Playing GW2 I've noticed that most of the gold I get is not generated directly from monsters, or even completing quests, but from selling items I get as drops on the auction house, which means I'm acquiring gold primarily from other players. This seems odd, given that this method cannot possibly be how all other player also get their money. Monsters don't always drop gold when defeated, in fact they usually drop no IGC at all, and when they do it's usually like 25-150 copper, which is a very small amount (1 gold = 100 silver, 1 silver = 100 copper, and some high end items sell for several hundred gold, the REALLY rare items are listed at like 3000-4000 gold even).
There are junk dealer NPCs who will give you the usual low-ball price for the junk weapons and armor pieces nobody wants (usually 50-150 copper as well), and there's the auction house where you can sell stuff. Some events give you 1gp as a reward or maybe they drop, at random, a few "trophy" items that have no use but can be sold to junk dealer NPCs for like 200-600 copper each.
The point is, I am not suffering from a lack of gold, I have like 90gp right now and have purchased like 200GP worth of stuff in the 6 weeks I've been playing. The game has a system of crafting and commerce that has some annoying properties, but it does a good job of keeping inflation in check, and I believe that the slow drip rate at which the game allows IGC to be created ex-nihilo is the reason for this. There are things I don't like about GW2's crafting and commerce system, like the multitude of different non-tradable currencies they have. Like reward merits, but different types of merits for every dungeon you might do, plus a bunch of other ones that only mean anything in specific zones in the outdoor maps. The Exalted vendor in Auric Basin will sell stuff for Aurillium, which you will get as a drop in Auric Basin, Fractal Of the Mists Vendors in the Fractal Lobby will sell stuff for Fractal Relics, which drop from doing Fractal of the Mists trials, the Twilight Arbor dungeon drops Deadly Blooms which can be traded to the dungeon vendor for Twilight Arbor-themed weapons and armor, etc. Also, there are a lot of weapons and stuff that cannot be sold, even if you don't equip them, and there are even some crafting components that can't be sold once acquired.
This might be designed as such so that people will have to grind for stuff they want instead of just using saved gold from years of play to simply buy it. Even if that's true, the stats are the same on all weapons based on rarity, and the only thing you're ever paying top-dollar for on the auction house is the aesthetics. A given sword might have a cool looking skin that can only be acquired as a random drop and then either equipped, salvaged, or sold. If you sell it, you don't get the skin unlocked, if you salvage or equip it, you won't be able to sell it but you will get the skin unlocked. And then of course there are a bunch of skins you can get by paying real money.
So my take-away from this is, maybe it would be better if mobs didn't always drop IGC and/or maybe you want to make the amounts they drop really low, compared to CoX. If you converted CoX's Influence to GW2's copper at a rate of 1INF = 1 copper, the MOST expensive thing I've seen on GW2, a staff called the Bifrost, would sell for ~4,000 gp = 40 million Inf. That's way better, to me, than the ~4billion some people wanted for some stuff in CoX.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Seems to me if all you do is make the average "IGC per kill" much lower in CoT compared to CoH then all you're doing is perhaps delaying the point where people are eventually selling stuff to each other for 2-4 billion. I think the game is still going to need multiple sinks of all shapes and sizes from the very beginning to ultimately control things no matter how quickly it's being generated.
Part of the reason CoH got (relatively quickly) to the point of having multi-billion INF trades is that for the first several years of the game there was almost nothing to actually spend INF on. Remember the major crafting/trading elements of the game didn't appear until maybe 3 or 4 years after launch. That left a bunch of people with stockpiles of billions spread across all their characters by the time the first "serious" things to trade actually appeared in the game. Perhaps the sooner CoT can establish a workable trading market the quicker people will start to spend their money making it less likely any given individual would have the hordes saved up to instantly be able to blow multi-billions in the first place.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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Since in-game currency is by definition a fiat currency (that is, since it is not backed by hard assets like gold bullion etc) inflation will be a thing you can never actually totally prevent. As such, given that most MMO games don't last forever, you might be okay simply slowing the inflation rate and not outright eliminating it.
I'm not against currency sinks either, just noting my observation that the IGC drop rates in GW2, in terms of the gold that gets created ex-nihilo, seem like that game's IGC is being created at maybe 1/100 the rate of CoX, based on price comparisons. Having an auction house from day 1 will be a big factor in this, as Lothic says, and I agree with that.
Another factor is that a lot of items, once created, cannot be sold. Some are account bound when acquired, so you can move them around to different characters on your account, and some are soulbound on equip, meaning you can't sell it after you've equipped and wielded it (slotting and unslotting is easy, though). This causes IGC spent to make an item to truly vanish when used, unlike CoX where you could use a thing, then later unslot it and sell it back. Items in coX retained their market value even after you used them for this reason. In GW2, your only option with old gear is to salvage it and hope for a random drop of some kind of useful crafting component. That said, it takes like hundreds if not thousands of crafting inputs to make a good weapon, and when you de-craft it, you get like ONE.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
A lot of this is to be set down during testing, but here is the basic guideline we are working around - Time = Money. Any tangeable asset you can buy can be earned through game play. A perfect example is in our latest update: the Elevator shoes. A penciled in way to earn them is to head over to a particular badge in the level 5-10 zone, set in front of a former dance club turned upscale shopping store. It will also be available in the cash shop for a Star value coming out to roughly a quarter. Low risk, low value. But you have to get the badge for each character who you want the shoes on. That $0.25 worth of Stars suddenly looks more appealing if you want to make a Kiss tribute band worth of characters.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Divorcing IGC "generation" away from Foe Defeat is the best place to START.
Obviously, if there are going to be Drops, then there will need to be a way to "dispose" of those Drops in a way that generates value, so the Vendor Bait for IGC methodology works just fine there. The other place that IGC ought to be generated would be from Mission TURN IN for rewards, as opposed to merely Mission Complete (inside the Instance).
Street Sweeping thus generates IGC via Drops.
Missions generate IGC upon turning in the completed Mission to the Contact NPC.
Storylines and Task Forces reward extra bonus IGC upon completing the entire arc with the Contact NPC.
As for "how much should be given out" of the IGC ... I'd honestly prefer a "Flat IGC" reward system, such that higher Level characters aren't generating IGC at rates in excess of 5000x that of newbies. Index the whole thing using the "Time Is Money" metric that Doctor Tyche mentioned and proceed from there.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Also, the GW2 system has a lot of churn that creates and destroys materials and gear and basically sinks all of that stuff, and IGC in the process. Crafting "Exotic" gear in GW2 requires Ectoplasm, which can be most efficiently acquired by buying cheap examples of lesser "Rare" items and then and de-crafting them in the hopes of getting an Ectoplasm to drop, which is not 100% likely. Then, to make the even more powerful Ascended gear, you need Dark Matter, which can ONLY be gotten by de-crafting Exotic gear, so the crafting system creates and destroys a lot of stuff. You also have to craft a bunch of stuff nobody wants to actually use in order to get your skill to the max so you can make the Ascended gear, which is the best, and which cannot be sold to other players, so everyone has to make their own. This creates a demand for raw materials and then yields gear nobody cares about which means you lose money on the crafting, but you gain skill level. Then once you get to the max level, you need to acquire a ton of materials to make the Ascended gear you want, which causes you to go on the auction house and burns IGC while also creating a lot of turnover of gear into raw materials, and reclaimed materials components back into gear again, all driven by RNG decrafting odds. The system sinks both IGC AND unwanted gear, in this way, so it works pretty well to keep prices down, except for the stuff that can only be acquired via random drops, like certain skins for weapons, etc. Those get to be expensive, and by that I mean like a 50gp-1000gp because they have to drop at random to come into existence at all, like recipes in CoX. I just wish the game didn't have to have so many niche currencies and non-tradable crafting components, and so forth. Also, not for nothing, GW2 has nodes in the outside maps where you can harvest crafting components, which is a thing I think CoT should avoid, for flavor purposes.
In GW2 if you are selling level 80 items on the market, you get like 1-5 silver for them, which isn't much, and the guy buying it probably wants to de-craft it to get raw materials to make his better gear with anyway. You COULD sell such gear to junk vendors, but in some cases that's probably not as good as just decrafting the stuff, if you have the better de-crafting machine, which is I think only available for real money.
So the tons and tons of max-level junk gear that gets created ex-nihilo by fighting monsters eventually turns into IGC, but not so much that it causes inflation problems, and if you spent extra money in the cash shop you can probably do better by de-crafting that stuff instead of selling it to stupid NPCs that will pay IGC for it.
Again, by comparison, if 1 copper = 1inf, the level 50 SO you might have gotten in CoX sold to a NPC for like 50,000inf. In GW2 the same type of thing, like a level 80 Fine or Masterwork coat, would sell for like 1-5silver, which is like 100-500 copper so like maybe 500inf. So it's as if everything is about 2 orders of magnitude less all around. Prices are about 1/100 of what CoX had and amounts of IGC that drop on you are about 1/100 of what CoX had.
Theoretically, this means 1cp in GW2 would be the analog of about 100Inf in terms of buying power, which is to say that CoX probably produced about 100x as much Inf as it really needed to. I still think that this is based, to some extent on the fact that mobs in CoX always dropped Inf, and when they did, it was probably way too much. You could probably have had them drop like 10 Inf per minion, at all levels, and the economy would have been way better. But then the NPC prices for SOs would have been 1/100 of what we saw too. You just end up scaling the whole thing down by that much basically.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
So GW2 is a game that you play, and you spend time and get rewarded with IGC, raw materials, and gear. Then the crafting and commerce systems are basically a way to recombine gear, items and IGC in such a way as to annihilate all three for the purposes of making the one item you actually want. You can grind for IGC for a while and/or stockpile raw materials, then make an item once you've reached a critical mass of that stuff.
This is unlike CoX, where you could make a thing and it lasted forever and retained whatever value it had. Actually, the prices of items went up over time due to inflation, so you were better off having rare and highly sought after IOs than IGC anyway.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
When crafting high-end gear, I almost Always end up buying more IGC from the Cash-shop, so that's one source of IGC to feed the Market.
Be Well!
Fireheart
With auction houses i played underbid so I could sell my stuff quicker and in bulk because I played my main toons more often. There wasn't really any sinks for me.
The only currency I worried about was the Incarnate system. Patience and luck often paid off for me.
There should be some sort of flat rate curency increase where a level 50 enemy provides 50x the reward of a level. So there would still be a risk versus reward.
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Perhaps IGC could be something representing favors owed or popularity or goodwill, and would primarily come not from defeating foes, but from completing missions on behalf of people who are now more impressed by you, feel they owe you a favor, or spread good PR about you so others are more willing to give you stuff.
The take-away of this would be that IGC generation is linked to mission performance. Grinding gets "drops," primarily, whereas actually building your story and legend by serving (or tyrannizing) others gets you IGC.
Not sure that this would slow IGC generation too much or not enough, but it's a thought.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Good idea! Let's call that IGC "Influence", because you're making friends and influencing people. And the villain can have "Infamy"! Well... maybe not, let's call it all "Influence", both bad and good.
Now, what do we call the IGC used to make exchanges on the Marketplace and sales with Merchants?
I don't mean to mock anyone, but this is kinda how we got into trouble in the old game, isn't it? I'd rather avoid any and all kinds of IGC proliferation. It's crass, it's crude, it goes completely against my hero of the people mentality, but let's call it Money and treat it like money, from the start. That way we won't see the players inventing money-equivalents to facilitate trade.
We do plan to have an alignment/reputation system for favors and goodwill.
That said, I do like the idea of getting the real payoff from contacts and mission-givers. There could also be free-floating mission opportunities that any player/team could encounter, jump in on, and earn a reward from the local authorities. Something like a Fire or Bank/Store Robbery, or an APB 'Be on the Lookout for...' Or, during some zone/area event, passing characters could spot a side-event that gives an opportunity for heroics/villainy, like Rescue/Kidnap civilians, or Start/Stop looting from a business.
It would be a hassle to actually have to Visit contacts after mission-complete, but we could certainly call-it-in, somehow, and get confirmation of success. Each character should have a Smart/PDA/Phone/Device that helps them keep track of events and contacts. 'Registered' Deed-doers night also get calls/referrals/tips through the device and 'official' alerts.
I don't mind having some lore-based obfuscation laid out, disguising the matter of being paid cash-money for services rendered, but I don't want to have to have to figure the value of my 'Influence' before I grab lunch at Up-and-Away Burger.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I see no reason to have differing IGC based on your alignment. Nor based on the market. Favor-trading is a thing, after all. What it's called is really rather irrelevant. The reason to limit it to mission-rewards would be more to cut down on just how fast it's farmed. Though I suppose that still doesn't make a huge difference. People can just do mission farming instead of monster farming. Ah well. 'swhat I get for posting after a long week! ^^;
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Okay, I agree, because IGC is IGC. Where I ran into trouble is in the philosophical shift of trying to say that money is not money. I would certainly wish that my wealth was based on the positive regard of people. Unfortunately, as I tried to imply, I can't pay my rent with people's good wishes.
Further, I have difficulty imagining some way to convert 'favors' into IGC. Not directly. Unless there's some sort of god-force that weighs people's gratitude and puts an equivalent value of IGC into a checking account. So, my argument is to not try to go that way and just get paid in cash, straight-up. Because we tried the 'favor' abstraction in CoH and it still got treated and used and counted and traded like money.
I do not expect people to farm missions instead of monsters. I think that the people who prefer to farm monsters will simply scream bloody murder, if they're not paid a bounty for those monsters. I feel that the people who prevent/perpetrate a crime will choose to Not Do It, if they can't expect a profit. As I said, it goes against my higher feelings, but that doesn't mean it's not True.
So, I do a Deed and get paid in Experience, and get paid in Faction points, and get paid in Money, too. The tricky bit will be in deciding how much.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Were I to try to codify it, what I would do is tie it to factions. Faction favor becomes the IGC, and you translate it into goods and services because you're literally going to the people who feel they owe you the favors and saying "give me that stuff." The interplay of IGC between players would be "okay, so the mob owes Thug McMastermind a few favors, and I want something from the mob, and I have this Musclemind Mentalbody enhancer that Thug McMastermind wants to use to make his minions stronger, smarter, and more loyal... so he'll cash in a favor for me with the mob and I'll give him this." Fluff-wise. But yeah, IGC is IGC.
In truth, it doesn't matter what IGC is in game-terms. It will be treated by players as money, because that's what it is. Pretending otherwise is silly. The point I was more leaning towards was that, if we made IGC primarily available only through mission-completes (or side-quest rewards, or whatever), it might allow a tighter control on the proliferation of IGC in the game. But it may not. I'm kinda brainstorming here.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I'd prefer if the IGC is NOT called "Money" or "Cash". Is it [I]treated[/I] as currency in the game? Sure. But thematically, in the world of supers, not every hero is a Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark. When Superman has to go to Star Labs to get a special gizmo to defeat Metlallo, he doesn't haul out his wallet. All heroes and villains find ways to influence others for their own advantage. Yes, straight up hard cash can be a means of influence, but so can your character's reputation, so can favours.
As for the issue of IGC proliferation - making it available through mission/task completion and not by individual enemy defeats is an interesting idea Segev. It would certainly give players greater onus to fully finish off missions (or complete secondary objectives within them if that's a thing), but it may put a wet blanket on activities like street-sweeping (unless of course there are repeatable street-sweeping missions).
All that said - and I'll be honest here - I wasn't doing missions or defeating enemies in CoH for the Influence. I was doing it for the XP, or sometimes even for salvage/drops. Hell - occasionally for badges. The only times I really paid attention to the IGC was when I was buying and selling, either in stores or at the auction house. As long as it was coming in at a steady rate I comfortably ignored it for most of the time.
There might be some 'ambient authority', whether police, or corporate, gang, or organization, which will reward street-sweepers. *phone rings* "Sir, we're aware that you have been doing good work, cleaning up the streets, taking out the undesirables, and we want you to know, you can call on us, if you need something."
Be Well!
Fireheart
Radiac, man, you have started no less than three separate threads all about the same topic. You are incorrigible.
But anyway, back to this one.
Rather than buy enhancements in a market, I think it would be far cooler to run a mission to 'rescue', 'kidnap' or otherwise bring a crafting professional into your sphere of influence. Just like how Daredevil rescued Melvin Potter who makes his equipment for him. Different crafting professionals can make different things and require you to expend your influence with them to acquire the things they craft.
If we do this, there would be no need for a market. That is, unless and until we implement randomized drops of them with rarity. If some enhancements are rarer than other enhancements according to some drop rate, then we will need a market to trade them. But I'm not certain we would need to implement random enhancement drops if we unlock access to enhancements by completing content instead..
In addition to unlocking crafters through missions, we could have some enhancements that are only available by some 'recruitable' crafters that are behind an achievement wall. The achievement wall could take the form of a minimum reputation with a certain faction, or it could be the completion of a hard-mode instance. In either case, the randomness is removed and the rarity remains. Enhancements gained by surpassing an achievment wall should be bound, however. Just like certain mounts are in games like WoW. The only people who can use the enhancements are the people who have earned them. Thus again having rarity without the need for a marketplace.
Then we have the issue of powerlevelers. I'm not trying to cast any stones here, because some people actually want to powerlevel to max level by farming repeated content. Good for them. However, if the developers would rather their players become part of the greater social community, take part in group content (thereby making queue time less for the people who are not powerleveling), and otherwise populate the world; putting access to enhancement crafters behind various mission arcs causes players to diversify their gaming experience. In my opinion that can only be good for the game.
It would be really cool if, after reaching a certain reputation with a faction, you could actually hire out your own dedicated crafter(s) for your lair, and you get to design your crafter using the character creator just like you can design your retainers in FFXIV. And the crafted enhancements and things you get from those personal crafters are free, so long as you pay a regular upkeep cost and provide the necessary raw materials (if applicable).
I'm going to stop now. The creative bug bit me and I could write on for pages...
I understand that some people really enjoy marketplaces. But if a marketplace does not need to exist, why should it?
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I'm going to put a marker on the table. Everybody ready?
* IF * there is to be IGC given for the defeat of Mobs, it should be FLAT SCALED to this metric ...
Underling
Minion
Lieutenant
Boss
Elite Boss
Archenemy
Monster
Giant Monster
Do it as a "powers of 2" increase and you're all set.
Underling = 2[sup]0[/sup] = 1 IGC
Minion = 2[sup]1[/sup] = 2 IGC
Lieutenant = 2[sup]2[/sup] = 4 IGC
Boss = 2[sup]3[/sup] = 8 IGC
Elite Boss = 2[sup]4[/sup] = 16 IGC
Archenemy = 2[sup]5[/sup] = 32 IGC
Monster = 2[sup]6[/sup] = 64 IGC
Giant Monster = 2[sup]7[/sup] = 128 IGC
After that, it's just a matter of figuring out what the scalar ought to be for +/- Levels relative to your PC. At this point, using the √ function ought to come back into play like so (just make a lookup table to do the work) ...
-4 Level Foe = 1/√(1+8) = 33.3% chance for IGC drop at all
-3 Level Foe = 1/√(1+7) = 35.4% chance for IGC drop at all
-2 Level Foe = 1/√(1+6) = 37.8% chance for IGC drop at all
-1 Level Foe = 1/√(1+5) = 40.8% chance for IGC drop at all
0 Level Foe = 1/√(1+4) = 44.7% chance for IGC drop at all
+1 Level Foe = 1/√(1+3) = 50% chance for IGC drop at all
+2 Level Foe = 1/√(1+2) = 57.7% chance for IGC drop at all
+3 Level Foe = 1/√(1+1) = 70.7% chance for IGC drop at all
+4 Level Foe = 1/√(1+0) = 100% chance for IGC drop at all
So ... what determines how much IGC drops? The Foe "rank" on the Underling to Giant Monster scale.
What determines whether that IGC [b]WILL BE[/b] dropped? The relative Levels between PC and NPC.
That means none of this "get 1 IGC at Level 1 and get 5000 IGC if you're Level 50" nonsense we saw in City of Heroes. I remember Exemplaring down to help a Level 1 Hero street sweep in Atlas Park and getting THOUSANDS (plural) of INF for each Foe Defeated and from every Civilian saved/rescued. It was ridiculous when compared to what new Heroes were getting (which was all onesey-twosey in INF terms).
So * IF * there's going to be an IGC reward for Defeating NPC Foes, make it a low level "flat rate" amount that pays the same whether you're Level 1 or Level 50 ... and then index the CHANCE for that IGC drop to happen on the relative Level between PC and NPC. That way, there's no opportunity to not have a source of IGC just from Street Sweeping alone (or just doing Defeat All Missions).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Okay, I would only apply the 'will drop' to common enemies. Any reasonably unique enemy, like from Archenemy up, should always drop a reward. Perhaps Elite Bosses, as well.
Possibly, just in terms of game mechanics, higher-level characters will have more/deeper sinks to fill and higher costs, and thus more need for IGC. Do we force them to work harder to keep the bank account full, so they don't 'succeed themselves into bankruptcy'? It seems to me that higher level ought to mean a greater earning potential, but how do we leverage that?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Warframe actually has this form of IGC, though it's in addition to its more standard Credits and Platinum. One interesting idea that Warframe presented for this form of influence is that when you gain influence with one faction, you piss off another faction; I've been working on Steel Meridian influence, and the result is that I've cheesed off New Loka and Perrin Sequence; because of this, every once in a while, they'll send hit squads after me. I receive a transmission telling me I'm a liability, or I need to be purged, and suddenly a squad of robots or monsters spawn in to beat my face in. I'm powerful enough that generally this isn't actually an issue for me, but it can cause some complications if they spawn in during a relatively sensitive mission (like when I'm trying to infiltrate data vaults and thus can't let the alarms go off)
Inter-faction conflict can be a useful tool for devs, and if you [i]do[/i] go with the faction based influence, I definitely recommend having factions offended by one another. for example, if you have influence with the Mafia, somehow I doubt the police are going to appreciate that and by contrast the Mafia may view you as a problem if you're getting in good with the cops. Even further than the Crime/Law divide, though, there may be rival corporations, or crime groups that run counter to one another. An example there might be a "Humanity First" movement that hates supers, versus a group of villainous supers that want to push their claim as rulers of the world. If you start supporting one or the other, the one you've been cheesing off might come after you.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
... or the game would allow you to have good influence with both opposing factions and you would get continual offers to be a double-agent for them. ...Could be fun. ...or maybe this would be the game's way of preventing you from keeping a good rep with both. If you turn down the offer to be a double-agent, you become persona non grata with the rejected party and then they send hit squads after you just like your example.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
While I think the idea of factions is good, I wouldn't want to have them become a driving force in the game. Particularly not with the complication of random hit-squads ambushing me, while in the midst of another mission. Inter-faction conflicts would complicate that. On the other hand if the factions were compatible, I could see 'reinforcements' from one faction in another faction's territory - Boss fight with the extra complication of Hit-squad, perhaps?
*beep-beep... beep-beep* "Yes?" "Lookout reports Wu Tang activity in your area. They won't want to tangle with the Made Men, but may plan to ambush you on exit." "Okay, thanks." *bip!* ...grumbles, "If it's not one thing, it's another."
Be Well!
Fireheart
I prefer to think of the angle as being [i]Faction Rivalries[/i] between NPC Groups.
One thing that does come to mind would be that different Groups would each have "territories" and that if you're friendly and in their territory they'll help/protect you, but if you're hostile and in their territory they'll try to make trouble for you.
Of course, if you set things up that way, I'd want there to be "contested zones" where control of the "territory" isn't something that's permanent, but rather something that the different Groups can squabble over (and enlist the aid of the PCs to secure for themselves), leading to opportunities for Missions and open world Events.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I'm not so sure that IGC should have a "chance to drop" - I'm of the opinion that it should [I]always[/I] drop at a steady and specified rate (modified by relative strength of the opponent/difficulty of the mission of course). At least then the devs have at least some control over that area of the economy and they can set it so that even people who don't want to play the markets have enough to buy at least a base level of enhancements/augments. I'm not sure what the devs have planned for the economy or if the crafting/markets are going to be optional (like they were in COH) or necessary for advancement. I'm hoping for optional despite the fact that I liked using the auction house and crafting in COH - I know several people that had no interest in the "fiddly" aspect of either. Crafting materials or other kinds of "drops" form mobs - sure, leave that to the RNG.
What I beleive Red is referring to is not that IGC is anrandom drop, as the ouline posted shows a flat rate based on pawn rank and then modified by pawn ranks off the base encounter rank. That amount is then further modified (up or down) based on the level difference between the pawn level and the player character level.
And just to assuage any concerns: We want to avoid players having to manage multiple currencies (as much as can be avoided). We want players to both be able to earn while in a mission and be rewarded for completing missions. One of my hopes (read no promises) is to allow players to modify (in certain ways) how they are rewarded between per encounter basis or upon objective completion basis in such a way that progress toward earning reward potential is not lost.
That is to say, systems that only reward upon missions / quest completion can result in players missing out in rewards of they can't complete the content they are engaged in. A simple disconnect can cause the loss of possibily getting toward the goal of a reward. I want players to both work more toward the reward than on an encounter basis, but also not end up with these issues.
When it comes to economy and crafting, we will introducenthe basic economy at launch, and expand crafting over time. Players will not be forced into crafting nor should they be forced into the player market at the most basic difficulty of play using a "basic" build. However, crafting will enable players to certainly greatly improve and expand upon their characters' capability. This can afford them to "do more" which is meant as a blanket phrase meaning anything from increasing the difficulty, efficiency of accomplishment, and the resulting reward earning potential of such.
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Ahh - ok that makes sense then. I misunderstood.
A few types of currencies is alright, and probably even makes sense. That said - too many and it's just overwhelming. Just see STO - Energy Credits, Fleet Credits, Latinum, Dilithium, Lobi Crystals, and just under a dozen different types of Marks at time of typing. I'm probably forgetting some as well. *Edit*: Ah yes - "Expertise" is another form of currency in STO.
Huh - good point - didn't consider that.
Good to hear!
Am I understanding it right in that you want to implement a system where we can shift certain rewards like IGC or XP to instead have f.i a higher chance of getting higher tier drops?
If so then it really sounds interesting, and could potentially be used instead of a no-XP toggle by being able to shift all XP into something else.
Yes, the concept is along those lines. The primary intentions are to 1. Allow players to tailor how they would like to be rewarded. 2. Insure that progress for obtaining rewards is not lost during play in case of interuption of play occurs. 3. This does not interfere but perfectly merges with all forms of reward meteics under the hood sonas not to throw said metrics off balance.
Again, and I can't stress this enough, there are no promises (as in it is not in the current plans and may not ever be) but it is something to be taken under consideration when we come back around to reward systems in our production cycle.
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Luxuries Rate
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What? I've played Civilization games before!
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One of the best game series! :)
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Avatar by MikeNovember
Yeah, it's hard to imagine a game where crafting isn't de facto mandatory. Crafting being a powerful tool to make your toon stronger is the same coin as crafting being required.
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Avatar by MikeNovember
The real trick is making the classic concept of "crafting" in a MMO apply to a superhero game.
Most people can easily accept the idea of crafting in fantasy/D&D type games because pretty much everyone runs around with "swords and armor" which are physical gear that can be created/improved. Even when you start looking at the superhero genre you can apply the mechanic of "crafting" to the gadgeteer archetype (i.e. Batman) who uses physical devices to "simulate" super powers. But where the concept of applying crafting to superheroes falls apart is when you get to characters like Superman or the Hulk who effectively don't use ANY physical gear as a focus of their powers.
This is why CoH (and presumably CoT) had crafting that was far more abstract and technically NON-GEAR based because somehow the game has to come up with some varation of crafting that can apply even to people who basically don't use physical gear at all.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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I agree with the idea of making IGC rewards non-character-level-dependant. If time is money, then my time spent playing as a level 10 toon ought to be worth about the same as my time spent playing a level 50. I mean, as a level capped toon, there are probably some raids and so forth that you can get into that are more lucrative than the average day spent street sweeping anyway, so there's probably no need to scale the reward IGC drop rates up with level.
I also don't personally think that a every player absolutely must get immediate, predictable, exact IGC rewards each and every time they defeat a mob in PvE in order to keep playins happy. I think sporadic random IGC drops in randomized amounts within a range is fine. As I already said, that's how GW2 does it, and it's not a bad thing there. People accept it and are used to it. I also think that the problem with people getting disconnected will persist as long as there is ANY kind of completion bonus reward for successfully completing missions. You might get some IGC and random item drops during the Trial, TF, or Hami raid, but if you miss out on that completion bonus, and you fail to get the HamiO or whatever the payoff was expected to be, you're going to be mad about THAT regardless of how much other stuff you got form actually doing the raid. So loading the back end of the content with a greater focus on completion rewards and fewer drops during the fights is fine, insofar as it doesn't really create any new problems.
Another GW2 example: multi-looting the Octovine. So there's this Octovine Raid you can do in one particular level 80 outdoor zone (Auric Basin) every 2 hours. Now, in GW2, there are usually multiple instances of the outdoor maps running at all times. And it's possible that you might have joined a team with someone on a different instance than you. To allow people to be able to actually team with each other, they have a team/squad control system that allows you to switch from the instance you're on to the one your teammate is on, as long as that map is not so full of people that it's not accepting any newcomers, which can happen, but usually doesn't. All you have to do is right-click on the other person's name on your team list and select the option called "Join" and you will join your friend in the instance of the map they're on. You both have to be on different copies of the same outdoor map to do this, but that's beside the point.
Once the Octovine has been defeated, the doors to the lost city of Tarir open up and you can go in and loot the 30 or so treasure chests found there. Anyone on the Auric Basin map can go there and do this, by the way, not just the people who fought in the raid. It's a part of an outdoor map that is usually closed off, but opens up to the public for like 10 minutes whenever the Octovine gets defeated, then the game teleports everyone out and it's sealed once again, for the time being.
So people basically set up like 4 or 5 instances all doing the Octovine at the same time, then when they're in the treasure room, they switch teams with each other and jump to a map they haven't looted yet, so as to be able to loot THAT instance too. A friend of mine looted like 6 instances of the same treasure chests in 10 minutes once. They call it multi-looting.
Now, I told you this story to make a point, and the point here is this: even when people are basically taking advantage of a mechanic that could be argued was not intended by the designers (maybe they wanted to let people loot multiple maps, maybe they didn't, I don't really know) in order to get MORE treasure than they really "earned", you STILL have jerks who whine on chat about how "person X hopped maps and now I can't leave the map I'm on to get more treasure, because blah blah blah, eff them, they're a jerk, they're a noob, etc."
So giving people MORE treasure up front is NEVER going to placate them or assuage their complaints about the treasure they expected to get but didn't get that one time that they got DCed. Every single player is like that newspaper boy in the movie Better Off Dead, they want their "TWO DOLLARS!!!!" regardless of the other monies they may have gotten in the past for other stuff. I'm sure everyone who ever fought the Octovine and then got disconnected during the treasure multi-loot bonanza was pretty angry at the game devs, their internet provider, the guy who "fixed" their computer, God, etc about it, but there's nothing you can do to completely prevent that from happening occasionally. In the unfortunate times when it does happen, it's not a fault of the content designer that the content has rewards for completion. The existence of bonus rewards is one of the big motivators for people to get them to do that content in the first place, so the solution to people occasionally getting mad that they got DCed at a bad time should not cause us to simply remove those rewards entirely. The rewards aren't the problem, the crappy internet connection that the one guy has is the problem, or his rig crashing on him, or bad weather taking out the cable, or whatever.
Time is money is a fine ethos, but actually accomplishing something during that time ought to count for something as well. Just standing around or running on a treadmill should be less rewarding than solving a tough problem, defeating a tough boss, etc. What you actually do with your time can, and in my opinion should, be a thing that gives more and/or better rewards than what you would get if you just log in, park your toon someplace, pets deployed, and then surf the internet for an hour while the pets level you.
One thing GW2 does, is it gives people rewards when an event completes if those people contributed to the event completion in some way. I think they base it on damage dealt though, and that might have to be looked at. Not sure about getting DCed, hasn't happened to me. I don't know how exactly this get's measured or whether they scale the reward amounts to the amount of participation, but that could be done too, with the rewards actually dropping at the end. I mean, as a superhero, the mission was to save the day, not attempt to save the day and fail, but still get paid for it. If IGC is even loosely associated with accomplishment or the amount of actual success you have in your attempts to fight crime, save the world, etc, then attempting and failing ought to yield far less in the way of rewards than being successful.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Going back to GW2 for another example, there are missions you can do at every ten levels that are parts of your character's personal story, which require you to go to places and enter instanced outdoor stuff, etc. In those missions, the defeated monsters NEVER drop ANYTHING upon defeat, BUT there is the guarantee of a reward at the end, often in the form of a "your choice of gear" menu where you get to pick which dagger you want from a list of like 3 choices. Also, that dagger is account bound and cannot be sold, and becomes character bound if and when you equip it. So not only do they NOT give you drops during the fights from the mobs you fight in that case, they reward you with rewards that you'll eventually outlevel and cannot be convert into IGC in any way.
Of course, those stories can be soloed, and can be re-tried ad infinitum until you succeed them. It's your character's personal journey, so you're expected to successfully do it, eventually. If you get defeated during, you respawn at some earlier save point.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If looking for a Mission Content Rewards vs a Mission Complete Rewards ratio, I'm thinking that 65:35 ought to work. It means the bulk of the reward comes from doing the content of the Mission, but the payoff for having completed it is significant enough that "it's not nothing" and will be a meaningful contribution. You don't want to go past 50:50 for similar reasons.
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Even if we could agree on a percentage breakdown that everyone's happy with (I like 67/33 in favor of the end bonus, personally, gives a nice 2 to 1 ratio), there remain the issues of randomness and uniqueness in the rewards. You might have a guarantee of getting a HamiO at the end of the TF, but which one it is and what the street prices are is an separate issue. At that point you have to work in averages I guess, but some items being unique have no substitute. If you're trying for that very rare cool thing that sometimes drops, and cannot be bought at all, you either got a chance at it or you didn't.
Another idea you could try to get around people getting DCed, is to have the game place rewards in a separate place that it tracks even when you're not logged in. Like for example, maybe the game emails the rewards to you instead of dropping them immediately upon winning the TF. Maybe you get the rewards via email if and only if the thing was done to successful completion and you contributed to enough of the content to have "earned" them, with some kind of metric for locking in one's right to share rewards upon dealing enough damage or using enough powers in the last room, etc. Of course whether or not ANYONE gets rewards will still be based on the trial being successfully done, but assuming it is, you might be able to put all player rewards for completion in some kind of escrow account that the game will track regardless of whether or not you're logged in when the thing finishes. Then, you could go to the appropriate place and claim those rewards, email being the primary example of a way to do that. You could also simply have a reward NPC who you can talk to and access your earned rewards that you haven't actually taken delivery on yet. Maybe that virtual space has a limit to its size or a time limit on how long you have to claim your rewards before they disappear, etc. I don't know.
GW2 has a mechanic whereby some rewards you get must be actively looted from treasure chests or corpses, while other "bonus" rewards come to you in the form of a treasure chest "icon" that appears on your screen when you get something. Often this is a menu of "pick which item you want from a small list" and you often have the option of putting off the decision for later instead of doing it right away. Those little treasure chest icons stay in the lower right part of your screen, just above your skill icons, until you click on them to open them up and process them, as far as I know. Cashing in level-ups works like that too. When you hit a new level, you get a little golden diamond with wings icon that you can click on to accept the new level and its rewards and power ups that it comes with.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising