While playing D2 I have noticed something I want to bring up here, not as a suggestion for something to do in CoT necessarily per se, just as food for thought.
In D2, in order to increase your effective level in the game, called your "Light Level", (which is the average of the light levels of the 3 guns and 5 armor pieces you have currently equipped) you have to spend various currencies and break down guns to make better guns (and armors to make better armors). This process usually requires 2-3 "Enhancement Cores" to upgrade one gun, which will raise that guns light level by +1 to +10 points, thus raising your overall Light Level by like +1, maybe. RARELY you'll get a core to drop at random from various things you might do. You're constantly getting and dismantling guns, and sometimes you get a core from that. That said, you need way more cores than will drop at that rate. So, on one planet there's an NPC vendor (The Spider) who will give you 7 different missions to do per week, each of which get's you one core. He has a list of 7 missions you have to buy from him for some paltry amount of IGC and then go do the mission to get the core, plus a random gun which you'll most likely dismantle for other stuff. Some of them require you to go to a planet and lie in wait for a named boss to appear (at random) then get some damage on him before he get's killed by someone else.
The Spider is the game's version of Jabba the Hutt and, that being the case, he wheels and deals a lot. He will trade you different currencies in the game for each other, being the whale that he is. Most of these are a bad deal for the player, but if you need a little of one currency and have a lot of other more general currencies, you can get what you need. IT's not the most efficient way to go, but it's faster, while being more expensive.
One of his "for sale" items, as you might have guessed, is Enhancement Cores. But the mechanics of how he sells them is interesting to me.
He has an icon on his vendor screen that gives you 1 Enhancement Core for 10 Legendary Shards. (You get like 3 Legendary Shards when you dismantle a gun, FYI)
If you buy a core for 10 shards, he immediately doubles the price for the next one. So the first core costs 10, the second costs 20 the third costs 40, etc. Then the asking price resets daily at like noon back to 10 again.
Most people say its best to always buy one core per week for 10 shards and no more, as 20 is a ripoff and 40 is totally insane.
How do people (devs) feel about this? Having vendor NPCs who raise their prices then resent them to baseline values periodically?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
unnecessary complication. especially since we wont be replacing gear, just enhancing it. finding myself on a repetative treadmill just to advance would see me leaving the game.
Having slightly different static prices in different shops might make sense depending on the circumstances/setting (CoH did this with the enhancements and selling them in stores), but tying vendor prices to a daily schedule would not be something I am interested in. I find too much of that turns a game into a job. See: all the daily stuff in STO. I stopped playing that game because it ceased being a fun game and became more of a daily obligation to refine dil and hit the dailies.
Absolutely this. When logging in and playing is fun, we'll do it because we want to. When we're forced to for any sort of progression, then it's not fun and we look for another game.
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If the forum had an upvote button, I would upvote this.
"Resets at noon" would be hard enough to keep explaining to US players, let alone more far flung customers, so gotta pass on that. BUT having an "odd" vendor with unusual, perhaps even occasionally shifting prices (once a week for example.) could work. Additionally, rig it so the devs can alter prices for special events. "Did ya hear? Crazy All is overloaded with alchemical silver for 2xxp weekend and he's selling it at half price with no limits!"
At one point while playing on infinity, my guild broke up(skip the long sordid tale of woe). we formed a new guild and I started a new tank. in a very short period of time I had over 1 million rep points to be used for ypgrading the base, just from playing normally. No farming of the same mobs over and over or the same missions over and over, just having fun doing whatever parts of the game felt fun that day. That was something I loved about COH. they didnt feel the need to force us into one segment of the game, the devs were happy we were enjoying the game.
Raising vendor prices to gait player progression is not fun. It just instills a grinding mechanic. You either grind out more widgets to pay the rising prices. Or you grind out more alts to be able to purchase things at the lowest cost. Or you grind out whatever currency (in-game or $) to pay another player (or gold seller or account hacker) to barter for what you want.
In a price variant system (if there was one), I would prefer to see regional shopkeepers have slightly varied rates. Then have those rates (or supplies) shift as commerce occurs. This could be anything like competing stores (think Lowes vs Home Depot). Or it could be a simple difference in supply chain (a farmer selling fresh fruit vs going to Whole Foods). Or it could be a mechanism for a fence to off load illicit goods (which observing it or hearing about it could create a lead for a mission).
Plus if there are regional differences and it varies in some way over time, it gives the players who travel in those circles a valuable piece of information that they can choose to leverage. Essentially if they are out there in the world playing the game and in some manner giving life to it by being out there, they can benefit from it.
"Just, well, update your kickstarter email addresses, okay? Make sure they're current?" - warcabbit
Clearly Destiny 2 is using this mechanic to limit how many of those "cores" you can buy per period of time but also act as money sink if you want to pay extra. I'm not necessarily against the idea of a game trying limit access to a certain resource but I am against the idea that such a thing should be linked to a real world time such as "noon".
For starters (as has been mentioned) how would that be fair to players around the world conceivably playing from any time zone? Also anything that has a "fixed schedule" like that will instantly become farmed for maximum efficiency which only encourages the "negative aspects" of farming in general.
I like what Impulse King said a few posts ago. Having vendors do "random" things would be cool and allow the Devs to do special things for special events. I also like the "competing stores" idea Planet10 came up with.
Ultimately if they really want to limit something like these cores just have the game set up so that instead of resetting the price at a fixed time of day just have it be a "timeout period" so once you've bought any number of cores you're not allowed to buy any more for say 20 hours of real time. That way people aren't limited to a certain real time of day. It's probably not the "best" solution to this, but it's better than keying it off of something like "noon" in the real world.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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The thing with such a vendor is, what will it sell that would be in such a high demand?
Only thing that comes to mind would be a Diablo-esque gambler-merchant.
Just to clarify - I'm not necessarily against ALL "time-gated" content. If there are a variety of things to do in the game it might not be that noticeable (and could discourage people just running the same thing over and over again). It's just that when you start applying that to the most mundane of things like [I]shopping[/I] or converting currency, that's when it starts to get real tedious real fast.
One form of this that I could envision working out "okay" would be a Currency Converter NPC.
Basic idea is that you can convert IGC-A into IGC-B at a loss (of course) ... but as you continue to convert, the conversion ratio becomes increasingly inefficient.
The notion here is that with "plenty of time" you can slowly convert your currencies, but if you're in a tremendous hurry (or are just impatient) there will be an increasing premium put on the service of currency conversion, which then helps sink some (more?) of that currency out of the game economy.
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On the subject of "the daily reset" idea, this is something Guild Wars 2 also does, only in that game it's at 7pm, I think. All of the open-world bosses you can defeat for "good" loot on a daily basis actually spawn like 4 times a day or more, but you only get the "good" loot drop once per day. Instead of separately tracking everyone to make sure nobody get's more than one "good" drop, what they do is reset it globally once per day. Yes, this does open up the possibility that someone might do the event right before the reset and then again right after, but that person cannot get another one until the next day, and people's schedules being what they are, this gives player some flexibility. All of the hidden treasure chests in the game (GW2) are emptied out once you open them and get their loot. They re-close when the reset hits so you can go loot them again.
I doubt CoT will have open world loot-bearing treasure chests, so this is a moot point, really, in that regard, but in regard to the more general issue of time gating player progress, I think this sort of thing actually helps. Nobody can just farm for resources 24-7 if you have daily/weekly reset timers on some of the most lucrative stuff, and I like that aspect of it. While it's true that it may make you feel like you have to log in every day, like a job, it's also a reason to log in often enough to keep my interest in the game in the first place.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Like I mentioned before I don't mind daily timers in games like this. I just don't like when they are keyed to "real world" times.
For instance in Fallout 76 they have daily vendor cap limits (caps, as in bottle caps, are the game's IGC). Pretty much every vendor in the game gets 200 caps per day to buy stuff from players. You can easily sell enough to any one vendor to clean out his 200 caps. But as soon as you "zero them out" a 20 hour timeout timer starts that's attached to you, the player. There's no way to "trick" this timer by switching characters or anything like that. It'll take that 20 hours before that vendor has more caps for you. You can buy stuff from the vendors, but only 10% of the caps you give them become available to grab back (i.e. if you buy something from vendor for 100 caps you only see 10 new caps in the vendor's inventory).
This keeps players from getting too many caps into the game's economy too quickly and secondarily probably serves as a passive means to "encourage" players not to play constantly because you get to a point where you can't gather more stuff until you can sell off the stuff you already have. This timer kicks in whenever you play - it's not linked to any real world schedule so you can't exploit/farm the timer in any way. It allows players to play on their OWN schedule, not the game's schedule.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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At one point, there was a discussion on the forums about NPC Vendors who 'played the Market' and thus acted as 'control rods' to keep the market from melting down. Thus, vendor prices were related to Market prices. There was a thread in there about Vendors who might give out Missions to hunt a particular Faction and collect whatever objects were popular. So, instead of hunting 20 'rats' or 'wolves' or Skuls, you'd collect 'thingies' for points.
Be Well!
Fireheart
One other thing I want to mention that I like about D2's missions system is that the NPCs in that game give out what are called "Bounties". A bounty is just a mission to go do something. In many cases the bounties have enough overlap that you can do multiples of them them while you also do other stuff. Things like "get 15 sniper rifle kills" and "kill 30 cabal" and "loot 5 caches" will all be doable and you can work on them at the same time. Doing a bounty gets you 10 dusklight shards or 10 datalatices or whatever that NPC's personal currency is, and when you get 55 of that, you can get a loot drop from them. You generally get more guns you don't want and you dismantle them for a small amount of raw materials you do want.
The NPCs that give out these bounties are all the vendor NPCs on the various planets. There are other NPCs on "The Tower" which will have weekly bounties you can do for "good" loot drops, which in some cases involve asking you to do like 20 planet bounties or whatever.
So all this bounty stuff gives you a reason to go out into the open world and shoot aliens, which makes the game seem full of people. I'm sure there are multiple instances of the more popular areas running all the time, because when you want to defeat a given world boss, you can find them, defeat them, the go to orbit and re-zone and often enough you'll end up on a different instance where that boss is still alive and you can do it again. Often this is helpful when you get a zone, lurk for the world boss to spawn, then arrive there too late after someone else already soloed it down in like 5 seconds, which happened to me last night :(
Edit: I think this compares favorably to CoH where you used to get missions with no specified loot drop at the end, the NPC never gave you much of anything for free, and not repeated loot drops in any case, and the worst part was, you might have a mission to "defeat 10 Tsoo" then you get a mission from someone else to go take out a Tsoo mission map, and the Tsoo in that mission didn't count toward your quota. I think letting people overlap goals and "double dip" or even triple dip when they do stuff encourages players to do more content.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'd agree that having a system like D2's "Bounties" is a pretty fun way to always give you something to do. Fallout 76 has such a system called "Challenges" that earn you various amounts of "Atoms" which is the currency the in-game store operates by.
In Fallout 76 there are several groupings of Challenges. Some of them are Daily and Weekly (which recycle as implied) and others are based on Combat, Character, Social and World activities. Many of them are typical like "scrap 100 rifles" or "kill 100 robots" but others are more entertaining like "level up while intoxicated", "complete a mission while wearing a Ranger Hat" or "take a selfie at a certain landmark".
Most of these encourage you to go out and do things around the world that you might not normally bother to do. Like D2's Bounties many of these activities can overlap with each other so oftentimes you can make progress towards several different Challenges at the same time. Best of all you can collect enough Atoms doing these things to unlock a fairly non-trivial amount of cash store swag.
Basically it would be cool to have some kind equivalent to it in CoT.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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COH had alignment missions that would give token to buy some very nice purple recipes. that sounds similar.
Cough.
Newspaper Missions.
Cough.
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Not really on either count. Fallout 76's Challenges (and maybe? D2's Bounties) are more like the CoH Badge system with these important differences:
1) You don't actually get "badges". You only earn various amounts of the type of IGC ("Atoms") that unlock things in the cash store.
2) The Daily and Weekly Challenges obviously change periodically. The others are permanently available to earn at any time (like Badges were).
3) They aren't like instanced "missions". They are more like a mix of the type of activities you did for CoH's Defeat/Invention Badges.
One of the nicest things about this is that you can choose to actively work on these things or completely ignore them. Even if you ignore them you'll still accomplish a decent number of them just by playing through the rest of the game.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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Imagine of you could get three missions in CoH, one of which was "defeat 20 Clockwork" another was "Go touch three glowwie call boxes in the open world " and another of which was "go read the History plaque in the sewer room" then instead of having to have one of the three active at any given time, you could work on all three simultaneously by walking through King's Row and hitting clocks, while periodically going from one call box to another, then you end up at the sewer entrance where the plaque is not far away. It's kinda like that, and the best part is, the NPC that gave you all that stuff to do will reward you with like 5 Reward Merits for each of those tasks as you accomplish them. Also, they'll have three more similar things for you to do tomorrow for similar rewards.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Funny story on this note: I was doing a bunch of bounties last night, many of which required me to "ignite a forge". There are 4 forges, I only have 2 of them unlocked so far, so I set up a bunch of bounties I could do by igniting the one forge once. I got there, and one of the bounties required me to click on it while the forge ignition was in progress (this effectively makes you gamble your bounty on the ultimate success of the forge ignition, which can fail if you get beaten by the mobs or the end boss, and the bounty itself has to be bought from an NPC for currency you get). I forgot to activate the bounty thing on that run, so I did a second ignition and activated the thingy doing that second run. Unfortunately, that was a waste of resources, because that particular bounty required me to be actually forging a gun from a gun frame, which I had done and finished in the first run. So in that second run, I burned my "get a new armor piece when you make a gun" item for absolutely no benefit to me, because I wasn't actually making a new gun in run 2 anymore.
TL:DR I had too many bounties to keep track of and forgot how one of them worked.
Another fun side note: one NPC charges you 250 glimmer for bounties that give you 2500 glimmer. You're literally paying money to get more money back, but you have to go do the bounty to get paid, which bounty usually is really easy (shoot 35 aliens, etc).
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising