Extra Credits - MMO Economies - How to Manage Inflation in Virtual Economies > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W39TtF14i8I
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whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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Very good read... and it highlights one the problems that City of heroes had as well. At level cap, there were *minimal* out going sinks for keeping your character at the top of the game... You could play a level capped character and have no outgoings at *all*. Costume changes only hit those who changed their costumes... SG fee's were in a different (although you could convert Inf to Prestige if you were short, and that was a cash sink).
The only other one that *could* hit everyone (or at least 50% of the game base when freedom was around) was the Auction house/IO crafting.
i agree u and anyone Suggestions Ideas add to is topic or ask Extra Credits do more videos of it
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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Sadly there is no way I can think of that will combat a max level character from growing in wealth without it feeling like a punishment.
In another thread I suggested a defeat penalty be just a flat percentage of the characters total currency with a cap on how much can be taken so it does not become a punishment. For example a level 20 character who has 10 000 currency is penalized 10% for 1000 but a level 50 with 1 000 000 is hit for 100 000. The cap would be decided with some data mining to find out how much a typical level 50 can earn in an hour then setting the cap based off how long you want a character to spend recovering from the loss.
This way its more fair across all levels as no character will ever lose the majority of his wealth from a single defeat. It also adds a drain on currently active max level characters while not affecting those not active.
I know there are ways to get around this loss with wealth transfers to other characters in your control (if the game allows such a thing) so some kind of safeguard might be desired ... like a transfer fee or a time period where the wealth was held before being transferred and still counts among the first character wealth.
Its not a perfect system...but then none ever will be.
Yup. Every time someone proposes a "sink" of some kind to manage an inflationary problem, someone else comes along jumping up and down decrying it because that "sink" has the power to Ruin The Game (entirely?) for them. It's the age old What's Mine Is [b]MINE!![/b] problem, backed with the "because I EARNED it!" rationale. That's because no one likes to see their toys broken and no one wants to be bothered with maintaining what they've gotten.
I'm sure there are plenty of engineers out there who would love to ban Entropy from the real world too.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Nomenclature: What do you guys think about the "reputation" model? Where your character gains reputation which while is used as "money" is not a direct correlation.
I'm a fan of tax/tarrif/sinks wherever they occur. I am also a fan of money caps on how much a player can hold and how much an item can sell for. Keep the players poor, but keep the game engaging.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Star Trek Online has a limitation on how many Energy Credits a single character can hold. 10 million.
You can then pay Zen to purchase an account wide upgrade that pushes this limit to 1 billion.
Game is perfectly playable with a 10 million maximum currency limit ... although there are some incredibly rare items in the Exchange (think auction house) that are priced above 10 million Energy Credits, and thus can only be bought/sold by players who have paid for the currency limit upgrade. There's only a tiny handful of items that are priced like that by players though. Most stuff is under 10 million a pop.
The way that Star Trek Online gets around this limitation is ... the Account Bank. The Account Bank, shared among all your characters on the account, doesn't have a max currency limit on it. But the characters themselves do have a max currency limit on them. Any currency gained while your character is at the currency limit is either prevented (so you don't "burn" yourself) or simply lost/wasted when you receive rewards (killing foes, mission rewards, that kind of stuff).
I'd be perfectly happy with having a max currency limit of the square root of your current Level rounded up for convenience in millions. So a Level 1 could have 1 million, a Level 4 could have 2 million, a Level 25 could have 5 million and a Level 49 could have 7 million in currency on that character specifically. Just round numbers up to the tenths of millions to keep it simple when doing the math (so only two significant digits). That would provide an indirect ceiling on currency accumulation and trading prices ... barring the "pay Zen for a higher limit" possibility.
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One way of getting people's influence (or whatever it will be called) is to have consumables that cost Infl. That way, you know when you buy it that its not going to last forever (like groceries, gasoline, etc). CoX had this, to a small extent, in the form of Inspirations you could get either on the AH or from NPCs. The "+1 effective level" ones could be gotten for like 2 Empyrean Merits from Emp Mike in Orouboros, and you could often find them for various prices on the AH as well, when they weren't sold out. The other thing that makes for a decent sink is not having Enhancement Unslotters. So you just lose the Enhancement when you replace it with something else. Assuming that even the Respec doesn't allow unslotting Enhs, this would likely lead to people just slumming it with cheapo enhancers until they get to level 50 and then thrying to get the build they want after that. That would require more endgame content to do with the toon for the time between hitting the cap and getting the build done. Cox in it;s later years had lots of stuff to do if you were lvl 50, CoT likely will not when it's first rolled out.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Reputation sounds fine....but I remember hearing something about a reputation system with foes groups in the game. One should probably be named different (don't care which)
Another thought. One reason why all of us aren't rich, despite the fact that we have jobs that make us money, is that we have to pay for upkeep stuff like insurance, food, rent, utility bills, etc. If the game had cool perks you could have that people love to use, but which cost influence over time, like electric bills and so forth, that might be good. I could see SG membership being one of these things, assuming SGs and their bases come with some cool perks, like the TPers that CoX, added storage for stuff, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
It would also hinder those who want to experiment with rare enhancements (assuming the game has them) for the loss would require a significant investment to replace. It leans to far in the gear grind type of game for my personal tastes.
I suppose you could charge in game currency to allow a player to use an unslottable regardless of respect. This would both act as a sink and allow players to experiment. It would actually be just another type of consumable.
Until I know how SGs and bases are going to work in CoT I can only say I am not sure I like tying it only to SGs is a good idea.....if we had personal bases then tie it there....but a SG usually has one guy in charge the logistics of how to pay inf for base perks would be a bit annoying to everyone else.
I like the idea of having consumables that are really good only purchasable through a Vendor. Sure inspirations dropped all the time when you defeated enemies, but have in the store an inspiration that not only boosts accuracy but damage as well. Have it cost 10,000 inf. Have one that boosts Accuracy and Damage and also decreases Endurance usage. Have it cost 100,000. Etc. The better the boost is, the more it costs. Have Temporary Powers purchasable from the Vendors. Have special costume pieces that can only be bought from the Vendor. Have the Auction House take a 20% cut instead of a 10% cut. I think there are ways to find currency sink without making it feel like a punishment to someone playing, we just have to look in the right places.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I believe one Sink in plan is the Personal Housing. Paying Rent and such. This wouldn't be the Supergroup base it be your own space. The Batcave instead of the Justice Watch tower. I do remember they said there would be both player housing and SG bases. Not sure how they plan the cost/money system.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
I suppose another thing you could do, in response to the "rarity of enhancements" issue islandtrevor72 raised, is to have unslotters or whathaveyou, just make the unslottter as expensive in Infl (or real cash) as like 50-75% of the street price of the enhancement being unslotted. That way you could just let the cheap ones get destroyed while still allowing people keep the really hard to find ones, albeit at a pretty steep price. I mean, availability and price are not the same thing. In the last year or so of CoX there were times when I had more than enough Infl to buy stuff I wanted at going rates, but there just weren't any on the market to buy (mostly uncommon recipes/set IOs that people were just deleting or selling to NPC vendors for quick Infl without the hassle of the market). This way, with expensive unslotters, you could still unslot a Purple and sell it or email it to another toon instead of having to delete it on the toon that currently has it and doesn't need it anymore.
Another thing you could do is have all enhancements be subject to wear and tear such that whether you get defeated or not, they eventually wear out and need to be replaced or re-energized in order to work as well as they used to when they were new (or to work at all, maybe). This way, again, you know when you buy an enhancement that it's going to need upkeep. You could even make the Influence cost of maintenance on a given enhancement a thing that some enhancements are really efficient and others really inefficient. So some Enhs are REALLY powerful and buff like THREE aspects of a power, but cost TRIPLE the going rate in upkeep costs, but others are maybe less combat-effective and are cheaper to maintain. And then some rares might be good AND cheap or GREAT and somewhat high-maintinence, etc. I could see that being a thing you could try to optimize, like factoring in cost-of-ownership on a car. It could be dependent on how long you stay logged into the toon with that enhancer slotted in, or dependent on how many times you've activated the power the item is slotted into, or dependent on how long the power is toggled on for, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
This is why I like the WoW/Wildstar route for respeccing... it is an ingame currency cost that scales with your level. WoW adds another factor into it, in that the more often you swapped your skills around the more expensive it got (up to a limit) where if you then stuck with a build its costs would slowly decrease over time. Wildstar just keeps its "Respec AMPs" cost fixed to your level (caps at 50G per respect at level cap)
Multiple builds (purchasable with ingame currency) can also help. Make them purchasable from an NPC above and beyond what you could normally earn in the game through levelling.
Having items that are ONLY purchasable from an NPC that give you a bonus above and beyond what the player could earn normally through the game (via drops) is another option as well.
"The bag of infuriation" (its a bag that cycled through the rarity... also gives you a title once you have clicked it enough). That can cost a load... has no ingame benefit... apart from a Title. Also removes cash from the system.
A Speed boost enhancement (passively ability) that gave you 2-3% more base movement rate... Cost a load if ingame currency. Means you get from A to B faster... but the bonus only really pays off in the long term. But it gives the players something to aim for... Something to spend money on. Something to say "I earnt this" (normally via the hard route).
World of Warcraft has a mount that costs 100,000 Gold. It has a vendor and a repair man on it (if I remember correctly). Does nothing else special. It is paying for convenience...
There are a million and one ways to provide sinks to help control inflation in a MMO economy, I am fine with must sinks that are optional (as in the consumables or permanent small buffs) personally. The one think that I would hope be considered before putting in any kind of sink is to not make it feel like it is punishing (in the case of defeat penalties), a necessity (like a buff that becomes a requirement to succeed) or out of reach ( a cost so high it would take extreme commitment from an average player to attain).
In truth one of the best way to control inflation is with currency caps on accounts (not characters but accounts themselves). At least as I see it.
CoX, which I think we all agree we liked, had several built in sinks, some of which were not optional, which did almost nothing to actually affect the economy in any big way. The fact that SO/DO/TO enhancements could be out-leveled as you leveled up made them a sink (and the main one in the early years before IOs, I mean people would intentionally go into XP debt just to avoid out-leveling their SOs sometimes). Was this punishment? I didn't think so. Was it pay to win, no because everyone had to pay a sub to play CoX during that time anyway, and afterward SOs were passe. There weren't unslotters originally then either.
Now, what I proposed above (enhancements which require maintenance in the form of in-game currency and/or real world money) is like the outleveling of SOs thing, except that it's not based on level but on usage. An enhancement would go from say, 30% damage buff down to some lower level, down to maybe zero (maybe not zero) as you use the power it's slotted into more and more, with the rate at which it does that based on how often you use the power (oir how long you have it toggled on for, etc). So it makes no difference how many times you get defeated (unless it's a power you can only use when dead, like RotP), and it's not something you get around by hitting the level cap. This gives people a need that they have to spend earned influence on in order to maintain their toon, but the system only requires you to expend resources in proportion to how much you use the powers. Oo if you put a toon on the shelf for a month, none of that toon's stuff will run out of gas in the meantime. This also means that level capped toons still need to spend influence on maintaining their builds. Basically, everyone needs to eat, exercise, put gas in the car, etc and this is a form of that for heroes. You have to put a certain amount of time and energy into practicing and training to keep your powers at their peak, and this would be the in-game reflection of that. Even for toons whose powers are completely internal and not gear based, those powers will still have enhancers in them which presumably reflect the amount of time spent and work done to make those powers as effective as they are, and that is a continual, ongoing process for heroes.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
With regard to the influence cap idea, CoX had a cap of 2billion infl on a toon. People circumvented that in a number of ways:
1. Stockpile useful items that you can buy with influence and which you or someone else may need in the future. I personally had one influence-maxxed toon and about a dozen rares and purples in the SG bin, not to mention salvage in the vault and recipes on my person etc.
2. Make more toons and mail them the extra influence/valuables.
3. Constantly have multiple bids and items for sale in the auction house such that you're making money over time (buy low, sell high) but a lot of that is bound up in the market most of the time. This can also be done using other toons you made, so your financial empire grows with every new toon you make, assuming there are limits to the number of bids and sales you can have at any one time on any one toon.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
One of the other ways to manage currency inflation is the Star Trek Online way of handling Dilithium ... making a distinction between Raw and Refined. The stuff drops or rewards in Raw form, and you can only Refine so much of it every day (8k per day, base). This then puts an upper limit on how quickly currency can enter the Dilithium Economy.
Then you've got a tremendous number of sinks for Refined Dilithium in the game ... everything from Fleet Projects upgrading shared facilities (think Super Group if it helps) to personal gear for ground and space. There are just so many ways to SPEND Dilithium that don't involve giving it to another player that it is very easy to spend a LOT of time playing the game and be Dilithium "starved" for almost everything you want to do.
Oh and although [b]INF[/b] was deployed brilliantly in City of Heroes ... as INFluence, INFamy and INFormation, depending on your faction, but it was just a semantic difference really ... we really want to use something else in City of Titans just to avoid the grasping tentacles of the Villains at NC$oft. So we're going to need to use a different name for the in-game currency in City of Titans. What say people toss out their ideas for currency names here?
I'll start with my idea:
[b]Publicity[/b]
Abbreviation could be either PUB or just simply P ... like how 100 gold gets turned into 100g. So 100 publicity would become 100p.
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Having a stockpile of items would be a limited way to avoid it sure.....but as I will explain below if the game takes into consideration the cap in its economic stratagies it would not matter.
I specifically said account wide not per character. It wouldn't matter how many characters you have the cap is the same.
The reason why the auction house thing worked was because of when the deduction for bidding was done. If it was not pulled out of an accounts wealth until the sale was final then it would still be considered a part of that accounts wealth. It could be set aside so that a player could not make a bid and then find he could not pay it.
In truth there will be people who will always find a way around any system...you cant prevent so instead you safeguard.
The biggest draw of having a wealth cap is the fact that nothing can ever cost more than that cap. If the game uses the cap to balance the game it will realize what the lowest value of a 1 currency is and it will never go below that. As a result the game economic model can take this into consideration and design around it.
There is also the fact that a max wealth means that ever player can reach the cap and so either they no longer add wealth to the game economy (a kind of sever cash sink) or they spend more before hitting the cap so as to not waste earned wealth. In the end the characters we worry about raising inflation the most just can't after a certain point.
As I have said before...its not a perfect option but then none ever will be perfect.
Ironically I think people would be against this form of maintenance, seeing as they seem to be against death penaltys/gear degradation in other threads (one person said "no matter how you wrap it up, item degradation is something that I dont want". Which is strange really because your combat effectiveness was NOT being affected. It was just your gear that was being used as a multiplier in rez cost)
I am fine with this one because it is a maintenance fee, and if it wasn't this one, then there is the death penalty/cost of rez/other things you can do. Sure you as a player might be against this option, or the other option, but something like this *does* need to be in the game otherwise you end up with a runaway economy where you have to start balancing the cost of new stuff for the older players, which then makes it extortionately expensive for the NEW players.
The thing is, I find it ironic that people complain about the cost of salvage in City of Heroes on Wentworths/Black Market... when it was a natural by product of both a *limited* avenue for some salvage so you had to run unrelated content for it (AE farms for tickets to get the salvage) or get them on an alt. And the fact that the level 50 characters had a far higher earning potential than a lower level character helped accelerate this (not to mention as well that level 50 characters NEEDED this salvage for their own IO's... which meant that they could and would pay over the odds for the same salvage that a level 15 character was going for).
Yes, there were break points that an IO was NOT as effective as an SO; but to be honest, unless you were a serious forum goer/interested in the game, that information was NOT well known. But that is something else that people need to factor in. That was a failure of the invention system there... where people were brought up from other games and see the scale factor (X is better than Y is better than Z... in CoX it was X is better than Y is better at Z, but not at all levels)
But this then meant that the people who had the influence could afford to pay a lot of inf for *common* salvage. Which then created a feedback loop. There was *nothing* that required a player to spend influence. If you were not a costume player, or you had purpled out your toon (or just were not able to use it) and not part of an SG... there was minimal other stuff to spend the cash on. Which then meant you were generating funds with NO option to spend it. It was something that CoX needed. More fun "optional" stuff that you could buy.
To be honest, inspirations dropped so often that if need be you could go and spend a few minutes playing the game and generally pick up a load...
But because the inspiration system was %age based, the small greens were *very* handy (for example) the higher level you were. They healed more for the same small cost that a level 1 player would pay. They didn't do the "heal 500 HP" that most other MMO's do. This meant that if a level capped player had to buy a small inspiration, the cost for it was FAR smaller (in earning loss) than a level 10 character would have to put up with, even though the level capped player could carry more of them as well.
The problem with "enh degradation" in CoT is that they are not "enhancements". They're, per the Devs already, "improvements". They represent the work you have done to focus on and get better at that particular powerset or power. If you've earned (through doing missions or getting drops) such an improvement and it afterwards degrades, it was never improved but instead had some external boost applied. This will definitely go counter to the character concepts of many players, especially those with "magic" or "natural" based origins. By making them higher in strength as they get higher in level (by smaller and more frequent increments than CoX used) you'd make players want to keep improving them just to get better. Just because enhancement out-leveling was done in CoX does not mean it should be done in CoT in any way.
In fact, I would say that it better fits the idea of Improvements to have them be non-transferable and non-sellable, thereby making them sinks. If you don't want to use an acquired improvement, your recourse is to save it or delete it. Obviously this would necessitate the ability to keep Improvements through respecs but those that are not reused would still have the same limitations on transfer.
Make their purchase prices low enough as compared to their rarity so that people would still want to buy them from vendors but high enough that it would still be a worthwhile sink and then the only drops people would use would be the ones they got that offered a significant improvement to something they really needed at that time.
Turning Improvements into Consumables is not a good option, IMO. I do, however, agree that Improvements could be an excellent target for use as a sink.
Another sink could very well be to place a cap on how much currency a character can have on them at any time, and then have storage facilities that can be rented. Each currency account could hold a certain amount (the greater the amount the greater the rent) and a character could rent multiple accounts if desired. This would force characters, especially those at the level cap, to sacrifice a small amount of currency to the sink in order to keep a larger amount available to them. The only problem with this is for the replayability of the game; it would mean that toons would have to keep being played in order to constantly pay off that rent and not lose their stored cash. That problem could possiblly be dealt with by making the rent schedule relative to the character's in-game time, but I'm not sure how feasible that would be. It would make it so the amount of rent paid would be offset by cash-gains per hour. Even then, it would limit non-productive time spent on Costume Contests, RPing, etc. In short, I'm not sure if this kind of sink would benefit the game as a whole even though it would certainly help to stabilize the economy.
CoyoteShaman
And here, IMO, is the perfect, albeit partial, solution to the economic issue. As I said pertaining to Improvements, I would make boosts (which is what the Devs have already said this kind of feature will be called) non-transferable and non-sellable. Further, they should be, as Gangrel said, set amounts instead of % based, and should have increasing costs for increasing strength. They should also only be available from vendors or via drops from foes at appropriate levels to the need for that strength of boost (i.e. higher strengths drop at higher levels).
Vendors could sell % boosts but at much higher costs, and such boosts could be crafted, again for much higher costs. Perhaps these kinds of boosts would not even ever drop except from EBs or above.
For the record, I was very pleased with the debt style defeat penalty except for its meaninglessness at level cap. Duplicate that defeat penalty except for applying it to cash and you get both a valid and meaningful defeat penalty and another very useful throttle on cash being introduced into the economy.
CoyoteShaman
I disagree with the assertion that "enh degradation from use" is somehow counter to the game's flavor or in any way harshes anyone's immersion. All physical items one might employ in fighting crime are subject to entropy, they can and will wear down over time, and many such items need to be fueled to work (flame throwers, ammo for guns, energy to power you ray gun, etc). As the old shoemaker's motto goes "Time wounds all heals".
Now, as for non-physical things, like karate skills, magic spells, the ability to project energy blasts from your hands, etc , there is still the possibility for a form of maintenance on stuff like that. You have to train and practice and exercise and eat right and study technique, etc to keep your mind, body, and soul in peak condition for performing the sort of superhuman feats one would expect from a martial arts hero. Heck even in the comics they talk about how many calories the Flash has to eat to maintain the kind of superspeed he has. You have to study and meditate and practice magic to be good at magic when the time comes to use it on a badguy. If this doesn't equate, in some way, to spending earned Influence to maintain your enhancements, I don't know what does. It feels like a perfectly natural fit to me that the one thing (game mechanics) would represent the other (the need to clean and reload one's guns, stay fit, practice, one's skills, etc).
If you claim that this is not a good fit of game mechanics to the ideas they represent, then you must, I would expect, have the same complaint about putting enhancements into powers in the first place. I mean, really, how was Li Tieh Kuai's Candle supposed to improve my toon's healing abilities in CoX?
From where I sit, it sounds like a lot of people here want to win the game in the rules writing phase. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, and by that I mean the vast majority of people want the system to work like this: "I get influence from defeating badguys, I use it to buy gear that can later be sold, which will retain its value over time or get more valuable, so thus the influence I earn and spend never really goes away, and I get to keep all the moniez and have the enhancements too. I win."
This is like saying "I'm going to buy a car now, drive it for the next 30 years without ever fixing it, buying gas, or replacing the brake pads, etc, then sell it 30 years later as a "classic car" collectible for a huge profit. I'm SO GOOD at the economy!
Anyone can slap together a convenient story about how THEIR character's powers work in such a way that they never need any consumables because their toon is powered by magic or gamma rays or what have you. The game needs to not be like that, in my opinion. So I'm sorry, but the unoriginal idea we've all had of playing the game as "Perpetual Motion Machine Man" who always has infinite energy to use to power his ability to do anything he wants and never have to spend infulence, money, or anything else to make that happen, nice though that pipe dream sounds, should not be allowed to actually work in this game, in my opinion.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'm sorry for sounding harsh, Radiac, but did you actually read my post, or just glance at the first paragraph? All of the examples you gave of things which need upkeep are instances where appropriate consumables would be used. These are represented by Boosts, not by Improvements.
As to all skills needing upkeep: yes, that's what experience is. If your "Energy Blast" isn't being upkept by your practice and experience, how is it improving over time? How are you learning to use it in new ways? Keep in mind, please, that the Improvement system is going to have two categories of things to tack on to your powers: one is a focus which you have developed and improves your powers' traits in some way, and the other is a modifier to how the power works (as opposed to how well it works). The latter is placed on top of the former. If improvements degrade, then you're potentially loosing an entire tree of adds.
If, instead, you follow my suggestion that new adds increase in value/strength at higher levels, then the older/weaker adds become relatively much less valuable and therefore replacement is desirable, giving the player the choice of remaining gimped or upgrading their powers.
Further, I did, in fact, have that same problem with enhancements in CoX. I said as much in my post. The problem of out-leveling them, coupled with them being called "enhancements" in the first place, made them external gear. By calling them "Improvements" in CoT, the devs have changed them from something like gear to something more like extra training. And yes, I always felt it was absolutely ridiculous to have silly names for the enhancements thereby making them completely inappropriate to certain character concepts. I had, and was verbal about, the same issue with Origins in total. It ran directly counter to the idea that players should be able to tell their own stories within the greater story and it had no purpose in the game.
I also expect you didn't read the part of my post that stated quite clearly that I believe both Boosts and Improvements should not be either sellable or transferable. Once they are removed they should be either saved by that character or deleted, thereby removing that resource from the game.
There should most certainly be consumables, even those that are very important yet very rare as drops and very expensive from vendors. I discussed and described my thoughts on Boosts in my post. IMO, the primary problem CoX had with insp was that they were both far too common as drops and far to cheap from vendors. This problem was aggravated by the ability to transfer them and sell them on the market, as well as one of the most foolish features: to combine them into more powerful or even different insp's.
I also spoke in favor of defeat penalties as a sink/expense.
If you are going to quote me, please address the comments I have made as opposed to comments by others. If you are not intending to refer to my post, then please don't quote it. Some of your comments were unnecessary, insulting and presumptuous ("So I'm sorry, but the unoriginal idea we've all had of playing the game as "Perpetual Motion Machine Man" who always has infinite energy to use to power his ability to do anything he wants and never have to spend [influence], money, or anything else to make that happen, nice though that pipe dream sounds, should not be allowed to actually work in this game, in my opinion" for instance). That is not remotely constructive, especially to someone who has, in nearly all topics, supported your opinions in whole or in part.
I respect your opinions, even when I disagree with them. Please don't change that fact by showing blatant disrespect for my opinions.
Thank you.
CoyoteShaman
Hmm I do want a bigger warehouse/vault than we had in CoH/CoV, I remember stockpiling extra things by selling them for extraordinary high prices in AH and using the AH slots for extra inventory spaces.
Imaginitive young lady looking for clients, talents are imagining the realistic possibilities of practically anything, and applying new technologies to practical applications in all types of business.
0 - Let's just face the fact - There will be economic/ class disparities. Regardless of what barriers are placed in front of us some of us will either circumvent the rules or use the rules to our advantage. Like in real life. There will be super rich and super powerful people. Some of us are more ambitious than the rest . Like Genghis Khan, Alexander, Martha Stewart ...
I - Regarding enhancements - Maybe the most powerful enhancements could have a risk-reward built into it. The greater the enhancement, the greater the risk that it will fail outright, misfire or backfire. Let's just say after twentieth level. Sure, I can drop a cool million on this enhancement which is crazy powerful but what if every 1% increase in power comes a 1% chance of failure. What about an exponential curve? Look, we're not purchasing a Maserati or hoverboard here. Those things have a guarantee , a warranty . However those alien technologies and magical things-that-man-was-not-meant-to-know come at a price, you know. Of course, the rewards should be great. I loved the boost (can't remember the name right now) that had a chance to turn me into a Rikti Monkey. Never used it in combat (after I used it in combat and it failed me and used it again in in desperation and it failed). Hilarious! Especially funny when you're a tank. Hey, it worked 99% of the time!
I'm bad at chopping up quotes and responding piecemeal, so I'm going to quote things "the low tech way" and for that I apologize.
Winterset wrote: " All of the examples you gave of things which need upkeep are instances where appropriate consumables would be used. These are represented by Boosts, not by Improvements."
I take this to mean that your take on things is that (in CoX language) Inspirations should be the influence sink , not Enhancements. I disagree. I view Inspirations as "reaching back into my inner reserves occasionally and giving 110% when the chips are down" not "investing my time out of combat wisely and staying in shape/keeping my gun well oiled etc". Going back to the suspension of disbelief problem for a second, that will always be there to some extent anyway, and I for one don't expect it to be a deal breaker in terms of the mechanics of the game. for example, I don't see how a "Rage" insp should make my bullets do more damage when I shoot my gun, and I accept that as a necessary dichotomy for the game to work well. You can't fully eliminate all of that, and I think designing a game that has a robust economy is more important than eliminating 100% of that stuff.
Winterset wrote: "As to all skills needing upkeep: yes, that's what experience is. "
I disagree, to some extent with your premise here too. I agree that one's energy blasts ought to get more powerful with experience. That's one thing XP does for you, it makes your best that much better. But with time, metal rusts, chemicals oxidize, muscles atrophy, muscle memory fades, spells are forgotten, skills start to dull, etc. The Inspirations are not meant to be a reflection of me practicing my batarang skills in my batcave, they're meant to reflect me exerting temporary extra effort when I actually throw the batarang at the Joker. I assume Batman could use a "nitro boost" to make the batmobile go faster for a brief time, but despite that he still had to keep the batmobile well-maintained via money and work in the batcave. He could pop pills to give him a temporary advantage in combat versus a foe, but he also he had to keep himself in fighting shape physically and keep his skills sharp. This every-day upkeep, to me, should be reflected in some form of influence cost of maintaining one's toon, in the sense that the powers (via the enhancers in them) will tend to degrade naturally over time and need to be maintained. Simply charging more for one-of power pills is not, to me, reflective of that at all.
Also, from a physcology standpoint, there are people who simply ignored the Insps in CoX or at least didn't rely on them in any big way. I mostly just carried wakies and blues for when I was out of endo, that and the ones that got you out of a mez. I thought of them as nice extras, not the life blood of my toons. Enhancements, on the other hand, were things I think basically everyone felt they wanted to have and to keep reasonably well maximized for effect. People in the early years used to die on purpose so as not to outlevel their SOs too fast. The problem with this as an influence sink was that when you got to level 50, you didn't need to replace anything anymore. With wear and tear costs that are based not on level but on amount of use, you still have to fix or re-energize your stuff even after level 50.
Winterset wrote: "I also expect you didn't read the part of my post that stated quite clearly that I believe both Boosts and Improvements should not be either sellable or transferable. Once they are removed they should be either saved by that character or deleted, thereby removing that resource from the game."
I read that. I don't think it's going to happen, and I don't want it to, so I basically ignored it in my last post. People like having an interactive economy where they can generate very random stuff and either use it or sell it to someone. That's a fun, robust game economy. Making everything bound on pickup is no fun, to me, and I know a lot of people who dislike it pretty intensely. Assuming rare and very rare recipe/enhancement drops are going to be randomized, this means that when you get a rare or very rare drop, you are most often going to get something that is more useful to someone else than it is to your toon, If you can't move it to the people who would want it for something fair in terms of infleuence, and you have to just use it or delete it, that just sucks. You were supposed to have gotten a REWARD from that rare or very rare drop, instead you're looking at the magic wand you just got saying "If I were a wizard, I would be able to use this, WHY couldn't it have been a magic sword?!" and then you delete it, because that's your only option. That is a major drag. This forces us to make the rare drops non-random and just drop merits or influence and let people buy or craft everything on their own, which removed the "random, I won the lottery" feeling you get when you occasionally get a purple, for instance. I like that feeling and I don't want to see it done away with.
Clearly the two of us have places where we agree and disagree and we would not create the same game if given the opportunity, and that's fine. If I have used these posts as a vent for my frustration with ideas not promoted by Winterset, I apologize for projecting that onto Winterset.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I have never played an MMORPG where player housing and guild housing were actually used. Almost every MMO that I have played in. You build your house/guild base...and you forget about it. You can sometimes go there to store items but that's about it.
I think player housing and guild bases are just a waste of time. Time that could spent in other areas of the game.
In CoX people used their bases to get around more efficiently (bases had teleporters that got you to places somewhat faster). I also used to craft stuff there and store stuff. There were some missions you could do from your base too right? Cathedral of Pain maybe? I forget. People liked bases as a Minecraft sort fo thing too, it was an archetectural version of the costume creation fun. You got to design an interior space and show it off to people. We also used them as an alternative place to rez instead of the hospital, which had its advantages some times too. You could rez at the SG base and then refill your stuff there to some extent.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I don't know the details. The Personal Housing is more for RP wise, friends hang out in a private instant (or more adult RP) kind of thing. Sure RP could be consider waste of time if you don't rp and are more into the just action side of it. I do know there was a lot of talk on how to make Bases and Housing more important to the overall game. Using your crime computer to look up info, scan security systems for clues for criminal activity. Monitor a jewelry store for the best time to brake in. Base Raids from other players and or NPCs so that nifty base could be a location for a battle when your Nemesis comes pay a visit.
Yeah you haven't seen such things used effectively before, then again MWM are thinking of new ways to do many things that haven't been done before.
At the same time back to topic. Setting up a pad with all the bells and whistles is a money sink something you do for fun just to have your own batcave with Trophy display. Hmm wonder how much a Giant Penny would go for?
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Radiac, I notice you have again quoted me, in the low-tech way, and yet have still taken some of my points either out of context or in direct contradiction of the point itself. This could be because I, perhaps, have not been clear enough about the points I am making so I will try to state them simply and separately. Hopefully this will alleviate the confusion. Note that I am not trying to convince you of anything. I'm merely trying to make sure my points are both comprehensible and not made by another (either intentionally or accidentally and not necessarily you but anyone) to sound like I'm saying something I'm not.
1) Names matter: Things in a game are named by designers. These designers have a reason for naming things as they do. They use these names to convey the role played by those things within the story.
2) Names have already been decided upon: The devs have already indicated what the names are for the things we are discussing. They're using Power-Set Improvements for those things that are slotted into power-sets and Power Improvements for those things which are slotted into Powers. They're using Boosts for those consumable things which give short-term increases to specific stats when consumed.
3) CoT things != CoX things: The devs have also already stated that they have different concepts for what these things represent, which is part of why they are using the names they are. Using CoX names obfuscates the intended role of the CoT things in the story. I am not discussing "Enhancements" or "Inspirations". Those things will not exist in CoT. Analogues are not Equivalences.
4) Not an either/or scenario: I do not believe the sink should be either Improvements or Boosts. I believe they both should act as sinks.
5) Degredation vs. Relative Value: By forcing Improvements to "degrade", the devs would effectively be making them not Improvements but instead "gear". By increasing the strength available as the level of the character and the mobs increase, the devs would be both promoting the upgrading of Improvements (which fits the story) and rewarding characters for fighting higher level mobs than themselves.
6) Non-transferability/-salability: I understand completely that this concept will rub many people the wrong way and has a very tiny chance of being implemented, but since I believe all of these points, on both sides, fall in that same category there is no reason to not present it here. The point is to make Improvements and Boosts even more of a sink. So long as they are transferable, there will always be those who will use them for currency farming. Every character will get Improvements and Boosts they cannot or need not use. That will be a substantial increase in available wealth.
7) Higher Boost Rarity: The more rare a consumable is, the higher the value. This is especially true if they cannot be passed around like so much candy. By making them be rare drops, you nudge people to buy them from vendors and you can get toons to pay higher prices for them.
8) Death Penalty is a Must: While I won't speculate as to numbers, I would say that charging a certain percent of available (or even total) money will promote resource stockpiling. By making it a debt that must be paid off by only receiving half of money drops until the debt is paid, the inflow of money into the economy will be slowed.
9) My Random Thoughts: I do not, necessarily, recommend or advise any or all of these concepts be implemented in CoT. These are merely ideas I have heard or come up with. (In fact, IIRC, number 8 was stolen from Radiac and then slightly modified) I'm not arguing in favor of these things; I'm trying to generate honest and rational discussions of the pros and cons. This will not be possible so long as I'm being misunderstood, so I'm trying, patiently, to be as clear as possible.
CoyoteShaman
PS: Please note that I'm not bothered by disagreement; I'm bothered by being misunderstood and then not asked for clarification. I'm also bothered by hyperbolic rhetoric or, worse, blatant condescension and insult. I'm not suggesting that Radiac has done the latter in this thread, I'm merely trying to explain my motives. In fact, I thank him for the clarification and apology in his final comment of the last post directed at me.
I enjoy a good spirited discussion too :)
1, 2 and 3) I agree that names matter, and I know they've indicated that they'll be calling things Boosts, etc. they've also said "None of this is set in stone until the game actually rolls out" and until we actual have a game (to argue about) I tend to crystallize my thoughts in terms of CoX because it was something I have a certain amount of concrete experience with. I don't have any experience with Boosts and/or Improvements, so I'd rather not use those terms, because I'm not thinking in them.
4) It's okay with me if Boosts cost more in CoT than Inspirations did in CoX, but if they end up working pretty similarly, (that is, providing a small increase to combat effectiveness for a brief period of time once activated, and being consumable in that sense), then I personally hope they are as optional in CoT as Insps were in CoX, and if that is the case, I don't think they'll be a terribly effective currency sink. In CoX I never got the impression that I HAD to have all the right Insps all the time in order to be able to do missions, etc. I mostly just used them as I got them on some toons and packed wakies and break frees on the toons that didn't have resistance to mez, and blues on toons that did.
As such, I think this leaves us in one of two places: either A) the Boosts are going to be WAY more necessary in CoT than Insps were in CoX and thus an effective sink (a possibility I personally dislike, because it makes me feel like some kind of power pill addict who can't function without his fix every five minutes) or B) The boosts will be as optional and "handy, but not 100% crucial" in CoT as they were in CoX, in which case the high price will cause people not to use them the vast majority of the time, just against really tough opposition, meaning there won't be much currency sunk by Boosts.
5) I disagree with this on several levels. First, if these are things that your toon slots into a power that make the power better, they're basically "gear" in the game-mechanics sense, regardless of what name you give them. I mean they operate like Enhancements did in CoX, on a basic level, don't they? They're not like "gear" in WoW in the sense that they have no effect on your character's looks, costume, etc, and they may not represent actual physical items in all cases in terms of the flaovr, but they ARE items in terms of the game itself. They can be crafted, found, bought, sold (if the economy works as I would want it to), slotted into a power, etc just like CoX's Enhancements did, so they're as close to "gear" as what CoX had, as I see it. Maybe in flavor they're not meant to represent the same things like Nectanebo's Gourd etc, but they serve the same purpose, which is to make your "Energy Blast" power more accurate, or recharge faster, etc.
In that sense, whatever an Improvement is, I don't think that it needs to be a thing whose effects on the powers it is slotted into must remain constant with repeated use. I mean, as an example, I might have a power where I shoot Radiation out of my eyes and do energy damage with a chance for -def to the target. As an Improvement, I have some in-game item that slots into my "Eye Beams" power that makes that power better. Maybe this represents better goggles I designed that I'm now wearing, making my Eye Beams more accurate. Or maybe it represents the fact that I'm practicing my Eye Beams more often in order to make it a better power when I need it in a fight. In any event, whatever that Improvement represents, there's no reason it has to remain at the same level as I use the power. The better goggles can wear out over time and need to be cleaned, etc. Or maybe I've stopped parcticing it in my spare time so much and it's starting to get rusty. In any event, I would argue that there is no loss of believability in the name Improvement just because the amount of improvement to the power might erode with repeated use. All things do. If you invest the time and effort in maintaining things, you keep them operating at max capacity (and improving MAX capacity is what leveling up gets you. You can always punch worse because you're out of practice, even though your BEST punch is still better than it used to be when you were 5 years old, etc). Also, I'm not saying things shouldn't increase with level, only that the sort of "out leveling your Improvements, need to get new ones" phenomenon ceases to be a sink when you hit the level cap.
6) Okay we just agree to disagree on the economy aspect here. I like being able to sell of unneeded stuff for currency.
7) See my response to 4) above.
8) No argument between us here, defeat penalties are something I embrace as a reason to avoid defeat. I've said many time that a more strict or harsh base rule set creates room for things that circumvent that harshness in various way, in short, they open up design space.
9) This is the pace for ideas, but if you posit an idea, I think people will expect that you are "for" that idea, in general.
10) I apologize in advance for all the places I will continue to use hyperbole in the future :) You can take the internet away from one sarcastic jerk, but you can't take all of the the sarcastic jerks out of the internet...
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
i make old topic name Rent-A-Hench Feature has potential i say
to help Economies what u guys think? and here link for Topic http://cityoftitans.com/forum/rent-hench-feature-has-potential
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
To be honest here, Rent-A-Hench is not a new idea for Shadowrun. The SNES version of the game had it in there.. both as plot mechanics and as a game mechanic (the person in your party affects how well you can do certain stuff. Not essential but could be handy).
They were also a limited resource IIRC. They could be killed, and wouldn't come back.
Now that last part is an interesting part for MMO's. MMO's have no "completion" factor in them... a lot of the time when you get to level cap, there is normally *some* form of repeatable content/long range target for you to shoot for. Or raiding.
So having them as a limited resource is *not* recommended. However you can scale the costs up and down according to the level of the charcter doing the hiring. Also they can be used in a similar fashion to the companions in SWTOR. Over there, you can use them as a stand in for one (or two) missing members of a team (the team size is four). They are *NOT* perfect, they are also not always a waste of space. But they can be better than being a person short. You just have to learn how to use them properly.... just like mastermind pets to be honest.
So if you have some forced "team" content. They make an ideal drop in point, to help fill the gaps. Not always needed (if you can find real people) but they are there if you find yourself *short* so you can that mission that just needs one more person there. Not perfect, but something that could help out.
I would put Rent-A-Hench in the temp power option. Being able to spend ingame funds on temp powers at the store. That could be a worthy cash sink.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
what i think of if u yourself *short* so you can that "missions" that just needs one more person there or "Duos are two-player instances"
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
I don't understand how any MMO gets this wrong. Consumables, equipment breakage/replacement. Any method to suck money out of the game at a rate comparable to its acquisition. Simple math.
On the other hand one of the things I really liked about CoH at launch was its lack of "stuff" and economy. You bought / looted enhancements and that was about it. Yes influence began to pile up eventually but that never bothered me. It felt realistically superhero-ey to me never to worry about "money" and I felt some of the later changes to the game in this respect detracted from its charm.
Before they introduced the AH and Invention system, to be totally honest, the lack of cash sinks was NOT a problem. Because you didn't have much else to spend the money on. But as soon as they AH and Invention system came in (especially with a limited source of drops for *some* of the salvage) the economy was effectively broken from the get go. It was introduced too late.
The thing is that *most* MMO's have the things that you say should be there... but there is normally an imbalance somewhere. The cash flows from mobs too fast, the cash sinks are not large enough, there is not enough "essential stuff" to spend the stuff on, NPC vendors will buy your stuff no matter what (limiting this would be most interesting to be honest... but money inflation is typically *slower* over there than anything else. The balance part is the hardest thing (even though you think it should be easy, players are well known for taking the *easiest* route to make money, or circumventing cash sinks you have in there).
But you have a look at how much cash some CoX players had... the amount they had made my eyes water. Not even the amount of funds that players in Eve Online had made me *that* worried (probably because of scale of the game, isk sitting there doing nothing is isk being wasted... unless you had it earmarked for something).
I might have a load of cash in Wildstar, but I *know* what I am going to be buying with it... it won't just be sitting there doing nothing. It will be working.
But here is the thing... the item that I am buying is from an NPC. The most *expensive* thing right now from a *player* that I could buy is cheaper than this skill, and that item that I could buy would be a *perfect* item (Max rune slots, correct rune *types* as well, correct stat bonuses).
Sure, this is on my server; but just perfection is hard to come buy (not to mention as well that Housing is a good way to take cash out the system... I keep on buying housing items. Shame that CoX used a different base currency for that as well...)
I have played an MMORPG where guild housing was actually used. It was called City of Heroes.
My SGs used our SG bases extensively. We would spend hours getting the base to look like we wanted it to, then we'd use it constantly. Sometimes as a transportation hub (having all the teleporters was nice), sometimes for crafting, and often as a place to hang out, chat with other members of the SG and role play.
Bases are anything but a waste of time.
Agreed. I have used the housing plots in WIldstar quite a lot to get from A-B quickly, to get stuff repaired whilst "mid dungeon/raid" (wiping 20 times on a boss gets expensive), selling stuff, crafting, Recording music [1] etc. And they don't even have to be on MY plot either. I can use my neighbours facilities as well (due to plug limitations, I might not have everything I want on one place)
And then there is just the social gatherings as well. With the exception of the floor piano though, everything else is pretty much doable in the game world, even if its not "immediate" access and you have to travel to get there.
[1] If using a floor piano counts that is.
For all the flack that Wildstar might get with its main game design, I *DO* enjoy the flexibility that the game has towards housing, and it is something that they are adding more and more to in upcoming content releases.
If I recall correctly, the storage of stuff in CoX wasn't totally perfect in the sense of who could access which stuff when. What I mean is, you could access your own personal salvage from the vault, but I think the storage of Enhancements was either communal or restricted by rank in the SG, e.g. only the highest level members could remove IOs from the bins they were stored in, etc.
It would be nice if the player's personal bat-cave in CoT were able to store all manner of personal stuff, plus maybe allow you to make your own mission content, get a mission to do occasionally from the bat-computer, rez when defeated at your personal bat-medical-evac-porter etc. Then have the "communal" version of same in the SG base, plus maybe something like the zone TPers that CoX had.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Removal Permissions were set for each individual storage unit, at the time of its creation. And doing so was somewhat non-intuitive. It was possible for a person with Base Editing privileges to create a storage unit that they could not, subsequently Use. That was the default setting.
Be Well!
Fireheart
There are two sides to designing an MMO economy. One is: Will it work (i.e. not suffer from rampant inflation that devalues the new player experience). The other is: Will the players let us get away with it.
Number one is already difficult to do, but players have over the years gotten used to the internet and the feeling that everything is free. The earliest games could get away with rent (a tax for being offline) and even being unable to store gear (you had to sell it to a pool and on relogging use your money to purchase whatever was available in the pool at that time with excess items being randomly destroyed to make room for new stuff). Nowadays such severe rationing systems would never be accepted.
In fact in SW:TOR there was a price to respeccing after the first (two?) and that price kept going up the more you respecced your character, but it reset again after a while. The end-game before everything crowd blew a collective gasket over that and forced Bioware to almost entirely remove that money drain. Same with death penalties and repairs, those are, marginally, accepted in single player games but MMO players by and large object to them. Strenuously.
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That warning given, let's see what 'money' means in a superhero game where there is no mild-mannered alter ego who needs a job to pay the rent. There is no food, no rent, no utilities bill, at least it is not in the game so we can rule out that whatever the heroes are paid in is entirely unlike real money. Those pesky necessities are taken care off off-camera and need not bother the player or the game designer.
So, instead what does it mean for a hero (for villains the concepts are a mixture of being exactly the same and of being the inverse) to arrest a criminal or prevent a dastardly plot? Two things I would say: Gratitude and Reputation.
Grattitude is fairly straightforward. It is the tickertape parade, the old grandmother naming her cat after you, the news paper putting your name on the front page. It is an interesting intangible reward mechanism that CoH employed in a very limited extent through the citizens talking about heroes and their successes when you stood near them for a few seconds. I think most players would enjoy hearing their victories mentioned by NPCs, and above that see frapped footage of their recent daring rescue mission replayed on television screens in shops and perhaps on billboards throughout the game, to have newsies hawk their papers using -your- name. And yes, defeating a giant monster or the most challenging raids would warrant a tickertape parade as part of the reward, not just for the players themselves in a cut-scene, but for -all- players to witness. And we do not have to limit ourselves to globe spanning events either. Neighbourhood newspapers and commitees can use the same mechanism for rewarding players for completing particularly challenging level appropriate missions in their area or zone.
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Reputation on the other hand has the possibility to be a real currency within a game. However it will be a very unusual currency. At its core your reputation is the belief -others- have that you will get the job done, whatever that job is. It is something you have with somebody else. You can lose your reputation by failing to get the job done, but that again is in theory only between you and the person who expected you to do your job succesfully. This reputation does not automatically carry over to different areas or different organisations. And if there are a hundred different organisations in the game you have a hundred different reputations. With a new organisation you have to start from scratch again to build up your reputation with them.
Of course, there will be some overlap and mission contacts in one zone will be able to barter some of your reputation you have with them, with another contact they know so they will give you a chance.
Another thing about reputation is that it never gets to be huge numbers. It could even be expressed entirely as a sequence (ranging from none to trusted absolutely) but computers work best with numbers so we might as well have it on a 0-100 scale.
If you, as a hero, agree to a mission you are promising to do something. If you fail to do so you will lose some of your reputation. This can easily be modelled by 'paying' some amount of reputation to a contact and being rewarded with a bit more than that on success. Depending on how deep te story is for a contact the markup can be bigger (few missions to tell the story) or smaller (many missions to do the same). Assuming you put 10 reputation points on the line for a normal mission, and on success you earn 11 reputation points that contact in essence needs 90 missions to max out your reputation with him or her. If you get rewarded with 30 reputation points you only need 5 missions to reach the same point.
If you crank up the difficulty slider then you also increase the risk to your reputation. You are after all telling your contact that you are able to do something even though the contact believes differently. If you fail the damage to your reputation will be greater (as you are now seen as a braggart as well), but if you succeed your reputation will increase more quickly as well.
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So where does this turn into a sort of currency you might ask? The point of having a reputation is that, on occasion you can say to your contact "I can do this but I need ..." and the contact will, based on your reputation be able to turn to his own network and put you in contact with somebody who can supply you with whatever it is you need. Do so too often though and your reputation begins to suffer again. Or in game design terms, you barter your reputation for in-game rewards. Your contact may be able to point you towards a vendor for training or augmentations or inspirations or information or temporary powers, but this will diminish your reputation with him.
And at the highest and most exclusive level you will need not only reputation but also gratitude. A reclusive genius may be able to provide you with some kind of extraordinary gadget, but he is reclusive and will not even see you, never mind deal with you, unless he has reason to be grateful to you. So unless you are willing to complete the story missions he is involved in he will not trade with you.
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This use of reputation as a currency however is, or should be, limited. It is between you and a contact, and by extension the organisation the contact belongs to. The more distant the member of the organisation from your contact, the less your reputation counts (e.g. halving your reputation with every degree of separation). Your 100 point reputation with your contact is just enough to get that 3rd degree separated new contact to give you a try (100 -> 50 -> 25 -> 13). And because your current contact takes a risk recommending you, you lose reputation with him as well.
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So rather than one huge pool of money you have small, finite amounts of reputation with contacts and the orgainsation(s) they belong to. Those reputation pools are capped, but that is ok, because the point of them is to use them for all kinds of in game rewards and improvements. You swap them for specialised training or inspirations or temporary powers, and of course to develop new contacts who have access to more advanced rewards. (this also neatly curbs powerleveling and low level farming as neither will offer reputation that your character has use for yet, or anymore).
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Where the use of reputation as a form of currency strains the willing suspension of disbelief is when it is used as a medium of trade between players. Your reputation as a hero after all is personal to that hero. You can barter some of your reputation with a contact to give another player a chance with that contact, but you can not give your reputation to another hero.
So if a system similar to inventions is implemented in CoT, or in fact anything involving any type of loot at all, it will need a separate type of currency, and a type that is much more traditional currency. There is however no way around the fact that that secondary currency is highly inflationary. The game after all creates an unlimited number of enemie to defeat and with that an unlimited amount of loot (money) to enter the economic system. Because trade between players does not remove any money from the game all that money continues to accumulate.
The only in-game limit I can think of right now is to assign to all loot an amount of 'potential'. Each hero has a limited total potential, but can exchange that in the market place with items (the IOs) that are an expression of a certain amount of potential. The maximum in potential will put a cap on prices in the market, but there are two undesirable potential consequences from such a system.
One is if the potential value is set by the developers than there is in effect no market, only a primitive barter system. The other one is that if the valuation is left to the players it is quite likely that some players will end up with too little potential for the IOs they need. The risk of shooting yourself in the foot is severe, and the game will need an exploit-safe way to reset a character.
And of course there is the problem that a hero who maximised his or her potential has no way to pick up further salvage/loot. We may have to split the system into a potential pool for actual autments and a budget for creating those augments with (which can simply be a maximum number of salvage items that can be stored). But that may make the whole economy too complicated and send us crashing into issue number two of designing MMO economies, players will not accept it if it is seen as too convoluted or too expensive or too unfair.
The two major currency sinks I have been working with the other designers on are the vendors themselves (which will take some explanation as it goes beyond the obvious) and the personal (and supergroup) bases/living spaces.
Vendors obviously are a currency sink, but in most games they're insufficient because they sell limited items and they have fixed prices for those items. Moreover, they give fixed prices FOR items, which means they're a direct translator of non-currency drops into more currency inflation. The interplayer market (the AH in CoX, the Exchange in STO, etc.) never normally solves inflationary issues because currency still enters the market faster than do goods people wish to buy (increasing the supply of currency more than the demand - the definition of inflation), and the market itself [i]is not a currency sink[/i]. Currency changes hands from player to player, but remains in the game. This is not a problem in a real economy where currency is either tightly regulated in its creation [i]or[/i] has some sort of intrinsic value; neither of these is true in an MMO (at least, no MMO of which I'm aware except, MAYBE, EVE Online).
An approach to solving this would be having the vendors act like real economic agents. They seek to earn currency through their businesses, and they have inventories to manage. Furthermore, they can, themselves, play the stock market in an effort to "buy low and sell high," helping smooth some of the rough edges that stem from the interface and market manipulation tactics of savvy players. This would influence their inventory, allow them to put their inventory on the market, and, most importantly, if their A.I. (whether heuristic or computationally intelligent) is done well enough, they will generally [i]make[/i] money from their efforts.
Vendors are under our control, as game maintenance personnel. While the developers cannot in good conscience simply delete currency from [i]player[/i]-controlled accounts, nobody would even likely know if we did so from vendor accounts. We can't just make all the currency a vendor gains vanish; he couldn't play the market or buy goods from other players, then, unless we gave them an infinite well from which to draw (which would actually increase inflation, and is thus a bad idea). But we could periodically cut X% of the currency held by vendors out of the game. So if they're playing the market successfully, they'll be up there with the top-tier market-players in wealth...and we can just remove vast quantities of that wealth from the game to combat inflation.
The other approach is in things like bases and living quarters. More things require rent than can be out-right purchased, and bigger and better things take more space, and more space is MORE rent...
The idea here is simply to provide a lot of the "Acquisition Game" services as recurring costs, and to scale them upwards in terms of their "coolness" geometrically or even exponentially. Always, always have something bigger and better and cooler to pay for such that no matter how wealthy a player becomes, he can always have something for which he wishes he had MORE currency. This is the nature of an acquisition game in general, but we'll need to really deliver on this to make sure we keep creating newer, better currency sinks for the ultra-mega-wealthy. And to keep it smooth enough that there's never an obvious plateau wherein "well, I'm rich enough to trivially afford what I have, and I'd beggar myself to get even one thing in the next level up of coolness, so I just won't bother." It should always be that, just as you get the last thing in your prior list of upgrades and new toys, you see another one juuuust within reach. Maybe even at the same price as the last thing you need for your current acquisition spree, so you can forgo the latter for the new toy...and thus must choose which to get right now. And can see how you could get the other later, with a little more wealth...
These ever-increasing sinks based on the cool stuff you're maintaining for your character will generally cause the players who accumulate large quantities of wealth (by whatever means) to [i]help[/i] us sink currency out of the economy, because they'll [i]want[/i] [i]something[/i] to do with their money. And we'll provide it for them.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I think that having for-profit AI, market vendors is genius...especially, if there's disparity across the goals, objectives and strategies among them.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
Segev's post makes me very happy.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Cosmetic stuff to buy for extortionate costs are always going to be stuff that players complain about.
I hear about it in Wildstar, where some cosmetic items (from NPC's) sell for 50 -100 plat (1 plat = 100 gold). Most players could earn 1-3 plat a day (if they know what they are doing), and more if they really *grind* it out.
So even just having a *few* of these "exclusive" items is good enough to take stuff out of the game.
Hell, I bought a speed increase for my mounts for 80 plat...
And people say that it was a waste of money.
I like it.
Especially with my hoverboards (which I can customise in look... and there are a few other boards and flairs that I want to get as well.... and they are expensive)
I never said it would be [i]easy[/i]. But the goal, in my mind, is not pure cosmetics, either. Genuine new conveniences and features should become available with some of these. I imagine a fair number of those who will be contributing to this currency-flushing will be completionists who want every single possible in-game capability available to them in their bases.
But it will take care and planning and adjustment as we strive to make it work. I think that it will be insufficient on its own, anyway. The vendors marketeering will be an essential complement. On the other hand, part of the reason for the ever-increasing places to spend currency are just to give people something new to strive for all the time, too. So if we gear that aspect of the game for that kind of gameplay, we should naturally stay on the right track.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I can't express enough disgust for having an in-game economy in a game about super heroes. It just feels completely wrong on every level.
That said, if we must cater to people's need to buy and sell stuff that doesn't exist outside the game server, can we keep it rooted as firmly in the "meta" as possible, and streamline the convenience of it's use. I don't want the SWAT captain offering to hire me as a mercenary to go take out 25 Pyrebrands before his team raids the warehouse... even if I am a mercenary, because the payscale offered for performing missions is dependably insufficient to buy anything of worth. I'd rather work for faction rep than game currency any day.
What I would find tolerable is an arbitrary, tradeable, stacking inventory item similar to CO's "Cosmic Keys of Power." Just similar, not the same. Let's call them "Bags of Cash" (because I've used that name before, and it's conceptually fitting to the genre). You can buy them from the cash-shop if you want, or find them in game through numerous sources (Rob a bank, arrest a druglord, etc). You can trade them to a vendor for a pack of boosts, you can trade them to special, unlocked-through-content vendors for other stuff, like special faction related powers (COP suit?) or faction rep, or costume pieces, or other stuff. Optimally they can function as a standardized commodity for players who want to trade stuff back and forth, like the Keys are used in CO at the moment.
As much as I would love to avoid the banality of my heroes going through the pockets of someone they arrest for loose inf (This may be a fair representation of many cops in real life, but I want fictional cops that live up to honorable ideals dammit), I'm sure we'll be stuck with it and it will be incredibly impractical to try and ignore this "feature" of the game, so since currency will inevitably be tradeable can we track it globally, rather than having to log back and forth between alts to transfer currency back and forth to account banks, just so one alt can buy stuff with money earned by another...
I also don't envision my hero shaking down thugs for loose change.
However, then comes the issue of what to do when I get a 'Widget X' as a reward for doing my good work, but I don't need another 'Widget X', I need 'Widget Y' to complete my super-project. So, maybe, through some clearinghouse, like a Market, I learn of somebody who has an extra 'Widget Y' and would trade for 'Widget X' because he's found another person who will trade an 'X' for 'Widget W'. So, we all make these exchanges and everyone is happy...
Of course, this presumes that all of these widgets are equally scarce and equally useful. If they're not, then things start getting... complicated.
History shows that a good way to smooth out the issues of a Barter Trade system is through the use of some medium of exchange, so we have currency, whether it's white shells and black shells, shiny rocks, metallic disks, or paper, or cigarettes, or 'Influence'. The Devs of CoH envisioned Influence as a sort of meta-currency for incremental reputation-enhancement that heroes earned for defeating foes. They could, then, trade on that reputation to acquire goods and services needed to enhance their heroic exploits.
Great concept, but the players quickly ignored that and said "Money!!" followed by, "Gimme More!"
So, conceptually, you never went through anyone's pockets, or put Influence in your own pockets, but simply accumulated reputation in an escrow account in the process of doing your deeds. And Red-side, they gained 'Infamy', while the Praetorians collected 'Information'.
And the players said, "Huh?? No, Inf is Money! Gimme More!" followed by, "Let us Trade!"
So, what I'm saying is an Economy WILL exist. If the Devs don't make it, then the Players will, because after Eating and Procreating, humans' most basic instinct is Trade. And sometimes Trade beats Eating and Procreating.
Segev just told us about some very interesting mechanisms the Devs could use to keep CoT's Economy running smoothly.
I'm looking forward to seeing how it works.
Be Well!
Fireheart
When it comes to Superheroes Finances play a part as well. Bruce Wayne has all the funds he needs for all the gadgets he wants, Peter Parker... um hold on I think there loose change in the sofa budget doesn't. The difference is day jobs of course, however I suffer working normal life as it is I don't want to have to mop floors playing Ultraman to earn the cash needed to buy that cool hoverboard.... So
Yeah get some kind of credit / reward for fighting crooks. Is it Mercenary job? Maybe not more like Bounty Hunting, or just rewards for turning in Wanted Villains.
As Fireheart said an Economy Will exist because of the needs of supply and demand. The demands of the Game in this case over rule Demands of Submersion. Arrachnoman isn't going to have to take a day job as a newspaper photographer to earn a living, Spiderman had too. Ultraman isn't going to be a Newpaper Reporter for the Daily World, where Superman worked for the Daily Planet.
There also the desire to see rewards for hard work from us players. That Epic Arch Villain we had to do a Seven Mission story Arc task force to beat better drop some damn good loot, XPs, and $$$. Yeah so my Hero technically wouldn't be raiding the pocket of those he fought (some alts might), I the Player want to know all my hard work was worth it. To Much XP would brake the game sending us to the end far faster than we should. So brake the reward up and give XPs and Credit/Gold/Inf. Some drops in the form of Enhancements/Augmentations (keep forgetting what we are calling them now) or Inspirations/Boosts.
Is the hero getting the XPs or are we? We are the ones who plan/plot/or guess how we build or hero. We choose the powers and put in the enhancements where and how we want. Those aren't Character XPs sure we can say it's them getting better or stronger but there no number value to it. Is Credit/Inf the same? Couldn't it be seen as the same Most of that would go to buy Enhancements for the character.
RP wise you can say the rest of the money is from the "Day Job" and not by taking out thugs credit cards.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
The theory behind CoH's "Influence" was that it [i]wasn't[/i] money. It was a combination of reputation and favors owed and goodwill from the populace for your good deeds. It was an abstraction of all of these things into what you could "influence" people into helping you with by giving you things. It's like how Superman can walk up to STAR Labs and get them to let him use their newest doodad to fight Benchtimus Prime and his army of robotic park furniture.
So that's supposed to help the "submersion" aspect of things: it's not money.
I know it played exactly like money and thus felt like it, though.
I still haven't come up with a good name or narrative explanation for the generic in-game currency. But we're working on it, and we will do our best to make it as immersive as possible. Still, MMOs need economies to function properly as games, lest they become frustrating grind-fests wherein you can't get what you need and want for your character but have detritous that others would kill for lying around and virtually rotting because it's useless to you.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Titan City has had a very large, very active superhero population for decades. It would not be particularly surprising if they had introduced a system for crediting heroes for doing their thing and keeping the city safe. This would also go some distance to explain why Titan City is so popular with heroes: people can do the hero thing full-time even if they're not independently wealthy.
There could also be an option to select a different name for the currency, such that if I want Heroman to be able to count on his fame/influence to get what he needs I can choose 'Fame' for him, while my mercenary characters will have 'Money/Dollars/etc.'
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Unless you can just convert 3 of something "useless" into something you find useful. Or break down the useless stuff into components that are used for crafting useful stuff (It was a good idea in CO, just wasn't implemented very well). You don't need a trade/economy system to help the players get the loot they need if there's another system that does that without creating a self-bloating economy, and an otherwise useless resource to grind in order to trade for things.
It doesn't matter what justifications you use to call in-game money something other than money. If it works as money, it will be used as money, and it will make a significant portion of the game a drive to acquire more money so you can buy things from people who want more money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM9N30V4wnQ
While we definitely will have a crafting system, and I hope it will very much help empower people to turn things they don't need into things they do, removing the option to simply trade with other players is defying the second "M" in "MMO:" multiplayer. Part of the reason to play an MMO is the many and varied ways to interact with others and share the world and game experience.
If we have a means of trading between players, there WILL develop a currency. I'm drawing a blank on the name of the item, but in Diablo II, even without it being a [i]massively[/i] multiplayer game, the ability to trade items between players' characters led to the development of a fungible currency-item. One of the rings that you could get was rare enough to be vaulable but common enough to be fungible, and was used as a default currency when people didn't have gear on both sides of a trade that the other side wanted sufficiently to barter.
Therefore, having a fungible currency is part and parcel of having a trade capability. If we don't introduce one, one will develop.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
This happens in movie prisons (and I assume real ones) with cigarettes as the currency. It also happened in Magic Online with "Event Tickets" as the currency, and there, the tickets cost $1 each, all tickets that exist were at some point created by the Magic Online company, and they can be traded along with cards and unopened packs of cards. So you have bots on chat channels advertising things like "Card Bot buying 300 of your unwanted common cards for a total of 1 ticket" etc. And then some bots sell stuff for tickets too. The only "intended" use of the tickets is that you need one or more to enter tournaments, which many people don't even do, but the game allows you to use tickets in place of dollars in some appropriate places. Like if you're entering a tournament that requires you to have three unopened packs, you can either use the packs you have or buy them with tickets as entry fee for the tourny.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
You know, I never asked this question before, but I wonder what the Magic Online legal liability is if the game should meet with some kind of catastrophic shutdown event. Do they have to refund all the Event Tickets for their original purchase price or not? I would assume not. My guess is that once you buy a ticket or acquire one from trade their policy, if they can work it this way, is to say "all tickets have no cash value and are non-refundable". So in other words, you get the players to spend real dollars on Event Tickets, and the tickets retain their value despite the fact that there are more of them than there used to be because they're still able to be used to enter tournaments. Also, the Magic Online company can choose to raise the entry fees for tournaments in the future from 2 tix to three or more over time. So as the fake Magic Online economy grows, they make real money for each ticket bought from them, but not off of player-to-player transactions. Still, every ticket in the system represents a dollar spent by someone at some point. And they don't have to keep money in a vault to "back" the tickets like casinos do with chips (or like the Federal Government used to do with dollars when they were still backed but precious metals like gold).
All this points to one thing: they must have R&D working on a sunblotter, like Mr. Burns....
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Stone of Jordon. Rarer items were priced by how many Stones of Jordon they were worth.
That was it! Thanks. Stones of Jordan, ISK... players develop a "currency" even if there is not one provided.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I like this. Small touches like this allow the player to customize the flavor of the game to their preference, and that is no small thing in a spiritual successor to CoH.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)