This was an idea from another thread, but I wanted to hear feedback about it, so I'm giving it its own thread:
What if there were different types of content in the game that gave different types of rewards, like, some missions TFs, etc are "high profile" and give IGC, XP, and random item drops, but other stuff is "low profile" or outright "secret" and gives no IGC or very little, but increased item and/or XP rates instead?
I can imagine this might give players the ability to grind for IGC when IGC is in low supply, but then switch to grinding for more random drops when IGC get's plentiful and that stuff goes up in price.
Since random drops are essentially an IGC sink, you'd always have them in there, but in the "secret" content, you get no IGC, but MORE items. Also, this content might be sort of "no questions asked" in the sense that it doesn't affect your alignment whatever you do in the mission, since it's secret.
Even when people try to max out their chances of getting the best items, they'd presumably be running secret content and as such generating zero IGC ex nihilo. Then, even if those people then sell those items fro lots of IGC, the IGC they're getting was generated by someone else somehow.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
From a design perspective it is asking for trouble. It isn't that it can't be done, it adds to the layers of complexity for when deciding what type of content needs to be in the game based in the the type of rewards it may yield and what effects it has on the game world (player economy for one thing), but also the effects it may have on the players. There is a lot of psychology that can often get overlooked in design decisions when it comes to rewards. One could argue that the AE limiting rewards to tickets instead of drops (while understandable why it was done) none the less could have been cause as a disincentive for general players to get involved with then content.
There are already complexities involved in reward systems that are designed around let us say, themes. This group drops x this group drops y. Every new group to the game can end up affecting the game world depending just on what is makes available to the world. Excluding things like xp or drops or other rewards ends up making it complicated for both designers as to when to put in a new non xp mission over a drop rewar mission, how to designate the distinction of content on a design level that provides cohesive reasoning different departments can adhere to without causing confusion. You also want to provde a metric for reward like xp that is unified to ensure a particular probable leveling rate for players. Itadds complexity to players who are new and may not understand the difference in why they aren't being rewarded in a certain way.
By far a much simpler design is to instead let players turn off xp in exchange for a greater rewards at their own discretion.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
To Tannim222's points:
The level capped who have no use for additional XP and would always turn off XP for IGC then, wouldn't they? All that does is give the level-capped vets an added ability to gain EVEN MORE IGC generation than the non-level capped toons, which is something I'd prefer to avoid. Don't get me wrong, I think that level-capped toons doing missions will almost certainly get more IGC for that than a level 15 lowbie would, just because of the level of the badguys defeated.
I just don't like making the lowbies have to choose between IGC or XP. I think ideally you'd want the new player leveling a toon to be able to keep getting XP for everything and still get some IGC and drops as well. Then they can play and level and still get some IGC for kitting out that toon as they go along. Not with "the best" stuff probably, I would expect that to come much later, after reaching the level cap certainly, but with stuff of some kind in the meantime.
In "early years CoX" one issue was outleveling your SOs. I wouldn't want to have to shut off XP just to avoid doing that, and I think the game can and should be designed such that it isn't really necessary.
As for designing the actual content, I think it could be something as simple as leaving the regular missions from contacts that would level a guy up alone (that is leaving them as missions that award XP, IGC, and drops) but then putting in specific things like repeatable daily missions from one particular contact, certain TFs and Trials that would be "no IGC, YES XP, but more/higher quality random drops". The "no IGC" stuff could maybe also drop more "Vanguard Merits" or whatever faction-specific rewards you might invent, if you want to invent any.
So like, Lady Gray sends you on a SECRET mission for Vanguard that will get you NO public recognition for it, and they will deny any involvement publicly, such that the mission or TF or Trial or whatever will get you no IGC, but you do still get XP and get more/better random drops. Something as simple as a double randomized drop at the end instead of just one drop, and/or it comes from a better table of possibilities, etc. That and/or maybe the bosses or whatever have better drop rates/tables in the meat of the thing as well, I don't know.
This could also be a decent immersive reason to have different alignments like heroes and villains teaming up, because it's all happening on the down-low. And as I said, this would be a place where, possibly, the discreetness of it would mean that nothing you do affects your alignment, as an added perk. And you could have these things at whatever levels you have regular TFs and stuff at.
I realize this means writing more content, but you don't need equal amounts for both, not by a longshot. A lot of people did a lot of ITFs and Katie Hannon TFs in CoX because for their times they were "the best" options for generating the swag people wanted.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
What you think IO'd as simple quite literally isn't. You have to understand the nature of the whole beast if you want to elicit a particular behavior. In this case determining the design decisions on what gets priority for implementation into the game. If there are different types of content for different types of rewards you have to prioritize what gets designed when and how. The standard system of cumulative rewards like xp and chance reward like drops will have expected values gains over time. The difficulty of the challenge always so commensurate with the reward rate.
Suddenly there is a mission that needs wholly different values for determining reward rate to the design challenge. Which requires a different set of parameters that the majority of the game uses.this means for every type of mission that rewards differently will end up having to require unique rules that apply, require a different design paradigm, and require a different set of metrics to track.
If the player has a choice of turning off xp, it is their decision to do so. For whatever radon that is, this places the burden on the player to determine what they want to do with their time and still allows the devs to design content without different parameters and leave the priorities not based on the different reward types but on the needs of the game as a whole.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Okay, but what if the different "no IGC, all drops" content doesn't happen until later, like not at roll-out of the game, but a year or more down the line, when you feel like you have a decent handle on what the average results of the random drop tables are worth in the game in terms of IGC cost to buy, make etc? At that point you will have the ability to take whatever content you're making and say "Okay, we have a certain budget in terms of rewards for this content, do we want that to be awarded in IGC, or items, or both? How much IGC? How much item drops? Maybe we tweak this raid more toward items drops and this other one more toward IGC."
Granted you can only talk about item drops in terms of long-term averages, any one run of a TF or raid will maybe give better or worse payouts for different people, etc. But over many many runs, the rewards ought to obey the law of averages. And it's not like CoX didn't mess with the rewards for the TFs over time to try to get them close to about equal in terms of time spent and rewards gained, so that can be done, I would hope.
And again, turning off XP gain, as as thing in and of itself, might be good for letting people try not to outlevel their friends, etc, so I'm not saying that shouldn't be an option at all. Its just that it doesn't affect the level-capped in any discernible way as they are at the point of not needing any XP anyway, plus it is they, the level capped, that will likely have the most extra IGC that needs sinking out of the economy or can be most easily sinked due to it being a "luxury". Giving them MORE IGC as a reward to replace the XP they no longer need certainly doesn't sink any IGC at all and is in fact generating EXTRA IGC which only adds to the problem of the rich getting richer, as I see it. That said, obviously, if there are other effective IGC sinks in place that all players or the vast majority of player will want, then you don't have to worry about this as much, I grant that. but this would be one way to go in terms of IGC sinking and letting the players themselves decide how much IGC to generate and how much of it to sink, treating random drops as sinks.
And really, I'm not trying to take away any IGC from people, but rather give people an opportunity cost to doing one mission or raid versus another. Some could be more "profit-driven" in terms of IGC with low chances at getting very rare and rare items, whereas others could be way better for randomized items and way less IGC paid out. That way players would vote with their wallets whether they want to get more IGC or more drops, and the overall economy would tend to drive people one way or the other, but they'd always have the choice to begin with. This way people end up choosing whether or not to generate IGC in the first place based on how much they need it and how precious it is, they're not just getting a free side of IGC with everything they do.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I understand your desire and combat what you percieve as a problem. The issue is that it may not necessarily be a problem that level 50 people can continue to earn their IGC and end up requiring they somehow resort to playing non IGC reward content for better drops. When there will most likely be an alternative means for people to play in a way to not require IGC to earn desired items they want.
Prioritization of content won't go away in a year or two either. There are far easier solutions to introducing alternative means for achieving goals than juggling multiple reward metrics layered on top of multiple reward metrics.
Don't ssume that level 50s will never have any need for earning XP. Don't assume as any post level 50 advancement is way, way off and could very well utilize XP in some fashion.
Earning none IGC rewards does not itself necessitate the removal of also earning IGC. Most likely the better rewards of the game will be crafted rewards requiring some amount of IGC to be designed. Using a system already in place that provides drops and IGC and using both the drops and IGC to create the desired item already removes earned IGC out of the game world.
Using a are cohesive system for reward simplifies players engaging with content rather than having to pick and choose "gee what do I run first the drop mission or money mission?" Or newer players getting frustrated that they were brought along for a "drop only mission" and not earn xp. Taking away one of the great benefits of the automatic side kick system - have your low level friends play with you and continue to level up as they play. And suggesting that pre-level 50 people earn xp if side kicked and level 50s automatically get increased rewards does not solve the problem you necessarily hope to avoid either.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
As for IGC sinks, I just like thinking about them, from an academic standpoint. It occupies my mind. Also, not for nothing, but CoX did not have sufficient IGC sinks and suffered from that. This game may well end up being able to avoid a lot of that by having an auction house in place from day 1, but I'm still more worried about insufficient sinks and ways to rectify that than the opposite. After all, if there's too much IGC sinking out, you can always just drop more IGC in, if it comes to that.
As for level-capped toons continuing to get XP, that idea worries me a lot, actually. I mean, if I'm level capped and I keep getting XP, what am I using it for? And if there is nothing to use it for, at present, I presumably just keep rolling up XP until they DO come out with some way of raising the level cap. When that level cap get's raised, I am now immediately leveled up to the new cap without having to do any content because of all the unused XP I still have. Even if you DO have stuff to do with that extra XP, people can still save some and spend some to the point where they're STILL auto-capped as soon as the cap is raised. I would personally prefer a mechanic whereby any XP that would be gained after reaching the cap is not tracked as XP anymore but as something else, so as to remove the possibility of using it to gain levels in the future when those new levels come into existence. Maybe that's just me.
As for the "no IGC" content and the "yes IGC" content being a divisive thing that causes people not to agree on what content to do, A) those arguments already happen in a number of ways (my mission or yours, Malta or Carnies, etc); and B) in times when IGC is plentiful and the prices of items are high, everyone has an added incentive to do the "more drops, no IGC" content, so theoretically they ought to agree on doing that anyway, and, most importantly, C) I think you're overlooking the fact that the random drops gained from the "no IGC" content can still get the people doing that content a LOT of IGC for themselves off of the auction house. When you do the "no IGC, but better drops and more of them" type content, you get some random items that you can then sell on the market for a LOT of IGC, maybe, because the prices of that stuff will be inflated when the value of IGC is low. Thus, this content is not "no IGC for the person doing it" but rather "no IGC created ex nihilo by the mobs dropping it". The people running the missions can and will still get IGC, and occasionally MORE than they would doing other content, whenever a plump rare or very rare drops and you're willing to sell it off instead of crafting and slotting it.
People did quick Katie Hannon TFs in it's heyday in CoX not to get the INF from defeating a bunch of Cabal and Redcaps, but rather to get the craftable recipe at the end so they could either slot it or sell it. I remember doing missions with my MM in 2012 and getting like 5 million INF per mission on a combination of INF dropped by mobs and swag I sold to NPCs. The random swag was about half the INF earned, if not more, but that was gotten from dumb NPCs who created INF ex nihilo and paid 100k per common IO recipe. In a game where that doesn't happen, I could see the common and uncommon drops being less valuable, but those rares and very rares were the reason for doing it in the first place. And when I got a purple on my MM it was like winning the lottery again.Of course, in that game, the INF was so worthless you kept the purple and stored it long term instead of selling it anyway.
In any event, you could have taken away the INF dropped by the mobs and just gave me more randomized chances of getting more rare and very rare salvage and recipes and I would have been more than happy to do that content still, just to get more stuff I needed to kit up my toons if nothing else.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The lat point you made about fetting better drop chances is the entirwly wrong direction to take. Rare is rare for a reason a d those reasons are designed by the loot tables.
It can result in a slippery slope of conflating rewards where even comon rolls become too common because the whole system is affected by increased rates. Even ifnincreased drop rates were for non-common items we are messing with the loot tables that the. Bave to take i to account this new upper bound of item entry jntk the fame world which means that those items end up dropping less often in standard content making the "get to 50'for rare drops content" the defacto xouese of action to take.
You citatikns of personal experience of the d game only serve to higjlight certain problems with reward metrics. Further more if the "only reason to play content is for rare drops" making thise rare drops less rare means less playing because players can more often get rare drops which means they aren't at all rare unless we to back the point I made above about maming them rare by affecting the loot table throughout the entire game for the rest of the "normal loot reaard content".
If the ideal is to play the game and earn that desired rare reward, there will be a system for that but it won't hinge on mecessarily being 50 or requring xp be turned off.
I am also nkt over looking anything about playjng increased drop reward content and getting currency on the market. Yes players will do that. More often than not it will be players who are active in the market and more than that those thst work the market. It actually serves as a barrier for players who don't want to deal with the market. There should be one coheisive reward system in place for playing content to provide an ease of grkuping snd playing. Different types of rewards for different thpesmof content certainky (getting a ninja themed costume piece from facing the Ninja Clan bad guys) but the reward system as a whole shouldn't be divvied up between different reward metrics like IGC bs drops.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I'm still rolling the idea of the "different drops" being a distinguishing mark of player-made content, specifically as a barrier to it being abused by optimizing the DESIGN of the levels usefully.
Which is why I like it costing IGC to actually "open" the stuff you get in drops from it. (I'd even go so far as to "lockbox" the EXP earned in them in discrete, even chunks, so it costs IGC to take advantage of the XP farm.)
I fully understand this is not necessarily popular. I even agree with some of the objections. But it's where I am right now, as I try to mull solutions.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Seg, depending on a couple of possible design decisions all of that may not be necessary. This however is best handled more discretely.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
"This needs to be handled discretely,"
"Yes, Mr. Fisk."
(Why yes, I have been watching Daredevil, why?)
There can be uses for experience points other than leveling up. Crafting comes to mind and maybe fending off debt from being defeated. In games like Guild Wars, you continue to collect experience and even have a bar to fill. Everytime that bar is full you get a skill point to spend. Those can be used to buy certain crafting materials and of course different skills for your build. In a City of Heroes context, those 'not- level ups', as I like to call them, could have rewarded you with a few merits. I am sure we could come up with a use for experience for City of Titans, once we know more about how it will actually work. :)
If this "post cap XP" is a thing that does not level one up when new levels do eventually become a thing, then I'm fine with it.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I for one would have no problem with that, as long as we're talking about paying only IGC to open the lockboxes. This statement must come with the disclaimer that I do not intend to design or play a lot of UGC if it is mostly optional and there is dev-generated content to do aplenty. So I'm really not a big "stake holder" in that.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I the added generation of random items is a problem from a statistical standoint, I can understand that. But that then imposes a non-economy-related restriction on the rate of item generation. That is, you're saying "we can't just hand people purples twice as fast because of the problems it will cause vis a vis people being done faster and just leaving the game" and that is a valid concern. Unfortunately, then, that concern places a limit on the amount of items generated and in so doing it limits the effectiveness of items as an IGC sink.
It sounds from the way Tannim222 is responding to these ideas that he feels like a lot of the IGC sinking ideas being discussed are hard to actually do, unpalatable to at least some segment of the gamers, and not necessary. The last piece of that "unnecessary" causes me to infer that Tannim222 has designed or is aware of some IGC sinking mechanisms that he feels the game will likely have and cannot discuss here for the sake of privacy and security of the game design, and I do not want to goad anyone into divulging anything that would cause them to get into trouble in that vein.
That said, I sincerely hope Tannim222 (or MWM in general) actually DOES have something really good up his sleeve to sink IGC as much as needed.
As for the rest of us, in the meantime between now and when the game actually does roll out, all we can do is speculate and philosophize, and I will continue to do plenty of both, even if a lot of it is totally unnecessary in the end.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, I'm not just concerned with creating sufficient sinks, but the system as a whole. The mechanism for how IGC is generated, the rate it can be generated, and the incentives for using it, currency is something used for an exchange of goods and services after all. And since the goods and currency are part of a player economy, the access to goods, how if any are dropped, the rate of how they are dropped, and providing a means for players to obtain desired items without participating directly with the economy.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Sticking with the purely academic side of this discussion, why is it incumbent upon anyone to try to satiate the needs of people who intentionally choose not to interact with the open market?
I mean, I play Magic and have bought Magic cards in packs and as singles in stores, and I can tell you that trying to get every card you need for a deck can be almost impossible if you intend to do that by just buying packs and not trading with other players, buying/selling with dealers, etc. You might be looking to make a cool mono-red Goblin deck you want to try and end up opening a lot of good, rare, expensive green elf cards instead. If you're not willing to interact with the market and trade some valuable elf stuff for the goblin stuff you need, you have only yourself to blame for that deck not coming together. And in any event this is always the most expensive way to build a deck. You'll spend far less money just buying the whole deck outright in one shot from a store or online dealer that has the cards you need.
In a game where stuff will drop at random, players can pretty much be guaranteed to often get items that are unusable to them because its random, and you might get an Augment that improves the defense debuff element of your blast attacks, and maybe you don't have any -def because you're not in that power set. Because of that, I would try to encourage people to interact with the market so that the person who does want that sweet -def Augment can buy it from the person who got it and doesn't need it. I would hate to think that we're encouraging anyone to just trash those unwanted items or even just store them long-term. The economy sucks if you do that. It ruins the multi-player aspect of the game in the economic sense when people are encouraged NOT to trade their stuff out in the open.
Also, regardless of whether or not we're going to encourage people to use the free market, it's still there and it's still being used by somebody, possibly a large fraction of the player base, and it's still driven by supply and demand and it still affects the lives of everyone in the game whether they want to actually access it directly or not. In a game where the market has been mismanaged to the point of rampant inflation, even the guy who would prefer not to have to use the auction house at all loses something. The perceived "going rate" value of any item you might to try to trade person-to-person will be driven by those free market prices. It forms the default basis of comparison for prices of different goods, if nothing else.
I was never a market-playing profiteer in CoX, but I did use the market to at least buy recipes I wanted (when they were available) and sell off some of the more valuable stuff I got and didn't need. I did that to get INF but also because I didn't want to deprive the needy person looking for a some random I recipe the ability to buy it. It sucks when you go to the store and they're sold out of the one thing you went there to buy. So people selling off unneeded items is a very important part of the game in general, to me. I would HOPE we're going to encourage people to at least do that, for the most part, even if not directly then through an NPC that accesses the same market or something.
Also, the marketeering that would go on presumably is just moving IGC around from one person to another and as such is "zero-sum" meaning that it neither creates nor destroys any IGC in and of itself. So it's inflation neutral anyway. There are winners and losers but the market as a whole always breaks even in the inflationary sense.
Edit: Assuming there is a "house cut" of al transactions, this activity actually does sink IGC actually. I Forgot about that. So that means more marketeering by people is good in that it keps the IGC moving around and sinks some IGC out via the "frictional losses" of the house transaction fees.
Edit: If market access itself is something that might be wholly denied to the non-subscriber, even I, who am all for encouraging people to pay subscriptions, would be wholeheartedly against that. The free market only works if everyone can access it. I WANT Those non-subbers to be allowed to sell me their random drops that I want for my toons. Number of actual buy and sell auction slots is another story, but even if the non-subscribers only have like ONE of each they can still do a lot. For one thing you're not usually going to have TWO hugely valuable very rares to move on the same day with the same toon.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
As a game develper we would want to promote a healthy as possible experience as possible. Even though random drops may net the player the item they want, it is entirely possible it won't either (ebil RNG and all). Understanding that there is a desire for players to work toward earning a particular item without having to enter into a market and being able to provide that experience is a good thing. Just like it was nice to be able to earn alignment tokens to spend on particular rewards in the old game.
Yes it does and it is a safe bet to assume as much.
Non-subs must have access to the game market, in the very least to be able to purchase Stars with IGC. There shouldn't be a requirement of designing specific Stars transaction slots and in-game-only transaction slots. There should just be a basic level of access to the game market for the non-subscriber to use. And giving basic access sets up the possible desire for purchasing greater access via micro-sub for full sub.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I used to grind for Hero Merits a lot in the last year of CoX. I did so because it felt like it was the only way to get the IOs I wanted at the levels I wanted without having to wait for it to drop somewhere in the game AND the person who got it to try to sell it AND I was able to beat out everyone else and get the thing for myself.
If something like that is going to exist, it ought to cost more IGC than the going rate in the market for the item, because of the "Buy It Now" factor that it presents to the customer. You're paying for convenience of getting the exact thing you want, immediately, even if no example of it actually exists on the market currently, and exclusive right to buy the thing without having to out bid anyone etc. That is true value added for the customer, in my opinion. This also has the potential to be an IGC sink, but you ought to be able to get a better deal on the market if you're willing to be patient and persevere in trying to get it that way. That's my take on that.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I did the same, with regards to Hero/Villain Merits. When I wanted to respec one of my characters and would need upwards of 40+ new IOs (mostly Sets at specific Levels), just about the only way to obtain them reliably was through use of H/V Merits. I'd basically start running my stable of 50s through Tip Missions every day and start racking up the H/V Merits. Every couple of days I could go on a buying binge and scoop up all the IOs that were simply "too expensive" to obtain through the Market. After about 2-3 weeks I'd have everything needed to "complete" the rebuild.
And that's not even including use of Task Force Merits to accomplish the same goals simultaneously (and faster).
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Ahh.. most of my IO'ed toons got a certain recipe doing the same thing.
Yep, you guessed the Recipe:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/KR5ttWC.png[/img]
Okay, so lesson learned here is what? CoX was dropping a whole bunch of INF on people who were largely unable to buy the stuff they wanted with it because prices were too high and/or there just weren't any of those items on the market. This caused us to avoid the market a lot and just deal with B.O.T.L.E.R., thus removing any need we might have had for INF in the first place, causing more inflation.
Do we really want to encourage people to just ignore their random drops and take them to the NPC shredder for some bloated IGC reward instead of selling that stuff on the open market where someone who wants it can get it? That basically turns the game into a single-player mode personal grind for bound-on-pick-up reward merits that you then use to create stuff you want ex nihilo for yourself. In other words, it's now a non-massive-multiplayer type of game, isn't it?
In my opinion, making the free market the ONLY place to get items makes more sense than that. You'd need a way to dump cheapo stuff on the market fast and get paid your lousy buy price IGC immediately instead of having to take up a sell slot for every Circuit Board and Range IO recipe you want to move though. That and it would be of tremendous help to NOT have 50 different level-based versions of each and every item to begin with.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
It's not about encouraging people to stay away from the market. As a matter of fact, using the market is most likely to be by far a faster way to get what you want provided you can afford it. Using time gated rewards is actually based on the reward drop rate metrics - a way for a player to "get a guarenteed drop" without messing with the RNG / loot table that would result in a negative impact on the game economy.
It is all about providing options that are good for the game as whole and keeping people playing.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
It seems to me that randomized item drops are the thing that require or drive a free market economy though. The items people want more often than not drop in someone else's lap and then trades happen so that people can get the stuff they want from other people who have that stuff. IGC is the fungible currency by which those transactions are negotiated.
If people are largely ignoring that by grinding missions for Hero Merits then the open market could go largely unused. In CoX only the VIP subscribers could do tip missions, I think, or else you had to pay for Alignment system access or something, right? If that were open to everyone, I feel like there would be a LOT more of us grinding missions against Doc Quantum for Hero Merits and a lot less stuff for sale on the market entirely.
In the last year of CoX, I could get a rare IO recipe, any one I wanted at any level, after 4 days of grinding for Hero Merits. If the item I wanted wasn't even on the market the day I started, I feel like the odds of it being there and me buying it within that four day window were very low.
If you have a way to grind content for a guaranteed drop of the exact item you want, any item at all, and if that content also gives the usual IGC and random drops in addition to giving you some merits or whatever to trade for the guaranteed item, that then creates a situation where you'd be a fool NOT to do that content, because you're going to get IGC and random drops from all the content, but this "better" content brings with it all of that and the ability to earn merits tradeable for guaranteed items.
I would think that the grinding of the 22 tip missions for Hero Merits with which to buy one rare recipe would probably get you like 10-15 million INF if you were trying to grind for INF too, less if you were just setting your difficulty to lowest levels and cakewalking the missions. It's kind of a double-dip that you're getting those merits AND IGC too isn't it? I would think you'd want to sink IGC by making those people using Hero Merits to buy rare IO recipes have to pony up a reasonable amount of INF too, wouldn't you? If nothing else like 10-15 million just to offset the added "paycheck" you were getting by doing the Hero Merit content.
Of course, in CoX that content was being paid for in real money, so that was the trade off. If we're talking about non-paywalled content that any and all players can do, then I would think there needs to be some added IGC cost to the buying of the "created ex nihilo" item, just to level the rewards for doing that content against other content.
But anyway, what worries me in that is the fear that many/most people will just get most of their items by creating them ex nihilo instead of trading and so forth on the market. Also, that system, to me, sounds like a really good way to get people "done" with building their toon and kitting them out to the nines a lot faster, which we've already agreed we want to avoid because people get bored and stop playing when that happens.
One of the things that was sort of a "great equalizer" in CoX was the fact that all defeated mobs had a very small chance of dropping purple, and there were no TFs, trials, tip missions, etc that could get that purple for you any faster. Purples really drove and required the market more than anything else did in that regard. If you don't have some very rare thing that cannot be created ex nihilo after like 20 tip missions, I worry that the market itself could be largely unnecessary.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
No, the lesson is, don't start the game off with no money sinks.
CoH had years of people just gaining influence and nothing to spend it on anything but some rather cheap level 50 IOs, which once you go you were set and just gained more and more influence. So when IOs did come out, there was already many who were level 50 and had LOTS of influence.
Also remember, by three years in, they said there really wasn't that many players who had hit level cap, as a lot of people would hit the harder/slower levels and stop and make a new alt. This would seperate the loaded in influence and not loaded in influence by lots more!
Even though i spent around 3 Billion on one toon, I never felt like it was nearly enough, if i ever wanted to PURPLE IO him/her out.
I regret not ever being able to Purple IO out at least One of my ALT's. :P
Phftt... Too much Influence.. Bah I say. Bah!
Late in CoH's life, 3 billion was becoming chump change :p
Ding ding ding ding ding!
We have a winner!
Furthermore ... ideally ... we'd want to have a [i]plethora of sink options[/i] hashed out and reviewed prior to game launch [i]so that the Devs can [b]pick and choose[/b] which sinks they want to use[/i] rather than having only one or two options and that's it (oh, and they're both inadequate to the task ... oops).
Best possible outcome is that we come up with so many sink options that the Devs can select the BEST options from a list, and have reserve options available, ready to go, in case the first set of options prove to be inadequate.
This is sometimes called PLANNING AHEAD ... or just "covering your bases" ... among other things. Some businesses even call this sort of thing Best Practices.
What would you call it, Radiac?
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
That is amongst our goals.
Personally, I want to see sink options that are in some sense "rentals" of things - either something that "wears out" or something taht you have to keep paying for - and which have different grades or tiers. Even better if they're in some way simply numeric, with higher numbers being able to be plugged into a formula to calculate how much IGC they cost for a time period (say, a month). That formula can then be made polynomial or even exponential. So lowerish levels of it cost reasonable amounts, and higher and higher levels cost more and increasingly more to pay for. If it's attractive enough, the IGC will sink itself out to a manageable level based simply on the fact that those who feel glutted with IGC have a highly desirable place to dump it, and the more glutted they feel, the higher the price it will hit before they feel it's "too much," so they'll self-regulate to sink out.
As an example - and this is not something I think would actually be GOOD fo the game, but is used for illustrative purposes - if there were a hit point buff you could rent for a month at a time that gave X hit points, but cost IGC = f(X) = exp(X)-1 per month. (The exponential function is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function . Note how it is "1" at 0, so I subtract 1 in this function so it's "0" at "0," instead.)
As illustrated semi-unintentionally by this example, these kinds of things can be problematic in their own right if they're the wrong KIND of bonus. Too useless, and they won't attract people to sink IGC. Too good, and they'll unbalance the game. The precise formula as well as what, exactly, the numeric "cool thing" is and does will have to be carefully considered.
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For what it's worth, yes, I agree that planning ahead is good. I think everyone would. Let's do as much of that as we can.
Another thing that was bugged about the CoX system (it did have many flaws) was the fact that some items were better to have at the lowest level possible, because they didn't actually buff the power they were in, they just gave you a proc or something. I'm thinking of the "+ Stealth" IOs you could put in travel powers as the poster child for this. You wanted the lowest level copy of that you could get so that it still worked when you had to exemp down to do lower level content, but people spent so little time as level 10-15 characters that those low level examples of those IOs were not being generated nearly as fast as the higher levels were.
That was another reason I would grind for Hero Merits. To get the level _10_ "+Stealth" proc to put in Super Speed.
To some extent this might be helped by having fewer levels for items, like maybe only on the 0s and 5s (so like there would be level 15 items, and level 20, but not level 16, 17, 18, or 19, for example).
Also, the problem of predictably getting the exact gear you want is, admittedly, dependent on the amount of grinding you have to do to get it. If it takes like a month of doing 5 tip missions every day to get one +Stealth proc, that might be a reason to still try to get them off the market instead, or in the meantime. And again, if the level of the thing is less of a concern, that would help too.
I don't want to see the IGC get largely ignored in favor of Stars, Hero Merits, or anything else. I feel that's an important goal, to protect the IGC's desirability in the game.
I agree with Segev about players paying to rent stuff. One of the reasons real life economies aren't hyperinflated is because people have a monthly cost of living to maintain. Of course, this leads directly to things people will always say they really hate, like gear degradation. The main reason people hate that stuff is precisely BECAUSE it's good at sinking IGC. So I doubt you'll ever find a really effective IGC sink that people happily embrace, because people hate IGC sinks when they hear about them and want to keep their IGC instead. Therefore I don't think we ought to be looking for an IGC sink people say they like, because what people really like is *ineffective* IGC sinks. We should rather be looking for the most effective IGC sinks from among the options available, all of which are probably equally unpopular.
Edit: When you try to get people to destroy IGC voluntarily, you're generally trying to get them to spend it in such a way that the IGC disappears and the person doing that is getting some kind of temporary fun out of that in the exchange. The only things I can imagine that would be the "consumed goods and services" you get for your IGC in that scenario are either some form of paying for a temporary buff or paying to remove a temporary debuff. That's as far as I'll go on that subject here, but if anyone else can think of something that would be a good product to sell for IGC that would act as a temporary consumable gotten with IGC that is destroyed in the process, I'd love to heard about it.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Uh ... you do know that the most common form of this sort of thing is ... Gear Repairs ... right?
And you also know that "repairing gear" has already been Ruled Out because people don't want to be bothered to have to go to an NPC and click a Repair All button (yay laziness!).
The next most likely thing to be "rented" in a City of Titans context would be ... Supergroup Bases and Personal Housing. And guess what? The way that Base Rent was handled in City of Heroes was both annoying and easy to "game" such that stuff never really cost what it was supposed to cost. I know that I certainly hated having to take the time every few weeks to go pay Base Rent simply so the Bases (plural) didn't shut down.
So why not move to a different sort of IGC sink ... one that's essentially transparent to the Players? Specifically, I'm talking about a "taxes" and "exemptions" model.
Functionally, there would be two parameters to keep track of ... the Tax Rate and Exemption Point ... for each PC. The Exemption Point specifies that any IGC rewards above the set value are subject to the Tax Rate. The Tax Rate then defines what the reduction is for any IGC rewards above the Exemption Point.
So, just for the sake of illustration, let's say that the Exemption Point is 1000 IGC and the Tax Rate is 50%.
0-1000 IGC earned = 0-1000 IGC gained
1200 IGC earned = 1100 IGC gained
3000 IGC earned = 2000 IGC gained
The idea is that this ... limitation on earn rate ... would be imposed prior to IGC being awarded to the PC, in effect "garnishing" the earnings of the PC.
Both the Exemption Point and the Tax Rate would be variables, and the values of those variables would be influenced by a variety of Player Choices. So if someone wanted to maximize their IGC gain potential, they could choose options that maximize their Exemption Point while also minimizing their Tax Rate, pushing the amount of IGC gained by performing a variety of activities (defeating Foes, completing Missions, etc.) to be as close to a "no losses" sort of throughput as possible. This could be accomplished by using Commons Only Enhancements and not having a Supergroup Base that requires upkeep, making use of a very limited number of Auction Slots in the Marketplace, not having any items attached to in-game emails, so on and so forth.
Conversely, a PC could be "tricked out" with all the best "stuff" and as a result have a rather low Exemption Point and a rather high Tax Rate, limiting their earning potential, possibly even severely. Thus a PC loaded with "all purples" (for example) wouldn't necessarily make for the best source of revenue for a particular game account. In other words, there would be an economic incentive to stop short of "maxing out" everything possible on a specific PC.
The advantage of this kind of Exempt Then Tax system is that it siphons off the earning potential of the "top end" while holding harmless the "low end" of the earning scale, making the system relatively progressive. It is also substantially transparent, since the "price to be paid" using this system gets handled before the IGC ever makes it to the PC. Thus if two PCs are teamed up together and defeat a Foe, even though the IGC reward for defeating that Foe may be 5000 IGC per PC, that wouldn't mean that both PCs [i]receive[/i] 5000 IGC each. PC1 might get 2000 IGC and PC2 might get 2500 IGC for defeating that Foe, simply because of where their Exemption Points and Tax Rates are set to respectively for their PCs. The beauty of this system is that [i]it prevents IGC from entering the game economy in the first place[/i] rather than trying to drain it out after having entered the in-game economy.
Once you accept that such a system is both simple enough and a viable (partial!) solution to the problem, it's then just a matter of writing the formulas that govern these variables and doing playtesting (and datamining) to determine if the factors controlling them have been set appropriately. Note that being able to "tweak" the weighting of various factors that go into the formulas for what various options "do" would be a relatively straightforward matter of documentation of a spreadsheet process (ie. simple if adequately explained).
How does that sound to you, Segev?
To me it sounds like a relatively "no fuss, no muss" type of system akin to NOT needing to go around and pick up drops off the ground (tedious) or dealing with Need or Greed styled inventory awarding system. In other words, the computer (ie. glorified adding machine) does all the work for you and just lets Players play the game.
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I don't think this tax idea is too far fetched. One thing I'd change though is I think the very rares ought to be the best, most efficient Augments and Refinements you can have. Like they give you "best of both worlds" good buffs AND low taxes on them. That way they're very desirable and very expensive to buy in the auction house, making their cost more about the up-front purchase, not the cost of ownership. Then you have the lowest level common "genenric IO" type of stuff that has lowest possible cost of ownership combined with lowest buffage, and a middle ground "rare" level that are significantly higher buffs but highEST cost of ownership. You'll be able to buy rares on the market, because they're expensive to keep slotted, they work significantly better than "commons", but cost significantly more to maintain than "very rares".
So people will start with the cheap generics to save up IGC, then maybe start using some rares to get more powerful, then try to slot as many very rares as they can to get their total operating costs down while maintaining high performance levels. The arc of the player build would go from (all common), to (common and rare) to (mostly rare) to (rare and very rare), in all likelihood. Depending on the power, people would likely still use some commons because they're not concerned about making Brawl or Run the best it can be, etc.
That's how I'd do it anyway.
Edit: I feel like each type of Augment/Refinement (in terms of rarity, etc) ought to have a different reason why you'd use it and why you wouldn't.
Very Rare: Use it because it's the best, all things considered, don't use it because you don't have it or you can't afford to buy it on the market.
Rare: Use it because it's way more available than Very Rare and only a little less effective in terms of performance, but don;t use it because it's got such high cost of ownership
Common: Use it because it's dirt cheap to acquire and own over time, don't use it because literally everything else gives noticeably better performance.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Um, the idea is to reduce inflation ... not find loopholes to make sure that the stupidly wealthy can get even richer. This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it too. Games that offer "do it all" options tend to be extremely unsatisfying in the long run.
No, having a high purchase price and a negligible "maintenance" cost for Very Rare Purples is not a balance point I'd be willing to accept as a Developer (if I were one). All that does is turn Very Rares into [b]Best At Everything[/b] rendering anything and everything else "worthless" by comparison.
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We can agree to disagree on the best way to run this, I think, but I don't think very rare items should be as cheap or available as rares, whatever you do. If they're that cheap and easy to get, they're not very rare items. The fact that a given very rare might be expensive as compared to a common or rare is not a sign of inflation, but a sign of the one thing having shorter supply and higher demand than the other. I mean, even in a world where there's a very low, very reasonable inflation rate, the Mercedes-Benz is going to sell for significantly more than the Ford Escort after all. The object of IGC sinking is NOT to make the prices of those two things the same, nor to make one come closer to the other, nor to try to provide a Mercedes-Benz for everyone who drives a car, but rather to keep the prices of anything from becoming "more money than anyone actually can posses".
To clarify, I don't think the very rares should have zero cost of ownership, nor am I saying they should be cheaper than the commons to own, just that I envision them to be only slightly better in terms of performance than the rares, but significantly lower cost of ownership. I envision people spending a lot of time grinding for very rares and only selling them for very high prices. This makes them hard to get in large numbers quickly and as such the end goal of having the "high performance, low cost of ownership" build is maybe a pipe dream for some of the more casual players and an achievable goal after much grinding and horse-trading on the market for others. I'm not envisioning a world where most people will have any one toon "all very rared out" in under a year. During that time they're using a lot of rare stuff and paying taxes on it. Also, I dislike the idea of making the rares, which are more common, more desirable than the very rares that could replace them. I feel like you should always want to use the very rare if you have it and can slot it. Otherwise they're not all that great, and it becomes a little anti-climactic when you get one. I don't want the very rare drop to be a bit of a disappointment if that can be avoided.
I don't think there's a huge problem there in terms of inflation, because even the very rares cost something to own, just not as much as the "almost as powerful" rares. But I can't predict markets, so I can't guarantee anyone I'm right either.
If you are going to make the very rares the most expensive in terms of cost of ownership, they'd better be head and shoulders better performance buffers than the next best thing because then the ONLY reason to slot them is performance, and one does so knowing full well the cost of ownership drag it creates. That's probably a valid way to do it as well, just not what I personally would do.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Congratulations, you've discovered the point of the exercise.
/golf clap
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A direct crimp on earning potential as you earn more and more would help throttle inflation, but I suspect it would be gamed by going to multiple alts.
Gear degradation doesn't work precisely because it is too directly related to the gain mechanism.
Base rental could work, because you're not using your base to make IGC. Why does it need to be annoying? I would prefer to see it as an auto-debit thing.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Is every player going to be required to have a base to pay for though? And how do the super groups split up the cost of SG bases? I might go without my own lair and just use the SG base of the SG I'm in, and depending on how that get's paid for, I might skate by with little or no actual cost in IGC for those services, right? It seems like that only charges the SG base owner/proprietors, and how large a fraction of the player base is that?
It seems to me that the thing people basically want is increased character performance (higher DPS, etc). I think most player view XP, IGC, item drops, the auction house, and everything else they might spend IGC on through that lens. While it's true that increases in performance will lead directly in increased earnings (and faster level ups, one would expect), if you're not using increased performance as a way of selling people something for their IGC, then that leaves you with what? Quality of life stuff? I thought that was what Stars were going to pay for.
I think the accumulation of IGC among the long-term veterans would be what causes prices to inflate over time. Not the newbs doing missions. Ultimately the IGC we're most interested in sinking out of the economy is that "superfluous IGC" that the veterans will have been able to roll up over time. The question is what can you sell them for their IGC that would be worth spending it on, isn't a performance enhancer, and would appeal to basically everyone?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
- SG Leader has to have the "SG Base Builder" perk (found in a micro-sub).
- SG Members that want to Build their own room in an existing SG Base, also have to have the "SG Base Builder" perk to do so.
- SG Members that dont have the "SG Base Builder" perk, can still get it, but they have to run through allot of content, plus pay monthly IGC, too.
- SG Members that want to Move out of an existing SG Base, into another SG Base, have to pay IGC for the Move.
- etc...
This is both true and an "oh gee bum" sort of thing. I mean, seriously ... an excuse/incentive to be an altaholic?
And has already been pre-emptively ruled out. Yes, we know. There aren't going to be any trips to the NPC to repair your Augments and Refinements via a Repair All button. That doesn't however, close the door on crimping earning potential, with the "tax rate" skimming off the top as a sort of hands free/background maintenance cost that is effectively transparent to the Player [i]so that Players don't have to deal with it[/i] or be hassled with "managing" repairs. Instead, it all just happens in the background. A portion of incoming IGC gets allocated towards maintaining your build automagically. No fuss, no muss.
Auto-debit schemes produce weird edge cases involving timing and the shuffling of resources. To be honest, I'd actually prefer to have the game "skim off the top" of anything I'm earning (via Exemption plus Tax) so as to not need to ever even really think about "paying rent" of any kind. It's just simpler to have the IGC not even enter the game economy at all, in that respect.
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I suppose one thing yo could try is to charge the users of the base IGC every time they want to use some part of it. Like, you'd click on the teleporter, it would bring up a menu of locations to TP you to, and prices of what it costs to get there, in IGC. The storage bins would have a rental fee, and if you stop paying, you get locked out of adding any more stuff to the bins but can still take stuff out, etc.
I don't really know what else bases are going to do, but charging for that stuff as you use it would be one way to go, I guess. It still probably soaks the newbie players that just joined an SG a little too much and probably doesn't take nearly enough away from the veteran fatcats though, assuming prices are the same for everyone.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
For storage bins in SG Bases, you could have a IGC price to put things into them and to pull things out of them. Key the put/take prices in IGC as a multiple of how many things are already inside the storage bin and you're set. That way a bin that is nearly empty costs next to nothing to USE, while a bin that is almost always full costs a great deal more to use. If your PC never does any put/take juggling with the storage bins, they cost YOU nothing in transaction fees.
Something simple like 100 IGC per item already inside the storage bin on each put/take transaction. So a storage bin with 30 items in it would cost 3000 IGC to either put in item 31 or take out one of the 30 items already in there.
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wouldn't an even easier method to do this be just by lowering the amount of IGC given out? has the same effect and loads easier on the programming side.
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I was thinking the same thing - this would be the simplest method by far.
The problem with a global reduction in IGC awards for everyone is precisely that ... it's a GLOBAL one-size-fits-all reduction. Proportionately speaking, all you'd really be doing is punishing the Have Nots while the Wealthy Haves simply keep on trucking.
No ... ideally speaking you want to hold the line on the Minimum while lowering the Maximum in terms of IGC awards for things. That way the IGC poor are not adversely impacted (or at least, not as much). Lowering the Minimum simply increases the height of the hurdles any new Player needs to get past, in effect creating a barrier to entry, relatively speaking. You want the IGC "poor" Players to at least be able to get ahead and achieve some earning power, while at the same time you don't want the IGC "rich" Players to in effect "run away" with everything such that no one can catch up to them (or compete with them) due to their "starter" advantage(s) of in-game wealth which can grow to the point of producing runaway inflation.
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I agree that to fight inflation you need to go after the IGC in the wallets of the rich and not the poor. I would hope to get the IGC-wealthy to voluntarily spend a lot of their disposable IGC income on something that is purely optional, doesn't have any IGC value in and of itself, and is really fun and desirable.
So far the only thing I can think of in that vein is a thing that's already been ruled out. If powering up your toon could be achieved in some way that costs more IGC than you'd make doing missions etc, then that might do it, but you have to factor in the fact that the "totally super-bufffed" toon will be able to do missions at the highest difficulty settings, maybe, which will lead to generation of a lot more IGC and will likely get more randomized drops as well. So in order to counteract THAT, you'd have to make the buff mechanism so expensive as to wipe out most if not all of that added IGC you're getting. You might in this way hope to put people at "break even" on missions except when some cool rare or very rare item drops and you make a little that way by selling it on the market. IGC made on the market like that is counter-inflationary anyway because the act of selling an item on the AH will sink some IGC in the form of transaction fees. Unfortunately I fear that the price to operate that buff mechanism, whatever it is, if it works as I've described, sounds so fantastically expensive that if it's barely able to break even against a map set to +4x8 or whatever, people might well just avoid it for that reason.
Of course, people want to be more powerful too, so I can't predict what the player response is really going to be. I suppose that if the choices are "adopt it and deal with the IGC drain" versus "avoid it and be less powerful" people's first reaction will be to try to find a way to exploit it for loopholes in how it works first. Assuming it's pretty fail-safe in that regard, I don't how many people will opt to become "high rollers" even among those that can easily afford it.
One thing you could do is make the really powerful Augments and Refinements have a cost to operate that goes up geometrically or exponentially as a function of how many you have in your powers. So like, a FEW rares and very rares are still pretty cheap to use, but as you slot more in, the cost of ownership goes up as the square of the number of such items you have in there, or the natural exponential, or the base-10 exponential, something like that. If that were the system, people might even get to the point where they're pushing the hard caps on a lot of different stuff (damage, accuracy, defense, resistance, recharge rate, regen rate, endo recovery rate, etc) but operating at a loss of IGC in the process simply because no map can give you the IGC generation rate you'd need to support that build. But of course, whether or not most "rich folks" would ever actually do that is a different question.
I would like it if there were the possibility of a IGC-wealthy toon to spend IGC faster than they make it back. To live above their means, at least temporarily. You have to make that a voluntary choice on the player's part though, and what will get them to do that, short of addictive narcotics, I have no idea.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
None of the recommendations does precisely what is desired in the vein of "stop from getting rich". If it's easier to accumulate wealth prior to the larger tax kicking in, players will halt xp gains at the right place in time to play their money maker at those ideal levels.
If the atrempt to take from the rich is to cost players seeking really "powerful builds" by making it cost more that they can earn, the. Players will get rich by using builds that don't result in such huge costs and accumulate wealth. No system will ever prevent anyone from the possibility of obtaining and maintaining wealth.
Segev has been quite clear as to why it's bad design to directly tie the reward model with the reward generator.
The best game design systems apply cost of activity in a way that the player doesn't directly realize they are being "gamed by the system". The costs associated with play are in line with the thematic design of the game world and non-prohibitive to functional play.
As far as using a "cost for more power" in the game, this is where having actually useful crafted temp powers can be effective. Instead of making the Shivans Pet a constant reward, you make a crafted version that can be remade over again. Buff stations in a base would have Botha per-use cost and also add to the "power consumption bill" of the base.
And our crafting system while keeping in line with the simplicity of the old game diverges in different ways to work within the game we are creating that will add to the cost for crafting.
By having multiple convenience and effectiveness costs throughout the game you give players plenty if reason s to want to spend their IGC,. Heck, we haven't even publically discussed how we plan to institute earning IGC which is a big step in understanding how to handle the model of reward rate and consumption of IGC. Many of the suggestions still seem to tread on the path beaten by the old game, which is not necessarily how this system is being designed. Just like with powers and mechanics, things on the sirface may seem familiar but how they are actually handled under the surface may be different.
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It's not that alting is meant to be en- or discouraged, but that a crimp on earnings based on a progressive rate will be gotten around by this mechanism.
If Alting weren't a "thing" with our community, this would certainly encourage it. When it became a "thing" to get around this, the IGC-limitation would no longer be effective. Because alting is already a "thing" with our target audience, it will almost be invisible to those who do it, will not crimp IGC inflation as well as we might like, and will seem an active punishment to the few who prefer to play one character nigh exclusively.
Honestly? I would be willing, if I thought it would achieve useful goals for the game and/or its economy, to argue in favor of it regardless of what has been said. Nothing prevents later updates to the game from changing such things (though admittedly ADDING a limiter mechanic that blanket-hits everybody later tends to generate more ire than having it from the get-go).
My issue is that I don't see it working. Again, because it's directly tied to your wealth-generation. "Your IGC gain will be slowed either by you being less effective as your gear falls apart, or by you having to spend it to keep it repaird." Whichever impedes the gain rate less will be what's used by the players.
Hm. That's an interesting thought: what if your base "payments" were made in the form of such a tax? The bigger and better your base, the more % of your IGC earnings were taken off the top. There would be a cap so that you could pay it in full if you earned enough in a short enough time period. To prevent gaming this by having an alt "own" the base but never bother earning IGC (so you could have a "free" base of whatever size you want),
Very automatic...but it still feels off.
I think what I, personally, like about the idea of there being a finite price tag based on size/quality/complexity/whatever of your base each month is that there's a definite push to make SURE you KEEP earning enough IGC to maintain it. If you're earning that IGC through gameplay, you're still flushing it back out of the system as fast as you earn it. If you're earning it through the market (and/or buying it with Stars through said market), then you're flushing the IGC generated by others out of the system. And you WANT to flush it, rather than find ways to avoid using the character whose IGC earning rate is crippled.
In closing, for now, the incentives for things other than combat perks tend to be along the lines of the other "mini-games" that attract people. Base building, crafting, ... hm, exploration? Badge hunting? I know there are a LOT of "ways to play the game."
If IGC sinks can make you better at these things, able to do them better, faster, more easily, or just to do more in them than you could without, but none of them [i]directly[/i] can improve your IGC gain rate, themselves, they should work well.
Take crafting, as an example, because it can give apparent improvement to IGC gain rate. If you invest IGC heavily into it, so you're somehow better at it, you can sell your crafted goods to support your crafting hobby. You are sinking IGC out of the economy that is generated by others, rather than using your crafting to actively generate more IGC, yourself.
Now, obviously, the end result is a player who plays in a way that generates IGC being motivated to buy your goods. He isn't going to spend his IGC on your goods if it doesn't make him better at how he plays the game. So it eventually leads to more efficient IGC generation, in theory. But the more steps there are between "spend IGC" and "generate more IGC through gameplay," the more we impede inflation.
For things like exploration, which may not ever result in something that makes IGC gain faster, the sinks would be particularly effective. (I confess that I have limited idea how to make exploration cost IGC in a way that isn't ham-fisted; maybe temp travel powers of some sort that serve as gateway powers to get to certain zones? Doesn't seem right to me, quite, but I'm just tossing ideas out at the moment.)
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Yep. Just like was discussed in the power effectiveness threads of long ago, if the cost-to-benefit curve has a sharp corner in it, people will tend to aggregate at the corner. We saw this in practice in CoH, where SO effectiveness dropped off rapidly after about the third SO, so almost no builds bothered slotting a fourth SO in anything, even powers which could only slot one type of SO at all.
That's why I've always pushed for smooth curves: asymptotic exponentials, logarithms, or lastly polynomials. There's no sharp point of transition into a "diminishing returns" range. Because sometimes it's worth it to push for every last drop of effect, and sometimes it's not.
Same with inventory hoarding. If you have "stack" limits, people will tend to go right up to but not over the stack limit. If the stacking limit is 1, they'll always care about how much inventory they're using to haul junk. If there's no stacking limit, they'll keep that stuff in inventory nearly forever... or get rid of it all at some point. Reminds me of something Richard Garriott told us about Ultima Online: people would hoard "t-shirt" drops that were nothing more than little promotional giveaways in the game, which had no real use past the first one, because "well they might be worth something someday."
Which gets us to IGC, where you're going to see some amount of hoarding unless you have some amount of currency depreciation, via price inflation on things you need to buy, reward inflation, and/or spoilage of hoarded currency.
... so long as said system allows people to progress as time passes. You just about have to go to a "from each according to ability, to each according to need" command economy, where your progress is reset every time you log in (like a console game with no save points), and nobody wants that.
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As I've said, I'm not against players being able to create a positive influx of IGC for themselves, but I think it would be ideal of there were something to blow all that expendable wealth on just as an option. Since most RPG games I've played use gold or whatever as a way to get better stuff, better stuff being defined as whatever makes you kill the monsters easier, that is to some extent the main purpose people will put their IGC toward. Yes because it;s an investment in making MORE IGC in the long run, but also because being more powerful means getting killed less and defeating monsters more, which is something we all want to do.
What if the character performance levels needed to defeat badguys in the game went up at a rate greater than the rate at which those mobs dropped IGC? That is, what if the economics were that the higher level mobs are a lot harder to beat as you go up in level, but only drop a little more IGC than the lower level mobs? Then, in order to maintain performance and defeat high-level badguys, you'd have to spend IGC to be able to keep yourself alive and fighting the good fight, or else focus on the more easily-defeated badguys to save up IGC. So like maybe doing a badge run on a TF will end up costing you IGC to be able to pull it off, but doing random door missions will make you IGC based on difficulty/payout numbers of the badguys?
Of course, that system, even if it did work, wouldn't really be all that optional. It's optional in the sense that you can either fight a lot of weaker mobs to make IGC or buff up and pay IGC to do the more fun, harder content, which presumably gives better random items drops (like doing the Statesman TF gave out Synthetic HamiOs,. etc). I don't know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If there is a cost associated with travel services, like for trains, taxis and other methods, like a teleporter network and so on, you would sink away IGC for exploring. Some areas might also need a special temp power to safely enter, because it is underwater or contaminated. But that always gets weird for certain character concepts that should not need protection in those circumstances...
You could work with hidden things that require a special scanner or magical instrument to be found and using that would be its own little minigame. If that is accessible and engaging enough, it would be worth the cost for buying and crafting the device.
Craftable or buyable travel powers would also be loosely tied to exploration.
Radiac, people will expect that if they have to work harder, like when they face more difficult enemies, that they get more out it. More efford = more reward. If that is not the case you would end up alienating players.
One thing about the taxes to point out. Eve Online does this with the corp tax rules.
NPC ran corps (which are the default a player drops into) have an 11% tax rate.
However, this earning ONLY kicks on bounties/mission gains above 50,000 ISK (if I remember correctly).
Now comes the interesting thing: A player ran corp can set the Tax rate to *anything* that they want. They could set it to 0%, they could set it to 100%.
The thing is though, the tax money goes to the corporation for the leaders to spend on things. This can be replacement ships, maintenance costs for outposts that they run/own... anything.
So whilst the currency is not directly taken out of the system, it is funnelled elsewhere for other uses. Of course, the people with access to the wallet can just give themselves the money (although this will show in a transaction log which cannot be doctored).
Eve is probably one of the better examples of a player economy in an. MMO. Not that it didn't 'to have its growing pains getting there either or that there aren't any problems, but by and large the system works.
Now we are making a different game so we can't crib everything off them, but the ability for an SG to set up its own tax (up to an amount) for an SG account to pay for upkeep and future purchases of crafting materials for base functions. Providing an account log anyone can see is possible as well, just so things are on the up and up.
Base upkeep can have two parts, size of the base and number of functional items that require "power". The items that provide convenience like a teleporter or storage bin shouldn't 'to require per cost usage but base items that statistical advantage like a buff station or reserve refueling station should have a per use cost.
Personal housing could have one time fees with furnishings and personal storage as well. Less likely to require upkeep costs unless connected to a base so a possible "connection fee" gets associated with the personal housing.
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Things I believe to be true:
1. I personally would expect to get more XP, more IGC and increased odds of getting a better items to drop from a defeat of a harder badguy.
2. In paper and pencil DnD there are monsters that are tough to beat but have no treasure of their own, often.
3. All forms of IGC sink are alienating to players.
I'm not suggesting that tough badguys will not drop more and better stuff, more IGC, more XP, etc, I'm saying you COULD make them more expensive to beat in some way too. So the stronger badguy, when defeated, still drops more IGC, XP, and items than the weaker one, but the cost to actually defeat it is actually so much greater that you could end up in the red, sometimes.
Saying "Toughter badguys must drop better rewards when defeated" is a statement I agree with. Saying "Tougher badguys must, when defeated, result in greater net profits for the hero in the final analysis, all things considered." is something else, and I'm not sure it has to work that way.
While it's true that this puts people in a place where they'll prefer to go after easier fights that they can make IGC on instead of losing it, the tougher badguys will still give more XP and drop better items, one would expect, so there's a draw to defeating them too. If you want that Synthetic HamiO, you have to do the Statesman TF to get it, and there are some archvillains in there that will cost you IGC to defeat. That's the idea anyway.
I think that giving veterans with a lot of disposable wealth the ability to sink a lot of IGC into a thing that maybe gets them a badge or defeats some iconic archvillain or something might be a worthwhile thing to have. Like, pay a bunch of IGC to raise an army to defeat the alien invasion, or the kaiju, or whatever. People like having a challenge and their preferred way of defeating most challenges is through as much simple brute force as they can muster. Given that, I wonder what if you could have defeated the Hamidon with only one full team of 8, but it ended up costing more IGC than you got out of doing it? People with IGC to burn would still do it at least once to get the badge probably, wouldn't they?
The devs here have hinted at having a system for all this that is so unlike anything I'm used to from CoX that I can only assume it's very novel and elegant (or hope it is). So most of this is academic anyway, from what they've said.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
My personal preference along these lines is that Augments and Refinements would have, for lack of a better term, "operational durations" that specify how long (in time logged in) they work. The baseline assumption I made would be that they'd operate for a number of hours equal to the Level of the PC when slotted, or when "refreshed" (by paying IGC). So if you're a Level 30 PC, either slotting an Augment or a Refinement will give it 30 hours of logged in game time duration before it stops working, and paying IGC to "refresh" the duration will reset this countdown to match whatever the Level of your PC is currently.
That way, rather than being a "repair" per se, it's merely a refresher. Exactly what FORM that refreshing takes (recasting magic spells, gene therapy booster shots, more gamma radiation, a shopping spree at [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cooke%27s_Electronics]Cooke's Electronics[/url] for spare parts or doing a little workout training in the danger room to keep your skills "sharp" can be essentially handwaved away.
When an Augment or a Refinement "expires" it isn't lost ... it just stops giving its bonus. Go pay for a refresh and it'll start working again.
This then gives you a means/method of applying an IGC "cost" to time spent logged in rather than making it something combat specific where "durability" is lost on every Critical Hit received or something like that.
I prefer to think of it as being a "maintenance" cost for the Base supporting you [i]while you're doing your thing[/i] rather than it being an obligation to meet every month (like rent). I'd honestly prefer Base maintenance to be a "cut" of your IGC earnings, skimmed off the top, rather than something that needs to be paid for at regular intervals like a rent payment.
So yes, if you're not paying, the "cost" of your contribution to your Base upkeep is nothing. Note that this means that Players would not be "punished" for leaving the game and then coming back after a while of being away. There's no "somebody go pay to turn the lights back on!" nonsense with respect to Bases. There are no "permissions" to mess with for paying Base Rent. There are no Griefing opportunities in which someone who has been given permission to pay Base Rent finds a loophole and just burns away all of the resources on overpaying rent simply out of spite. Also, by "skimming off the top" you have everyone contributing ... automagically ... rather than just a select few (one?) being trusted to manage paying the rent while everyone else ignores the obligation.
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I enjoy a healthy discussion, even if it is purely academic. So to adress your points, Radiac:
1. So does (almost?) everyone else.
2. Pen and paper roleplaying games are something completely different. You have a lot more freedom in what you do, but you are supevised by the storyteller. If he decides there is a giant monster running rampant in the city, well there is and you have to take care of that right now or there will be no more city. In an MMO players can choose not to do the content that they do not like. And content that costs them more money then they earn by playing it will be not very popular.
3. This is not only about that it is an IGC sink. It is a principle that is rootet even deeper in the human psyche. I worked hard, so I deserve a high reward.
People will do the harder content to earn rewards. They will do it for fun too and a lot of reward is the feeling that you have done something great and difficult and were victorious. But that will fade if it is not profitable. Making them loose money is a form of punishment and this will give people the feeling they do the wrong thing. And this will cancel any other motivation pretty quickly for many people.
Even if there is a reward at the end that makes up for the loss of money, it still would be difficult to sell. Especially if you can only get it this way. Players will feel forced to grind up money to get the item. Frustration will be getting very close to ragequits if a player almost finished the raid but failed on the last boss, while all the way he lost money playing it. And then, if a players is out of money and did not even get something special, he will feel cheatet.
It will feel like the rewards- analogy to CO's energy builder powers. I have to do a lot of lame stuff to get to the awesome things, then my ressource is depletet and I have to go back to lame stuff again.
Also it can exclude. Some might just not have the IGC to play with their friends. In the discussion about the raids that will cost stars I did not see that as much of a problem, since there were many ways around it, but here I fail to see them.
Remember the Eden trial? It started giving tons of reward merits for completion. People did speed runs to game that system. That turned into a nerf of the amount of reward merits for that trial.
Then people mainly ran it if it was the weekly strike target.
The people for whom that net loss of IGC for buffing up to defeat the Big Bad is a punishment weren't doing that content BEFORE either, they were all doing farms and that's all they will ever want to do. They're a lost cause in the first place.
Your arguments against spending IGC to get higher performance out of a toon can be applied to anything one tries to charge IGC for, as I see it, and basically boil down to "You can't charge people IGC for anything because they hate paying IGC for stuff." Yes, people hate paying for things, but yes we can charge them IGC nonetheless. That's my take on that.
If we design the game with that kind of IGC hoarding in mind and set up the game to nurture it, then every mob drops lots of IGC and you never have to spend it on anything, so IGC is completely worthless in the first place, because the game has been designed to let you keep it in all cases because players in focus groups said "We don't wanna pay IGC for that." to literally EVERYTHING you tried to put an IGC cost on. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
There is no doubt in my mind that people will be willing to pay IGC for increased performance. Spend your INF to get a new Purple to put in your main attack, etc. This is a form of spending INF to get more powerful in order to be able to defeat more powerful enemies. Are you saying that those purples should have been free because people are inherently aware of the fact that free is less expensive than not free? All I propose is that maybe there's a level of IGC cost that you can put on being REALLY powerful, on a temporary basis, such that YES you can defeat the Big Bad but NO you cannot make money doing it, in the final analysis. I think people that havw a lot of IGC they don't otherwise have a use for would do that at least once for the badge.
As far as dividing the player base goes, trying to do a badge run of a TF generally was a thing that people would try to form the best possible team for in the first place. I mean, the people forming those teams didn't just take all comers out of a sense of trying to be inclusive, they tried to form the best team they could in terms of synergy and performance, so there was a lot of scrutiny of possible teammates there already. People likely didn't get on those TFs for any number of reasons. If there's an IGC cost to get that badge run TF going and make it's success more likely, people might be willing to pay someone ELSE's IGC costs just to get that person on the team so the team has a better tanker or whatever and we all get the badge successfully.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
You're right; everything EVENTUALLY leads to greater IGC gain from IGC-generating activities, for somebody. The point is to have more ways to spend it that don't directly do so, so that if you're getting IGC for them, you're sinking the IGC out that is created by those who do it.
It's actually significantly less of a problem if the IGC inflates slowly due to it being traded around amongst players before finally sinking out; it engages all aspects of the game across multiple players, making them all useful to each other. It makes the "multiplayer" aspect meaningful. And it differs from having just a grind off from the IGC-producers' pocketbook or earnings because more players are engaged. The IGC has served a purpose in being created in the first place.
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Radiac, I do not think it is a bad thing to give players the opportunity to spend money on improving their character. Not at all. neither do I think one should hand out purples for free. Actually I am very much for having IGC sinks and I am not against having some slightly uncomfortable ones either. As you said, they will be inconvienient anyway and I think you are right about that.
But I think even players who are not farmers will find it very discouraging if they see that doing some content will leave them with less money than before. I fear the demotivation this causes would lead to a significant number of people quitting the game, when they invest a lot into this and then fail, effectively gaining absolutely nothing in return. Or at least not having the fun they could have.
And having people with tons of IGC and nothing to spend it on is the one thing we are trying to find ways to avoid here. Make a mission so hard that you have to buy so many buffs that it will always end up at a loss will then only have the effect of them avoiding this mission. It hurts me to do that, why should I be so stupid? It is a bit like trying to sell a 'put your hand on the hot oven'- game.
I am fine with temporary buffs you can buy for IGC. It would work well as a sink, combined with other methods. The thing I have a problem with is making them a requirement for something.
And yes while some really rich people might be willing to give their IGC away to others, just to play with them, that will also drastically limit even the really rich players to how often they can play this content and the fun everyone can have with that kind of challenge.
People do difficult content even when they know they're going to get defeated a lot in it though. There are/were losses associated with getting defeated and people still tried to defeat the Hamidon knowing they'd likely get killed one or more times, and that encounter didn't garner anyone a whole lot of IGC or even XP, all you really looked forward to at the end was a random HamiO. That said, the Hamidon was, for a time, the ONLY way to get those HamiOs, so people did that content for that reward.
I don't think all content has to be demonstrably profitable in terms of IGC in all cases. I think if there is some raid or TF or trial that can get you some high-end bit of gear at the end, people will do it to get that bit of gear, and those veterans who have lots of IGC but can't get a HamiO on the market because nobody has any to sell can either do that content to get that item, or else do it to get the item then SELL that item, possibly for a large personal IGC profit for THAT player which gets made off of the IGC of the player buying the item. In that case the content itself might have cost he player doing it an up-front IGC cost in terms of special Insps you needed to do it, or some form of temp power(s) you have to create to stand a chance against the trial, etc, in so doing it sank IGC, then the reward at the end was an item so precious you could sell in on the market for a lot of some else's IGC, thus sinking out more IGC in the form of transaction fees. The content sank IGC by making everyone have to gear-up with the temp powers, but then ended up giving those people a hot commodity that they can then use or sell, thus sinking a little more IGC in crafting fees or transaction costs.
I think that would work, even if you don't get a guarantee of getting one of the really desirable HamiOs ever time.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
For what it's worth, I still like the idea of having the option of a very powerful level of performance for a player's character that is unsustainably high in overhead costs to maintain. If that existed, people with a lot of IGC and nothing to spend it on would have something to spend it on, at least temporarily until thay run out of IGC to fuel the fun. Largely, I would expect that outlay of IGC to be done for the sake of getting really powerful, if only for a transient period of time, and then you do a lot of hard content while you're uber powerful at the cost of operating at an IGC loss. Maybe that content you're doing is being done for badges, maybe for the sake of generating random rare/very rare HamiOs or something, in any event, you'd want to do it for personal gain, just not for gaining IGC generated ex nihilo.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Speaking of IGC sinks and counters to inflation Tannim222 stated:
Like my Fishing Temp Power suggestion! (^_^)V
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Radiac, the primary reward for a hamidon run was a hamio that had a sale value from 300k to 1 bill influence. It's not a good example of people doing things in spite of the profit motive.
DR q is better and people did that once per badging character
City of heroes had a very low death penality. Getting defeatet did not matter too much and only got frustrating if it happened very often. But it was not much of a punishment and you did not loose anything. And whle you may not have earned much, you earned something.
And the hamidon origin enhancements attractet people because they were better than other enhancements and there was only one way to get them. As long as you have an unique reward for the IGC-sink-content, players might grudgingly do it. But that also creates the feeling to be forced to do said content. And now this gets a little edgy. Add the wrong thing to the mix, like a need for a team or certain archetypes to do it and it starts to really make some people angry.
And if the reward would not be exclusive, but the chance to get it would be lower in normal content? Well, the IGC-sink-content will be almost abandoned.
Sure, I can not know for certain, but I think this is what would happen. You need a very very strong incentive, something that not only compels people to do it but forces them to do it. And that alone makes me very sceptical about it.
I think it is important to ask why a player seeks IGC. Why did I want it? It was to further the abilities of a toon. I wanted this particular enhancement set to get a particular bonus to make a toon more powerful. Or to feed my army of alts to make them better. Whatever I deemed that to be it was always to further progress toward that end that I played. Now if you take that away and make it so that it is a job to maintain a toon at a certain level. Now I feel I have to grind just to keep a toon at an acceptable level of play then this becomes a job or chore that I have to do. I would not enjoy playing just to maintain. I personally need to see a return in some sort of upward achievement. I do acknowledge that you must have sinks in IGC to keep the in game economy healthy but I do not want to have to play just to maintain. I would see this as another job. If I wanted another job to support a hobby of mine I would get one and likely find a more enjoyable hobby to spend my more scarce time and more plentiful money on.
I reserve the right to have an opinion. You reserve the right to not agree.
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What you "lost" was Earning Power ... for XP, for INF, and later for Prestige.
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In response to Brighellac: YES, people wanted to get HamiOs to sell them, and YES they made a profit off of that sale,and I'm fine with that BECAUSE that INF was NOT being created from out of thin air. I'm not trying to keep anyone from getting rich by trading on the market OR trying to keep anyone from getting rich by grinding farms for IGC, for that matter. IT hink people should be able to do plenty of both. What I want to do is give people something to actually SPEND all that IGC on, voluntarily, that gives them something they want, i.e. added powerfulness, at least temporarily, and harder more challenging content to do with it. Selling items on the market SINKS IGC because of the house cut that get;'s subtracted, so I'm all for lots of commerce. Thus the Hamidon content was in and of itself NOT creating the INF you were getting, it was creating items which were effectively sinking some INF on transaction fees. All I'm saying is, people WILL do content that does not create IGC out of nothing if that content can get them items that get them IGC from the market, and when IGC changes hands over the market, IGC is sunk. If you add in some sort of supercharger or temp power "Anti-HamiO gun" that you need to make the Hami beatable, people will probably still do it to get the HamiO, or so I believe, even if that thing has to be crafted for IGC costs.
People spent time getting jellomen and Warburg nukes in order to make hard hard content easier, like the Statesman TF, and I believe those same people would have done those same things even if the jelloman power and the warburg nukes had a significant cost to create in terms of IGC.
to Lutan: Yes, getting defeated in CoT was a joke, eventually. There were times early on when people got really mad at you for "getting them killed" though too. Also, even if the "content so hard you end up LOSING IGC to do it successfully" does have some form of HamiO or other that is exclusive to that content, that is NOT forcing anyone to do anything. People can still try to buy and sell those items on the market, and people can still just ignore that content and the items it gives and live without. It's not written in stone anywhere that every toon MUST have the best possible stuff. None of my toons ever did in CoX. The option of having that content be there is intended for the people who have some IGC and want to try something fun, challenging, and possibly rewarding in the form of not IGC but some cool items (which probably still have to be crafted, which costs IGC or which, when sold at market, will end up causing IGC to be sunk in transaction fees).
I still firmly believe that people will spend IGC to make themselves more powerful. It think the only novel thing in all of this is the idea that the powerfulness is not a permanent upgrade but rather a temporary one, and that, therefore, makes it a better IGC sink, which therefore makes everyone who hears about it hate it because "Hey, I want to KEEP my IGC!". I mean, people will still be able to spend some (if not all) of their time farming or whatever for massive IGC gains anyway. That option will still be there. I just would like the option of, when that get's too boring, to be able to blow most of that IGC on some cool thing that maybe gets you a shiny item but no IGC to replace the IGC you spent doing it. That way people can spend some time saving up IGC for a while, then go on a spending spree and do some runs of some trials or something, spending like most of it, and getting some random items for their efforts. Then after you've had that fun you go back to grinding farms for IGC for a while, rinse repeat.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Redlynne, I know that, but this scenario came across more like content for high level characters, who do not really need all the experience. And the higher level content of city of heros got you experience very fast and got you past your debt reasonably well. I have to confess I do not know how this looks like on a Hamidon Raid, something like that was rarely done on the server I played on.
And Radiac, this is why I wrote it creates the feeling to be forced. It is true that this is only a feeling, but I think it makes little difference if the player is forced or feels forced. It will annoy him just the same. What I expect is that the price for those items will skyrocket pretty fast, they will be at least worth the amount of IGC one looses for the raid and then has to bring a big profit for the player for his time and effort. And since the content will not be done too often, it will go up and up and up... Are exploding prices not the thing we want to at least restrain with IGC sinks?
The idea of offering temporary power boosts for IGC is good, I like it. But tying content to that, that can not be done without them is what I dislike. I guess there is a big risk that every other content then becomes the boring routine one has to go through in order to save up money to get to the exiting bits. I would not want that to happen.
But there is a design problem too. The boosts for sale have to be very high or stackable to a great amount. Otherwise you run the risk of specialised builds to arise, players will use to farm the sink-content without needing to buy the buffs. And that is a good way to encourage elitism. Those who not play that special build needed, will be left out.
That will probably happen anyway, since if you have to invest much, you want to succeed and make sure you will do so.
Now think about what players in City of Heros could do with their builds. Some could take on giant monsters alone. How hard has the content to be if you want to make sure everyone needs the buffs to do so? And how big will the buffs be? They would turn everything else into a cakewalk.
I'm not trying to ensure that all items on the auction house are reasonably priced in comparison to each other. In any game economy the best and rarest pieces of swag will be the ones with the highest demand and shortest supply, and will therefore be the ones with the highest asking prices and probably also be the ones which are "Sold Out" most often. None of that affects or is affected by inflation. In a hyper-inflationary economy, prices of everything are out of whack with respect to the amount of IGC one toon can carry.
So please don't confuse an attempt to curb inflation with an attempt top make all items easily affordable. Even in an economy where inflation is not so bad, the rarest and best stuff will still have comparatively high asking prices and a lot of people still won't be able to afford a lot of it.
So for example, if there were a purple that is selling for 1billion, most people don't have 1 billion to pay for it, and even those that do would rather not pay that. So instead, people run the content that generates that item the fastest, hoping to get lucky and get one to drop for them. This generates some drops of that item, and of some other items, people sell that stuff on the market, etc. Even if the content itself was IGC-negative (meaning it cost you IGC to do it), you might still come out ahead if you got the the expensive item, but those that do so A)have to sell it instead of just slotting it and B) are not getting that 1billion IGC as created out of nothing, they're getting it from someones else, minus a transaction fee. So in terms of the economy at large, that activity sank IGC even if it ended up making the guy who got the random item drop rich in the process.
I'd rather give high-rollers (people who have saved up a lot of IGC over time spent playing) some purchase options for their IGC that are fun and desirable to have. I think this is better than taxation, or dropping less IGC overall, or taking people's IGC away somehow. What I feel the game needs is a product that can be sold for IGC and can be bought repeatedly, like a temporary thing that wears off over time or needs to be re-applied or bought again, etc. I'm not trying to make anyone permanently poor, I;'m just trying to figure out a way to give people the option of spending a lot of IGC on fun stuff.
I mean, in real economies, when times are good and people generally feel like they're making enough money to live, they tend to spend more on luxury items like eating at restaurants, traveling, buying jetskis, etc. The game needs more of that sort of stuff, luxury purchases you can make using disposable income. In the real economy, even the most durable of those goods will wear and tear over time and need to be either disposed of, sold for a loss, or repaired. Sadly, in the cyber-verse, all durable goods last forever, so you don't have that as a natural sink.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
All right, point taken. But we should also not try to ensure some items are unreasonably high priced. I think it is highly likely that the strong psychological entry barrier will keep people from playing sink-content and that will make any item that this content exclusively drops artificially rare. And there will at least be a minimal price for all those exclusive drops, since the seller will want to at least get as much as he lost, plus a little profit. And if he can not even get that, that will further devalue the experience.
The high price will ultimately add to the feeling of being forced to play the content, because the other option, the market, will probably be too expensive for most.
And the question how to balance the buffs then still stands.
I think the auction house, if it does it's job of creating an open market for all to participate in, will ensure that prices will end up wherever the supply and demand for the item in question would cause them to end up. At that point the problem becomes one of popularity of the item versus its rarity, like anything else.
I personally think that if you gave people some really challenging piece of content to do, with some kind of good random drop at the end or something that isn't pure IGC, like merits or something, people will try to beat that end boss for that reward. If you then create some cool temp power or something that can debuff that end boss or make that TF a little more tenable, people will voluntarily pay IGC to craft that temp power, pay to slot common generic IO type Enhancements into it, and do the TF itself at a loss of IGC all things considered, just to beat the end boss with the uber weapon to get the random drop.
In an inflated economy, there will be people with like 1 billion IGC laying around, and I don't think it would be any great problem for them to sink like 10million into something like that, I feel, given the possible reward at the end.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Hmmm, the way you put it right now, it seems that the content you would want to build would be possible to do without the temp power. Did I get you wrong the whole time?
There is a good point here: If the reward for the super-hard-to-complete, "unprofitable" content is not IGC, but a highly-desired item drop, then it can serve both the purpose of luring people to spend more IGC than will drop while still being worth doing for all the high-powered IGC expenditures required.
Whether this is due to a gate that literally costs you 10,000 IGC to even enter, or is just going to need 10,000 IGC worth of expendables (perhaps not the full use of them to exhaustion, but getting "enough" to make it through costs that, so you may as well use them again later on other things), that could be feasible.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Welcome to raiding territory, where the potions/consumables that you need on hand *just in case* (or do actually use) can mount up to more than what you directly get back from running the content.
The shiney is the object of desire here.
This is also a balancing point towards running costs here, you have to make sure that the money earned from mobs in this content is high enough to offbalance the costs of a typical run through the content, without it becoming a loot pinata for everyone who does it.
Case in point: Wildstar raids. At the start, I *typically* lost money from the raids, both through consumables used and repair costs. The loot though for defeating mobs/completing the raid made this up in my mind.
Now, when we run it, we make a profit (we rarely wipe on the bosses) and they are almost at the "loot pinata" stage. But we have spent several months running that content to get to that stage as well.
We know the tricks, we know what to do.
Of course, when I first started running the content, my repair costs were LOWER than what they are now... one of the downsides of running with "uber" gear.
You're certainly welcome to try :)
Maybe after enough power creep sets in, it will be, who knows?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
What makes this a little trickier in CoT is the fact that there are no Health Potions or Endo Potions, there is only Momentum and Reserves, both of which are filled through play, not by buying them. Of course, you could put some kiosks inside the TF that refill reserves for an *ahem* SMALL fee....
Even so, I think that if some TF or raid or other has what is perceived to be a "best chance" of getting some item or other (Synthetic HamiO being the prototypical one from CoT), you could set it up such that people who try to do it and fail at the end against the end boss lose IGC overall from all the stuff they bought to try to beat the guy, but those who succeed still are out that IGC but gained some precious random loot and/or merits or whatever.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yeah, Gangrel points out the obvious here.
In Tabula Rasa, it was perfectly possible to play a Sniper using a Torqueshell Rifle (the signature weapon of the class that only they could use) and LOSE MONEY on almost every single shot. The economics of the class were just terrible. Torqueshell Rifles used Rockets for ammo ... the most expensive ammo type in the game. If memory serves, Cartridges (for Physical damage weapons) cost 2 each ... Power Cells (for Electric, EMP, Laser and Sonic weapons) cost 3 each ... Cannisters (for Fire and Ice) cost 5 each ... and Rockets (for specialty weapons) cost 8 each. This is Per Shot by the way. Got kind of expensive to buy ammo in the quantities of thousands.
Well the game was set up in such a way that if you could kill a target with a single shot from a TSR, that Foe would drop less than 8 IGC (usually more like 3-6) so you'd be losing money on the kill. Against big stuff that required multiple shots, you'd still be losing money on every kill. Even adding in the cash flow from vendor selling all the trash drops, you'd still be struggling to break even. The economics of fighting using Rockets was just terrible. They were in almost every way "too expensive to use" because they'd cost so much. And that wasn't even including the price of weapon maintenance, which degraded the performance of your gear with every attack you made with that weapon. Needless to say, with some weapons, it was way more "expensive" to MISS than with others, and over time it just all added up towards struggling to generate positive cash flow.
As a result of the "adverse economic pressures" on sustainability in Tabula Rasa, I eventually developed the Grey Ghost build that relied on using the absolute cheapest and easiest to modify (and repair) gear that the game had to offer ... all "grey" items as the name suggests. Sure, my relative throughput was lower than that of someone decked out in all purple gear, but I could AFFORD to run a Grey Ghost build, up to and including getting killed DOZENS of times and needing to repair up afterwards and STILL be able to generate a positive cash flow. So rather than aiming for Uber Build and never dying, instead I went the other direction and made a Cheap Zombie that just keeps coming after you to eat your brains ... and it worked. It worked beyond anything I'd ever imagined! It meant that BOTH the High End as well as the Low End builds were equally viable, so long as you were willing to pay the tradeoffs.
Once I started playing my Grey Ghost, I convinced a few other people to try it out and they were rather pleasantly surprised by it too, since it was such a counter-intuitive thing ... being a "weak" yet easily sustainable build design that could get the job done. It was about as resounding a case as I'd ever seen of the "good enough" being superior to the "perfect" in actual practice.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
One thing that still bugs me about IGC economics is that there will be people (powerlevelres, gold farmers, etc) that just grind for IGC like its their job in order to out-earn everyone else. In the real world you drop dead of a heart attack or something when you try to do that, and even when you don't there's a diminishing returns factor involved. If it is those "workaholics" that tend to drive prices up and source more IGC into the system (via generating more IGC for themselves), I wonder if there;s some way that could be at least modulated so that as you keep turning the crank on IGC generation, the IGC generated comes at a slower rate of return over time. I wouldn't want to hurt the casual gamer or even the "this game is AWESOME!" CoT addict, but I would like to affect the "MUST......EARN.....IGC......" farmer in some way.
I'm not sure how to proceed in that vein though, and anyway it might not be a topic for this thread.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If we're talking about some kind of Hamidon Raid that has few if any minions to defeat, the IGC gotten by defeating the various stuff in the raid will be minimal due to the number of badies being minimal. Then, all that remains is to have some sort of IGC sink that costs more than that minimal amount.
In a longer TF type scenario, you need to account for the fact that the minions, of which there may be many, will tend to drop IGC, assuming we don't just turn that off, with the excuse being that the content is being done "in secret" as was the original post's main thrust. So there you're left with either A) let the minions drop IGC and make the cost to finish the TF cost MORE IGC to make up for it, or B) make the minions NOT drop IGC and make the costs associated with completing the TF less expensive.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I personally think that what drives prices up is how desirable any given object is (either perceived or real). An item in the auction house is only worth what someone is willing to pay.
I also think that like the real world, if I am willing to work harder to get rewarded and I find a better/more efficient way to do it, this is fair. As long as I am not cheating some one else out of their things that they work for I see no foul. If a slower rate over time was implemented, I would just cycle through more toons when I decided to farm. If you want to take a chunk out of the farmers who peddle inf/gold/IGC then the only way I see to help this is to have IGC transfers cost something in the form of percentages of the amount of the transfer. Much like the auction house did.
I reserve the right to have an opinion. You reserve the right to not agree.
Remember that the net effect of somebody going out to win a rare item will be to decrease the rarity of that item, and thus its price in the market. Similarly, somebody spending IGC on a sink (e.g. the consumables that make a particular rare-item run doable) increases the rarity of IGC, and thus deflating it (and causing things to go for lower absolute prices on the market).
Therefore, "Hamidon raids" set up such that they burn more consumables in IGC-value than is generated directly by the victory will have a net effect of lowering, overall, prices of things in the market as measured in IGC. Everything will go down in aggregate due to the deflation of IGC resulting from IGC sinking out of the game, while the rare item (e.g. "Hami-Os") gained becomes more plentiful and thus goes for a lower price on the market.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Congratulations ... you have discovered the [b]Korean Grindfest[/b]. You may now begin paying your dues.
Pretty much the only way to do so is to keep a record of how much IGC a specific PC has earned (as opposed to being traded/given by other Players or obtained through the Marketplace) since character creation and then applying a decay curve to additional earnings based on that ever increasing amount. Essentially, the more you IGC you earn, the bigger the "tax" on your earnings.
It could even be something as simple as a logarithmic scale.
0-9 IGC lifetime earnings = 0% tax rate
10-99 IGC lifetime earnings = 1% tax rate
100-999 IGC lifetime earnings = 2% tax rate
1000-9999 IGC lifetime earnings = 3% tax rate
10,000-99,999 IGC lifetime earnings = 4% tax rate
100,000-999,999 IGC lifetime earnings = 5% tax rate
... and so on ...
1,000,000,000-9,999,999,999 IGC lifetime earnings = 9% tax rate
That could then form the "minimum" tax on earnings, and then additional options could increase a PC's tax rate, but would never lower it below these amounts. Just adjust the Exemption Point (an absolute value) to decide when the tax kicks in and you're set.
Now, to be fair, I'd honestly consider this to be something of a "too little, too late" kind of drain on earning power, but it could perhaps be useful to illustrate the possibilities of alternatives where once you've already earned a lot of IGC over time it becomes increasingly harder to generate IGC at the same rate from the same activities.
A different alternative would be to set things up with a Log Out = Rest mechanic, similar to what World of Warcraft does when logging out at an Inn ... except that instead of applying the Rest bonus to XP, it's instead added to IGC earnings. That would then allow for casual players to earn enough IGC to be profitable [i]when playing their PCs intermittently[/i] while conversely making non-stop grind/farming potentially uneconomical/inefficient by comparison of return (IGC) on investment (time spent) compared to other alternatives.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I personally wouldn't mind seeing an IGC lottery. Half the proceeds make some lucky toon rich and half get siphoned into the abyss. The beauty of it is that it is a voluntary tax, much like in real life.
I reserve the right to have an opinion. You reserve the right to not agree.
Actually, here's a different question ... how much should Foe NPCs be worth in IGC to defeat?
One of the things that City of Heroes (and a lot of other games) do is increase the amount of IGC dropped by defeated Foes as the Levels go up. Do we want to do the same thing in City of Titans?
My immediate thought is that it would be a much braver thing to NOT inflate IGC drops with increasing Levels. Indeed, I'd rather tie the amount of IGC dropped to the ratios of HP expected for each "rank" of Foe NPC.
Remember the whole "Gearing Ratios" thing I was on about a little while back? This thing ...
1/4 of a Minion = 1 Underling
1 Minion = 1 Minion (duh...)
2 Minions = 1 Lieutenant
6 Minions = 1 Boss
24 Minions = 1 Elite Boss
120 Minions = 1 Archvillain(ness) or 1 Superhero(ine)
720 Minions = 1 Monster
5040 Minions = 1 Giant Monster
40,320 Minions = 1 Raid Monster
362,880 Minions = 1 Plot Hole
3,628,800 Minions = 1 [b]GAME OVER[/b] Event
I was proposing that those be the "gearing ratios" for each rank of Foe NPC. Aside from the Underlings, it's just a simple 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x10 progression, stopping off at each multiplier along the way.
So why not use that set of ratios to set the IGC earnings? Just multiply every by x4 (to account for Underlings being 1/4 of a Minion) and you're good to go. So using the above numbers you'd wind up with:
1 Underling = 1 IGC
1 Minion = 4 IGC
1 Lieutenant = 8 IGC
1 Boss = 24 IGC
1 Elite Boss = 96 IGC
1 Archvillain(ness) or 1 Superhero(ine) = 480 IGC
1 Monster = 2880 IGC
1 Giant Monster = 20,160 IGC
1 Raid Monster = 161,280 IGC
1 Plot Hole = 1,451,520 IGC
1 [b]GAME OVER[/b] Event = 14,525,200 IGC
Make this a constant value throughout the game, rather than something that gets inflated upwards by increasing Levels and you should be off to a good start.
I still remember the time that I Exemplared my Level 50 down to Level 1 to help a newbie in Atlas Park, went over, beat up a purse snatcher, and was given like over 3500 INF for my troubles, because of the "wonkiness" of the Defeat rewards still scaling towards Level 50 instead of towards Level 1.
So I'm thinking that a prime way to prevent inflation from occurring is to NOT build inflation of IGC earnings right into the system from the start based on Levels.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
There are more options than Health and Endurance "potions".
Hell, CoX had them... it had a *whole range* of other type of inspirations out there. Damage, resistance, accuracy, defences etc etc
You could add more with crit hit, health steal, decreasing the damage (type) resistance of the mob you hit and a whole load more.
The thing is, that these effects, whilst minor by themselves, can make a difference over a period of time. For example, in Wildstar, most of the "potion" type buffs last for 3 or 5 minutes (or until you die), whilst food buffs can last for a whole hour (or until you die).
Sure, it will only add a few points here or there, but over a prolonged period of time (think AV bashing for 5 minutes) that ALL mounts up to a nice respectable increase.
But this is where the meta gaming also kicks in. You *WON'T* need these for normal gameplay. For 95% of the content it won't make a difference. However, there will be times when it *could* be useful.
Stuff like this also allows the "weaker" players to catch up with the "better geared" people who might not necessarily need this stuff running all the time.
Now in most other MMO's this are typically craftable. If there are any available form an NPC these are typically the weakest version. But this is also just enough to give a taste of what they can do, and also build up links with other players.
The thing is, as long as the content is completable (without exploits) then most will stick with it, learn it and then master it. It might take a period of time, but they will do it.
What you don't want is content that is (in all fashions) NOT completable. WoW had this with a raid boss that was mechanically "unbeatable".
The amount of money that was drained out of the game via this learning period is quite a bit. If anything, it actually helps limit inflation. But only if people run the content (and fail) for it.
Wildstar had a problem with the raid mobs not giving out enough cash so that the general wear and tear quite easily (in some cases by an order of magnitude) outweighed the costs of succeeding.
They got around this by (slightly) increasing the normal "mob" currency gain whilst loading up the bosses with more of a cash bonus.
So even if you wiped 10-20 times defeating a boss (not getting there) then chances are you made the money back (if only just) by defeating one boss.
+111
Lets team up for the IGC Boost Weekend! ;)
Which Augments do i need to buy to stay viable?
Whatever the cost of those are, thats how much it should Add up to!
OK, Maaaaaybe a little bit over that cost!
Cause You know I'll screw up and buy at least One or two wrong ones. :{
And of course fighting higher level NPC's shouldn't make you rich. I like the Diminishing returns for that.
+1 Con. Most IGC
+2 Con. A little more
+3 Con. .....
+4 Con. Not that much more than 3
if it were a graph?
i guess it would be:
[url=http://sole.github.io/tween.js/examples/03_graphs.html][img]http://i.imgur.com/RW0iWLf.png[/img][/url]
Fighting +4 Con becomes more about bragging rights. ;)
Costs to level a toon up to the cap are one thing, I have no problem with playing a toon thorugh content to get to the level cap and still having some IGC left over after we're done. I don't think people leveling up toons is any great cause of IGC inflation in the first place and I feel that one should be able to level a toon up and get enough IGC to buy needed items in passing, with some left over so that you can change your mind on the slotting or drop a power in favor of another different power along the way, etc.
I feel the IGC that need sinking out of the system most is in the wallets of the veteran, level capped characters that have been accumulating IGC from play but have little to spend it on. Giving them something to spend it on is the ultimate goal, and if that thing is a "repeat purchase enabler" that can be purchased/done over and over, that would be ideal.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
This is precisely it.
I envision a world where once you've hit the level cap, you can either grind for IGC by doing the various soloing and missions and farming and whatnot, which is boring, but gains you IGC, or, when you want to let loose and have fun, you can do a raid/TF/trial and end up with LESS IGC than when you started, but get a chance at a cool item drop at the end. This way people looking to kit out their toon's build in the long term will spend some time grinding for IGC and some time doing runs for items which costs IGC. And the best part, to me, is that the economy will regulate itself in this regard, one hopes, because when items start to go up in price, either because they're getting scarce or because IGC is getting too plentiful, people will do raids/trials/TFs to get more item drops (to sell for the high IGC prices they can now got or to keep for themselves). And if/when IGC starts to get too scarce (fat chance this even happens at all) they'll do more grinding for IGC and worry less about the item content.
This way the economy has a feedback mechanism that helps it regulate itself.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising