. That doesn’t always happen in PVP.

I think one of the ways forward for making raiding fun, and in general PVP servers more fun, is to take the PVE out of PVP. The million dollar question is obviously, how do we do that? Just something to consider.