Nifty suggestion w/ poll

[zeus9860]

So after taking a 2 hours nap, i woke up, checked the servers and got a suggestion all of a sudden that might be nifty to use in the near future, it is related to town maps and yes it's related to smiths/etc (woohooo).

What i thought about was, use the system behind the golden axe (gear that degrades overtime or after a certain amount of hits or after a certain amount of damage dealt). Like, give the players schematics to create degradeable gear in town smiths so that we could smith and craft (wooden gear duh).

So these items would require maintenance, some of them would require gold to repair, some others could use additional small ingredients to repair. And obviously these items should be a little bit harder to come by, and their potential outcome should be more usefull (reason why it requires a constant maintenance to keep the items going into use, specially those who require additional items).

What does this achieve?
-New fun way to gather new gear in the future;

-New stronger type of gear that requires maintenance, which could go from low to heavy cost;

-Basically add new features to what is already implemented in the game, we have smithable gear of this kind already yes. But this could use a new interface option completly separate from the other options we get in some of the npcs (eg: smithy in sorc);

-Potential interaction with random npcs throughout the world, not only in towns, but also in hostile maps, give players schematic rewards for saving a npc for example, to be used in the appropriate town smithy, like a share of wisdom from npc to player, we could learn the ways of creating some dwarven gear after a dwarf decides to share the knowledge he knows about this stuff, just an example;

-Give use to our gold, most of the players are flooded with money at higher levels;

-Possibly get rid of the excessive amount of spares we come by;

-Give use to most npcs in towns all over the world, honestly most of them are useless except for a select few ("WEAPONS FOR SALEEEEEEEE!" Pfft, for real!);

-It could achieve a new way of handing out new stuff to the players, the casual rig-chest with loot in the end of the map is getting old (again, i know >_>), instead chests could drop weapon parts and schematics + ingredients;

-Mini questing + exploring diversity, picture the golden axe, it requires 1 additional item (on top of the gold) to make it unbreakable, imagine one top-nodge item would require something like: 250k gold + item X + item Z (both could be random drops from any map, or some could be specific to themed maps, to give players a reason to explore different maps, not the same ones);

-Create a diversity in a player's arsenal when in a warzone, people these days rely alot on the same few items to inflict damage points and to try and stay on top of other players, making items degrade would change that, (eg: player A uses degradeable item "O", item degrades in between the 8th farming run, player is forced to use a new degradeable item called "P" as a substitute or change to a non degrade type).

I would suggest a system like this for some items in the tiers of 20-40-60 and they could act similiar to items 5-10 levels ahead of them (to justify the extra op'ness in some of the items, more specifically the ones "expert+", explained below), for example. Mostly for weapons and some armor/shields, perhaps we could craft new ammunition too? I also thought that there should be at least 3 types of degradeable classified items:
-the basic ones, which require gold to repair;
-the intermediate ones that require gold + item X;
-the expert ones that require gold + item Y + item Z (1 item could be *special drop or not while the other is a random map drop);
-we could even pull a master one with gold + item X + item Y + item Z (at least 1 (or more) item(s) = special drop to make it more difficult/ along with the casual random map drops for other items).

*special drop = quest drop, boss drop, quest reward, etc

Potions (alchemy) wouldn't be a bad idea either but last i remember Oyster wanted to use an alchemist in his maps so i'm not going to bother with suggesting something that was already debated in the past.

I wanted to post this in my suggestions thread, but i wanted to make a poll, so here ya go, a new topic to debate (or not). And ignore the last option on the poll... :roll:

 

[Monika's_BFFEx0256]

Where's the tl;dr option?

 

[zeus9860]

You either read it or you don't. No tl;dr included.

And i guess i need to remove that poll option as there can only be one of me, not 3, ah well.

 

[Thothie]

While I'd like to encourage most of the positive points you describe, in addition to the fact that I think a lot of them may not automatically result, especially without additional effort, and the fact that this is all hard to balance out, especially prior to an economy reset... I'd much rather use carrot than stick, when attempting to achieve such goals.

Not a big fan of weapon decay myself - usually just amounts to busy work - but what I was hoping, is that adding the dynamic quest system would provide most of the desired effects, without penalizing the player, but instead offering him more opportunities.

Also, the only tracker we could possibly use for weapon degradation, I was hoping to use for a weapon upgrade system instead... Said system could also have several of the same positive effects, without adding frustration.

The Golden Axe, btw, has no durability tracker - it just breaks randomly.

 

[TheOysterHippopotami]

but what I was hoping, is that adding the dynamic quest system would provide most of the desired effects, without penalizing the player, but instead offering him more opportunities.

this.

 

[Borya]

...especially prior to an economy reset...

An economy reset? What sort of economy reset?

 

[Thothie]

Oh, you've been here long enough to remember that resetting the economy (balancing out all the items and services and resetting everyone's gold), is one of the many "one day" dreams we've been having for the past five years or so... I wouldn't worry about it, given that it's one of those more epic projects that I don't know when we'll ever get to, and isn't exactly high priority, even among those.

However, to balance costs of a weapon decay system that uses gold, it'd have to be done first, as the economy is pretty wildly broken, in part to due exploits patched, but also due to some that still exist.

 

[zeus9860]

Going via economy reset, alot of things would probably need to be implemented though. Like making trades (player <-> npc) more meaningfull in towns to the players, for example.

Anyways, this kind of change would probably be best dealt with after endgame. It's like finishing a product and then you start hammering the game for exploits, bugfixes and additional gameplay content (new systems, small additions, not physical content). Pretty much no burdens from others would be slowing you down i guess, meaning you could focus on polishing the game into something better.

And i would be on favor of an economy reset for any crucial update that actually makes the economy something to look further into. It's pretty much broken/unstable at this point in-game.

 

[Thothie]

Like I said, don't panic, not happening anytime soon... Just saying, if we wanted to do something where gold were to be used on a regular basis throughout the game, like you are proposing, that'd have to come first, as it's impossible to balance prices over time, as things stand now.

 

[zeus9860]

I'm not in panic, i'm actually in favor for this kind of changes to the game.

I'm still waiting on that SC revamp, i know there are other things on the to-do list that need focus, but it's probably the thing i would want the most in terms of updating, followed by the "chart of dreams" or w/e (the one with the perks/paths/titles). While i do think that the latter makes more sense to be released near endgame with all the choices that might pop up by the time it happens.

Now if this was a character wipe, yeah i would panic because i would loose a crap ton of hours of my life all of a sudden. :roll:

 

[Borya]

Oh, you've been here long enough to remember that resetting the economy (balancing out all the items and services and resetting everyone's gold), is one of the many "one day" dreams we've been having for the past five years or so...

Ah, I had forgotten. That doesn't sound too bad.