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Auction house and cash shop

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Xjaehax
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Auction house and cash shop

hello

this time i would like to suggest few things for the auction house in game

anyone here played GW2 and saw the auction house no need to scroll and click each stack to buy it if you are buying in a bulk or going trough all of the same items before you find something new or interesting its easy to check and easy to buy the amount you want

also if you want to sell something quickly or do not like to put item up for auction house and wait it to sell you could just sell it for the price other players offer on auction house

same with cash shop you could buy your cash from other players and they could buy gold from you that way limiting gold sellers and people that spend real money in game will more likely buy gold that way than risk buying from gold sellers and getting banned

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos"

Radiac
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In City of Heroes/Villains,

In City of Heroes/Villains, the auction house worked a little differently than you're describing.

What the software did was, it allowed anyone who had a given item (say, a Carbon Rod) to place it in the auction house for sale. Buyers who want Carbon Rods would go to the "Carbon Rod" section on the "items for sale" side of the AH, and enter bids to buy a Carbon Rod. If your bid was the highest current bid and it met or exceeded the asking price of the current LOWEST asking price among all Carbon Rod sellers, you got the Carbon Rod for the buy price you, the buyer, entered in, and you bought it from the person who had the LOWEST asking price among all sellers. As long as there were Carbon Rods for sale, the software would consonantly compare the lowest asking price among all sellers to the current high bid among buyers and if the highest bid buyer is willing to pay as much or more than the lowest price seller wants, the deal happens. The game continuously keeps matching buyers and sellers until there are no more Carbon Rods for sale, or until the current highest bid is lower than the current lowest asking price, at which point the market is static until someone changes their bid or their asking price. There was an up-front cost to post an item for sale, which was a percentage of the asking price, so as to encourage people to sell low, and you got that posting fee back when you sold your item. If you never sold it, you just left it on the market. You could take it off the market, but if you did, you'd forfeit your posting fee. Buyers and sellers could not see each other's names nor could they see each other's asking prices or bids, but every time a sale actually happened, the game would publicize the actual sale price that happened. For each item, there was a running ticker that told you the last 5 successful sale prices for that item.

You had to buy stuff one item at a time in that system, but then most people never really needed like 10 or 20 Carbon Rods anyway. The only reason to buy stuff in bulk like that was if you were trying to corner the market, which the controls actually discouraged a little given the one-at-a-time nature of it, but people still tried.

I don't know if CoT will have a system that is anything like CoX had, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. That system worked pretty well, in my opinion.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

blacke4dawn
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You sure it matched in that

You sure it matched in that way Radiac?

I got the impression that it matched to the same or closest sell-price below the posted buy-offer, and that the whole buy-offer was payed.

Radiac
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The description I gave above

The description I gave above is my understanding of how it worked, given what I was told by other players at the time, I have no first-hand insight into how it worked other than that.

But, to be clear, the buyer's bid was always the number that the deal went down at, which is what I wrote above. So you could bid WAY higher than anyone was asking and end up overpaying for a thing sometimes. You could also post items for sale for the asking price of 1INF and get like 100million for it, if the market's current lowest bid was around there. If it was an item that had zero items currently on the market for sale, and like 5 bids, chances were you'd get some decent money regardless of the selling price was.

For example: I once epically mistyped a bid of 440,000,000 INF (440 million) for a Radioactive Isotope, which at the time was a salvage item selling for like 440,000 INF (440 thousand). I hit enter before counting the zeroes and got burned. Presumably somewhere out there, the person who put that Radioactive Isotope up for sale was pretty psyched to get almost half a billion for it. It only took me about 3 months to make the INF back.

I also used to routinely put stuff I knew was fairly valuable up for sale for the asking price of 1INF just to be able to offload it right away. If the thing was generally selling for like 100million INF, I'd usually get like 50million, but it was instant INF, no waiting. At those prices you weren't selling stuff to people who were going to use it, you were selling to speculators who wanted to buy low from impatient people like me and sell high to people who wanted that recipe or whatever to actually use it.

Those who were willing to wait several days/weeks to sell something generally got paid better per item.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Ok, I read it wrong initially

Ok, I read it wrong initially on how much was actually payed, so we are in agreement on that point.

Though I'm pretty sure the matching was more complex and different than what you initially stated. Pretty sure it matched the closest ones possible, closest under when placing buy-orders and closest above when placing sell-orders. Outside of that your understanding is same as mine.

I wouldn't mind to have this kind of system in CoT, though with a few improvements. Like being able to "refill" an existing stack that you are selling, and maybe increase the stack size for sell-orders.

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I don't know for sure how

I don't know for sure how anything worked, but the explanation I gave above (which is what someone told me when playing CoX) seems reasonable and fair to me, not to mention maybe easier to do. I mean, they did try to encourage people to sell low, which is a thing the posting fees were supposed to help with. Also, if I were willing to sell a thing for 100 and you were selling it for 200, and then a guy comes along and bids 250, it seems unfair to me that the game would match that buyer with you (the 200 asking price guy) when my asking price was lower. I feel like putting in a low asking price ought to ensure that I manage to undercut you and get the sale before you. It's awfully counter-intuitive to me that a person who can't seem to ever sell a thing would possibly need to RAISE their asking price in order to be able to actually move it, ever, which is a thing that could happen in the auction scheme you describe.

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Maybe so, but in you example

Maybe so, but in you example it wouldn't matter if the buyer bid 100, 150, 250 or even 250 000 000 he would still get the same seller. Outside of settings ones own "minimum price" I don't see any point of posting for anything except 1 inf since you won't sell it either at a higher price since anyone else with a lower price will just go before you. And since it's still the buyers price being actually payed then what they get is more fair imo. Also, I'm pretty sure that the devs intended it to be a "gamble" on both sides of the trade. Ask for more and you're guarantied to get more.

The thing with undercutting and selling it before someone else is valid but only if you include standing buy orders that are below what the other one is asking for.

Though I'm pretty sure that it was more complicated than that since the more common items would have both sell and buy orders active at the same time and yet posting mine for 1 inf didn't sell. And I'm not talking about just mine, the listing for last 5 sales didn't move at all, in that there was a couple of thousands of sell orders and over a hundred buy orders and still last sale was over a day ago.

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The reason to set your price

The reason to set your price higher would be so you don't sell it for lower than the price you want for it.

(Discussing only what has been described here; I am not speaking about CoT at all right now.)

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I'm pretty confident it

I'm pretty confident it worked as Radiac understood. The person willing the list the item for the least among all sellers would sell his product first when a buy bid was placed at or above his sell price no matter the sellers price point. The reason sellers did not list their products for 1inf all the time was that doing so would eventually consume all the standing bids at or near market price and drive the price of said product down eventually to 1inf. 1inf would be an undesireable price for a high value HO or IO.

All that said I do like the way GW2s auction house is set up. It easily handles bulk purchases (although the arrows for changing quantities are too darn small) and it includes a cash shop and IGC<->RMC exchange in a single neat package. My major gripe is that this takes a second to load every single time it opens. It ought to be able to cache the default view at least whilst loading the other items quietly in the background.

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Personally, I hope we don't

Personally, I hope we don't really need to be buying, selling, and carrying around big stacks of dozens of similar objects in the first place.

A man can dream...

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Radiac
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If you were selling a thing

If you were selling a thing that had most recently sold for like 100million INF, and there were currently no copies of that thing for sale, selling for 1INF sometimes got you as little as 20million. That alone is a reason to up your asking price. Some speculators put in low bids all over the pace and waited like fishermen with multiple lines in the water, waiting for a bite on a line here and there. That was a way to get around the INF cap and still have, or control the fate of, more INF. Your INf that you had in buy bids wasn't INF you were walking around with, so it didn't count towards your 2 billion maximum. There was basically no risk in doing that either, as there were no posting fees for bids, if I recall correctly. Playing the market like that was the way a lot of people got most of their INF. I mean, if you're buying for 20-80mil and selling for 95-105 mil, you're making more INF that way in one transaction than you'd get in multiple missions at level 50.

Now on the other hand, if there were some sellers and some buyers and the market was still static, it usually meant that the guy selling was asking something near fair market price and all the current bids were low-ball bids from speculators trying to buy low so they could flip the thing and sell high. Of course, the current seller(s) might also be a speculator(s) trying to sell high in that case too. Either way, selling for like 1INF there was somewhat less risky, sometimes.

In any event, I think that system worked just fine, for me. People did try to corner the market on some stuff sometimes, and that was annoying, but that auction house software worked, for the, most part, pretty well.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

In any event, I think that system worked just fine, for me. People did try to corner the market on some stuff sometimes, and that was annoying, but that auction house software worked, for the, most part, pretty well.

While cornering the market could be annoying, it was also helpful at times in CoH. Case in point for the bulk of the time I played the game I mass produced Level 35 and Level 40 Recharge IOs, and because of that I tended to have all my alts using all their Wentworth slots either buying the salvage to craft the IOs (Spell Inks and Circuit Boards), or selling the crafted IOs themselves. BUT when I sold the crafted IOs, I was selling them at a cost that was slightly below the cost of just the recipe (if you bought it from a vendor), all while still making a slim profit on them. Thus if people went into the AH they were able to buy a complete IO for less than it cost to make one. Also because of my standing orders for the salvage (I usually set my buy prices at about half of whatever the price they were going for at the time I placed the orders), it could be argued that I helped establish a 'base' price that kept the price of the salvage from dropping below a certain threshold, thus people selling their stuff for a quick Inf (i.e. those people dumping a ton of stuff on the market at 1 Inf each) were less likely to get an even lower amount than what I was willing to pay for their salvage, thus upping their profits.

I know one guy on CoH's old forums (Smurphy if I remember correctly) use to make large posts about the economy of the game, how it works, and how people who do things like I did were actually helping the in game economy (i.e. lessening the impact of market price dips).

Of course there were some Marketters who were evil, and would do things that earned the rest of us a reputation that might not have been stellar (i.e. one guy bragged about spending an insane amount of Inf to slowly drive up the price of a rare salvage to an insane price over a period of months, then suddenly dumping all of that stuff he bought onto the market for 1 Inf each, causing it to bottom out to record lows).

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

Izzy
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Aoide wrote:
Aoide wrote:

Of course there were some Marketters who were evil, and would do things that earned the rest of us a reputation that might not have been stellar (i.e. one guy bragged about spending an insane amount of Inf to slowly drive up the price of a rare salvage to an insane price over a period of months, then suddenly dumping all of that stuff he bought onto the market for 1 Inf each, causing it to bottom out to record lows).

Why cant MWM devs set a Min and a Max for each category/type for salvage/augment/etc... so the market NEVER Peaks or Dips and always stays Normal'ized? :[

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I would rather limit how many

I would rather limit how many items you could buy or sell instead of trying to set prices. I mean, no matter how cheap or available or useful a given bit of salvage was in CoX, you never needed more than like 10 of any one thing at any given time, so anyone who tried to get dozens/hundreds of the same item was doing it to corner the market. Just making it harder to work in such large quantities would help that, I think. If this means limiting how many buy/sell slots a given account or toon can have, I'm all for it. Then you can charge the would-be tycoons real money for more of those slots.

For the record, I'm also against the idea of being able to sell a lot containing a large number of similar items all as a single package. The last thing I would want is for someone to buy up all the singles and then try to sell a 1000-pack of them for a profit, it being the only quantity available. You might have to allow it for something you DO need large quantities of, like Stars maybe.

I would keep the commerce on things like Carbon Rods, recipes, and even crafted IOs to one-at-a-time transactions only and give people a limited number of buy/sell slots.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

Why cant MWM devs set a Min and a Max for each category/type for salvage/augment/etc... so the market NEVER Peaks or Dips and always stays Normal'ized? :[

To be honest, if they're dictating minimums and maximums, that kinda defeats the purpose of a 'player run economy' (or at least a heavily player influenced economy). Depending on how it's handled, it could be no better than just buying stuff from an npc, instead of from another player (with possibly an npc middle man).

Worse they run the risk of stuff that might be insanely hard to get never being sold on the market proper, if only because players may feel that the market maximum doesn't reflect how rare/how much effort something might be worth (thus in turn causing more of a possibility of heavy 'off market' trading if players can get higher prices that way).

Radiac wrote:

I would rather limit how many items you could buy or sell instead of trying to set prices. I mean, no matter how cheap or available or useful a given bit of salvage was in CoX, you never needed more than like 10 of any one thing at any given time, so anyone who tried to get dozens/hundreds of the same item was doing it to corner the market. Just making it harder to work in such large quantities would help that, I think. If this means limiting how many buy/sell slots a given account or toon can have, I'm all for it. Then you can charge the would-be tycoons real money for more of those slots.
For the record, I'm also against the idea of being able to sell a lot containing a large number of similar items all as a single package. The last thing I would want is for someone to buy up all the singles and then try to sell a 1000-pack of them for a profit, it being the only quantity available. You might have to allow it for something you DO need large quantities of, like Stars maybe.
I would keep the commerce on things like Carbon Rods, recipes, and even crafted IOs to one-at-a-time transactions only and give people a limited number of buy/sell slots.

The entire 'you can only buy the entire listing, even if they're either huge amounts at a low individual price, or insanely expensive in small amounts' issue is one that other game's markets have (Blade and Soul is a PERFECT example of this). One thing the CoH market let you do was sell certain things (mainly recipes and salvage, enhancements weren't stackable, and I forget if inspirations were) by allowing sellers to list large stacks at a price, but buyers could buy as many or few as they needed at a time, thus were only buying part of a stack, which was a major help.

I am for limiting the number of auction slots a person can use on the market in a single day (not at once like CoH, but a day total), with a limit on the number of items can be stacked in a slot. Mix in a time limit for how long a listing would last before any unsold items are automatically returned (minus a fee), and you have a good way to inhibit the ability of any one person to corner the market. i.e. Instead of having 20+ slots where you could put a stack of 10 salvage in each slot, and it'd sit there until it sold or you took the salvage back, maybe limit it to 10 slots where you could only have a stack of five in each slot, where you have to pay a small fee when you list the item, and if the items weren't sold in a reasonable amount of time (let's say 12 hours) you loose the fee and your unsold items are sent back to you.

On the other hand, buying should still be unlimited. You should be able to buy as much of anything in a day as someone wants, so long as they have the cash. Why? Because there's a LOT of non-exploitative reasons to do bulk buys that have nothing to do with 'ebil marketeers'. In CoH you had to do a ton of crafting to get the crafting badges, and as a badger I basically went on a buying spree to get those, buying almost everything at once (or as much as I could with the inf I had). There's plenty of stories of people in CoH where people with a lot of inf went crazy and bought tons of stuff for SG mates and friends. Heck, it was common for people to buy a ton of identical common IOs from the market after doing a respec in CoH (mainly Damage and Recharge, but depending on the build and AT other kinds were also common). In other games, where there's 'Crafting XP' and you have to level your crafting to unlock better recipes I'd tend to bulk buy just to work on that XP. And that's not even counting anything where you might have a random element on a crafted item, thus you might drop a ton of Inf on the materials to craft that item, just so you can keep crafting until you get a 'decent roll' (i.e. something akin to Costume Affixes in Marvel Heroes, which I hope CoT does NOT put in this game, since the whole 'everything is randomized' thing in the Marvel Heroes version of 'enhancements' and the crafting system is BS). I could keep going on, but there's a lot of reasons why people shouldn't be blocked from doing bulk buy orders that have nothing to do with market manipulation.

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

Izzy
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Aoide wrote:
Aoide wrote:

Izzy wrote:
Why cant MWM devs set a Min and a Max for each category/type for salvage/augment/etc... so the market NEVER Peaks or Dips and always stays Normal'ized? :[

To be honest, if they're dictating minimums and maximums, that kinda defeats the purpose of a 'player run economy' (or at least a heavily player influenced economy). Depending on how it's handled, it could be no better than just buying stuff from an npc, instead of from another player (with possibly an npc middle man).

Hmmm... question:
Does that mean MWM will need to keep switching around which components are required to Craft augments every so often, maybe annually?

Sorry, every time i thing about crafting, i unintentionally relate it a bit to Custom Built computers and component parts. As time passes, depreciation creeps in and newer innovations come around that cost around (little more or little less), slowly replace a slower counterpart.

If you want to avoid having to mimic the same thing in game, regularly creating newer inventory for crafting, etc... "a living economy",
and keep the existing inventory recipes for much.. much.. longer, selling costs could have min/max limits.

Of course this means its not really a "player run economy", but i dont care. I dont want to be one of the developers spending 30% of my time working on reinventing crafting items to replenish the economy. I rather work on Cool WHAP, KAPOW, etc.. animations and more interesting parts of the game. :/
Thats me though. ;)

But, how will MWM make money if its too simple!? ;)

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The truth is that setting

The truth is that setting minima and maxima, just like having vendors who buy and sell at fixed prices, is what leads to overinflation of IGC and IGC becoming next to worthless. The whole point of having a player-run economy is to allow market forces to keep prices reasonable.

The reason this doesn't quite work, most of the time, is that IGC in a player-run economy never leaves the economy, and yet it keeps flowing in because of the conceit of the game mechanics that IGC is manufactured by beating up enemies. i.e. there's a creation mechanism that doesn't have a commensurate and equally-popular destruction mechanism.

So just as there has to be an ongoing Star-sink, there has to be an ongoing and potentially ever-increasing IGC-sink. Something that there's always more you can buy for even more astronomical amounts, so that no matter how high inflation gets, there's something to buy, and that "something" drains the inflated IGC back out of the economy. I'm not entirely sure how to achieve that, though I have ideas.

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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

Aoide wrote:
Izzy wrote:
Why cant MWM devs set a Min and a Max for each category/type for salvage/augment/etc... so the market NEVER Peaks or Dips and always stays Normal'ized? :[
To be honest, if they're dictating minimums and maximums, that kinda defeats the purpose of a 'player run economy' (or at least a heavily player influenced economy). Depending on how it's handled, it could be no better than just buying stuff from an npc, instead of from another player (with possibly an npc middle man).

Hmmm... question:
Does that mean MWM will need to keep switching around which components are required to Craft augments every so often, maybe annually?
Sorry, every time i thing about crafting, i unintentionally relate it a bit to Custom Built computers and component parts. As time passes, depreciation creeps in and newer innovations come around that cost around (little more or little less), slowly replace a slower counterpart.
If you want to avoid having to mimic the same thing in game, regularly creating newer inventory for crafting, etc... "a living economy",
and keep the existing inventory recipes for much.. much.. longer, selling costs could have min/max limits.
Of course this means its not really a "player run economy", but i dont care. I dont want to be one of the developers spending 30% of my time working on reinventing crafting items to replenish the economy. I rather work on Cool WHAP, KAPOW, etc.. animations and more interesting parts of the game. :/
Thats me though. ;)
But, how will MWM make money if its too simple!? ;)

Well, first off, I'd say that swapping out what's needed every now and then might help a little, but odds are it might only be short lived. After all, if someone is trying to manipulate the market, they probably will still find a way. So, to follow your idea, instead of trying to corner one particular type of salvage, they might instead try to manipulate the kinds of salvage that might be in the most demand for the most in demand types of augments, and have it so they can switch quickly when it happens. Thus it'd possibly be a case of switching from manipulating one thing to another.

With that said, I agree that odds are the Devs would probably be better off working on everything overall instead of going back and just having to tweak the crafting system every few months just to try and spite a few people who might be manipulating the market.

On the other hand, they could still /sorta/ do both. After all, in City of Heroes we did still get the occasional new IO sets (just not that often). If done right it could shake things up with the market if/when those are done. But that's a whole different kettle of fish, with its own set of problems (i.e. how to work the new ones in without making the old ones completely useless and unused in the long run, much like most high level non-IO enhancements became once the invention system had been around for a while).

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

The truth is that setting minima and maxima, just like having vendors who buy and sell at fixed prices, is what leads to overinflation of IGC and IGC becoming next to worthless. The whole point of having a player-run economy is to allow market forces to keep prices reasonable.
The reason this doesn't quite work, most of the time, is that IGC in a player-run economy never leaves the economy, and yet it keeps flowing in because of the conceit of the game mechanics that IGC is manufactured by beating up enemies. i.e. there's a creation mechanism that doesn't have a commensurate and equally-popular destruction mechanism.

Thank you! This is exactly what I meant by 'being just like buying from an npc' but explains it better and concisely!

And if you don't mind a small suggestion regarding something that could be done to help drain things from the economy, I'd love to make a small one. Basically have an item or two in whatever regular special events that you run regularly (i.e. a Halloween Event, a Christmas event, etc.) that can only be bought with in game currency, is and is insanely expensive, but make it clear at the exact time that this happens that this thing (preferably some sort of cosmetic thing) will be back next year at the exact same price, and make it clear that it's priced so high to purposely drain IGC from the economy to fight inflation. That way in theory everyone who plays will have multiple chances to get the item in question (so long as they stay with the game long enough), you have the option of adding more if you feel there might not be a demand for 'last years item', and people have a reason to save up their IGC with the idea that they could use it one the stuff they 'need now' or the stuff they want but won't be available until 'later'.

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

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And I apologize to everyone

And I apologize to everyone if I'm coming off strongly regarding Market related stuff here. Basically the two things that kept me playing at times in CoH were Crafting/Wentworths (trying to find ways to make Inf without screwing over the 'average player', if not make Inf and potentially helping them), and Badging. And after dealing with the Achievement systems in certain other games (which I won't name) or the market in certain other games *CoughMarvelHeroesCough*, I kinda want something more like CoH (with possibly some tweaks) which I personally felt was the best system I've dealt with to date, rather something that flat out makes me want to rage quit in frustration.

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

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As far as I'm concerned,

As far as I'm concerned, there's something of an "ideal shape" for in-game economics can be broadly imagined like this ... a magnetic bottle ...

... and as any physicist (let alone engineer!) will tell you, magnetic bottles "leak" at the ends. In this case, that's the whole point, when talking about an in-game economy. You WANT the economy to "leak at both ends" ... meaning the high end AND the low end ... because that's where you put the "sinks" for resources, on BOTH the high and low ends. That way, it isn't ALL about merely "upgrading" to get the top end stuff. Instead, you also have a "low end demand sink" for resources as well, that can promote the destruction/conversion of high end resources (at a loss) so as to provide a prevailing cross-current in the economy to keep everything "churning" rather than just building up indefinitely.

If you want to get REALLY jazzy, you could even go for a "three point sink" out of 5 system that would look like so:

Highest -> Sink
High
Middle -> Sink
Low
Lowest -> Sink

That way, you have THREE ways to "drain" resources out of the economy, not just two, and you've got the high/low as "buffers" against anyone cornering the market in the other areas exclusively, so that supply/demand works to "smooth" some of the volatility. Set up rules to allow resources to be upgraded/downgraded (always at some sort of loss) and you're on your way.


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No apologies necessary, here,

No apologies necessary, here, Aoide. I for one welcome the ideas and the discussion. And I agree that the market is a way to engage players and should be preserved as such.

IGC sinks have been a topic of discussion before. There are ideas that have been floated about that, some of which had been shot down by various people for various reasons.

1. People seem to hate the old "lose some of your gear when you get defeated" idea, and I'm personally not a huge fan of it, because it leads to really vicious player-on-player hate and blame. "You got me killed! You owe me three Purples!" NO THANKS.

2. The idea of just making gear, that is Augments and Refinements, the analog to CoX's Enhancements, have some amount of wear and tear that causes you to have to repair or replace them over time was an idea. People said it makes the game feel too "gear-centric" for a hero and villain genre game and is more of a fantasy trope really. It might do that, it might not, in my opinion. I think you could have some not-very-powerful "Single Origin Enhancement" type of thing that's more or less immortal and never has to be replaced, and make them common, cheap, plentiful and disappointingly weak to the extent that they enhance powers, then have "better" crafted stuff (of various rarities and power levels) which is subject to some finite shelf-life once created. Not that it necessarily gets progressively worse over time, but that eventually it gets worn out and exhausted and has to be replaced with a new one, like an old pair of socks. You have to remember, in a game like this, unlike real life, things never actually wear out or get broken, so the stuff you buy lasts forever, unless you program in a wear and tear function of some kind to make that not the case. If you DID have this sort of thing, then the erosion of an item's value over time due to it eventually expiring would cause the IGC spent to create to truly disappear once and for all. In a game where there is no wear and tear like this, the objects you craft retain or appreciate in value as the IGC inflation sets in. A purple crafted three years ago is probably worth more IGC now than it was when it was made, since the IGC itself is less valuable. If you add in wear and tear, or "item erosion" in some way, every item made by spending IGC on it will eventually expire and finally actually sink its IGC costs out of the game entirely. It think this sort of thing would be doable in a way that preserves the "heroes and villains" identity of the game, personally.

3. What if every mob you defeated didn't drop loot immediately upon defeat? What if the NPC sending you on the mission gave you some stuff at the end instead? This might be good, but street sweeping should still be a viable thing, so you have to solve that problem. Also, aren't we still acquiring the same amount of stuff anyway?

4. What if, in order to actually craft the salvage items that drop for you in combat into a usable Augment or Refinement, you have to spend IGC in some way that is essentially a randomized gamble-fest? Like how some of the NPCs in CoX would let you spend Reward Merits on rolls for recipes, except you're gambling away your IGC now instead, because that needs sinking. So people need to acquire IGC so they can then waste most of it on random rolls that mostly come out "craps" for everyone, but occasionally give you something really rare and awesome. This could be roleplayed in the form of any number of different scientific experiments, magical rituals, etc. So like you go to Stork Enterprises and do some missions for Terry Stork and then eventually he let's you use his lab to do some of your own "experiments" which basically amount to you clicking on a piece of equipment and paying IGC to power it, then getting a random recipe or something that you'd need to make an item. Maybe it's what you want, usually it isn't. You could then have the option of rejecting the result, and thus losing your IGC, but getting a discount on the next roll, or accepting the result and then crafting or selling the item. One thing I like about this system is that Very Rares don't just drop off of random minions getting defeated. Like, how the heck did that gangbanger have that Apocalypse Negative Energy Proc? This way, you're hitting upon such powerful and innovative things through experimentation and science lab accidents etc. In fact, that would be a way to explain why you can't just learn how to make something and then manufacture it forever, because you're not sure why it worked the first time, so you have to keep experimenting. Maybe you can build a science lab or magic laboratory in your liar or SG base and it gives better IGC cost rates than the NPC ones. Maybe only subscribers get that perk. Maybe you can unlock some kind of thing that makes it better in some way via badges earned. Maybe if you spend enough IGC, pay a sub, get allt he badges, etc you can actually make different types of salvage components from scratch using this system too. Just kicking around ideas.

5. What if crafting an item had a timer that could be bought down by spending IGC? Or, for that matter, Stars? (idea stolen from Clash of Clans, or from my friends description of it)

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One thing some people might

One thing some people might be freaked out by, but which I actually like about option 4 above, is that it then takes a longer amount of time to actually get fully kitted out, or so I assume. I like that, because it means I'll be playing for a longer stretch of time (more days/months) than maybe I otherwise would before being "done" and having my toon totally outfitted as I want them to be. I think that adds replay-ability to the game.

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All right, I'll try to

All right, I'll try to respond to your ideas one at a time. Some have potential, but one... Ugh. I'll try to be as concise asd I can.

1) Total gear loss: You hit the nail on the head on why that would be a bad thing.

2) I agree. Too gear centric. Best I can see is that instead of completely wearing out, that as it gets damaged you might have to spend some Inf (and/or some salvage along the lines of the same kind that may have been used to craft it originally) to repair it o that it's back at 100 percent efficiency. But so long as it's never truly destroyed via this method, or fully 'wears out' it might be eventually accepted by the player base.

3) It's a possibility, but again, you hit the nail on the head.

4) I need to have a little time to process what you're saying here before I can fully respond, but for the most part I'm having flashback to the INSANELY poor drop rates of the gear that 'everyone wants/needs' in a certain other MMO, mixed with how that gear had randomized stats as well in that game (please, we do NOT need that here), mixed with the elitism that people who had that gear use to toss at the people who didn't. Hell, right now I want to either go /jranger, but feel this might work in some very limited fashion, or to have a freak out that starts with 'No. Please fortheloveofallthatsholy,doIneedtosacrificeafirstborntoCthulu,pleasemakeitstopwhywhy no. Once you start adding random elements to the stats on 'gear' you get the gear elitists coming out of the woodwork in ways that people who deal with them quickly start telling horror stories. Especially when it can take insane amounts of time to get gear that is suppose to be good/something everyone wants, but actually has crap rolls for stats. Usually you end up with people not only demanding you have this high end and rare gear, but they also have good (if not insane) rolls for the stats as well', so maybe tomorrow I'll have a proper response. This is just hitting very close to one of the biggest issues that turned another MMO off to me, and I have such high hopes for this game that I don't want to get turned off due to the same issues.

5) Maybe, but that might strike a bit too close to home for people who dislike certain kinds of F2P games.

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

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I miss my brute Blue Gem. :p

I miss my IO'ed out Tank.. :p
61+ Defense across the board.. Except Psy. at 40.

she had him at Hell..Owwwww. ;)

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

4. What if, in order to actually craft the salvage items that drop for you in combat into a usable Augment or Refinement, you have to spend IGC in some way that is essentially a randomized gamble-fest? Like how some of the NPCs in CoX would let you spend Reward Merits on rolls for recipes, except you're gambling away your IGC now instead, because that needs sinking. So people need to acquire IGC so they can then waste most of it on random rolls that mostly come out "craps" for everyone, but occasionally give you something really rare and awesome. This could be roleplayed in the form of any number of different scientific experiments, magical rituals, etc. So like you go to Stork Enterprises and do some missions for Terry Stork and then eventually he let's you use his lab to do some of your own "experiments" which basically amount to you clicking on a piece of equipment and paying IGC to power it, then getting a random recipe or something that you'd need to make an item. Maybe it's what you want, usually it isn't. You could then have the option of rejecting the result, and thus losing your IGC, but getting a discount on the next roll, or accepting the result and then crafting or selling the item. One thing I like about this system is that Very Rares don't just drop off of random minions getting defeated. Like, how the heck did that gangbanger have that Apocalypse Negative Energy Proc? This way, you're hitting upon such powerful and innovative things through experimentation and science lab accidents etc. In fact, that would be a way to explain why you can't just learn how to make something and then manufacture it forever, because you're not sure why it worked the first time, so you have to keep experimenting. Maybe you can build a science lab or magic laboratory in your liar or SG base and it gives better IGC cost rates than the NPC ones. Maybe only subscribers get that perk. Maybe you can unlock some kind of thing that makes it better in some way via badges earned. Maybe if you spend enough IGC, pay a sub, get allt he badges, etc you can actually make different types of salvage components from scratch using this system too. Just kicking around ideas.

To be truthful, in this regard knowing why it worked is less important than knowing that it does work. Just doing "random experimentation" and not saving previous result and comparing them with each other is not doing research, it's just playing around with a "Blackbox RNG"-thingy. If it's really going to be presented as a form of research and experimentation (regardless of if scientific, magical, psionic or whatever) then I should be able to get a specific and intended result simply by a "trial and error" approached and, more importantly, be able to save and later replay the better outcomes. If one does not have any control what so ever over the inputs then the outputs can not be labeled as meaningful imo, especially not from an RP perspective.

Research and experimentation is about controlled changes (preferably one single variable at a time) and see what the changes are compared to all previous runs, not about just throwing a number of dices in isolation and see what the outcome will be.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

4. What if, in order to actually craft the salvage items that drop for you in combat into a usable Augment or Refinement, you have to spend IGC in some way that is essentially a randomized gamble-fest? Like how some of the NPCs in CoX would let you spend Reward Merits on rolls for recipes, except you're gambling away your IGC now instead, because that needs sinking. So people need to acquire IGC so they can then waste most of it on random rolls that mostly come out "craps" for everyone, but occasionally give you something really rare and awesome. This could be roleplayed in the form of any number of different scientific experiments, magical rituals, etc. So like you go to Stork Enterprises and do some missions for Terry Stork and then eventually he let's you use his lab to do some of your own "experiments" which basically amount to you clicking on a piece of equipment and paying IGC to power it, then getting a random recipe or something that you'd need to make an item. Maybe it's what you want, usually it isn't. You could then have the option of rejecting the result, and thus losing your IGC, but getting a discount on the next roll, or accepting the result and then crafting or selling the item. One thing I like about this system is that Very Rares don't just drop off of random minions getting defeated. Like, how the heck did that gangbanger have that Apocalypse Negative Energy Proc? This way, you're hitting upon such powerful and innovative things through experimentation and science lab accidents etc. In fact, that would be a way to explain why you can't just learn how to make something and then manufacture it forever, because you're not sure why it worked the first time, so you have to keep experimenting. Maybe you can build a science lab or magic laboratory in your liar or SG base and it gives better IGC cost rates than the NPC ones. Maybe only subscribers get that perk. Maybe you can unlock some kind of thing that makes it better in some way via badges earned. Maybe if you spend enough IGC, pay a sub, get allt he badges, etc you can actually make different types of salvage components from scratch using this system too. Just kicking around ideas.

All right, the tldr version of my response to this (if you don't want to read my longer explanation below) can be summed up as 'randomized gamble-fest = No Fun'.

The long version? It's waaaaay too easy to get screwed over by RNG. And if you have to play a separate RNG game just for what you get for every single thing you need, then things have crossed the line, since it means you are more than likely going to get a subset of players who no matter what are going to never get what they need from RNG. This is why the NPC enhancement vendors, the common IO recipes you could buy from the crafting stations, the market, the stuff you could get for AE tickets, Merit Wards, Incarnate Merit vendors, and above all else Wentworths/The Black Market were so important in CoH. It meant that no matter what you did or how you did it, you had a chance to get either something you needed and could use without it being a random drop (but you could still get it from a random drop), or something you could sell for Inf that in turn could be used to buy what you actually needed.

But as I said, if everything is RNG, and mandatory RNG, people can and will get screwed over. First by the RNG. Then second possibly by feeling like their char is under-performing despite a lot of effort that they've put into playing the game. And third by other elitist players who tend to put too much of an importance on people having 'good gear' rather than being good players (CoH was amazing in how rare it was, but I've played other games where I got majorly burned by these people mainly because RNG hated my guts when it came to getting the gear I needed). Hopefully category three here will be as insanely rare if not more so in CoT when it goes live.

Now, if people could dump IGC/Stars for purely extra rolls for the loot that drops, extra rolls that are totally one hundred percent optional at that, then it could work as an IGC sink. Especially if the normal free rolls that you tend not to really think of as rolls since they just up and give you stuff anyways (whether from contacts/vendors for completing tasks, or from defeating enemies) still exist, since no matter what people would still get a 'fair shot'. But once you make it mandatory that everything has to go through an RNG filter (especially one where they know they're being screwed over by RNG, and one where they flat out know that they're spending their own hard earned IGC where they can feel like they're getting little if anything for spending it) filled with the majority being junk to get what you want/need, then you have issues. Potentially major issues.

But basically, if someone's played for 30 hours, they should be able to feel like they've played for 30 hours and gotten ahead for it. If someone's become a diehard player and put in 8 hour days every day fix six months, they should feel like they've gotten stuff out for the amount of effort put into it. But in either case, they should not, under any circumstances feel like they are at the complete and total mercy of RNG, and have utter and total crap to show for it. Especially since in the long run those feelings can fester (especially if 'gear elitism' starts to take hold with either high profile vocal players, or is even regularly used by players to justify excluding players from legitimate game content where teaming may be mandatory), thus in turn potentially alienating players from the game.

Now, on an semi-unrelated note if the Devs wanted to do something like Merit Rewards, AE Tickets, Incarnate Merit Vendors, etc, where you can trade in a specific currency for specific rewards, that would be great. And if they added an IGC cost to it where you might be able to cut out part of the Vendor Specific Currency buy using extra IGC it might help as an IGC sink. That is so long as it only went down to a minimum level of Merit/Vendor Tokens that had to be used, all while the amount of IGC went up at a very, very high rate for the privileged of using IGC to cover some of the cost. If anything it helps people get what they want/need, with more options to do it, all while helping act as an IGC sink to boot. I.I. The equivalent of a CoH Purple IO Proc might cost 40 Merit Reward Tokens, but you might be able to cut that down to a minimum of 20 tokens if you spend some insane amount like 20 milling IGC. That way people could get it cheaper IGC wise with all tokens, or cheaper Token wise by sinking in IGC.

And finally, and I know you didn't mention this, but it feeds right into the whole 'screwed over by RNG' thing, for the love of all that's holy, this game does not need to have stats that are overly randomized. Remember how in CoH how every level 35 common recharge IO had the same stats as every other level 35 common recharge IO? That's good. This game should stick with that. Not with a 'every piece of gear will be different, and have stats that are randomized' because that quickly becomes a case of 'too much RNG', especially if it's on a piece of gear that is insanely hard to get. I mean who in CoH would of wanted to use a Purple IO if it had a bad roll on a stat that made a common SO enhancement look like a better option?

And again, I'm sorry for my strong reaction last night.

The greatest high for a Blaster always will be annihilating huge mobs before anyone else knows that the enemies are even there.

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To be clear, in 4. above I

To be clear, in 4. above I was envisioning a world where you could still get rare and very rare stuff you wanted from doing Task Forces and Trials, etc. Like in CoX, if you did the Statesman TF, you had the option of getting a random Synthetic HamiO at the end, or else Reward Merits, which could be saved up and used to buy a recipe or take a swing at a random roll for less money. I was just thinking that if there were a gamble-tron NPC or device, like the Reward Merit vendors in CoX, somewhere in the game that let you roll for recipes by paying IGC, it might be a good way to sink IGC. Of course, this might not be the only way recipes come into existence, and it might not be the only way to acquire one that already exists. I mean, there's always the free market, plus some of that still drops at random from various things, like Task Forces and Trials, maybe only Elite Boss level mobs and above can drop that stuff, etc.

And I agree that we don't want to turn this into WoW, LoL, or anything like that in terms of gear-head-ism and people calling each other "noob" and "pwning" each other all over the place.

As Einstein once famously said, "The only winner in Monte Carlo is the croupier." (translation into American "The only winner in Las Vegas is the rake."). If you want to sink IGC, putting in an IGC casino for players to gamble it away is probably a good way to do that.

Of course, if there is an IGC casino, and you can trade Stars for IGC, that does mean that there's a definite pathway to allow people to spend real money and end up gambling it away. That might be a deal breaker, legally speaking.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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blacke4dawn wrote:
blacke4dawn wrote:

To be truthful, in this regard knowing why it worked is less important than knowing that it does work. Just doing "random experimentation" and not saving previous result and comparing them with each other is not doing research, it's just playing around with a "Blackbox RNG"-thingy. If it's really going to be presented as a form of research and experimentation (regardless of if scientific, magical, psionic or whatever) then I should be able to get a specific and intended result simply by a "trial and error" approached and, more importantly, be able to save and later replay the better outcomes. If one does not have any control what so ever over the inputs then the outputs can not be labeled as meaningful imo, especially not from an RP perspective.
Research and experimentation is about controlled changes (preferably one single variable at a time) and see what the changes are compared to all previous runs, not about just throwing a number of dices in isolation and see what the outcome will be.

I don't think there's any mandate on the devs to make anything as strictly true to life as that, to be honest. I think, in a case like this, if it feels even like a half-assed version of scientific or mystical experimentation, then it's close enough. I mean, the Merit Vendors in CoX had no realistic reason to exist or solid RP explanation for how and why they were giving away randomized rolls for stuff like that either, but there they were.

Also, in the comics, half the characters got their superpowers due to an experiment of some kind that ended up being impossible to later replicate for some mysterious reason. Even Captain America's shield was originally made of "vibranium steel" which was not pure vibranium, like in the movies, but an alloy of unknown composition. The guy who made it the first time fell asleep while mixing the chemical components and could never figure out what the missing ingredient was that made it so nearly-indestructible. So unrepeatable experiments yielding stupendous one-time results is totally remaining true to the genre of comicbook sci-fi even if it's not as true to real science.

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IGC sink ideas remain under

IGC sink ideas remain under discussion, right now, so brainstorming here doesn't hurt.

I, personally, favor having various things that are not purchased permanently, but rather "rented" with IGC. Maintaining your base becomes a constant sink, for example. If you don't keep up maintenance (by spending IGC), things stop working.

I know this could be EXTREMELY annoying for those who have to go on hiatus for a time. Let's imagine "maintenance" as "paying your electric bill" for this simplified example. If you keep paying, your base stays online and all's well. But what if you have to go on hiatus? Your base'll go offline when your IGC payments cease. You don't want to come back to a defunct base; that's no fun. So, buy a "battery" item. Or a lot of them. These will only turn on when you're not getting your power from the power plant, and will only BE on (and thus using up their activity time) when you are online. This means you can come into your base and use it after being gone for months...but it's going to be on borrowed time. So best hurry up and get your IGC payments to the power company back in gear.

Now, "power company" is a metaphor, here; while it could also be literal, I am envisioning a lot of different things that serve similar purposes, ultimately: pay IGC for it to work for the next unit of time. "batteries" could take a lot of different forms to accommodate the same function.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

IGC sink ideas remain under discussion, right now, so brainstorming here doesn't hurt.

I, personally, favor having various things that are not purchased permanently, but rather "rented" with IGC. Maintaining your base becomes a constant sink, for example. If you don't keep up maintenance (by spending IGC), things stop working.

I hope bases are not the only thing being thought about for sinks. Purchasable buffs, crafting costs, leveling fees, resurrection fees or diminishing returns on sales will do much more than base upkeep, which for the most part is not divided fairly among the guilds members.

Personally I think the best way to sink IGC is by using a faux bank system and hard limits on how much IGC players can carry. If players have a hard limit on how much IGC they can carry and the excess is placed into a bank account which in turn has a limit that can be increased and deposit fees you make the IGC sink behind the scenes and more managable. Basically it acts as an overflow that costs IGC to increase the amount stored and an IGC fee is charged every time something deposited.

By limiting how much a character can carry but not how much they can have you can still have high priced items for additional IGC sinks by allowing purchases directly from the bank but limit the ease of RMT bots by not allowing bank transfers between players.This could also help keep the auctions in check by limiting them to carry IGC only. The best thing about this is you can set up auto pay systems for upkeeps, upgrades or whatever else to keep the IGC sink flowing.

The bad thing about this is that it can be confusing for new players and frustrating for veterans.

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In CoH, if the Base fees

In CoH, if the Base fees weren't paid, then the base didn't go away, it just didn't have power to run the equipment. When you got back to it, it was dark. That's a model I could see extending to personal spaces. If you go on hiatus, you just have to pay your rent to fire the thing back up again. Perhaps that happens automatically, if you pay your Subscription? If the issue is made too complicated, players will protest.

Be Well!
Fireheart

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I don't think there's any mandate on the devs to make anything as strictly true to life as that, to be honest. I think, in a case like this, if it feels even like a half-assed version of scientific or mystical experimentation, then it's close enough. I mean, the Merit Vendors in CoX had no realistic reason to exist or solid RP explanation for how and why they were giving away randomized rolls for stuff like that either, but there they were.

Right, they weren't given an explicit reason to exist therefore there weren't that big of a disconnect that they did exist in that way. Therefore we could give the underlying reason for it's existence and thus "make it work".

Your proposal reads much more like it would be in a controlled environment to further the "art of science/magic/whatever" and thus if we can't reproduce it, or heck not even affect the inputs at all, then it becomes a disconnect between how I know it should work (because it does work and is used in RL) and how it works in the game. This kind of disconnect is, to me at least, a major immersion breaking "event" (for a lack of a better term).

Quote:

Also, in the comics, half the characters got their superpowers due to an experiment of some kind that ended up being impossible to later replicate for some mysterious reason. Even Captain America's shield was originally made of "vibranium steel" which was not pure vibranium, like in the movies, but an alloy of unknown composition. The guy who made it the first time fell asleep while mixing the chemical components and could never figure out what the missing ingredient was that made it so nearly-indestructible. So unrepeatable experiments yielding stupendous one-time results is totally remaining true to the genre of comicbook sci-fi even if it's not as true to real science.

But the thing is that effectively all of those are from "uncontrolled" experiments or even from total accidents. The number and range of variables is huge, most likely so big that even finding a good starting point would take years. Even in your vibranium example (haven't read any details on it myself) has this to a certain degree since if a completely unknown substance(s) could have been introduced then the possibility of the ratios of the other known components could be significantly different then what was written down or intended, thus the "starting point" for finding the unknown one(s) could be completely wrong and never reproduce those results. Considering that they, afaik, had a very limited amount of vibranium to work with in the first place then the "amount" of experimentation they could do was similarly limited.

The point is that these "stupendous one-time results" are the exceptions, not the rule. But you are proposing to make them the rule, not the exception. Now, if we change your proposal so that everything except the highest quality tier is predictable then we are much closer to how it is depicted in comics.

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I was proposing that you

I was proposing that you might, once in a great while, end up having a randomized roll on your "laboratory" that results in a Very Rare recipe. If you want, the very fact that these results would come up so infrequently might define them as "accidents" and not "intended consequences". You're certainly not nominating WHICH recipe you want and then getting it, in my vision of it. And as for learning how to make stuff you actually want, you could maybe allow that for the common stuff, as CoX did with common IOs.

In any event, I disagree with your argument above about the Merit Vendors. The fact that they had ZERO immersive reason to exist made them one of the MOST immersion-breaking things about the game, to me, whereas stuff that sounds like quasi-realistic psuedo-scientific excuses for people getting superpowers, to me, though still far fetched in any real life sense, is still far more immersive than a Merit Vendor standing around handing out recipes. Bruce Banner gets irradiated with gamma radiation from a bomb going off, and instead of being instantly vaporized, he gets super powers. That's totally preposterous in any real-world understanding of how atomic bombs, gamma radiation, etc actually works and in the real world Bruce Banner is just dead. But as Stan Lee once opined in an interview "It was the atomic era. I didn't know anything about gamma radiation, but it sounded good, and it worked. People ate it up." I'm willing to go along and PRETEND when stuff like that comes at me in a superhero game, I think everyone in the room has to be willing to accept stuff like that once they walk through the door. Everything in the game will fold under scrutiny if you try to peel back enough layers and demand that it be realistic on all levels.

Edit: I couldn't find the exact Stan Lee quote, but here's something from YouTube that's in the same spirit.

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Ok, went back and re-read you

Ok, went back and re-read you proposal for this and it seems I got a few things mixed up, my bad. Lets see if I can better address my issues here (including the later responses).

Super powers don't exist in our world so their mere existence requires a suspension of disbelief, one that makes sense in that regard. Manufacturing (the process you are talking about) on the other hand does exist in our world and having that produce random outcomes does no make any sense at all and would require some serious suspension of disbelief, almost to the point were one would have to reject realities imo.

Now if we change your proposal from a manufacturing process to a purely research/experimentation process then we can possibly make it work. By that I mean that you can upgrade the quality of the recipe itself, and through that the item it will craft. Or perhaps better would be to apply this "principle" to the components them self in that the quality outcome of a recipe depends on the quality of the individual components, and you could experimentally "enhance" them. Lots of discoveries have been happy accidents and better materials/components generally produces better items.

It'll probably create a bit more work for MWM in that every recipe, craftable item and/or component needs a version for each quality tier but for most things that's just a matter of scaling certain attributes/properties, but it could also mean that the number of "base" recipes is much smaller since you don't need to create different ones to cover all quality tiers.

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It seems to me that the

It seems to me that the things that give you trouble suspending your personal disbelief are usually the limitations imposed by the game and usually not the advantages given. You seem to have no problem with Merit Vendors who have no explanation at all for their existence when they serve a purpose which you can see might benefit you, but when presented with something that maybe feels like you should be able to take some major advantage of it, you start to think "With this system, I should be able to discover a way to mass produce Purples for myself once I stumble upon the way to do it once. If the system works like I would role play it, I should be allowed to do that, therefore, if I CAN'T be allowed to do that, the system is immersion-breaking, because I was able to imagine a way to abuse the #$% out of it and become uber powerful, it and it won't let me do that."

Anyone can always imagine a more powerful character, a crafting system that makes better stuff faster and cheaper, or a way to progress in the game with less work. That isn't the point of the "IGC-powered gamble-tron disguised as a science lab for generating random stuff". It's supposed to sink IGC. That was the intended effect, not to hand everyone a way to make their own Purples at home without randomized recipes having to drop in order to make it possible. That's just way overpowered, in my opinion, and shouldn't happen no matter what the roleplaying seems to be pointing to.

If the game is seriously going to allow people to learn how to make Very Rares, then they cease being Very Rare at that point, and their value drops anyway. I'm pretty sure I don't want the game to work like that, and if I were a developer, I wouldn't add in a crafting system which allows that to happen, no matter what. If it's your decision, as a dev, to do it the good way and preserve the rarities of the Rare and Very Rare drops by NOT allowing them to be made at will like that, then you might have to live with a "research station gamble-tron" which is perhaps a somewhat imperfect metaphor for "research" in the game, whereby you cannot learn from previous experiments nor make Rare and Very Rare stuff at will, ever. Once the roleplay explanation starts to become overpowered, a dev has to draw the line and say "Sorry, you can't do that. Game balance is a thing." If it has to be a little immersion-breaking in the sense that it's not so fantastically overpowered as you'd think it could be, then I'm not afraid of doing that for the sake of game balance and actually sinking some IGC. There's not much lost by doing it that way, other than it not working as well as our imaginations might want it to. That's how I see it.

Now, if you can think up a way to sink IGC in the item creation process that's more efficient than just charging a set rate per item, with no gambling, or if you want to explain away the gamble-tron in some other way, which makes it sound more palatable and immersive, I'd love to hear that. At the end of the day, the IGC sink is the thing I'm trying to accomplish there. What I want is to give people a reason to voluntarily spend IGC like crazy without actually gaining much of anything permanent for it, or at least very inefficiently generating valuable stuff. I think the gamble-tron does that, however you want to explain it away.

As for your latest wrinkle, in terms of affecting changes to the inputs and thus making the Augments and Refinements crafted better or worse, I would personally prefer to leave it alone such that every copy of "Positron's Blast +Energy Proc" which is ever made works exactly the same as every other one. I was envisioning the gamble-tron as a way to sink IGC by rolling for random recipes, but the recipes themselves would be the same ones as the game already has, with no changes to their stats or numbers in any way. Basically like a Merit Vendor random roll from CoX. That system would sink some IGC every time you pull the lever on it, and even when you get something more valuable than the IGC you paid, you still deleted whatever IGC you paid, it's out of the game and not coming back. Also, that item needs to be crafted, which sinks more IGC. If the cost/reward odds are set up right, the gamble-tron could be popular enough that people would do it but inefficient enough that as a net effect, it sinks IGC. Some people get lucky, some don't, that's why it's defined as gambling.

If you think everyone should get equal rewards for equal work, I say they do. The IGC earned is the reward. Once that is earned, however, what those players spend their hard-earned IGC on is up to them. Some of them may go and spend that reward IGC on randomized rolls for possible cool loot. That's a personal choice. Others might avoid such and just save up to buy the stuff they want on the auction house. That's a different choice. I think both are valid. I don't consider time spent pulling the slot-machine lever to be time spent "working" for anything , and I don't think anyone should "earn" anything for having done that. And in the real world, lord knows that you can spend a lot of time in the lab and end up only proving the theory wrong or getting no working successful result out of it for yourself. I can tell you from personal experience as a graduate student / research assistant, the pay sucks, you don't do it for the money, and successful results are not guaranteed. If anything, success is more often the exception, not the norm.

In any event, I don't see where your new wrinkle here of modifying the items made sinks IGC effectively, I don't want there to be different modified versions of any given Augment, and if your proposal is any more immersive than mine, that difference only exists (or is only important enough to matter) in your mind, not mine.

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I don't think the concept of

I don't think the concept of randomization in crafting is too far out field. I wouldn't do it exactly the same way I think Radiac is describing it though. Now, this idea isn't any guarantee, but something I was considering. I can't go into full details here as the crafting system as a whole has not been approved for release of info yet, so pardon some avoidance / vagueness on my part.

The portion of randomization I'm thinking of is when we get to players crafting set pieces. I'm not just thinking of how the old game did it where you only need two pieces to get x bonus, but each Augment and / or Refinement offering unique bonuses themselves, and combined pieces offering bonuses within the set. These bonues are where the randomization comes into play. Crafting say, the very rare (set name) Damage Augment would result in one of a few possible bonuses each with a range of values. The entire Set itself would also have fixed bonuses, but with randomized set-wide values. Then, once crafted, players would have the option to 'upgrade' their craftmanship (by sinking more igc and possibly other resources) into this 'perfecting process'.

Now, there would also be some variables in the market for the same crafted pieces if people are putting up the slightly lower quality versions. And players could choose to by these and use them, or by them in an attempt to 'upgrade' them on their own without having to go through the entire process of obtaining all the right materials to craft the item in the first place. Of course there is also the chance that a player could craft an item, get their desired bonus stat at its maximum value, which would be just as rewarding as getting the rare drop necessary to craft the item in the first place.


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So something like, you can

So something like, you can craft the (name) Damage IO, and instead of getting various bonuses for having 2,3, 4, 5, or 6 pieces from the same set, you get an inherent bonus just from that one piece, but the bonus it gives can be small, medium or large depending on the randomized "quality" outcome when you crafted it...

Then low quality stuff can be re-randomized to try to upgrade it, as a gamble which either pays off and gives you a better item, or whiffs and you have to live with it as is or try again, for more IGC.

Assuming the (name) Damage IO has a set amount of actual Damage augmentation that it always does, and the "quality" lies entirely in what would have been the "set bonuses", I have to say I like this idea, actually.

What if gambling to upgrade a thing from "+1% global regen rate increase" could result in either no change at all, something WORSE, like a +0.5% instead, something BETTER, like 1.5%, or something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT like a global 0.5% increase in endurance recovery?

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Tannim222
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

What if gambling to upgrade a thing from "+1% global regen rate increase" could result in either no change at all, something WORSE, like a +0.5% instead, something BETTER, like 1.5%, or something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT like a global 0.5% increase in endurance recovery?

That's certainly within the realm of possibility. I meant to imply as much when I said there would be a range of values, and only mentions that a player can attempt to upgrade. Having the bonus switch to one of the different bonuses effects is possible as well.


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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

It seems to me that the things that give you trouble suspending your personal disbelief are usually the limitations imposed by the game and usually not the advantages given. You seem to have no problem with Merit Vendors who have no explanation at all for their existence when they serve a purpose which you can see might benefit you, but when presented with something that maybe feels like you should be able to take some major advantage of it, you start to think "With this system, I should be able to discover a way to mass produce Purples for myself once I stumble upon the way to do it once. If the system works like I would role play it, I should be allowed to do that, therefore, if I CAN'T be allowed to do that, the system is immersion-breaking, because I was able to imagine a way to abuse the #$% out of it and become uber powerful, it and it won't let me do that."

No no no. This is about how much of my critical thinking I need to suspend to "make it work".
A vendor who hands out boxes, for what is essentially coupons, from a specific item-group but the exact item is unknown doesn't require much suspension of critical thinking. Heck, I'm sure there are such "vendors" in our world so most of the suspension is in regards to the organisation behind it. Those kinds of vendors I can "dismiss" with the thoughts "OK, I wouldn't do it that way but I can see it working". Also, that something doesn't have an explicitly stated reason for existing actually works in favor of RP since then I can fill in that gap myself and "make it work" in a way that suits me.
On the other hand, labeling an RNG-based system as experimentation or research requires me to suspend a shit-ton of my critical thinking due to how I know that it should work. Here my thoughts would be more along the lines of "what idiot designed it that way, it's so freaking inefficient and idiotic". I fully admit that I don't suspend my disbelief so easily when it comes to technical systems that do exist in our reality.

Quote:

Anyone can always imagine a more powerful character, a crafting system that makes better stuff faster and cheaper, or a way to progress in the game with less work. That isn't the point of the "IGC-powered gamble-tron disguised as a science lab for generating random stuff". It's supposed to sink IGC. That was the intended effect, not to hand everyone a way to make their own Purples at home without randomized recipes having to drop in order to make it possible. That's just way overpowered, in my opinion, and shouldn't happen no matter what the roleplaying seems to be pointing to.
If the game is seriously going to allow people to learn how to make Very Rares, then they cease being Very Rare at that point, and their value drops anyway. I'm pretty sure I don't want the game to work like that, and if I were a developer, I wouldn't add in a crafting system which allows that to happen, no matter what. If it's your decision, as a dev, to do it the good way and preserve the rarities of the Rare and Very Rare drops by NOT allowing them to be made at will like that, then you might have to live with a "research station gamble-tron" which is perhaps a somewhat imperfect metaphor for "research" in the game, whereby you cannot learn from previous experiments nor make Rare and Very Rare stuff at will, ever. Once the roleplay explanation starts to become overpowered, a dev has to draw the line and say "Sorry, you can't do that. Game balance is a thing." If it has to be a little immersion-breaking in the sense that it's not so fantastically overpowered as you'd think it could be, then I'm not afraid of doing that for the sake of game balance and actually sinking some IGC. There's not much lost by doing it that way, other than it not working as well as our imaginations might want it to. That's how I see it.

In my second reply I did make concession for the highest quality tier, a.k.a very rare/purples/epics/whatever you want to call it, to be gained purely through RNG in such a system. Depending on the percentage chance I could probably make a concession for the second highest as well. You also seem to be dead-set on an all or nothing approach to any suggestion around this, regardless of who makes it.
However, regardless of if the recipes or materials/components for very rare quality items are commonly available you can balance it out by the other one. As long as not both are commonly available then they (the finished item) would still be very rare. Sure, the "monetary value" of the commonly available side will plummet in but in total it won't flood the market with finished items.

This is not about making it "fantastically overpowered" but rather removing what I feel is an unnecessary usage of suspension of disbelief.

Quote:

Now, if you can think up a way to sink IGC in the item creation process that's more efficient than just charging a set rate per item, with no gambling, or if you want to explain away the gamble-tron in some other way, which makes it sound more palatable and immersive, I'd love to hear that. At the end of the day, the IGC sink is the thing I'm trying to accomplish there. What I want is to give people a reason to voluntarily spend IGC like crazy without actually gaining much of anything permanent for it, or at least very inefficiently generating valuable stuff. I think the gamble-tron does that, however you want to explain it away.

Thinking more about this if it's presented as trans-dimensional research/experimentation specifically then it would fit fairly well due to the amount of uncontrollable variables on the "other side". Though I'm not sure how good it would fit for recipes specifically but I could let that go.

Quote:

As for your latest wrinkle, in terms of affecting changes to the inputs and thus making the Augments and Refinements crafted better or worse, I would personally prefer to leave it alone such that every copy of "Positron's Blast +Energy Proc" which is ever made works exactly the same as every other one. I was envisioning the gamble-tron as a way to sink IGC by rolling for random recipes, but the recipes themselves would be the same ones as the game already has, with no changes to their stats or numbers in any way. Basically like a Merit Vendor random roll from CoX. That system would sink some IGC every time you pull the lever on it, and even when you get something more valuable than the IGC you paid, you still deleted whatever IGC you paid, it's out of the game and not coming back. Also, that item needs to be crafted, which sinks more IGC. If the cost/reward odds are set up right, the gamble-tron could be popular enough that people would do it but inefficient enough that as a net effect, it sinks IGC. Some people get lucky, some don't, that's why it's defined as gambling.

If by "works" you mean having the same kind of attributes then my system would still do that. On the other hand if you mean that they should have the same numbers on every attribute then no it won't work that, and neither did it in CoH due to the level range on all but the purples.
My proposed system would only work on quality tier (sorry for not making that clear), so at most 4 "versions" on each recipe. Think of it more like the differences between TO, DO, SO and IO (non set ones) when it comes to the amount that they improve a power by. To add, if not all components/materials are of the same quality tier then there would be some "gambling" involved since the outcome would not be guarantied in those cases. Personally I would model it on a slight exponential curve, for instance having half of the component/materials being common and other half being uncommon would only yield a 35-40% chance of an uncommon item.

Quote:

If you think everyone should get equal rewards for equal work, I say they do. The IGC earned is the reward. Once that is earned, however, what those players spend their hard-earned IGC on is up to them. Some of them may go and spend that reward IGC on randomized rolls for possible cool loot. That's a personal choice. Others might avoid such and just save up to buy the stuff they want on the auction house. That's a different choice. I think both are valid. I don't consider time spent pulling the slot-machine lever to be time spent "working" for anything , and I don't think anyone should "earn" anything for having done that. And in the real world, lord knows that you can spend a lot of time in the lab and end up only proving the theory wrong or getting no working successful result out of it for yourself. I can tell you from personal experience as a graduate student / research assistant, the pay sucks, you don't do it for the money, and successful results are not guaranteed. If anything, success is more often the exception, not the norm.

You do have a point here but that slot machine has to be completely and utterly voluntary. And no, getting the item from the AH does not make it completely and utterly voluntary since someone has to use it to make the item in the first place. I'm basing that on your first sentence in this specific suggestion: "What if, in order to actually craft the salvage items that drop for you in combat into a usable Augment or Refinement, you have to spend IGC in some way that is essentially a randomized gamble-fest?"
To me that reads as to even get any item at all you need to perform at least one roll of the RNG, thus you could never just craft the original recipe. Now if you meant that the first ever action was a choice between crafting or "gambling" then we're on level.

Quote:

In any event, I don't see where your new wrinkle here of modifying the items made sinks IGC effectively, I don't want there to be different modified versions of any given Augment, and if your proposal is any more immersive than mine, that difference only exists (or is only important enough to matter) in your mind, not mine.

As I said, it would only work on quality level. It could be a more effective IGC sink since you wouldn't pay as much per roll but end up paying more in total per item crafted due to making many more rolls. Don't remember any reference (and cba to search) but I'm pretty sure that economists have said that many small fees/payments perceived as not so bad compared to a few large ones, even if the smaller ones are larger in total, since many don't consider the grand total.
Personally I think that stumbling upon a completely new material (or even component) is much more likely than stumbling upon an unknown but fully functional blueprint when one is doing experimentation.

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Okay NOW I think we're on the

Okay NOW I think we're on the same page. I never meant that the IGC-randomizer should be a mandate of the crafting process in all cases, although rereading it now, that was *exactly* what I typed, so sorry about that. I only meant that the IGC-powered randomizer, when used, would ultimately spit out objects which would be then used to craft stuff, which could also be done in the same lab room, and which could be of low or high value, based on their rarities. Like salvage and recipes in CoX. I wrote that sentence badly, and for that I apologize. To be clear, it wasn't supposed to be "the randomizer is mandatory" but rather "the randomizer takes in IGC and spits out things, which things are mandatory parts of the crafting process, and you can then craft things right then and there with those things."

For what it's worth, I still dislike the idea of minions being able to drop really valuable loot, albeit VERY VERY infrequently. Maybe the game needs that though, I don't know.

Either way I'm starting to mentally crunch on Tannim222's thing, which sounds similar to blacke4dawn's, so assuming there's a perceived benefit to constantly re-randomizing stuff, I can get behind either of those ideas, I think.

One other thing I wanted to avoid was having different Damage Augments with the same name do vastly different amounts of damage augmentation based on a randomized quality index that could range from like 10% to 80% damage increase or something. I'd rather have set amounts in a few, maybe three grades, with the grade in the name "Bronze Damage Augment", vs. Silver and Gold, etc, as opposed to just calling them all "Damage Augment" and then you have to look at the fine print to see how good the thing actually is. I think both systems would be okay in that regard.

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I have to say Tannim222's

I have to say Tannim222's suggestion really has me thinking about the "switch from one bonus type to another" idea. Here's an example:

Let's say there are like 9 different types of bonuses you might have applied to your Augment. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board, where each square is a different bonus type. Maybe "global damage increase" is the center square and "global accuracy increase" is in the upper left corner, etc. When you make an Augment, you get a random bonus type and a random quality factor (high quality is less probable, etc). Then you can put the Augment back into the randomizer to try to upgrade it, which costs IGC and salvage components. Based on the IGC and salvage you burn when running your randomizer to upgrade the item, maybe each different Very Rare salvage item has a predictable effect. Like, the "Positronium Matrix" always causes you to jump from where you are to the square left of where you are. Other specific salvage items might cause jumps in other directions, etc. If you're already in the top left corner and you would jump "up", you wrap around and end up at the bottom of the grid (like going off the edge of the screen in Asteriods, something mathematicians call "periodic boundary conditions"). If you use Rare salvage instead of Very Rare, it might do similar jumps, but with more randomness. Maybe a specific rare causes you to always jump "rightward" but sometimes it goes "diagonal up-right" and sometimes it goes "diagonal down-right" and sometimes it just goes "right". And then maybe using an Uncommon will cause it to change COMPLETELY randomly, including "changing" to what it already is one time out of 9.

The thing is, this sort of system has advantages in being able to change the type of bonus and advantages in being able to preserve the type of bonus. Players will want to eventually land on the thing they like and stay there. So maybe the inclusion of certain common salvage pieces tells the randomizer to "please jump types" and maybe other commons included tells it to "please preserve types" whereas if you don't get the exact three commons you need in there with no extras, it just confuses the thing and you get "no change" a lot more often and "totally random change in both type and possibly quality, with possible decrease in quality" otherwise.

And then you DON'T tell people any of that and make the community crowdsource on it to crack the code and figure out all the the rules. :)

In the early going, it will be total chaos, with maybe some occasional breakthroughs, and the devs can drop hints from time to time, or include hints in rewards given for stuff, hints in exploration badges, hints in history badges, hints in NPC dialog and/or mission text (because nobody reads that stuff, so of course you bury good info about crafting THERE..).

Even after the players get the system totally figured out, it's still a randomized thing, so it still works to sink IGC, I think. I think something like this could be really FUN, actually. Reminiscent of the Horadric Cube in Diablo, only less reliable even under the best circumstances.

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What I'm about to discuss is

What I'm about to discuss is not an area in which I have any influence in the game, for the record.

I would love to see our crafting system be very Minecraft-esq. That is, you take the ingredients, you walk up to a crafting table, you arrange the ingredients, and you get a thing.

I would like the depth of the sub-game of crafting to come from having a lot of different kinds of crafting tables, with different kinds of slots and, therefore, different things it can make. A highly advanced crafter likely will have membership in some sort of crafting guild or association or club which gives access to specialized crafting tables, if he doesn't have his own personal crafting tables of all important sorts, painstakingly earned through other crafting exercises, mission rewards, and wheeling and dealing with NPCs and maybe even the auction house. Not to mention the efforts he's gone through to develop supplies of the higher-end crafting items.

Essentially, it wouldn't be level-dependent, not directly. It would be acquisition-game style.

But that's what I would want to see. I have no influence on this in the game's development, and don't know that it is anything like what those whose job it is are planning.

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I would not enjoy crafting if

I would not enjoy crafting if it was made to be tedious with multiple levels of component refining before you can craft the desired item similar to minecraft. It works in minecraft because thats what the game is about but I don't think it will really be popular in this game.

I would also really hate it to the point of it being a deal breaker if I had to craft everything for base decorations or as part of the PCC quest system in that minecraft refining style.

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I haven't played Minecraft,

I haven't played Minecraft, so I don't really know what this entails, but I don't have a problem with having different levels and types of crafting benches, to be unlocked through play, crafted using salvage etc, or bought with Stars. Also, doesn't Minecraft have like actual cubes of different colors, etc as the crafting resources? I would like to see something like that in the sense that you'd have a graphical manifestation of the object you're manipulating to construct your desired Augment. Like maybe if you are working on the "molecular manipulator" crafting rig, all of the salvage pieces that it allows you to use look like different colored spheres that you have to bond together in various configurations, like a ball and stick chem set. Then, on the "mystical rune" rig, you're moving tiles around on a stone altar of some kind and trying to get them in the right places to do the ritual, etc.

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I wouldn't mind a little

I wouldn't mind a little depth to the crafting system - but something as extensive as Minecraft? Like Brainbot said it works for Minecraft because that's the whole game. I think that it could be a bit of a distraction for the player and not quite as casual-friendly as I'd like to see in CoT. But who knows?

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I meant I don't want to have

I meant I don't want to have to gather 10 magic ore which needs to be smelted in a basic or better magic smelter to make 1 magic ingot then require 10 magic ingots which require a basic or better alchemy table to make 1 magic Rod then get cosmic diamonds that can only be acquired when you combine 50 cosmic stones that require a basic rock polishing table with 50 flawless diamonds that needs a basic gem polishing table then require another step of refining 100 regular diamonds into flawless ones using your advanced gem polishing table and with the magic rod and cosmic diamond I also need the ether sword which also takes another magic rod and a some soul forged iron of which you need to get 10 souls and 50 steel, the steel only gotten when you use your primitive forge to refine 100 iron ore into iron bars then use your industrial forge refine it with pure nickle and pure copper to make steel, both the pure nickle and the pure copper require you to find 10 plain nickle and 10 plain copper and refine it using your primitive smelter. After you do all that you can craft your magic spear.

But that spear is no different than a normal spear until you finish the magic infusion process which requires a whole new set of parts made up of other parts and a whole new set of crafting tables.
This doesn't even begin to go into what hoops you need to jump to make the various tables and forges to begin with.

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Brainbot wrote:
Brainbot wrote:

I meant I don't want to have to gather 10 magic ore which needs to be smelted in a basic or better magic smelter to make 1 magic ingot then require 10 magic ingots which require a basic or better alchemy table to make 1 magic Rod then get cosmic diamonds that can only be acquired when you combine 50 cosmic stones that require a basic rock polishing table with 50 flawless diamonds that needs a basic gem polishing table then require another step of refining 100 regular diamonds into flawless ones using your advanced gem polishing table and with the magic rod and cosmic diamond I also need the ether sword which also takes another magic rod and a some soul forged iron of which you need to get 10 souls and 50 steel, the steel only gotten when you use your primitive forge to refine 100 iron ore into iron bars then use your industrial forge refine it with pure nickle and pure copper to make steel, both the pure nickle and the pure copper require you to find 10 plain nickle and 10 plain copper and refine it using your primitive smelter. After you do all that you can craft your magic spear.
But that spear is no different than a normal spear until you finish the magic infusion process which requires a whole new set of parts made up of other parts and a whole new set of crafting tables.
This doesn't even begin to go into what hoops you need to jump to make the various tables and forges to begin with.

Yeah, no. I wouldn't want THAT much crafting. I need to spend SOME time actually fighting crime, after all. But even CoX had work tables that could be made in your SG base using SG Base Salvage, etc. You want far fewer layers and levels and refinement steps to have to go through, to be sure, but the basic process could still work. And I'm assuming that doing missions and defeating mobs is what gets you raw materials to work with in the first place. Not simple mining. Go. Hunt. Kill Skulz. Get their loot, craft with it.

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Going back tot he Tannim222

Going back to the Tannim222 crafting idea for a minute, you could also add in rules pertaining to which Augments can have which types of bonuses. Maybe Damage Augments can't have global damage increase bonuses. Maybe the types of bonuses can't be the same, or don't stack, if the Augments are in the same power. Like say, maybe having two different Augments, both with "+1% Damage" bonuses still only gives a total of +1% damage overall if those Augments are in the same power, but they do stack if they were in different powers. Obviously you have to have hard cap limits on how many things stack or how much bonus damage you can have, at the hard cap maximum, etc. Between the sheer number of Augment and Refinement slots you'll end up having in a totally level capped and kitted out toon, the number of different types of Augments and Refinements you have, the number of slots in each power, the types of powers, the types of bonuses you can make, etc, you could make a lot of rules concerning what can be made to go where and get best possible bonuses. That system has the potential to be very richly detailed and very customizable on a toon by toon basis.

So like, it's probably WAY better than just "gamble for recipes" (which was as good as I got in terms of original ideas). Good job guys.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Yeah, no. I wouldn't want THAT much crafting. I need to spend SOME time actually fighting crime, after all. But even CoX had work tables that could be made in your SG base using SG Base Salvage, etc. You want far fewer layers and levels and refinement steps to have to go through, to be sure, but the basic process could still work. And I'm assuming that doing missions and defeating mobs is what gets you raw materials to work with in the first place. Not simple mining. Go. Hunt. Kill Skulz. Get their loot, craft with it.

My description might be a bit exaggerated but its how i remember a mud i played back in the 80's. But the underlined parts of Segev's comment here sure seem similar to it.

Segev wrote:

I would like the depth of the sub-game of crafting to come from having a lot of different kinds of crafting tables, with different kinds of slots and, therefore, different things it can make. A highly advanced crafter likely will have membership in some sort of crafting guild or association or club which gives access to specialized crafting tables, if he doesn't have his own personal crafting tables of all important sorts, painstakingly earned through other crafting exercises, mission rewards, and wheeling and dealing with NPCs and maybe even the auction house. Not to mention the efforts he's gone through to develop supplies of the higher-end crafting items.

And about crafting materials only coming from drops. That seems like it encourages farming.

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We might have to change the

We might have to change the term from "farming" to "mining" heh heh...

But yeah, enough is enough with that, I get what you mean.

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I keep thinking that only the

I keep thinking that only the 'gadget guy' characters ever worry about crafting. The rest will have a contact who is a crafter. These characters may collect parts, but they then trade those parts to the crafting NPC for a finished thing. My main point, is, all of this crafting goes on 'off-screen'.

The intricate, multi-valued crafting system is... interesting, right up to the point where I get frustrated by having to collect a dozen different parts, all to make a thing. Frankly, I want the thing itself, and I'm not Really interested in the 'process' by which that thing becomes 'real'. I actually Want to visit the 'vending machine', order exactly what I need, pay for it, and walk off.

I was continually frustrated by the Auction House, because, if I ordered what I wanted for a reasonable price, by the time I actually collected my purchases, I was five levels higher. Meaning that what I'd just bought was no longer (as) useful to me.

And let's not even get into Purples. A character with a full set of purples had Lousy statistics. Because whoever was designing these sets was Actively trying to prevent us from having power and effectiveness in the game. And, If I was lucky enough to get a purple, it was Completely the wrong type for my character(s). And there was no way to exchange them for something more useful.

So, I really want to have the crafting system be Simple. Collect your parts, toss them in the magic box, and pull out the items you need. Or order them from Amazon and have them UP-Exed directly to your mailbox. Or visit you contact, tell them what you want, and they give you a mission to collect the parts needed to compensate the contact for the goods.

Be Well!
Fireheart

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I had thought the player-run

I had thought the player-run market (e.g. the auction house) would serve the players who wanted crafted items without having to craft them, themselves. Somebody else makes them, and they buy them from said crafters. It throws a wrench in that to learn that putting up purchase orders for such things would take multiple levels' worth of play to get filled.

Perhaps a secondary option, aside from the AH, where one could put up a "I will pay X for this, first come, first serve" sort of Craig's List deal? Allow similar "player-run vendors" which put up X item for Y publicly-listed price. Use the AH for anonymous bargain-hunting or mass-selling your goods for the best price you can get; put up items you want specific prices for on a first-come, first-serve basis?

I'm not sure how effective that would be. There are reasons the AH uses a sort of price-hiding model.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

I had thought the player-run market (e.g. the auction house) would serve the players who wanted crafted items without having to craft them, themselves. Somebody else makes them, and they buy them from said crafters. It throws a wrench in that to learn that putting up purchase orders for such things would take multiple levels' worth of play to get filled.

I think the main complaint there by Fireheart is that you couldn't just put in a buy order for a "Positron's Blast: Accuracy/Damage" but you hade to put in for a specific level, like for 30, 32 or 35 or whatever level you wanted it for and thus anyone wanting to fill got a huuuuge span to check. That meant that to get a buy order filled that specific level of recipe had to drop for someone, and that that person was even inclined to check the AH to see if there were any buy orders for that specific level, or inclined to craft it and put it out up for sale in the hopes of someone eventually buying it.

Quote:

Perhaps a secondary option, aside from the AH, where one could put up a "I will pay X for this, first come, first serve" sort of Craig's List deal? Allow similar "player-run vendors" which put up X item for Y publicly-listed price. Use the AH for anonymous bargain-hunting or mass-selling your goods for the best price you can get; put up items you want specific prices for on a first-come, first-serve basis?

So instead of checking a nice tree-like structure contained within one single UI I would have to go around and check hundreds of different "personal vendors"? I have seen these kinds of arrangement in other games and to me they are discouraging since having to find the right vendor (or catch the right announce in chat). Only way I could see it working in the long run is if you something similar to SWG, that is collect and list the contents of every "personal vendor" under a single UI where you can search them all in one go. You could even buy from that interface and then go to the vendor to pick it up. Though in fairness to SWG this was their version of the AH-system.

Quote:

I'm not sure how effective that would be. There are reasons the AH uses a sort of price-hiding model.

I highly recommend to go with one or the other system, not both. Having both will be confusing and only create more "work" in finding something to buy/sell, especially if you have to go to each "personal vendor" individually before you can see what they buy or sell.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

I had thought the player-run market (e.g. the auction house) would serve the players who wanted crafted items without having to craft them, themselves. Somebody else makes them, and they buy them from said crafters. It throws a wrench in that to learn that putting up purchase orders for such things would take multiple levels' worth of play to get filled.

I think if you had a system that required a concerted effort to craft the highest items and rely on a market as an option for those who don't want to spend the time learning to craft you would divide the players into a few crafters and a lot of buyers. When that happens the few crafters will usually only craft things they can sell for a profit. This would make experimentation and creativity less common and result in far more cookie cutter characters. IE I like to use single target attacks but all the crafters are making are things for AOE.

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I have always contended that,

I have always contended that, in CoX, trying to keep your SO enhancements current with level was impossible on your first toon, while on the other hand, if you had a sugar daddy toon at the level cap, you could use that to hep outfit your other toons as they leveled up. That said, I mostly stuck with SO's while I was leveling, then worried about the IOs after I hit the cap, on every toon. So the idea of getting the right level of Posi Blast was not something I tried to do while leveling at all. By 2011, leveling was so fast that you were at level 50 before you knew it anyway.

As far as CoT goes, I wouldn't plan on having uber elite loot for low levels that people are going to be apt to outlevel quickly. I think there's a place in the game for cheap, common Augments and Refinements to use while leveling, and then also have then rarer, more expensive, and more labor intensive stuff for the level capped people to play with and get fully built out over time. You could maybe dispense with "levels" of Augments and Refinements completely and just make everything level-agnostic. I would probably make the high-end very rare stuff level-agnostic in any case, and probably impossible to get or slot before you hit the cap, like how purples in CoX worked.

I don't think anyone wants it to take a month to get from level 10 to level 11, and assuming it is significantly quicker than that, I don't see a need for crafted, rare, high-end, low-level stuff at all. If you want to have level ranges of the cheap, common low level stuff go ahead, but I don't think that stuff sank much IGC in CoX. It was all pretty cheap. I still wouldn't have a level number on each item, but more of a ten-level range. Like "you can start using this Augment at level 11, at level 21, you outgrow it and have to replace it." This cut's down on the sheer number of technically differet but mostly very similar items to have to track in the AH. Every "level 11-20 range Damage Augment" is now the same, no "this one's level 11, this other one's level 14" etc. I'd do somethign similar with rare stuff too. I'd leave the auction house like what CoX had and then just have way fewer levels of items. There was no need for having ten separate levels worth of Posi Blast IOs. I would make it one Posi Blast IO set, no level number on the items themselves, you can start using it at some level, like maybe level 30, you never technically out-level it in the sense that you could keep it forever if you want to, but by level 40 and 50 there are perhaps better things, with different names, to replace it with, if you want to make/buy them. Then if you're going to have "crafting quality bonuses" of some kind, the market will have to sort this stuff by that variety instead of level.

I don't like the idea of super labor-intensive crafting, but if the "labor" is basically that you set up a queue of things to be crafted on your personal work bench(es) and then go do missions and stuff to cause progress on those jobs, I could see how that allows us to use our actual crime fighting time as a way to make more stuff. And if you could have multiple jobs happening at multiple sites, that would be a force multiplier. You'd be doing missions to both generate raw materials in the form of IGC and salvage drops, then also the "work" of defeating mobs and so forth causes the progress on the jobs you have in the pipeline to progress too, in the sense that the NPCs in your lair or SG base (or both simultaneously!) are doing that work while you go out and fight crime. Then you could even give some content a bonus on how much "work" you get towards completion of items for the amount of mobs defeated or whatever. That "better content" could be a different thing every week, or the new thing that just rolled out, or the seasonal event of the month, or whatever. You could also let characters grind and do missions for different factions in order to unlock that faction's crafting bench, so as to add more NPCs doing crafting work for you while you fight crime. Maybe each faction gives better "progress accomplished per mob defeated" rates if you're fighting their enemies and doing missions for their NPC contacts even. So you might have like 1 or more personal crafting tables in your lair (overseen by Jarvis or Alfred or whatever NPC is there), then one or more additional crafting tables in your SG base (and maybe the SG members have to fight over---er, "agree on" who gets to use which table at any given time), and then several more in remote areas where you've made friends with a faction that has one.

I could see that.

Edit: You could even let people buy crafting progress with Stars somehow. Like maybe you sell an "overclocking mechanism" that makes one crafting table progress faster for some amount of real time. Or maybe you get a "Stroke of Genius" item that can be applied to any job and just gives so some amount of progress based on how many Stars it cost to buy.

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I don't object to crafting, I

I don't object to crafting, I just don't want to have to deal with having to mix and match dozens (or hundreds!) of different ingredients (and Store them!). I don't want to deal with any sort of 'Crafting Level' which gates what I can make. I don't, really, want to spend hours while the 'magic' happens. None of this stuff contributes to my 'heroic experience'.

I also don't want to have to 'camp the market' in order to get the things I want. I did find the AH in CoH to be a perfectly fine system. Unfortunately, when I wanted a certain level of Enhancement (regardless of type), it often wasn't available and Recipes were even worse. So, for sheer Convenience, I was 'forced' to go to Hero Mart and buy what I wanted from vendors. Later, I was happy to buy Recipes for Merits or Tickets because I could buy exactly the ones I wanted, at the level that I wanted. Then I could Craft them, slot them, and Go Play!

Randomly generated loot was always Random, so it could be the right Set, but the wrong Enhancement, and almost certainly the wrong Level. And usually it's not the right Set, either. So you put it on the Market to sell, only to find that the RNG Gods have generated Hundreds of what you have, so it's not worth much, and six of what your Want, and they're all priced accordingly. I'd like it, if there was a way to reduce this randomness, or it's effects, in practice.

I definitely don't want to have to queue up for crafting-time, that's ridiculous! I want to Craft and Go Play!

I know there are people who enjoy the Crafting 'game', and the Market 'game', and the Badging 'game'. That's fine, but I want to skim through that stuff, quickly, and Go Play!

Be Well!
Fireheart

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Sorry, let me `splain. I

Sorry, let me `splain. I meant that you the hero would be in your lair, and while interacting with the crafting table, you'd pre-set it to do several jobs, in series, one at a time. As soon as one is finished, it dumps out the finished Augment or whatever into your lair storage and then proceeds to next thing in the queue. So like, YOU'RE not waiting in a queue at all, but your crafting jobs are set up, by you, ahead of time, such that as soon as one runs its course, any adventuring you do after that gets applied to the next thing, so as to avoid making you run back to the lair to set up another job. So each crafting table has it's own "job queue" that you can set up this way.

So as long as you go into the lair with the IGC and salvage components needed to start the jobs you're setting up, you just arrange them in the order of your choosing and go out and do missions etc while the crafting table processes your stuff, in the order you specified. Hopefully when you get back that last job isn't totally done, because if it is, that means you wasted some time defeating mobs whose defeat contributed nothing towards any future item creation.

And again, the immersion component of this is that your NPC buddies in your lair, Jarvis and Alfred, are actually overseeing this work while you go and fight crime, but the mechanics are that every mob you defeat contributes some amount of work toward the ultimate completion of those items.

You could even have bonuses granted in TFs and so forth where by you get immediate completion of your current job when you succeed in the TF or something. Similar to the Diablo rule of "Get a level, immediately heal to full and full mana" or something.

Also, a system with this much grinding for items will likely have far fewer "dud rares" as drops. Depending on the rarity and so forth of the crafting components, you might even set it up such that you can set out to make a thing with no recipe at all, just collect enough of the raw materials, refine them enough,etc and you'll l get it. In a system like that, the value of the rarer stuff is a function of how labor-intensive it is to make, and less so the rarity of the recipe drop, if there even is one. Or so I assume.

So my take is, you can run it like CoX with randomized recipes, or you can make it really labor intensive like Minecraft, but I don't think you'd ever do both. In the Minecraft type deal, you'd be able to make anything you want given the right components, which components would NOT include a specific copy of the recipe for the item. There you just have a list of required stuff, much of which was made, by you, from unrefined raw materials on crafting tables, and once you get all the pieces in place, you can craft the item. In that system, when you do content, you're hoping for high-end salvage pieces to drop for you (like, say, Hamidon Goo in CoX), and when you get it you might be like "Great, this is not needed to make anything I want." but hopefully, if the system is done right, the really rare items still are very valuable to somebody, just not you, so you sell it and buy the thing you need with the proceeds. One hopes.

Of course, if any one class or power set is really popular, the components for making the best stuff for that class are going to be more in demand and more scarce and that will always drive the price up. Also, if any Augment or Refinement is ever so good that practically everyone would use one or two, then those are going to be in high demand and short supply too. There's nothing much you can do to prevent that.

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Why wait?

Why wait?

Dump a sack of parts into the crafting-thingus, select the output you want, and yank the lever - 'Ding', out comes your result. Select the next thing and yank the lever - 'Ding', out comes your result. ...yank - 'Blat', oops, you're missing a part, check your pockets for lint. Or, program in your list of results, yank the lever, and 'clickety-clickety-clickety-Ding', the thing delivers the package, unless you forgot a part. Even better, if you've got tons of parts in storage and the crafting-thingus just draws down your stock, so you don't even have to sort it all out.

Or, you go to your crafting-NPC, order up a list of things, and they either give you a list of specific things to get, or they say, "I've got all that, but I need you to collect a hundred green-widgets, while I make them." If you happen to already have the 'green-widgets', then Bam! it's a done deal.

There is absolutely no excuse to time-gate crafting. If you do, you risk the result of setting up the crafting-queue, going off to run a TF, and returning to find you've out-leveled everything you just got made. I suppose I might try crafting ahead of need, but then you're storing a bunch of 'gear' that you can't use. I much prefer (almost) immediate gratification.

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Fireheart

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While convenient, automatic

While convenient, automatic crafting isn't intersting either. The idea I have (and no this is'nt set yet) is that crafting will can take time if left to autocomplete, but the player can reduce that time by getting more involved a crafting puzzle mini-game.
Now the concern of out levelling what you've crafted is valid unless what is crafted is still useful and usable once completed. Of course just how luch time is needd here is another issue. I'm uncertain of automated crafting timers taking hours to complete during which players have engaged in sufficient content to out level the usefulness of their craft.


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Segev
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There are a number of

There are a number of potential solutions to such problems; two that occur to me include the ability to "temper" a crafted item that has been completed, but is now underleveled, by adding some secondary resource to it (call it "tempering fluid") that bumps its level up to match yours, or something. Can be added before an item is "collected" from the crafting table, but not once it's been picked up.

Another would be an ability to craft items for higher than your current level. Either unlimited (so you can make something for your buddy 30 levels higher than you, if you've got the crafting chops), or within a certain horizon. This would allow you to plan ahead. "I think I'm going to gain 6 levels before this finishes, 'cause I'm going to do this really lengthy raid; I'll set this item to be built for a character 6 levels higher than I am now."

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I still think the solution to

I still think the solution to the level problem with gear, assuming leveling happens as fast as it did in CoX, would be to make the low-end common gear totally level-agnostic and make the high-end rare and very rare stuff available mostly to the level-capped, or nearly there, only. Purples in CoX were level 50 only. There were some uncommon sets at fairly low levels, which everyone out-leveled so fast it made them totally pointless. Some rare sets stopped at level 40, for some reason, with no level 41+ sets to replace them. That seemed odd to me.

Assuming you don't feel the need to have 10 different versions of the Rare Damage Augment for levels 41 through 50, each with a SLIGHTLY different amount of damage buff, and for each different "set" if there are to be sets, then you just make all "Positron's Blast Damage Augment" items the same (pick an amount of damage buff it gives and stick with it), with no level attached to them, and only allow, say, level 40+ toons to slot them in. People can probably plan ahead well enough for that.

And to me, the reason for putting a timer or a progress bar of some kind on the crafting is to add in a limitation in the base rules, so that exceptions can be created that help with that. The exceptions then become a valued resource in the game. Maybe you can unlock them, and get a feeling of accomplishment. Maybe you can buy them. Maybe you sometimes get them to drop at random, giving you the giddy feeling of "I WON THE LOTTERY!". All kinds of good, fun games have stuff like that. The game designer's job is to make the game more fun, more interesting, and more interactive for everyone, not to just make it easier wherever possible, so adding stuff like this in has it's place.

Personally I like the idea of "working" to get crafting progress more than just "waiting" for a timer to wind down, because it feels more pro-active and less like I'm sitting on my hands waiting for the bun to be done in the oven. If that is what the crafting mini-game turns into, great. I just hope that such a crafting mini-game has decent graphics and is interesting enough in itself that I'm not just boringly turning a crank.

For example, I don't know what the copyrights are, but let's say you make the crafting mini-game work like Alchemy. You have to arrange randomly appearing runes on a lead-tiled table until they all disappear and the tiles turn from lead to gold, which then means you've won and get your item. That's got some repeatability to it all by itself, it may get too hard, but it doesn't get boring, or feel like rote work ever. You generally always end a game of Alchemy feeling like the choices you made were important and made a difference. Then, if by spending IGC or Stars you can get better runes to show up, or you have one or more "wildcard" runes, you've got an advantage. Of course, going back to the Shakrizade article, that sort of thing basically turns crafting from a "skill game" into a "money game", assuming you're not willing to just wait out the timer, and assuming the game of Alchemy eventually get;s so hard you can't really win without incredible luck or some purchased wildcards. Not to mention you have to program up a crafting mini game that's robust and interesting enough to work. Also, the actual flavor text of the mini game could be either magic or technology, and some toons might not want to role play one or the other. So you might want to have two "skins" to choose from for that game, one that makes it look like magic, another that makes it look like science.

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Why not just make that

Why not just make that 'tempering fluid' able to boost the level of any crafted item at any time? If I am right and special crafted items will require dropped recipes then this could act as another IGC sink, help the market and give players a reason to craft before level cap.

If you make it more costly to improve an outleveled item than it is to craft one of the wanted level wouldn't people do it out of convenience and be another form of IGC sink?
And if any level of an item could be useful to any level character simple by boosting its level through crafting I would expect lower level items to be on the market more frequently and not be near worthless due to it being outleveled by most characters.
I know in most games that allow you to outgrow your items I usually don't worry about what I have until I can't outgrow it anymore. This might also make the game less gear focused which I think I read was important to MWM.

I think that made sense but lets give an example.
I make a level 20 ghost slaying sword but when I hit level 30 it no longer does enough damage to be useful. I can either craft a new ghost slaying sword that cost 100 IGC or I can boost the level 20 sword up 10 levels at 20 IGC per level for a total of 200 IGC. If I am more ambitious I could check the market and see a recipe is on sale for the level 30 sword and then sell my previous one or I can hope to get lucky and get a level 30 recipe from a foe. In any case the market might get a new item for sale, the market makes a sale, some extra IGC is sunk or the game simple maintains an expected baseline.

If some crafted items are more powerful or rare than others then the cost or means to boost them could be adjust to fit. If my ghost sword does 20 damage, the demon sword does 30 and the rare god sword does 60. Well to boost the ghost sword it costs 20 IGC to boost per level, 30 for the demon sword and 60 plus a rare heaven metal to boost the god sword per level.

I personally don't see why there needs to be a lot of barriers of difficulty between a player and an expected level of power when you can make it simple for players and still achieve the same or better goals in balance and sinks.

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Hmm, immediate gratification

Hmm, immediate gratification from Vendors, semi-immediate gratification from the Market, delayed gratification from Crafting, and semi-delayed gratification from 'working' the Crafting. Perhaps 'surprise' gratification from drops. This looks good!

Perhaps 'enhancements' don't degrade with use and they're level agnostic, but the low-level bonuses aren't very exciting in the mid- and high-level game. So you can upgrade, to get better performance, either via replacement, or by 'tempering' (I like this idea.)

Perhaps 'enhancements' are completely level-agnostic, but their bonuses are fixed at the level they are slotted? Mmm, and they can be extracted and re-sold through some mechanism, but their 'fixed' bonuses never go higher. They can be used by a lower-level character, which can re-fix the bonuses, but only to a lower level. Or, they can be recycled into materials for crafting into something else.

Of course, anything can be sold to a Vendor, whose price is figured by the Wentworth Index, a sliding scale derived from all sales at the 'Old Wall' market. (Traders have been meeting at the Old Wall for hundreds of years.)

Be Well!
Fireheart

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I personally dislike the idea

I personally dislike the idea of being able to refund a crafted item and break it down into it's constituent parts. I prefer a game where the crafting is irreversible. Once made, items cannot be unmade, only slotted, unslotted, sold, bought, and deleted.

Every character in CoX had a level, and your level determined, to some extent, what your "combat effectiveness" was. Being level 50 meant your attacks had higher unmodified base damage etc than they did when you were level 10, right?

If those base numbers are going to scale with level, I don't think the Augments and Refinements have to have a level on them necessarily. You might WANT to have them work that way, for IGC sinking or something, but you could probably get away with making the items in question character-level-independant and just rely on the character level to set the baseline combat effectiveness for each power, with the enhancement bonus being basically the same for everyone that uses the item, as a percentage of the base for the level you're at. So like if a "+10% Damage Augment" causes a level 10 toon to go from 100 damage on his attack to 110, that's an increase of 10%. The level 20 toon might do 200 base damage on that attack, and as such gets 220 when the augment is slotted.

THEN, if you DO want to have different versions of the Augment, make different versions, but not based on character level. If you want to have restrictions on which level toons can use which items, fine, but in that case I'd prefer to work in like 10-level increments, I don't think we have to go one level at a time.

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Mendicant
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I personally dislike the idea of being able to refund a crafted item and break it down into it's constituent parts. I prefer a game where the crafting is irreversible. Once made, items cannot be unmade, only slotted, unslotted, sold, bought, and deleted.

I don't mind being able to break down an existing item for resources, but I would expect it to be a very inefficient process. Say if a crafted item needs 3 X, 2Y, and 1 Z to make, when you break it down you might get 2 X and possibly a Y.

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If it cost IGC to do it maybe

If it cost IGC to do it maybe. And even then I would make it a dicey proposition as to whether or not it's cheaper to do that than just get more raw inputs and start over. If it saves you a lot of crafting that you'd have to redo, it should cost a lot and not always work in your economic favor, in terms of IGC spent alone. So like, you'd have to sak yourself "Do I want to break this thing down and maybe get some usable parts, maybe, or do I want to start all over again and craft my tail off to save the IGC?" That way you're sinking IGC to save people time, inefficiently.

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Mendicant wrote:
Mendicant wrote:

Radiac wrote:
I personally dislike the idea of being able to refund a crafted item and break it down into it's constituent parts. I prefer a game where the crafting is irreversible. Once made, items cannot be unmade, only slotted, unslotted, sold, bought, and deleted.
I don't mind being able to break down an existing item for resources, but I would expect it to be a very inefficient process. Say if a crafted item needs 3 X, 2Y, and 1 Z to make, when you break it down you might get 2 X and possibly a Y.

If you bypass Deconstructing Augments (or other stuff), just tally any existing slotted Augments (in a powerset), towards a Badge. Kinda like a Recycling Program. This way, the player doesnt just HATE the fact they spent all that time crafting and now their character has outgrown them, and the player might be a little less grumpy if they have that sense they still get Something in return for past crafting, but also an incentive to also look forward to Enhance kinda already GOOD augments (which are still effective, but could be made a bit better still). ;D

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I think the randomized

I think the randomized crafting results or stats are interesting but I don't think it is a "fun" system in practice. They used something like this in Huxley (a game that never made it out of beta) where you could combine two items to hopefully get a better result. Each time you got a better result it would cost more to attempt to upgrade again. So for instance if you had a level 10 damage item you could combine it with an upgrade item (basically a looted token) and you would have a 75% chance of getting a level 10+1 damage item. To upgrade the level 10+1 you would need two tokens and a have a 50% chance to get the 10+2 damage item. In our case you could sub the tokens with currency. It's a very logical system but at max level it becomes very expensive to get the best "gear" and at a certain point diminishing returns kick in. there was also a chance to destroy the item that increased with each "+" value. Maybe it could be tweaked to be a bit more fun. Maybe by simply removing the chance to have the item destroyed would be a quick solution.

For all the talk about limiting the number of tiers of enh I think you are forgetting that at launch there will only be 30 levels with the goal of releasing 31-40 Soon (tm) and 41-50 "some time after." So at launch you have you might have 4 tiers of enh (0-3)...I don't know if that is enough for outsiders to consider it a "complete" kitting system. At the very least it's something that should be considered for testing. I don't really understand the need to restrict the volume of enh to 10 level brackets, and I disagree with having them be level agnostic without some serious caveats. That's pulling too big of an IGC sink out of the game IMO. I think the main complaint about having so many enh at every level was that the search option at in game vendors was pretty poor with no way to filter results. Further the name required you to verify the enh against the description to ensure that you were buying the right item. Adding some simple filters would have solved that problem. The second argument was that these faded pretty quickly, every 5 levels. I think you could institute an in game vendor that would "tune" enh to eliminate the fade (but not buff the enh) To elaborate slightly on that idea this "Tuner vendor" would charge more to tune up older enh. So, tuning up (eliminating the fade) an enh from level 2-3 would be trivial but tuning up from 2-10 would encourage a player to just buy something new. This also acts as a IGC sink. A player could do this easily between missions rather than replacing all of their obsolete enh right at that moment. Just to reiterate this doesn't make an enh better or more effective it just treats the "wear and tear" on the enh. At max level a player might still experience wear and tear (death effect) on enh but via this vendor could easily treat such symptoms.

That's all I have for now (and its lunch time)

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Mr. Drupal wrote:
Mr. Drupal wrote:

The second argument was that these faded pretty quickly, every 5 levels. I think you could institute an in game vendor that would "tune" enh to eliminate the fade (but not buff the enh) To elaborate slightly on that idea this "Tuner vendor" would charge more to tune up older enh. So, tuning up (eliminating the fade) an enh from level 2-3 would be trivial but tuning up from 2-10 would encourage a player to just buy something new. This also acts as a IGC sink. A player could do this easily between missions rather than replacing all of their obsolete enh right at that moment. Just to reiterate this doesn't make an enh better or more effective it just treats the "wear and tear" on the enh. At max level a player might still experience wear and tear (death effect) on enh but via this vendor could easily treat such symptoms.

I think city of heroes had crafted gear that couldn't be out leveled. Just extending the lifespan of the item without increasing its power will does not make low level items useful. Most players will still only consider top level items valuable and anything lower will disposable. I doubt it would act as a sink of any sort. Why make only one level of item be worth anything.

I still think the best way to help the market, players and IGC sink is to simply allow people to boost the level of the item. It makes all levels of items useful for either selling on the market or to buy when players cannot find one their level. If the market does not have the item they want and they can't get one from enemies, people will probably keep boosting a favorite item instead of losing it when they out level the item which acts as an IGC sink.
Its easy for players to use this system and MWM can still keep rare items rare by adjusting the cost to craft item boosts. I explained it better 7 posts above.

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CoX had "combine two SOs to

CoX had "combine two SOs to make a +1 level SO", if I recall correctly. And then that process could be iffy depending on the levels of the SOs used, like they and to both be the SAME level or there was a chance of failure, right?

If you think that giving each Augment and Refinement a level number will sink IGC, I'm not against it. I just think that if leveling to the cap happens as fast as it was in CoX circa 2011, then there will literally be no use for ultra-rare, low-level Damage Augments. Nobody wanted a level 12 Rare Damage enhancement set piece in CoX, because they would have had a very short useful lifespan. Most of the uncommon recipe sets at low levels were terrible, and even if they weren't you got rid of them after like a week when you got to the next level range for the next good set anyway.

As I said, I personally always stuck with TO-DO-SO stuff while at low levels, knowing it wasn't the "best" and that I would out-level anything better very soon anyway. Then I only really started to worry about rare IO sets and purples when at the cap. Now, to be sure, there were some pieces you WANTED to be as low level as possible, due to the exemping rules. That was a bit of a curveball in the sense that it wasn't easy for a level 50 character to generate level 11 recipes for some of that stuff, like Zephyrs, and travel power +Stealth procs, etc. I doubt that particular peculiarity of the CoX system will repeat itself in CoT though.

Now, if the leveling is a lot slower, then maybe the gear does some IGC sinking as you level, I don't know. I do remember that having a completely new toon at level 1, you weren't even able to keep your TO-DO-SO stuff up to date the first time through the game. You needed a level 50 toon to finance your other ones. So it's the level-capped toons that have all the IGC, and thus need the sinks, not those leveling up. For that reason I feel like the high-end, level capped gear-making ought to be where the real IGC gets sunk. Maybe the Minecraft method of having tons of crafting refinement steps and different work tables is the way to do that, I don't know, but I would still make progress on those jobs dependent, in some way, on how much actual "hero stuff" you actually get done.

I really hope that the game doesn't turn into "Yeah, I'm a superhero, but I spend like 80% of my logged-in time doing crafting BS instead of fighting crime, because I'm at the level cap and need to make better gear. In fact, I need to mae better gear-making machines so that I can make better components with which to make the better gear." I like it when the game rewards you for doing missions and stuff by making your crafting move along faster for it, for that reason. I wanna be a superhero, not a machinist second class turning out widgets in a widget mill. So like, as a way of measuring the amount of "game roleplay time" that passes between starting a new gear job and finishing it, I would prefer not to measure it in real hours, nor in hours logged in, but rather in mobs defeated since the job was started, or XP gained, or something. That way you are still going out and doing your heroics to make the gear happen faster, not grinding away in the lab for days over it.

If mobs are going to drop XP and IGC when defeated, or even if that stuff get's held in escrow until the end of the mission, the game has two different metrics right there for determining how much time has passed since you started your gear job(s). Any system that makes use of that stuff and encourages actual TFs, missions, street sweeping, etc is the way I would go. This approach might encourage farming missions, but that's still better than farming other grindy, non-heroic feeling stuff, so I'll take it.

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I think you've missed my

I think you've missed my point almost entirely. To address the very specific complaint of outleveling enh and having to buy new enh every 5 level immediately upon level, because everything you slotted till that point is now totally worthless, you could visit a vendor that would spruce up your enh until you had time to buy something new. IO's were designed partly to combat this very issue. I also stated very clearly that my goal was not to make low level items more useful (twice in fact) but to negate the effect outleveling. Temporarily.

Quote:

Most players will still only consider top level items valuable and anything lower will disposable. I doubt it would act as a sink of any sort. Why make only one level of item be worth anything.

the first sentence answers the last sentence in that quote I think.

I don't think boosts as described will work out that great. If I want to sell a level 49 enh I will only be able to sell it for the cost of a level 50 enh minus the cost to upgrade. Because no one will have any interest in buying something and upgrading it for more than the cost of that level 50 enh when they can just buy the level 50 enh. This rolls all the way down to level 1. So if the cost of level 50 gear is very high and the cost to boost is very low that would mean that even level 1 gear could be prohibitively expensive. But if the cost of level 50 gear is low (which it will be as I explain in a second) then it would cost more to buy low level items and upgrade them to 50 than it would to just buy the level 50 gear. The reason level 50 gear will be cheap is that A)most people spend most of their gaming time at max level thus most items in the AH will be max level B) everyone will overtime upgrade their items one way or another to level 50. If those items are then put on the AH it will create a large supply of max level items. The demand will be relatively constant but the supply will grow exponentially. Over time this means that prices will go down. If you want to avoid high prices on the AH this is the way to do it.

MWM will not be able to adjust the cost of craft item boosts in the upward direction. Players will throw a fit if in order to keep rare items rare MWM has to increase the cost to boost the an item. Imagine one week you boost an item up to your level then you come back the next week and it costs twice as much to boost that same item on another character. I don't think you would say "oh well that's the market for you" no this is the internet and you would scream bloody murder at the devs for jacking the prices. Having the devs perform market corrections is never really an option. The only thing they can do without causing a backlash is adjust the drop rates a little at a time. Anything facing the customer pretty much has to stay static in an MMO or go down in cost.

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

think you've missed my point almost entirely. To address the very specific complaint of outleveling enh and having to buy new enh every 5 level immediately upon level, because everything you slotted till that point is now totally worthless, you could visit a vendor that would spruce up your enh until you had time to buy something new. IO's were designed partly to combat this very issue. I also stated very clearly that my goal was not to make low level items more useful (twice in fact) but to negate the effect outleveling. Temporarily. .

I understood your idea. I don't agree with it because it tries to correct the wrong problem.
When you have level based gear in a game there comes a point that it becomes detrimental to continue using it. This is the reason why developers make gear you have out leveled be unable to be used. To force a player to upgrade the equipment so they are the within the proper power level range that the game is balanced around. If they did not do this then players will eventually hit a wall and not be able to advance further. You may know that gear needs to be upgraded and your extension is a temporary stopgap but not everyone will. So there needs to be a point where extending an items life has to stop which is not that different than it would be without the extension.
Having to buy new gear is not a problem its a design choice that does not need to be fixed. If there is a problem with replacing gear then the problem is not with out leveling it. The problem is with its cost to replace, availability of replacements or simply a chore to replace.
Extending outdated gear will be about as useful as level 5 crafted gear in city of heroes. So few will ever use it and most that do will learn later that it was not worth it to do so.

Grimfox wrote:

I don't think boosts as described will work out that great. If I want to sell a level 49 enh I will only be able to sell it for the cost of a level 50 enh minus the cost to upgrade. Because no one will have any interest in buying something and upgrading it for more than the cost of that level 50 enh when they can just buy the level 50 enh. This rolls all the way down to level 1. So if the cost of level 50 gear is very high and the cost to boost is very low that would mean that even level 1 gear could be prohibitively expensive. But if the cost of level 50 gear is low (which it will be as I explain in a second) then it would cost more to buy low level items and upgrade them to 50 than it would to just buy the level 50 gear. The reason level 50 gear will be cheap is that A)most people spend most of their gaming time at max level thus most items in the AH will be max level B) everyone will overtime upgrade their items one way or another to level 50. If those items are then put on the AH it will create a large supply of max level items. The demand will be relatively constant but the supply will grow exponentially. Over time this means that prices will go down. If you want to avoid high prices on the AH this is the way to do it.

Boosts for common gear will probably be just as much of a waste as your extending idea. I am talking about providing an option for keeping favorite gear. That was why I used ghost sword as an example and not just sword.
One of the more frustrating issues with rare level based gear is that it expires. You get some cool rare gear at level 5 but it expires at level 10 and then it becomes almost worthless. You can't use it anymore and few are going to buy it because it will expire quickly for them too. If that same cool level 5 gear could be boosted all the way to max level you can keep it as long as you want. If you decide to sell it then it does not have the stigma of expiring making any level of any hard to get item have value.
Its true that max level rare items will still be the most valuable but that is as it should be. What will happen is gear will have a value based on its level instead of seeing max level gear be ridiculous and everything else being worth a whole lot less.
The market should work the same as vendors and rare gear should be valued proportionally based on its level.

Grimfox wrote:

MWM will not be able to adjust the cost of craft item boosts in the upward direction. Players will throw a fit if in order to keep rare items rare MWM has to increase the cost to boost the an item. Imagine one week you boost an item up to your level then you come back the next week and it costs twice as much to boost that same item on another character. I don't think you would say "oh well that's the market for you" no this is the internet and you would scream bloody murder at the devs for jacking the prices. Having the devs perform market corrections is never really an option. The only thing they can do without causing a backlash is adjust the drop rates a little at a time. Anything facing the customer pretty much has to stay static in an MMO or go down in cost.

Rare items will become less rare as the game goes on regardless. Items in games are rare because the chance to get them is low not that there are few of them. The longer the game goes on and the more people playing means more of the rare item is in the game. MWM won't adjust the cost or drop rates to keep an item rare. MWM will only adjust the cost to boost if they made a mistake in determining how rare they want it to be in the first place. Just like they would only adjust the drop rate if they made a mistake in how rare they wanted it. In both cases players get upset if the adjustment was not in their favor. I can link you to threads in other games showing you how negative drop rate adjustments are not met with smiles and sunshine and the worst of those are when the developers tried to do it without telling the players first.

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Not speaking as a dev at all,

Not speaking as a dev at all, but just as a fellow fan looking at problem-solving, what if one of the crafting options involved forging newer, level-appropriate (but more common) gear as components into older, level-inappropriate (but rarer) gear to create new, level-appropriate gear of the older gear's rarity?

Heck, maybe some of the "Crafting Recipes" may just plain use lower-level gear explicitly, thus making lower-level gear a useful "drop" even to higher-level characters, because while it was great for them back when they were low level, it's still a craft ingredient for their higher-level improvements.

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That makes sense, and also

That makes sense, and also gives a reason for a higher-level character to exemplar down... Although... that brings up the question of getting level-appropriate loot, or exemplar-level-appropriate loot, or both.

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In CoX there were rules to

In CoX there were rules to the exemplaring that caused you to, in some cases, want lower level gear rather than higher level gear. As I recall, (fuzzily), you actually wanted like level 11 Super Speed +Stealth Procs because they would still work and do their stealth thing while super speeding when exemped down to like level 10, or whatever the lowest level was that they could work at, and since they did nothing else for your SS power that was actually level dependent, the only thing you cared about was what exemp level they shut off at.

I think the rule should just be that higher level gear should is always desirable, for those who can equip it, over lower level gear, no matter what level you end up later exemping down to. That is, if I'm a level 50 and I'm trying to get a Super Speed +Stealth Proc, I should WANT a level 50 one, I think, even when I exemp down. At the very least, the level 50 item shouldn't be strictly worse than a lower level one under any circumstances.

I think if you're going to have the ability to combine one or more lower level gear items into a higher level one, this is even more important. I don;t want to be combining or up-converting a level 40 thing into a level 50 thing just to find out that when I exemp down, the level 50 gives me nothing while the level 40 would have had me covered in good stead.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

In CoX there were rules to the exemplaring that caused you to, in some cases, want lower level gear rather than higher level gear. As I recall, (fuzzily), you actually wanted like level 11 Super Speed +Stealth Procs because they would still work and do their stealth thing while super speeding when exemped down to like level 10, or whatever the lowest level was that they could work at, and since they did nothing else for your SS power that was actually level dependent, the only thing you cared about was what exemp level they shut off at.

IIRC IO's "deactivated" if you exemplared down to more than 5 levels below the IO's level, even if the slot itself was still available.

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Right, that. I would rework

Right, that. I would rework those rules such that there is never a reason to want level 11 gear when you could have level 50 gear instead.

And let's not forget, people who play a lot are apt to spend more time playing their level-capped toons than anything else, so highest-level gear will drop MORE than level 5 gear will for that reason. So that alone reduces the street prices of level 50 gear based solely on supply and demand economics.

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As much as I agree with not

As much as I agree with not de-valuing higher-level gear, wouldn't this make exemplared high-levels a bit OP in lower-level content?

Devs might need to insert some other mechanism for balancing exemplar power?

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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

As much as I agree with not de-valuing higher-level gear, wouldn't this make exemplared high-levels a bit OP in lower-level content?
Devs might need to insert some other mechanism for balancing exemplar power?
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Fireheart

Exemplar the gear as well?

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Any way you slice it, you

Any way you slice it, you have to set a power level that the exemped-down 50 is going to be at, probably as a hard cap. You may find that the full boat of level 50 gear is overkill when exemped down because the hard cap is the limit anyway. That's fine. I just wish my level 50 procs and so forth don't get shut off while the inferior level 11 ones stay enabled. Maybe they all shut off when exemed down far enough. Maybe they all stay on. Whatever. Anything's better than "Oh, you want a level 11 one of those, for weird reasons that bear lengthy explanation".

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