Don't really care for it, especially in this type mmo. It's basically just an arbitrary money sink which tends to discourage a number of people.

Hearty agreement with the "No Gear" party. My problem was always: "Dang. I'm dead. Okay, respawn with broke gear. Dang, dead again. Respawn with USELESS gear. Dang, gotta go across town to repair. Aaaaand all the mobs I fought through to get to where I died are back! Yay, frickin' yay." If this boss was too tough the first time, How'm I supposed to finish him off with busticated ol' gear?!

Gear repair served as both a "pacing" technique for the game (encouraging you to take time away from the constant grind) and as a currency-sink to keep the economy's inflation managed. It would be possible to counter the inflation with other currency-draining elements (or even limiting currency rewards) and "pacing" is a rather dicy element.

On one hand, it can slow a player from sloughing through content mitigate a gold farmer's activity- if he's got to constantly repair during his daily grind, he has less coin at the end of the day and time spent repairing (or he functions at diminished capacity with broken gear. On the other, it is just... well, un-fun time.

Now, there are plenty of ways to encourage "downtime" or slow the farmer rather than armor repair.

Back in SWG (original) there was battle fatigue- (they had this on top of repair). As you fought, you took battle fatigue. As it built up over time, it affected your battle performance. You'd go to a cantina and watch a dancer or listen to a musician to relieve that fatigue. It was intended to also encourage socialization with the player-dancers and musicians, but that went poorly- people wanting the fatigue relieve and entertainer buffs just wnated them done so they could leave and kinda resented the forced-socialization.

Still, something of that concept could be done. The trick is to make it engaging and rewarding and turn the "penalty" around, applying bonuses instead.
Spidey often did some web slinging to clear the cobwebs from his head. Storm found solace in the clouds.

- define non-combat activities that don't earn coin, but doing them earns a buff that follows you for X time. travel is one, time spent in social spaces like dojos, dance halls, etc could be another. The rampant farmer has to decide between playing without that buff (and possibly earning more) and not earning gold while earning the buff. By including some social elements and some active ones (like the travel power minigames I'd mentioned somewhere else) you don't make this boring downtime. You also let all players not see that time spent not earning XP as "downtime" -- its' a different type of play with its own type of reward.

chase wrote:

Gear repair served as both a "pacing" technique for the game (encouraging you to take time away from the constant grind) and as a currency-sink to keep the economy's inflation managed. It would be possible to counter the inflation with other currency-draining elements (or even limiting currency rewards) and "pacing" is a rather dicy element.
On one hand, it can slow a player from sloughing through content mitigate a gold farmer's activity- if he's got to constantly repair during his daily grind, he has less coin at the end of the day and time spent repairing (or he functions at diminished capacity with broken gear. On the other, it is just... well, un-fun time.
Now, there are plenty of ways to encourage "downtime" or slow the farmer rather than armor repair.
Back in SWG (original) there was battle fatigue- (they had this on top of repair). As you fought, you took battle fatigue. As it built up over time, it affected your battle performance. You'd go to a cantina and watch a dancer or listen to a musician to relieve that fatigue. It was intended to also encourage socialization with the player-dancers and musicians, but that went poorly- people wanting the fatigue relieve and entertainer buffs just wnated them done so they could leave and kinda resented the forced-socialization.
Still, something of that concept could be done. The trick is to make it engaging and rewarding and turn the "penalty" around, applying bonuses instead.
Spidey often did some web slinging to clear the cobwebs from his head. Storm found solace in the clouds.
- define non-combat activities that don't earn coin, but doing them earns a buff that follows you for X time. travel is one, time spent in social spaces like dojos, dance halls, etc could be another. The rampant farmer has to decide between playing without that buff (and possibly earning more) and not earning gold while earning the buff. By including some social elements and some active ones (like the travel power minigames I'd mentioned somewhere else) you don't make this boring downtime. You also let all players not see that time spent not earning XP as "downtime" -- its' a different type of play with its own type of reward.

Uhm... no intent for this to come out brash or anything, but are you posting in the wrong thread or something? what's with all the farmer/gold farmer talk? The OPs post.. and subsequent posts for that matter, have nothing to do with nor mention of either. Furthermore, I think your suggestion would hinder casuals and normal players more than gold farmers, who could for example, just let a character sit around in a social area while they load up another account to continue farming.. swapping back to the first when it's time for the 2nd account to get their "buff".

I get where you're coming from, but honestly man, gold farming was never a big problem in CoX... there was like a 6 month or so span where it TRIED to make an intro, a short time after the release of AE I think it was, and then it was gone but everybody kinda stayed a little paranoid about it. The only thing we need to quell gold farmers is a good reporting tool and a small service team to verify reports aren't made just to grief others, I'm pretty certain the community can take care of the rest.

As far as "gear repair" goes... no thanks. It's something I've always despised in MMOs. Any kind of money or time sink tied directly to player effectiveness like this is a fail in my book. Time and money sinks, IMO, should be implemented through player extras like the auction house, personal housing or non-required advancement (see "incarnate system"), QoL upgrades like bank or storage use and express travel (using trams/teleporters for quick transit) or group oriented content like super group related activities (i.e. buying/building/expanding sg bases and options).

One of the great things about CoX was no matter how much play time you had, you could get something accomplished, whether it was just logging in for 5-10 minutes to check your auctions or 20-30 minutes for a few missions, you could do that. I've played with people who only had like 2 hours a week to play... would they even have bothered if they had to spend half or even 1/4 of that time "fixing gear" or being required to "sit around a social area" or "just fly around a while"? We should let the players decide for themselves when they want to have "down time"