Segev wrote:

You say you'd not spend Stars on other players in the AH.
Assuming that Stars are, in fact, the c-store currency, why would you never spend your Stars on the AH to buy an item you really want for your character?

Why would I not give my hard earned cash (as stars) to random people in a game yet I'd happily spend that money in an officially provided store run by the developers?

It's just not where I see my money going. I see my money going on the developer shop if there is one. If stars can be used for something else such as paying for subs as has been mooted, I'll use them on a second account. I wont support people who want to not pay a sub, play for free and make money from the game. Or the RMT trade. Or promote duping or money laundering or confuse MWMs book keeping.. or encourage items to be put on ebay or guild websites..

I just want to be happy playing, for me (I may be the only person here who feels the same) that means not giving my money to random people I am naturally suspicious of. It means buying account bound items for my toons.

The thing I think I'm not getting across is that, having bought Stars, you've supported the game. If you spend them at the AH or if you spend them at the c-store, it is all the same to MWM's bottom line: you bought the Stars, so MWM got paid.

The thing I am not understanding and hope you can clarify for me is how you think spending Stars on the AH will contribute to things going on eBay or into RMT coffers. Could you elaborate on this process as you see it happening, please?

Don't get lost in what people are speculating on versus what's actually being proposed.

There are only two currencies proposed: in-game currency, and Stars. The former is like CoH's inf or STO's energy credits or WoW's copper/silver/gold. It is gotten through gameplay. The latter is like League of Legend's Riot Points or STO's Zen. It is bought with real money and then used to purchase things in the c-store.

The only "complicated" thing being proposed right now is the ability to list in-game-won items on the market for either in-game currency OR for Stars, and the ability to use Stars directly on the market to buy items that other players have put up for sale. (This includes the ability to put up in-game currency for sale for Stars, and vice-versa.)

The rest is speculation and brainstorming on ways to make these things work.

Segev wrote:

The thing I am not understanding and hope you can clarify for me is how you think spending Stars on the AH will contribute to things going on eBay or into RMT coffers. Could you elaborate on this process as you see it happening, please?

I'll try and take a stab at it, since I also had similar concerns at the beginning of this thread (before you engaged, Segev).

It basically comes down to what amounts to Money Laundering, in a sense. With multiple vectors of exchange possible, and multiple means of acquisition, when you have Itemization where the Supply is seriously out of whack for the Demand, you can wind up with some pretty perverse market distortions. To give some historical context for this kind of thing in City of Heroes, remember the market prices for [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Luck_of_the_gambler]Luck of the Gambler[/url] and [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Numina%27s_Convalescence]Numina's Convalescence[/url] and their special/unique Set IOs. For a good long while there, the INF prices on these items were nothing short of usurious highway robbery, because the supply for them was so constrained (there weren't anywhere NEAR enough dropping to meet demand!).

This created an opportunity for Speculators to move in and collaboratively manipulate the market.

Because the prices on these highly desired items were so high, and the prices for them were so insanely high, pretty much anyone who either wasn't an Ebil Marketeer or who hadn't been playing (ie. farming) for cash since time immemorial was effective priced out of the market. THAT then created the opportunity for Gold Sellers to ply their services of exchanging INF for $$ so that people could actually purchase horrifically inflated costs for high demand items. This in turn created a vicious cycle in that people who paid $$ for INF could "drain" the market of its supply of high demand, low supply items ... ensuring that the cycle would continue for the NEXT "customer" to come along for the Gold Seller's services.

It pretty much required the Merits and Alignment system to come along and break the cycle of distorted, manipulated and heavily speculated upon supply for certain high demand Items. I for one figured I'd *NEVER* be able to afford even so much as ONE Luck of the Gambler PARTIAL Set until alternative means of supply were made available through Merits and Alignments. After the switch to Merits and Alignments though, I pretty much never needed to pay out tons of INF to the market for overpriced Set IOs ever again, because I could generate my own "supply" of such Itemization [i]through actually playing the game[/i] as opposed to merely just grinding the game (in abject futility, praying for a 0.2% chance to drop after completing a Task Force).

Basically, there is a ... danger ... in that if supply and demand get "too out of hand" that the in-game market will become ... distorted ... in such a way as to favor speculators and manipulators, who can then (effectively) collude together to constrain supply and prop up prices in such a way as to give Gold Sellers the necessary [i]demand[/i] for their services AND sufficient room to "maneuver" in such that they can diversify their practices across multiple specific commodities and (in effect) manage to keep the ball rolling by hopping around in a circle, laundering their wealth from one currency to another to another to another, essentially "riding the wave" to their advantage at every point in the exchange cycle and thus "turn a profit" ... potentially in real world $$ terms as well as in in-game currency terms.

It's something that's hard to describe, but it's basically concern that the ... shape ... of the economic environment could wind up making a "good fit" for parasites, if the exchange of currencies (in this case, INF and Stars) does not have some kind of "cost" associated with the conversion from one to the other (ie. completely liquid currency exchanges with no "transaction" charges).

Even something as simple as a 1% "tax" on market based movements of goods and currency could be sufficient to prevent some of the more nefarious "laundering practices" from being consistently profitable over the long(er) haul. For reference, I think that City of Heroes ran with a 3% fee (am I remembering that right?).

Segev wrote:

Hm.
Well, on the one hand, the answer in my head to this is that MWM is cutting the RMTs out of the loop in two ways:Putting these rare items up for sale in Stars means players who would normally go to RMTs for their gold instead buy Stars from MWM and go buy these items.
The ability to sell currency from one player to another for Stars also means that players will have the ability to buy Stars, again, from MWM, and go buy the currency from other players.
This at least cuts out one third-party manipulator who is motivated by real-world money to distort the market. It does not directly address the issue of the item's supply being so ludicrously short, however.
On the other, any item that is going for so much must perforce be too rare (unless we really WANT it to be that hard to get, for some reason).
That said, while I'm not comfortable putting a Star-tax on market transactions, I'm very comfortable with - practically eager to - put an in-game currency fee on such things. This allows more sinking of the more problematic inflation-prone currency.

I understand it's an interesting idea to try to eliminate third party RMTs by essentially having CoT sell currency directly to the players instead.

But the only way that's going to work is if you sell currency cheaper than the RMT farmers can. Last I remember the CoH RMTers were only charging something like $5 or $6 per billion INF. The danger of undercutting the RMTers of course is that you make game currency so worthless that inflation takes over and all of a sudden things like Luck of the Gambler type items go for multi-billions of INF and/or Stars because anyone can buy tons of it for pennies on the dollar.

Basically it seems like this Stars idea might be worse for the game economy than RMTers were. I hate RMTers, but lets not introduce a "solution" to them that could potentially be far less desireable.

Segev wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I understand it's an interesting idea to try to eliminate third party RMTs by essentially having CoT sell currency directly to the players instead.
But the only way that's going to work is if you sell currency cheaper than the RMT farmers can. Last I remember the CoH RMTers were only charging something like $5 or $6 per billion INF. The danger of undercutting the RMTers of course is that you make game currency so worthless that inflation takes over and all of a sudden things like Luck of the Gambler type items go for multi-billions of INF and/or Stars because anyone can buy tons of it for pennies on the dollar.
Basically it seems like this Stars idea might be worse for the game economy than RMTers were. I hate RMTers, but lets not introduce a "solution" to them that could potentially be far less desireable.

I...still get the feeling you're not understanding what I'm saying.
Stars are not in-game currency. Stars are c-store currency. Stars are sold for real money; they're like Zen or Riot Points. They have values fixed relative to real money and c-store items based on the amount of real money MWM charges for Stars and the number of Stars c-store items cost.
In-game currency, as-yet unnamed, is what is "dropped" in the game. MWM never sells this to anybody.
However, the plan I'm championing would allow players who have purchased Stars to take those Stars to the in-game market and use them to buy the as-yet unnamed currency from other players.
So the RMTs who would normally sell in-game currency for real money now compete with players who can sell in-game currency for Stars. The Stars transaction is wholly secure, as it works with in-game mechanisms that are already set up to handle market transactions between players, and doesn't require any logging in to third-party web sites.
If RMTs are selling $5 per billion currency, presumably there will be something resembling a going rate of *600 per billion currency. (I hope we do a better job fighting inflation so that these ratios don't get that currency-high, but as a working example...)
If RMTs are willing and able to compete with players who sell currency for Stars, this won't stop RMTs. But neither will it encourage them. It allows players to DIRECTLY compete with them.

I guess what I'm saying is that you're going to have to price Stars at a price point that'll be at least equal to or less than something like $5 per billion INF to negate what the RMTers can do. At that point the value of Stars will be so low that the idea of being able to use them to buy INF from other players will be jeopardized.

Bottomline there's very little if any margin of error when it comes to pegging what the arbitrary cost of Stars will be. Seems problematic at best.

Segev wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I guess what I'm saying is that you're going to have to price Stars at a price point that'll be at least equal to or less than something like $5 per billion INF to negate what the RMTers can do. At that point the value of Stars will be so low that the idea of being able to use them to buy INF from other players will be jeopardized.
Bottomline there's very little if any margin of error when it comes to pegging what the arbitrary cost of Stars will be. Seems problematic at best.

That's just it. We're not going to price Stars in relation to in-game currency. YOU will.
MWM will never sell in-game currency for any amount of Stars. We'll sell Stars, and then players who have in-game currency they wish to sell for Stars will price their currency in amounts of Stars they feel they're worth.
So the price of currency in Stars will never be directly controlled by MWM, any more than RMT prices for inf were controlled by NCSoft.

I understand the difference between your Stars and the yet-unamed INF equivalent.

But the "YOU" in your "price determination equation" will be determined what players can get amongst themselves OR from RMTers. Again if your goal here is to undermine the RMTers you risk not only driving down the value of any of your currencies (Stars and/or INF) so much that RMTers may in fact find a way to remain viable but also hyper-inflation.

I'm simply not convinced your idea is completely bullet-proof yet. I hope it is - I just don't see yet if it is. *shrugs*

Gangrel wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Segev wrote:
Lothic wrote:
I guess what I'm saying is that you're going to have to price Stars at a price point that'll be at least equal to or less than something like $5 per billion INF to negate what the RMTers can do. At that point the value of Stars will be so low that the idea of being able to use them to buy INF from other players will be jeopardized.
Bottomline there's very little if any margin of error when it comes to pegging what the arbitrary cost of Stars will be. Seems problematic at best.

That's just it. We're not going to price Stars in relation to in-game currency. YOU will.
MWM will never sell in-game currency for any amount of Stars. We'll sell Stars, and then players who have in-game currency they wish to sell for Stars will price their currency in amounts of Stars they feel they're worth.
So the price of currency in Stars will never be directly controlled by MWM, any more than RMT prices for inf were controlled by NCSoft.

I understand the difference between your Stars and the yet-unamed INF equivalent.
But the "YOU" in your "price determination equation" will be determined what players can get amongst themselves OR from RMTers. Again if your goal here is to undermine the RMTers you risk not only driving down the value of any of your currencies (Stars and/or INF) so much that RMTers may in fact find a way to remain viable but also hyper-inflation.
I'm simply not convinced your idea is completely bullet-proof yet. I hope it is - I just don't see yet if it is. *shrugs*

There is *NO* 100% perfect way to do it... if there is an in game currency of some form or another, there will be a market for people to buy that currency. It can be gold, credits, inf... it could even be items like in Path of Exile.
Actually tell a lie, there is. Have no form of currency (or the ability to trade between players) at all... although that won't stop the Power Levelling services being offered.
Stars will always have a value though, because they can be used to buy stuff from the MWM equivelent of the Paragon Market. The only difference between the two though is that unlike Paragon Points, the STARS can be given to other players (so are effectively not account bound).

Again I'm not completely against this Star idea of yours. I'd just rather badger you... uh I mean offer construstive criticism about these details now so that you are as sure as possible it'll work as intended. ;)

I agree your system may curtail RMTing and provide a motivation for those who horded INF in CoH to sell it for Stars. But it's not going to stop RMTing for those people who WANT to keep hording INF and it may even be possible for people to game the system by buying cheap RMT INF and then selling it for Stars when the player market allows them to buy it for cheaper prices than MWM sells it for. Those people would represent a double negative - they'd buy INF from RMTers and -not- buy Stars from MWM.

As long as those deficiencies are understood and accounted for then I suspose the system will be "working as intended".

Gear that degrades over time will go a long way toward requiring people to either 1) buy a "never degrade" item or 2) Keep re-buying the gear they need at the highest color they can afford. It also makes it easier for loot tables to be more generous.

I have offered to call the gearing system "disciplines" and as with any discipline they must be continually trained or they will degrade. So if I just learned a defensive discipline (lets say learning to fight of crowd control effects) then I would need to keep going to the gym to train in that discipline in order to keep my skills up. YES I know you'd be "using" these skills and thus training in them as you fight. There could be a second system where experience points can boost your discipline back up?

Just throwing out ideas.

Re: money sinks, while some of the ones Gangrel suggested would annoy me to no end, I have to admit it's a good list to consider. Also, please keep in mind that not everyone plays the economic game -- in 7 years of playing CoX, I never felt any character (even my 50s) had a ton of extra cash. I used the market for shopping, but was never a speculator. If I could afford what I needed when I needed it, I got it; otherwise, I didn't. I never hoarded items in order to play the market; I just shopped when I had to, because for me, missions were the fun part of the game. Using the market was like shopping in real life: something to get over with as quickly as possible. I guess I'm saying while I understand the need for universal money sinks, too many could really interfere with the enjoyment of the average player.

Also, please try to keep the money sinks from also being significant time sinks. Having to replace a few enhancements every 3 levels or so was ok; games that cause gear to deteriorate such that you need to travel to a repair shop after almost every mission and then repair each item by hand get old pretty fast. I really like the idea of optional sinks like Gangrel's #4: it lets you choose whether you want your sink to be time or money.

Gangrel wrote:

1) Hospital bills

This would work if it is limited to needing to rez at a Hospital. Note that an SG Base could be equipped in such a way as to mitigate (without completely negating) this form of Death Penalty. Net effect: use of Wakies and Rez Powers is encouraged.

Suggest a loss of 1% of currently held INF on character provided the character has at least 100 INF (so at 99 INF or less there is no loss).

Gangrel wrote:

2) Ability purchases (either for temp abilities, or as part of the "levelling up process").

I'll counter this with the notion that certain Contacts and other NPCs will want to be bribed before they'll "do business" with you. This could potentially be a consideration for the Integrity Challenged alignment axis, such that NPCs are only willing to be your "friend" so long as you keep buying them off.

Gangrel wrote:

3) Market transactions (either putting up for sale, or for receiving monies from sales)

DEFINITELY MUST HAVE. Markets that require no fees turn into mules and fill up with trash very quickly.

Gangrel wrote:

4) Travel costs (if you want to take the lazy route going from A to B and not drive yourself there)

Less "travel costs" and more a matter of in-game Taxi Services (ala Gryphons and Bats in World of Warcraft). "Public" transit shouldn't be "free" ... even if the price for using it is a pittance.

Gangrel wrote:

5) Changing your appearance
6) Housing purchases and upgrades, and fees.
7) Guild forming
8) Enhancement/gear purchases

Agree to all.

Gangrel wrote:

9) Entrance fee to zones (its a thought!)

Actually, this would make sense for PvP Zones. Think of it as a Cover Charge for joining Fight Club. It could even be done as a sort of "ante up" system, where everyone contributes into a pot with the winners receiving shares of the pot (3rd place breaks even if 5 or more?) with MWM taking a "rake" that isn't returned in the payout which effectively forms a sink.

Gangrel wrote:

10) Mail fees (cost to send items to others via the mail system). This can also be set up so that "blind spam" has an associated cost (this is if the "friend system" requires confirmation from the other player.. it will costs you currency to send a mail to someone who is NOT on your friends list)

Text messages to people on your Friends List are free.
Mailing Items to people on your Friends List costs a small fee.
Text messages to people NOT on your Friends List costs a small fee.
Mailing Items to people NOT on your Friends List costs a small (additional) fee.

Gangrel wrote:

11) Inspiration purchases

Definitely.

Gangrel wrote:

12) Storage upgrades (ie bag upgrades/bank upgrades in other MMO's)

This one I'm a bit leery of doing with INF instead of Stars.

Gangrel wrote:

13) Customising the look of mounts/vehicles

Appearance editing should cost INF.

Gangrel wrote:

14) If contracts are implemented in the game (like in Eve Online), there would be a cost to setting each one up

Fee for service.

Gangrel wrote:

15) Delivery charge if you have purchased stuff from the market, so that you don't have to go to a certain location to pick it up

Nah. Make people actually go pick up their stuff.

Gangrel wrote:

16) Crafting... maybe some crafting materials are limited in how fast you can gain them (ie normally 1 or 2 a day via mission completes), however you can always buy one from a special vendor

Any crafting system that isn't a complete waste of time (and money!) is going to need to be very well thought out.

Gangrel wrote:

17) DUMB IDEA COMING: A powerset that actually cost you money to use it... throwing money at the enemy to "defeat them"... actually, that leads onto a case of where some missions will require you to spend in game money to progress... might not be much of a charge, but it takes money out the game!

You mean ... [url=http://25.media.tumblr.com/078e3120604981418d1105d8f478b710/tumblr_mzorakH0we1s0qqgvo1_400.gif]like this[/url]?

[img]http://25.media.tumblr.com/078e3120604981418d1105d8f478b710/tumblr_mzorakH0we1s0qqgvo1_400.gif[/img]

Obligatory Kill La Kill (episode 14) reference is obligatory.

JayBezz wrote:

Gear that degrades over time will go a long way toward requiring people to either 1) buy a "never degrade" item or 2) Keep re-buying the gear they need at the highest color they can afford. It also makes it easier for loot tables to be more generous.

This is why I keep pushing for a Death Penalty that gets assessed when you choose to Hospital. Enhancements (or "gear") that [i]can be lost[/i] and therefore might need replacing can lead to some very interesting economic incentives.

In Tabula Rasa, I successfully explored one of the most Bass Ackwards solutions to having a Death Penalty that anyone had ever seen, and I used it all the way up until the the servers went dead.

I called it the Grey Ghost build.

Gear in Tabula Rasa came in grey, green, blue and purple levels of rarity, and with increasing rarity the items gained increasing power (like +20% per rarity step) ... so a purple had +60% more of whatever that item did than a grey. So, obviously, if you wanted the most powerful stuff, you wanted to be decked out from head to toe in purple gear, right?

Yeah, well ... funny thing that. It turns out the devs in Tabula Rasa dialed up the repair costs on higher rarity gear (because the base value of the items themselves was so much higher if sold), meaning that simple "maintenance" of your weapons and armor could potentially become (*polite cough*) "ruinously expensive" in actual gameplay if you were completely decked out in nothing but all purple gear. And mind you, you didn't even need to DIE in order to generate a repair bill! Simply engaging in combat (and surviving) would wear down the durability of your weapons and armor, leading to repair bills in their own right (just not as fast as getting killed would do). So periodically you'd need to stop off in a friendly area, visit an NPC would could repair your gear (cash sink) and then head out again.

Then, towards the end, in Tabula Rasa you could modify (read: craft) your own weapons and armor. You could take loot drops from the field, drag them back to the crafting station and "crush" them for crafting reagents (which stacked conveniently in your bank, think Invention Salvage that you get out of the crafting table). Anyway, long story short ... maxing out the mods on purple gear cost WAY MORE in terms of resources consumption than it did on grey gear (go figure).

Well, I turned all of that on its head and figured that I'd deliberately play with all Grey Quality gear (ie. the cheap "crap") and max it out (cheaply) and then have teeny tiny little repair bills that would make my build very economical to run (and it didn't hurt that I was doing this on my Spy first, who always had positive cash flow due to my weapon not consuming ammo to use).

So you can kind of imagine where this goes next, in terms of gameplay. My character was "squishier" than others on the Base Stats of my gear (lower armor totals, lower damage per attack) ... but at the same time my gear was completely maxed out and totally optimized for mods that I could craft and control. The irony then was that because of the mix of mods I was able to craft onto my "crappy" Grey Ghost build, I actually wound up with better attribute stat totals than a lot of the people around me, which then made up an extremely sizable chunk of the difference in performance due to using such "crummy" basic gear (that was essentially vendor trash). In fact, at the end game, it was actually HARD to find max level (50) items that were grey quality! Most of the stuff that dropped was green or blue!

Anyway, I was running an instance with some other people once (think Task Force) and we hit something of a brick wall where we were just getting SLAUGHTERED with repeated wipes and having a really tough slog of it. The funny thing was, I was wearing my full kit of Grey Ghost gear then, and my repair bills per death penalty were like ~1000 credits. Some of the other people on the team though had gone the "pimp my purple" route and were fast going broke on the repair bills! Eventually we reached the point where their in-hand cash got exhausted, simply because they'd died too many times and they needed to go back to the bank in order to "afford" to continue fighting and the gear they were wearing was simply too expensive to repair and maintain.

I of course had no such problems and was actually breaking even on cash flow because my Grey Ghost gear was so cheap to own and maintain! In fact, when the other guys bailed out because they were broke (both financially and equipment wise), I was still in the black for the entire aborted run through the Omega Labs.

That experience right there taught me (and after I related it on the Planet TR forums, a lot of other people!) that a game which offers a High Road and a Low Road solution to the exact same problem can make for a very interesting set of incentives and rewards. With my Grey Ghost build and setup, I had what was effectively a partially "gimped" build (since I was using grey items for everything) that I could optimize extremely fast and extremely cheaply [i]to counteract a significant portion of that gimptitude[/i] through the stacking of the mods on my gear (which I could modify into being whatever I wanted) in a reasonable time frame (instead of a year long grind) and which was "cheap" to own and operate, giving me a level of "bounce back" persistence that pretty much nothing else out there could match! I sometimes teamed up with people who would have to pay repair bills over 100x higher per death than mine, making their deaths VERY EXPENSIVE while my deaths were hardly even loose change, which in turn gave my character a level of [b]persistence[/b] on the battlefield that was highly unusual ... simply because I didn't need to "fear" the cost of death. I could easily "afford" to get killed DOZENS of times compared to almost anyone and everyone that I ran with, and yet at the same time, my survival rate when fighting alongside them was often 90% (or better) of theirs ... meaning I wasn't getting killed a whole lot more than they were.

For me, the most annoying part about dying was the run back to where the fighting was.
For them, the most agonizing part was paying for the repair bills on all of their blue and purple gear (and being able to afford to replace all the ammo they'd expended).

Note that City of Heroes never really had ANYTHING even remotely analogous to this kind of experience. But to this day, I'm still rather proud of accomplishing what effectively amounts to making a build using nothing but Single Origin Enhancements [i]work better[/i] and more effectively than someone else's build that was tricked out with Level 50 Purple IO Sets and PVP Sets that cost them hundreds of billions of INF to afford. It was one of those "take lemons and make lemonade" kinds of things, which I believe took the game developers by surprise towards the end of Tabula Rasa's run when other people started following the path I'd blazed with the Grey Ghost, and started having their own successes with it.

I'll just reiterate that I have no intention of giving my stars to players.
Said it to death, so this will be the last time. Ever. Promise.
I would rather not buy stars and use in-game currency to buy my in-game items.
I'm happy to spend my rl cash in a cash shop.
I'm not happy giving my rl cash to players.

Everything else I can agree with, including inf sinks, time sinks, the horrible prospects of equipment degradation (one of the things I loved about CoX was no repair costs, damage costs, res costs, the cheapness of enhancement upgrades, respecs etc..)

Doesn't matter really that everyone else is OK with it, that you insist it's good for the f2p market (which is where I see this being most advantageous and is of course my pet bugbear) or that you don't think it will affect RMT (which I think it will). I'm going to just put it out there that as a subscriber who probably also buys stars.. I'm not giving them to players.

At this point I'm seriously considering swapping my proposed payment model and ditching my kickstarter account with bonuses and credit and going down the f2p/don't ever buy anything route. But two years is a lot of time to make up my mind about that kind of thing and I've still got a bunch of other games I'm currently spending money on so we'll see.

Actually maybe all those fees would be useful to roll up into a subscription model. That could actually be part of the stipend - sub for $15 a month, get discount coupons/vouchers or something like a weeks worth of free listings/stuff.

That way you're not actually giving stuff away that you could sell on the cash/stars shop. That might be more valuable to people who don't want "stuff" and who would rather stop being gouged by transactional costs.

I hope MWM doesn't plan to implement many of these ideas, because the more I read the suggestions in this thread, the more disinterested I become. I want spend my time using super powers on enemies, not shopping, maintaining equipment, and re-shopping.

I wouldn't mind maintenance that occurred at around the same rate as in CoX, which was about once every 3 levels, but having to go to a vendor between every mission would annoy the heck out of me.

GH wrote:

(one of the things I loved about CoX was no repair costs, damage costs, res costs, the cheapness of enhancement upgrades, respecs etc..)

Completely agree. The fact that CoX didn't force us to spend so much time on shopping and maintenance was a big part of my enjoyment. When I play other games I always sigh when it comes to inventory management time. Red's idea of enhs that could actually be destroyed upon death would probably discourage me from ever playing again. That sort of item management doesn't sound like fun to me at all. Especially at early levels, where my character is more likely to be poor and more likely to die. That's a bad combination.

I'm glad we like different things. A good MMO can take advantage of this by having many different optional areas. If some people like to play the market, that's cool, but don't assume we're all rolling in cash that needs to be drained. As I said above, I never felt rich in CoX, but I didn't need to. It wasn't required to be super, which meant we could spend our time fighting mobs instead of thinking about gear and money. People could focus on that stuff if they wanted to, but that was always optional. My goals were never based on items, like enhs; they were always about levels, powers, and missions. But I did need enough cash to keep my powers viable.

And please never make in game cash a barrier to proceeding with play, like needing a certain amount as part of mission content, or to rez w functional equipment, as in Red's example from another game.

P.S. Don't give up hope, GH. This is all just musing at this point. Let's hang on and see what the game will actually be like. Keep that hope alive!

Gangrel wrote:

Doing this in a different post because it is a *slightly* different point, and I dont want it to get mixed up.
In CoX when you levelled up, you had to on a *regular* basis re slot your enhancements. And this wasn't necessarily a short process either. Being able to hold just 10 enhancements at a single point in time it could take a long time reslotting accordingly. Hell, a reslot could take up to 30+ minutes (the buying, the making sure that everything was correct due to the lack of "OOPS" button)
IO's were like the normal gear in other MMO's... they never expired. In fact, compared to other MMO's CoX was *very* hard to run your character from 1 to 50 on just what dropped, without having to using vendors at one point or another. Most other MMO's tend to work on the "Play with what drops... what is given as a reward". Is that reward always handy? Nope... you might have something better already equipped.
But the quest rewards are a good way of making sure that there is a least a "bare minimum of quality" involved in the character as well. CoX gave you *an* enhancement when you completed a story arc... but when you are dealing with 30+ enhancement slots, it didn't really save all that much as a percentage. And you might not even be able to *use* said enhancement either.
That was another thing that bugged me with CoX. Just the *huge* range of different enhancements available. Brilliant for promoting flexibility... horrible to actually sort through.
I will say one think (just so that this doesn't look like a CoX bashing post)...
Common IOs were a good thing. They *finally* made enhancements work like gear does in other MMO's (ie never expire). I just wish that they dropped off normal mobs though.

What exactly is wrong with spending 30+ minutes to slot a character, wrong? MMOs are long term/time playing games.

I also want to thank Gangrel for his list; it has some neat ideas in it. And some things I think might not be so great, but I am sure we all have things we like and things we dislike. It's a good brainstorming list. Thanks, as well, to all who've commented on it and added their own ideas.

Regarding degrading gear as a currency sink, it sounds like there are three primary schools of thought: [list][*]Don't do it! It is unfun!
[*]Degrading gear is how other MMOs do it and it's familiar to people from those
[*]Having gear become obsolete as you level up and re-adding new gear to replace it is the better way to go[/list]

If the goal is a currency sink, perhaps "degrading gear" can have a couple "payment models:" Let the gear either degrade with time or levels, and then let people either "re-apply" new gear or "repair" the old gear...OR they have the option to pay an ongoing subscription fee in in-game currency (which would easily translate to an out-of-game subscription fee if they used Stars to regularly buy currency from other players to pay for it) to cause certain categories of (or all of) their "gear" to never degrade/to level up with them.

Fluff-wise, if we treated "gear" as some sort of techniques or disciplines, as one person suggested, this could represent either periodic retraining, or a membership in a "gym" where they maintain their peak physique.

Heck, if we have wide varieties of "gear" that takes fluff from training, devices, power-enhancing treatments, etc., the various categories could have different "never degrade" ongoing sinks (paid daily, weekly, or monthly, perhaps) or could be treated just like they are in other MMOs and replaced/repaired, depending on the choices of the players. Those who like "fire and forget" can pay the regular ongoing amounts, while those who like retooling regularly might prefer to pay up as they use it up.

Kind of like the choice between leasing a car and buying one: do you prefer to consider it that you're just getting a new "loan" every few years when the lease runs out, or do you prefer to buy the car and maintain it, yourself, until it wears out and you HAVE to get a new one?

Gangrel wrote:

oOStaticOo wrote:As for buying stars and selling them to another player or giving them to another player, I'm in the same boat as GH. I bought those stars, those are my stars, I don't want you to have my stars. I can see buying them and using them in a market to buy something that is let's say account bound to my character and then basically those stars are destroyed after payment, but I don't like the idea that somehow a person can get ahold of those stars without having to pay real money [color=red][to MWM but to RTMers instead via indirect currency trades][/color] and use them for themselves. I don't know, I just have a bad feeling that somehow that can be taken advantage of and abused.

Fair enough point. And yes, I do agree (to an extent) with the "stuff bought of the STARS market is account bound". But as soon as *anything* that is "better" than what drops in game can be bought off the STARS market is implemented, then in my mind P2W has been implemented.

These were basically the kinds of concerns I was trying to articulate in my recent posts yesterday. I slightly modified oOStaticOo's post (in red) to drive home the point. The idea that people may be able to get Stars without having to directly pay MWM for them seems like a vector that could allow bad abuses to happen. At the very least it could give RMTers an avenue to remain viable and I still think this could destabilize the overall values of the currencies involved.

Segev wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
oOStaticOo wrote:
As for buying stars and selling them to another player or giving them to another player, I'm in the same boat as GH. I bought those stars, those are my stars, I don't want you to have my stars. I can see buying them and using them in a market to buy something that is let's say account bound to my character and then basically those stars are destroyed after payment, but I don't like the idea that somehow a person can get ahold of those stars without having to pay real money [to MWM but to RTMers instead via indirect currency trades] and use them for themselves. I don't know, I just have a bad feeling that somehow that can be taken advantage of and abused.

Fair enough point. And yes, I do agree (to an extent) with the "stuff bought of the STARS market is account bound". But as soon as *anything* that is "better" than what drops in game can be bought off the STARS market is implemented, then in my mind P2W has been implemented.

These were basically the kinds of concerns I was trying to articulate in my recent posts yesterday. I slightly modified oOStaticOo's post (in red) to drive home the point. The idea that people may be able to get Stars without having to directly pay MWM for them seems like a vector that could allow bad abuses to happen. At the very least it could give RMTers an avenue to remain viable and I still think this could destabilize the overall values of the currencies involved.

Once again, if the RMTers are getting ahold of Stars, they're providing some service to those who give them those Stars.
If they're able to then sell those Stars for less money than MWM would sell "new" ones, MWM still got paid for those "old" ones originally...they just haven't been cashed in, yet.
So, again, if you're buying Stars from RMTs, I can only assume you're doing it 'cause you want to buy something on the c-store. At which point you're sinking the Stars out of circulation, so somebody has to buy new ones from MWM at MWM's prices before the RMTs can somehow get ahold of them.
The only place the RMTs are competing with MWM is in selling Stars as a player-to-player market currency. And, to get the Stars they use to fuel that, they have to compete with other players on the market to sell items that people will buy with Stars.
This means the RMTs would have to undersell the other players, driving the price of items in Stars down (thus making Stars less needed to buy things on the AH), and then would have to sell the Stars at less than MWM charges for them.
In all, I doubt whether this would prove a viable model for them. If it does, it would seem to drive prices on the market - in Stars, at least - DOWNWARD, not upward. And they're still dependent on somebody paying MWM full price for the Stars in the first place.

Again I realize the only source for Stars is MWM. You keep telling me that despite the fact that I've incorporated that fact into everything I've said here.

I still contend if there's ANY chance that there will be people who figure out how to operate WITHOUT having to buy those Stars directly from MWM then that represents lost sales for MWM and a psudeo-legitimatization for RMTers. RMTers aren't going to be buying and selling Stars directly - they are still going to be selling INF and they are going to do their best to make it cheaper than it would be to buy the equivalent value of Stars from you. That way when people who've bought RMT INF turn around and buy Stars from other players they'll be able to afford to do so at effectively cheaper prices than what you're selling Stars for because they'll be able to flood the market with INF. Essentially players who buy Stars from you will turn around and buy RMT INF with it. It could all become a very large and messy money laundering scheme.

Frankly because of this I don't really see why it's worth that risk to allow people to directly trade Stars for INF in the first place. Not sure the pros of that are going to outweigh the cons.

We seem to have two subthreads going here. I don't really have much of an opinion on the Stars issue, so this is back to the money sink topic:

One of the most amazing things about CoX -- which I didn't quite appreciate till it was gone and folks started to discuss their experiences playing -- is that it supported such a myriad different ways to play the game. Sometimes on the Titan Network I'd hear someone fondly reminiscing, and for a second I'd think they were talking about some other game, because my experience in CoX differed so much.

Gangrel, that's what is happening to me now when I read your descriptions re: CoX. I'm certain that what you say is an accurate depiction of your experience; it just seems to be the opposite of mine in almost every area. Whether it's how often we had to go to a vendor, whether we needed a loan to get SOs, whether it took long to upgrade expiring enhancements, whether it was hard to run our characters primarily based on what dropped, or even (from a separate thread) whether we were the victims of killstealing more or less in CoX and whether we found instancing to help or hinder cooperative play. These are more than merely differing opinions; I think we actually had completely different experiences in CoX. If CoX had been for me as it was for you, I'm sure I would agree with more of your proposals/comments here. As it was, my experiences with CoX and other MMOs have produced the preferences I have expressed. CoX got it right for me on money sinks; other MMOs don't.

As another example, even though Static and I seem to agree on our opinion of degrading gear, our experiences regarding enh purchasing and IO crafting in CoX were worlds apart. (I would not want to spend a whole session just crafting IOs!)

So what does this mean for MWM? Each of us is "right" in our own way. Each of us represents a real part of the community -- and I'm sure there are many more facets that don't have representatives weighing in on this thread. I guess the main thing MWM can take from this is what a difficult prospect it can be to set a single rule on anything that will be experienced this truly varied playerbase. Or, as I see Segev has suggested above, provide options to cater for the various experiences. Maybe that is the best way to go -- once again coming back to his point that we're the vocal minority on the forums. If MWM offers a set of choices, the sales receipts for the various options will speak louder than anything we can say here.

One thing I would like to counter on any topic is the notion that the adoption of some design or policy by a bunch of other MMOs (claimed as a "standard") is in and of itself a reason that CoT should follow suit. If there are merits, please list them; but -- on its own -- I see the claim that other MMOs do something as more of an indictment than an endorsement. Many of us are here because we liked the fact that CoX was different; we have tried those other MMOs and found them lacking, so we're hoping CoT will stand out from the crowd as did its spiritual predecessor.

Gangrel wrote:

Those people who don't like repairing gear... were you a person who never let your enhancements go red, and as soon as you could fit better ones you would?

I wouldn't say never, but I did manage to avoid it most of the time -- when I could afford to. This was after I learned 2 important things:
[list=1]
[*]Don't fit all the slots in one power -- or, heaven forbid, all my powers -- at once, because having everything go red at the same time is really really expensive and can kinda stop play.
[*]Don't upgrade even a single slot to an SO unless I expect to have the cash for upgrading when it does go red. More than once in the early years I had a single SO go red at the same time as several DOs, and I had only enough money to upgrade either the DOs or the single SO.
[/list]

Until they were 50, if you took a look at any of my chars, they'd have a mix of TOs, DOs, and SOs in their powers, depending on their level. I rarely had any IOs sub-30 unless they dropped and I happened to have the right ingredients at the time.

Why do you ask/what is the brainwave idea?

What about degredation with levels that can be "repaired" with in-game currency? Think of it like being able to auto-upgrade your enhancements when you level out of them.

Segev wrote:

Regarding degrading gear as a currency sink, it sounds like there are three primary schools of thought:Don't do it! It is unfun!
Degrading gear is how other MMOs do it and it's familiar to people from those
Having gear become obsolete as you level up and re-adding new gear to replace it is the better way to go
If the goal is a currency sink, perhaps "degrading gear" can have a couple "payment models:" Let the gear either degrade with time or levels, and then let people either "re-apply" new gear or "repair" the old gear...OR they have the option to pay an ongoing subscription fee in in-game currency (which would easily translate to an out-of-game subscription fee if they used Stars to regularly buy currency from other players to pay for it) to cause certain categories of (or all of) their "gear" to never degrade/to level up with them.

This is one of those "be careful" moments, Segev. If you set up a currency sink AND supply an all too easy way to avoid said sink, then you might as well have not bothered with creating the sink in the first place. As proof of this "more annoying than it's worth" factor, I offer ... SG Base Rent in City of Heroes ... which ultimately became an entirely pointless exercise that no longer fulfilled a useful purpose.

Let me take apart your 3 bullet points as helpfully as I can.

People throw out the "unfun" card on anything that isn't going to "reward" them with something. In this case, the root cause is the belief that once you get something [i]it's yours FOREVER[/i] and it not only "can't" but also "won't" get taken away from you for any reason. City of Heroes offered a pretty solid case for Item Permanence in its model of Enhancement Slotting, such that your Enhancements could never "come loose and pop out" for any reason short of replacing them (in which case they were destroyed) or in the course of a Respec. The ONLY thing that could "degrade" your Enhancements was ... gaining Levels ... and once you hit the Level Cap, you could just Slot And Forget and never bother that aspect of the game ever again.

The second part of this is that I was recommending Item Destruction as a sort of Death Penalty Cost for resurrecting in a Hospital (in the "we got most of you, but we couldn't save everything" model). Bottom line here is that Players will always hate on Death Penalties, no matter what they are. People in Star Trek Online hate the Death Penalty over there ... of an incrementing 15 second "time out" before you can resurrect, and if you're playing on higher difficulty settings, a "permanent" Debuff that requires going to a Base/City to remove (which costs you nothing in cash) or use of a consumable Item to expire the Debuff. Costs practically NOTHING ... and people still hate on the Death Penalty, even when it's a pretty limp slap on the wrist.

And yet, [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1XXRDHVWGg&t=286]this announcement[/url] all the excuse I've ever needed for there to be a Death Penalty of some kind.

The second point you make, that in-game gear degradation is an MMO standard is both true and "inapplicable" to the City of Heroes experience, owing to the fact that the only "gear" in City of Heroes that affected your character (ie. Enhancements) were never subject to Durability rules, but rather Leveling Obsolescence. Thus, there is the baseline expectation that City of Titans would afford the same kind of "eternal gear" that is never damaged for any reason so that Players won't have to bother with this kind of currency sink.

The third point of having gear become obsolete as you level up works fine ... until you hit the Level Cap. Once you reach the Level Cap, your gear can no longer become obsolete, and therefore no longer (ever?) needs to be replaced for any reason. This then creates a sort of "sugar daddy" situation in which Players advancing in Levels are penalized by needing to replace their gear periodically, while characters at the Level Cap are "freed" from such currency sinking concerns AND and receiving the highest amount of INF per NPC Defeated, creating the potential for a runaway currency generation (which then contributes to currency inflation, leading to a Rich Get Richer while the Poor Stay Poorer dynamic).

If you're going to create currency sinks ... don't go out of your way to create "immunity" systems that turn around and effectively negate the value of those currency sinks at the same time. And be especially careful about constructing a system in which being able to obtain "immunity" from currency sinks involves a Pay Stars scheme that functionally amounts to a "Pay to Play Sink Free" because then you're just setting yourself up for abuse.

I would like to see gear with a "minimum degradation" limit. If you go train before a big battle then your gear goes from yellow to green, or even as high as pink but it's only temporary (either by death tax or just degrade over time). It costs in-game currency to use the training facility. This will also go a long way to keeping the game level gated and NOT gear gated. So many games today where having "average" gear is basically a death sentence in competitive gameplay (PvE and PvP). I personally think death taxes are needed. Maybe in the opposite, if you keep training a discipline your "minimum degrading" is no longer "yellow" but is not "green" and you can keep training yourself up to a "permanent pink" or whatever.. the variance of the gear color is usually pretty meaningless to everyone but pvpers.

As with everything the devil is in the details. We don't know if gear will be 10% of a characters performance or 30% of character performance.. I assume that IF it exists then players will find it "necessary" but how necessary depends on the gamer. I know players who run the whole game with "base/average" gear and enjoy their concepts just fine. I would likely want to fully "trick out" my character. I would likely NOT pay a subscription to "play the marketplace" but I know people who really like to and find it rewarding. I think all forms of metagame should be supported in their base concept including people who like to "win" at the marketplace. Just charge them currency to do it.. (likely in-game currency).

The goal is to have enough "sinks" that keep the player striving to continue increasing their status (whether that be character gear, amount of characters, currencies, perks, badges, collectables, etc). The second the player is "done" then it feels that the game is over until the game has a expansion (and usually level increase). So to look at the equation backwards, Identify what players' objectives will be and make sinks that make those objectives harder to attain (Money sinks in this occasion, but also Time sinks and other currencies the studio values).

Brand X wrote:

How would we have degraded gear in CoT? Example here...
I envision a character as an INVUNERABLE Superhero in spandex! Basically Supergirl. What gear would I have that degrades?

Hairspray.

Nail polish.

Boot heels. Those things always break at the worst possible times!

Wait ... those are all costume parts, not "gear" ...

Redlynne wrote:

Brand X wrote:
How would we have degraded gear in CoT? Example here...
I envision a character as an INVUNERABLE Superhero in spandex! Basically Supergirl. What gear would I have that degrades?

Hairspray.
Nail polish.
Boot heels. Those things always break at the worst possible times!
Wait ... those are all costume parts, not "gear" ...

Exactly! CoT just isn't the type of game to have degraded gear, if it's going to be like CoH.

Gangrel wrote:

Brand X wrote:
How would we have degraded gear in CoT? Example here...
I envision a character as an INVUNERABLE Superhero in spandex! Basically Supergirl. What gear would I have that degrades?

Thats strange, because my hero would not be invulnerable. Sure, he would be "at peak physical for a human", but not invulnerable.
Hell, look at Iron Man. he gets hurt, his suits get broken, wear down. What they do have though (in the vast majority) is the ability to go so much further when hurt compared to a normal human.
But that is just my take on it.

Yes, but is CoT going to have that option to separate GEARED HEROES and UNGEARED HEROES? Not likely.

Yes, it makes sense that the Iron Man hero type would suffer from degrading gear and then have to pay to fix it. Not so much for my Healing Factored Supernatural Levels of Reflexes who wears spandex <---that's my main...the invulnerable as it seems you missed it was just an example of why degrading gear doesn't work.

It wouldn't work in CoH it won't likely work in CoT.

Not necessarily. Look at General Zod vs. Superman. General Zod obviously had more military and hand to hand combat training than Superman ever had. Superman grew up on a farm in Kansas, went to school, and became a reporter for the Daily Planet. Not once did he ever go to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or ever take any Martial Arts classes to learn how to fight. Sometimes Heroes are just born with the powers and abilities they need to do what they need to do. Again, highly debatable. Also, once you learn something and use it constantly.......why would you ever forget how to do it or apply it? Doesn't make sense to me. If I learn how to box and get in the ring several times a year, once a fight is over I don't immediately forget how to box.....

Yes, but again. Once you train in that discipline, you don't forget it. So why would I need to re-train in it after a few battles? I could train in one discipline, then train in another, then another, etc. I would then have all disciplines known and be able to use them all. Much like Neo in the Matrix. Download all the combat techniques and I can then adapt my style of fighting to any style to compensate for who I'm up against.

I can see armor and weapons being degraded due to use and abuse. But Abilities or Powers? No. Once you know it, you know it. My Grandfather learned how to take apart a rifle and assemble it pretty much blind-folded while he was in the Military as a young man. He can still do it to this day even though he is in his 80's.

I would hope that this being a Super Hero game that we don't have Gear that degrades. Only because there will be less "Tech Powers" than there would be "Natural, Magical, Mutant, or Scientifically Modified Powers". That would put an unfortunate bias on anybody who loves Tech backgrounds and chooses Tech as there background for their character as their stuff would degrade while the other players' powers would not.

I'm sorry, but that just really sounds dumb to me. Also a big waste of time. While I understand that there is always room for improvement, I also think there comes a point where you can pretty much master something as well. Sometimes it takes literally hundreds of years for something to be improved upon from what it originally was. Training is not always for bettering your abilities, it's also just to keep yourself in shape. So what, will we have our hero's get fat and lazy over time if we don't send them to the gym for 1 hour a day 5 days a week? There are some things that just don't need to be in some games. Degrading powers or abilities in a Super Hero Game is one of those things. I say look for money sinks elsewhere than in powers or abilities. Enhancements as we go up in levels? Fine. Base rental? Okay. Rent for Apartments or Home? Sure. Rent for a Post Office Box at the Post Office? You bet.

Are we going to be basically playing Sims with our Heroes now? Will we have to feed them, make them go to sleep, make them take a shower, make them use the rest room, etc.? I hate Sims. I hate the tediousness of it all. There needs to be a line drawn for what needs to be done and what we can leave out to make the game play fun and enjoyable. Repairing gear or re-training disciplines, abilities, or powers.......not my kind of fun. I don't like it, I don't want it.

Segev,

New game content, enhanced character specialization (powers/looks) and perks/preferential treatment as Redlynne suggested are winners for obtaining/retaining subscribers. But different people want different things, so periodic polling of the silent majority is advised. And, metrics on C-Store buys won't hurt either. Still MWM will have operating cost and new project (content development) cost and ROI that may influence pricing.

Quick comment on the auction house (AH) prices: It was a challenge but purple drops got you into the game. The funny thing is I had almost finished my IO sets by the time they were sold at the store. Fortunately the store made it very easy to finish things up.

The "gear" in CoT, as far as I'm concerned, should be just that from CoH. Enhancements. Those enhancements degrade over levels, not time or battles. If you feel like the level degrade should be faster than I have no issue with that. Instead of making it every 5 levels you want to make it every 3? Fine. CoH had that right in my opinion. Your ideas of what are good for a game are far left of my ideas of what are good for a game.

The whole thing that gets me, is the degrading disciplines/abilities/powers idea. It just doesn't fly with me. I don't buy that you learn something and then you have to re-learn it again later. So, then the change up to "well you aren't re-learning, but instead improving it." Well isn't that leveling up and getting new powers? Cause that's what I thought it was.

Pick a discipline/ability/power called Super Strength. Level 1, learn how to Jab. Level 2, learn how to do a Haymaker. Level 3, learn how to do an Upper Cut........

Why would I need to go back to a trainer and re-learn how to do an Upper Cut after I've just fought 1000 bad guys by punching them with an Upper Cut?? O.o

Like I said, this idea sounds extremely stupid to me and like a waste of time. Let's find something else to sink our In-Game currency into.

No. You never forgot how to throw a fireball "better". You had a base chance of hitting with said fireball. The enhancements only enhanced that percentage to hit. Also there was always a 5% chance you could miss. Plus add in the enemy debuffs that floored your accuracy and you had to have some way to overcome that. Also add in the higher the level they were above you the more % chance you had of missing. It was never about a degrading power. Your power was your power throughout the whole game and stayed at the same level if you never enhanced it.

oOStaticOo wrote:

The "gear" in CoT, as far as I'm concerned, should be just that from CoH. Enhancements. Those enhancements degrade over levels, not time or battles. If you feel like the level degrade should be faster than I have no issue with that. Instead of making it every 5 levels you want to make it every 3? Fine. CoH had that right in my opinion. Your ideas of what are good for a game are far left of my ideas of what are good for a game.

Static, you're pulling on the wrong thread. It's not a matter of "faster" degradation, it's a matter of that degradation "stopping" at some point (any point, really). For an economy to "work" there needs to be a supply (acquisition) and a demand (consumption) so as to create a useful level of "churn" in which supply is supposed to reach an equilibrium with demand. That doesn't happen (usefully) when supply remains constant and demand drops to nearly nothing ... which is what happened with most Enhancements at Level 50 in City of Heroes. The flow of supply didn't stop, but the demand for that supply effectively dried up because there was (barring respecs) almost no "churn" in the slotting for people's builds. Enhancements never degraded and were never destroyed (except deliberately by Players) and were thus ... ETERNAL ... at Level 50.

And that was just the Single Origin market prior to Inventions. Inventions "moved" the point at which demand for Enhancements dried up to be even earlier in the game, since Inventions were "immune" to being obsoleted through Leveling Up. Meanwhile, the supply kept rolling in without slacking off just like it had before, meaning big supply and diminished demand for that supply. That oversupply substantially wound up being Vendor Trash that got converted into currency (INF) with nowhere to go, because there weren't enough currency sinks to drain away all of the INF building up into the game's economy. Result? Runaway inflation, and all of the perverse incentives that allowed and encouraged to flourish in the game's marketplaces.

This is why I say that there simply NEEDS to be some way to "degrade" or otherwise depreciate game "gear" (in this case, what amounts to Enhancements) so as to create a currency sink [i]that still applies to characters at the Level Cap[/i] ... because absent such a degradation/depreciation at the Level Cap you wind up with an inherently inflationary situation simply due to the fact that a "pressure" that has existed all the way on up TO the Level Cap is no longer present once your character is AT the Level Cap.

Now, exactly how that would be done, what form it would take, etc. etc. ... all of that comes after the YES/NO question of whether or not "gear" at the Level Cap should be subject to some sort of degradation/depreciation [b]AT ALL[/b] ... which then has extremely broad implications for how much effort Players must invest in "combating" that degradation/depreciation (and what circumstances are required to cause it) AND the effects that forcing a demand for a supply like that onto the Level Cap endgame does to the entire game's economy in general. Because if you're going to have currency sinks, they need to apply to ALL Characters ... not just the ones who haven't reached the Level Cap yet (and then once you reach the Level Cap, one of your major currency sinks just stops being relevant).

Gangrel wrote:

However in the other "gear dependant" MMO's out there, you level up, and the stuff you have still provides the same bonus as it did 10 levels earlier. It might not necessarily be as good as what you could be wearing at that point in time, but at least it still works.

In the Blizzard context, they do that through absolute scaling rather than City of Heroes styled relative scaling ... which has the unfortunate effect of generating not only Power Creep but also rampant Power Inflation and Planned Obsolescence through ridiculously disposable itemization. I don't even want to THINK about the number of developer man-hours that have been drained away by World of Warcraft's itemization list requirements for content creation!

Redlynne wrote:

This is why I say that there simply NEEDS to be some way to "degrade" or otherwise depreciate game "gear" (in this case, what amounts to Enhancements) so as to create a currency sink that still applies to characters at the Level Cap ... because absent such a degradation/depreciation at the Level Cap you wind up with an inherently inflationary situation simply due to the fact that a "pressure" that has existed all the way on up TO the Level Cap is no longer present once your character is AT the Level Cap.

I see what you are saying here, Redlynne, but I don't think that degrading gear is the necessary (or only) way to address the problem. The issue is the increased amount of currency that becomes available due to no longer needed to spend it on repairing/upgrading gear once a character hits level cap. While implementing a gear depreciation at level cap would keep that currency out of the character's spare cash pool, the same effect could be achieved by changing the currency rewards once level cap has been achieved.

If, on average, Metaman spends 40 currency out of every 100 he gains on gear repair, then once he hits level cap, decreasing the currency reward so that 60 currency is awarded for every 100 that was previously awarded would result in the same amount of 'after-repair' cash, without having to implement the post-level cap degradation of gear.

Segev,

Good idea!

oOStaticOo wrote:

Also there are other ways to do it besides degrading gear. Temporary powers to be bought. Inspirations. Temporary travel powers. Temporary xp boosters. Temporary enhancement boosts.
Let's not just fall back on Gear Degradation. Let's come up with other ideas to make money sinks work.

I can completely agree to hearing new ideas. The front runner ATM for me is degrading gear or necessary training. Not because it's my idea but because I haven't heard anything more compelling yet.

The mechanic of degrading gear is something familiar, and it can be easily re-branded so that it doesn't reference the clothing of your character is all I was trying to point out.

I am fine with everything you have mentioned as well. I just would not like to see "Gear Degradation" as a money sink. I'm just not really liking that idea as it is so overused.

Getting 733T gear is only important to certain metagames. If you are fine with having your "Pink" turn into a "Green" then you don't have to worry about the system. But if you want to sharpen your skils back to the "elite" level then you need to go train. (BTW I do agree that the low threshold of how "low" a piece of gear can go could stand to be again on the "rent-to-own" basis.. you trained in it 30 times, ok you can stay elite but you can't "sell" it at the elite level.)

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I don't like "taxes" because the sinks seem to become mandatory for all concepts instead of optional opt in basis. There is no "metagame" attached to paying a flat tax. If the tax is weighted how can we be sure it's attached to a metagame that has as much reward as it does cost?

I'm hopeful, but not going to even come close to promising, that we will be able to weight currency sinks relative to the wealth of those who are using them in such a way that currency sinks out of the market at least in a reasonable ratio to how fast it comes in. But that is, indeed, a tricky thing to manage.