In reading some of the previous posts in another thread, I had an out of box thinking moment to curb IGC inflation. Standard part is give set amount for mission completion. Out of the box part is give one tic of IGC for certain amount of in game play. Example: You play for 1 hour, you get 600, IGC Complete a mission you get 1000 IGC. MWM can tweak rates but nothing else gives IGC. I would think this would keep prices in the AH down since you now have a limited source of in game income. More play time equals more IGC, off set on whatever you can generate from the AH from drops. So now if you have a rare item you might have to rethink a price check since people will have to evaluate their IGC expense. Since I have also thought of an exploit to this one thing that could be added is, if flagged as AFK or idle for a certain amount of time. IGC not given.
Thoughts?
Won't work. It will (if anything) lead to "speed runs" of content, because the only way to get more currency would be to actually *complete* the content. The more content completed, the richer you are.
And people complain about *other games* where players spend little time talking to others... if my earning was based on how fast stuff was completed, you can bet my bottom dollar I am going to try to complete it as fast as possible.
Now if killing mobs themselves generates zero currency, this will only increase this "complete missions as fast as possible" behaviour
Side note: 99.9999% of all games gives currency as a reward for completing missions. It isn't anything new.
The mission completion was the normal part, the out of box is 100 IGC = 1 minute of in game time, Example: If you are running a costume contest, you are gaining IGC for being in game. 20 mins of doing anything in game nets you 200 IGC. The mission complete and AH would just be the other 2 sources and 3 sources total. But I can see the con of speed runs.
Trades speed runs for farming... Interesting idea but not personally a fan
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I think what I would o to try to keep IGC inflation down would be to put in "gear degradation" as a sink. People know about this and have seen it in other games. The thing I like best about it is that it gives you the ability to essentially tax the rich more than the poor.
A brand new noob with no really great gear yet pays very little if anything based on having very low-level Augments etc in his powers. The veteran who has all the best Augments would presumably be paying more IGC to maintain those and as such would be subject to higher "taxation" on that so to speak. I like that aspect of it. Unlike the SG bases and personal lairs, which are more of an optional perk that not everyone will want to set up and maintain (just doing that is a learning curve that some of us didn't want to climb in CoX) Augments and Refinements are more or less universally used by people, as most people want to put Augments in their powers and many will not be satisfied with "less than the best" in many cases. PVPers for one, and then just people who want to be able to speed run through tuff content in PVE for another, plus presumably you could get badges for the harder-to-do dsuff, not to mention badges for keeping your Augments maintained for given lengths of time.
As for how exactly to pay out IGC and random drops when doing missions, I'd work it like this:
1. When Street Sweeping, each mob drops some set amount of IGC every time, but that is the lowest rate overall and you can do better if you do missions, and better still if you do missions with a bigger team
2. Missions, trials, and TFs have mobs that give IGC when defeated, but VERY little compared to street sweeping, but then you get bonus IGC at the end of the mission or whatever when you successfully complete it. If unsuccessful, you get nothing, but can attempt to do the mission again. With chained-out missions (story arcs, task forces, etc) you'd still get bonus loot at the end of each mission, but then you'd also get additional bonus lootz at the end of the TF or whatever. The exact breakdown beign set up to reward competing the thing, but you still get loots on a per-mob-defeated basis in the meantime. You would have the mission keep track of how many mobs were defeated and then assign team bonus rewards at the end of the mission based on that, which thus causes more defeats to translate into more IGC at the end of the mission, and thus metter rates of IGC than just street sweeping, which ahs no "mission end point". This hopefully causes people to have a real reason to actually complete missions instead of just milking one forever in an unrealistic and non-immersive mission farm.
3. Each "Giant Monster" or such encounter, like the Hamidon raid, or even the Rikti Mothership raid, would award a set amount of IGC and random drops t the end, and as such the smaller your group is that did the raid, the more each person gets. You've basically got a set "prize purse" that get's divvied up among the raiders at the end. I think you'd have to base the reward divvy on how many toons entered the raid in the beginning, and then award loots shares at the end in such a way as to avoid the temptation of leaders to kick people just to deny them rewards at the end. Not sure how to do that, maybe give rewards to people who got dropped after a certain time point, or give rewards to anyone who actually ever entered the "inner sanctum" of GM's lair or something.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
What I'm envisioning for the way the gear degradation would work is that when you click on powers to activate them, toggle stuff on, or just have Augments slotted into passive "always on" powers, this would cause them the degrade a little with each click, or each tick of the clock while the thing is toggled on, etc. Then, when you log off of the character, the game asks you if you want to do physical exercises, meditation, and lab work to maintain your Augments while logged off or not. If you decide "Yes, I want to keep my skills sharp" it immediately deducts some IGC and uses it to refresh your Augments with. If you choose "No thanks, I want to save my IGC" it just leaves the Augments in whatever state of disrepair they're currently in and you keep your IGC. That way it gives the immersive impression that your toon is actively working out, reading up on arcane whatever, and/or innovating in the lab to keep their skills and abilities honed to the best they can be while you're logged off. It feels less like getting your sword and armor fixed and more like hitting the gym, library, and/or lab to stay on top of your game.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Gear degradation is a weak currency sink re LOTRO and irritating to boot. I vote for something else
When you say "weak currency sink" do you mean that it doesn't sink currency effectively enough, or that it's "like, weak, dude" to do that in the first place? Because if your argument against gear degradation as a currency sink is that it doesn't sink currency effectively, then they're clearly doing it wrong. You COULD crank up the IGC per click rates to the point where it would work well as a sink, maybe even too well (powers taking more IGC to maintain than they're worth, etc). The fact that other games failed to find that point or decided not to actually push their rates of IGC sinking to the point where it's doing it's job is the problem there, not the gear degradation idea in and of itself. Anything can be done incorrectly or badly by people if they don't take care to make sure it's done right, that doesn't make all ideas bad.
On the other hand if your objection is based on the fact that you as a player don't like it when the game takes away your IGC, then no other IGC sink will be any more palatable, if it's effective in doing what it is supposed to do, I would think.
For the record I'm not saying that the Augments should get destroyed and have to be replaced when the degradation is allowed to go on forever, just that they ought to be reduced to the point where you'd get more buffage to your powers using some lesser Augment that costs less to maintain, but maxxes out at less of a maximum also. So like your Positron's Blast set piece might degrade to the point where a level 50SO would be way better at buffing your blast power, but it wouldn't get destroyed or cease to exist.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The concept of "gear degradation over time" might have a place in traditional MMOs where everyone uses "swords-n-armor" as the main basis of their power. But I don't think it really belongs in a superhero based game where the very idea of having tangible "loot" as a source of power is questionable at best.
Sure gadget-based characters might have plenty of equipment that degrades over time. But how you do really square that kind of inflation control mechanic against characters like Superman or The Flash who don't technically use "gear" of any kind? Yes I realize that everyone in CoT would be using "Augments" as an expression of their powers. But in the grander scheme of things it just doesn't make sense to impose a degradation mechanism on a game that's already going to be playing fast-n-loose with the idea of "gear" to begin with.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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I'm saying both
Gear degradation makes no sense in a superhero game
It's fine if you're in a suit of power armor, but if you're a mutant large lizard ?
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Yeah, I've heard that argument, and for what it's worth I think the devs agree with it. I don't, but that's just my opinion.
My counter argument is this: any self-serving writer of hero backstories can take the cop out of "my guy's powered by Earth's yellow sun in such a way that his powers should never degrade" or "it's magic, I ain't gotta `splain, SH!T" but you could also write your character's backstory such that they DO need to do something to maintain their power levels over time.
Maybe Superman is spending his off time laying in a tanning bed he designed and built and getting a tan to keep his superpowers fully recharged for when he needs them, maybe the Flash has to eat a huge amount of calories to keep up his energy levels, maybe Doctor Strange has to spend time reviewing and practicing and studying spells to be able to remember how to do them when he needs to.
My point is, just because people want to make the choice of "my guy has no need for maintenance, this is BS I won't pay it" the game company has no reason to bow to that ethos, because gear degradation CAN be realistic and immersive if one chooses to accept it and folds it into their backstory. People just don't like paying for it, period, and the immersiveness angle is, to me, a flimsy excuse not to do that. The game already has IGC and Augments and Refinements for powers. This is a natural extension of those things that isn't any more immersion-breaking as any of that other stuff. In fact it CAN be plenty immersive if one chooses to accept it.
Min/maxers who will try to find any and every reason to kill gear degradation because they don't want to lose IGC over time can cry foul about the immersiveness problems this causes, but then where are they when you bring up other things they actually LIKE that break immersion, like mission repeat farming? They're all for that, they all say "NO! Don't take that away, that's our 'Preferred Play Style (TM)". This only proves that people will, if allowed to, all agree none of them should have to pay taxes. Well, in the immersive real world, you gotta pay the taxes, actually.
I personally think that the "never degrades" type powers are the MOST unrealistic and non-immersive powers you can imagine, given the laws of thermodynamics. The law of increasing entropy and the law of conservation of energy basically dictate that nothing will endure forever without us having to do work to keep it going, and eventually the universe itself will run out of the ability to do that work. In other word, time wounds all heels.
Now, I understand that a certain degree of suspension of disbelief is at work in the super powered hero genre, but that same suspension of disbelief can work in FAVOR of gear degradation if done right in the fluff text too. The fact is, most people don't like gear degradation in and of itself, even in places where it is totally in line with what you'd expect in a game. If that;s the main thrust of the argument against having it, then you need to replace it with somethign else that will sink IGC effectively and not harm the noobs who have like NO IGC to begin with.
As I see it this is one pretty good option as an IGC sink. People don't love it, but people don't love any other IGC sinks proposed either from what I've seen, so this is the most mechanically attractive option from amojg a bunch of painful options we all wish we didn't have to live with.
The only other option I can think of that might have the same potential to sink IGC would be simply lowering rates of IGC gained per mob defeated in order to put IGC into the system slower when needed. The problem with that system is that the rich get richer while the poor noobs get less IGC for their defeats than the original veterans got last year. I hate that because it repels new players by turning the game's IGC into a pyramid scam.
Segev mentioned the idea of having NPCs buy and sell on the auction house (and I would assume direct trading with players too) and then just deleting some of their IGC when they accumulate a lot of it. That only works if they trade smartly and don't give out 100k INF for each and every common IO they get or 50k for a level 50 Damage SO. And even if they do trade smartly, there's no guarantee they will ever accumulate enough IGC to make a difference.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Do large mutant lizards have to eat food to avoid starving to death like other animals, or are they immune to that now just because they're mutants? Or is it because they're lizards? Any why doesn't your lizard's musculature atrophy over time like mine does when I don't work out?
Just because you can write a backstory for your toon that prevents them from having to pay upkeep costs on Augments, I submit to you that slotting Augments into those toons' powers in the first place is MORE immersion-breaking than making the Augments cost something to maintain over time. If anything, Augment degradation imposes MORE immersive reality into the game than it takes away in that it forces people NOT to give their toon UNLIMITED POWERZ!!!!
In your world, _MY_ mutant lizard has a power ring that never needs to be recharged (because reciting poetry to recharge your powers is lame) AND Thor's magic hammer, AND his skin absorbs cosmic rays to recharge his cells so that he never needs to breathe, eat, sleep, or work out at all, but he still looks like a totally buff chiseled stud despite the fact that he never goes to the gym and he can keep blasting energy blasts out of his fists for as long as he wants and he'll never run out of power, like the Everlasting Gobstopper of Energy Blasters. I WIN!!! THIS GAME IS LIKE _SO_ EASY!!
That game sounds like I already won it when I took it out of the box and installed it. Boring, after the initial newness wears off, I would say..
Even in DnD based games, the fact that magic items are MAGIC is enough of an excuse to make them not wear out over time. You never hear about King Arthur sharpening Excalibur do you?
Gear degradation is a means to and end and not as immersion breaking as people claim it is, at least that's my take. YMMV
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think the trouble I have with "gear degradation" as a sink is that it will run into the same problem we'd have if we had "pay IGC to run missions" as a sink: RPGs are built around the concept of a certain amount of [i]positive[/i] IGC influx as you play.
Gear degradation and missions are inevitable parts of playing. It's most clear in "what if we made people pay for missions?" Missions are the primary source of in-game rewards. Going into a mission, beating up the enemies, and overall completing it should net you IGC. If it costs IGC to go in, it has to cost less IGC than you can get from it for the reward structure to work.
Similarly, gear degradation would have to cost fewer IGC than the IGC gained from using said gear, or the reward system fails to provide net IGC to a player and could starve him out to decrepit poverty.
Sinks have to be disconnected, to some extent, from sources. Any source with an entry cost has to still net yield IGC, or it isn't an IGC source; it's an IGC sink.
If we try to couple our sinks to our sources directly, we wind up choking the reward engine.
Doubtless, there are tactics one could try to balance this. But the net result is that the developers will want a certain expected rate of IGC gain for various activities, and since most of those activities are going to involve power use, gear degradation would just cause the amount of IGC granted by a reward to increase to balance with the expected IGC sunk just to obtain that reward.
IGC sinks need to be on areas where it CAN cost more IGC than you make from the activity, probably because net IGC gain isn't a consideration. Bases, maybe vehicles, in-game "club" memberships (faction memberships?), and anything else we can think of that is not [i]directly[/i] proportional in cost to the means used to acquire IGC would be better, because one can overspend or act frugally as one wishes without directly impacting rate-of-IGC-gain.
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Obviously any superhero's source of power could be explained in a way that includes it degrading over time. I'll even go so far as to acknowledge that plenty of famous comic book heroes actually do have powers that degrade over time. I'm just making the point that the superhero genre OVERALL does not ubiquitously lend itself to that idea.
The problem here is that you're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. I don't deny that CoT may very well need to come up with various IGC inflation mechanisms - I'm simply questioning whether "gear degradation over time" is a viable/appropriate method to accomplish that. Surely there are alternatives which fit the venue better. Even CoH showed us that IOs could work without any form of expiration.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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Along with the points Minotaur, Segev, and Lothic have stared there is also seceral other relevant points involved with the subject.
There is a psychological factor that affects gear degeadation for the player. This isn't about necessarily the mechanic messing with player back grounds for their character as much as how the game world is designed to integrate the mechanic.
Most games that use gear degradation provide a means for repair that is thematic to the world setting. Take that away and what you are left with isn't "come up for your own reason why your character gets weaker over time" but results in a blantant "we need to take currency away from you". While mature, intellectual people may grasp why this may be beneficial for the game, a grwat deal of players will most likely conclude that the "game is making me pay all the time".
If the idea is that the "gear of the game" must defeade over time tocomnat inflation, a greater tool would be to understand and properly tune how currency is generated over time rather than directly link the currency generator to the currency sink as Segev went into detail already. Other sinks lateral to the generator method is how inflation is dealt with.
There are other assumptions at play here as well. Most reference either directly or indirectly Cityof games which has no bearing on the necessity of gear degradation for City of Titans. We will be handling a great many of aspect related to efonomy differently.
Now to unpack gear degradation from most other games, they usually involve one of two ways (or both). Use of the item - armor is damaged on a hit, weapons are damaged when hitting / when being hit, or use of item. Dodging is either a player reflex actionand therfore not subject to gear (though there was a game that affected character speed that I played) or is a stat based action which mainly improved by gear. Per use of power would mean that even handing out a buff comes with a tax, moving from place to place comes with a tax, and each attacj type from instant effects to durations, area effect size, character being hit and charging based on direct hit powers vs dodgey powers and more all need their own tax. It is a detrimental mechanic for the desired type of game environment from social to player activity in combat that we want to make.
Can you imagine how it would feel to know your fireball power was taxed when it ended up taking out. 1 hp off 1 target because someone was faster on the draw than you? Or you laid down that nifty trap only to have the NPCs not pulled out of range? There are so many instances we would have to account for to provide equitable results would still result in a situation whwre the common player would still not vrasp the reasoning their powers cost igc to use if they want to keep their improved performance they already earned.
When you have a game as diverse as this game there will be no equitable way to properly maintain parity of gear upkeep. Which means each power type has to be adjusted to apply its own tax on the tupe of aug. / ref socketed. This can easily result in a slippery slope of balancing sets over cost of upkeep - meaning players who are good at earning igc will benefit the most, or reslting in a continously under performing metric due to required upkeep.
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There can be control, by the player, over the amount of IGC spent on Augments in powers though. All you have to do is put some low rent Augments in your powers when you want to make positive IGC flow then switch to the more powerful "high rent" ones when you feel the need to dominate the PVP arena or power-run through some PVE content. So the players can try to optimize their build for "break even" on IGC and get as powerful as they can that way, or maybe go for "conserve funds" mode where you're slumming it with low-rent Augments on purpose, or they can slot in the UBER powerful high rent Augments when they need them and operate at a small loss for a short time.
In addition to that, there is the possibility of simply letting the Augments go un-refreshed indefinitely and they don't disappear or "break" completely, they just don't give so much buffage to the powers as a cheaper, lower-rent Augment would. So like, your Posi Blast set piece goes totally un-kept-up and eventually it's a little worse than just having a straight Damage SO in there, but it's still doing something.
Also, the people in CoX who had like 8 billion INF spread over multiple toons had almost nothing to spend that INF on at times. This would be a thing to spend that on. You could run "high-roller" style for a while and carve through missions with ease etc, then pull back and respec into a more pedestrian build that breaks even or comes out ahead a little, or just let the UBER stuff decay into "meh" stuff until you want to jack it up again. Then you can accumulate some IGC again while you go the low-rent option for a while (low rent being either cheaper stuff after respeccing or just letting your good stuff go un-paid-for for a long time to the point where it bottoms out).
Lastly, people COULD trade Stars for IGC to cover the cost of Augment upkeep, so it sinks both IGC and Stars, but then any IGC other sink would do the same probably.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If this genre doesn't lend itself to gear degradation over time, I don't think any of the others do either. What the he11 kind of magic items need to be repaired ever? Lousy ones.
As for CoX, that game had rampant inflation BECAUSE it didn't have sufficient IGC sinks (and becasue, like most games, the NPCs would pay more for crap items than you had to pay to get them in the auction house, if there were any), do I'd be careful what you're reaching for as a goal there. In the last 12 months of CoX I ran solo missions (tips and repeatable dailies in Dark Astoria) for Hero Merits and general swag and ended up getting like one Purple recipe per month, on average. I had no real use for some of them but didn't sell them because I knew the Purples were more valuable and easier to store than the INF they'd get me on the market. If that's what people are doing, your economy is suffering from too much inflation. I should have wanted to offload the unneeded purples for INF but I didn't.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I prefer if This was used in i place of Day Jobs for CoH, but only if you went to Police station and clicked an NPC, and THEN logged off.
Then it would feel like a Day Job. :/
Sorry, that irked me a bit in CoH. :P
No one is bringing up the way CoH did it. And why players didnt complain Too much, at least the 1st 3 years. ;)
When you Level Up, a Reward, your TO's/DO's/SO's became Less Effective, a Punishment.
So... does that mean, you can Punish the player only after a Reward? if you dont want them to COMPLAIN Too Much? >;)
First, the fact that gear degradation exists in other games and that people still play them only proves that it isn't this horrible, depression-inducing thing that some people are making it out to be.
Second, as a player of primarily Defenders and other support types, I can tell you that the set bonuses and so forth that I put in most of my powers were there to make me a better damage dealer, mostly. I slotted healing enhancements in my powers, but I wanted sets that gave me some added damage, recharge time, etc for my ATTACKS too. I can easily see where I'd try to make my heal/buff powers more "low rent" if that's all they can do for me, but if the set bonuses on some stuff are really good while you have them well-maintained, I might consider some of those too. I envision the CoT equivalent of SOs as having pathetically low cost of ownershiop, then the next level up like the oranges and yellows of CoX being a little more upkeep cost for a little more oomph in the powers, and in some cases these might get very expensive to maintain actually, then the purples would do as much or more than the other stuff does, AND might be pretty "IGC efficient" giving the best overall bang for the buck in the game, which would make them the most desirable and thus the most expensive to buy. I think that formula works in all types of powers. Depending on the class and pwers taken, you'd have to dink around trying to economize it, but that's doable, I think.
Third, I'm not saying that players shouldn't be given an option that allows them to MAKE IGC over time, just that that option might not be the most damage output over time either. Maybe you have times when you want to run on the cheap and maybe you can afford to let loose and get jacked to the damage cap once in a while too.
This way people could use IGC they've saved up over some time spent "slumming it" and slot up some really good stuff to do that Badge run on that TF they've been trying to get together, or that Hami raid. Then you go back to soloing and let the Augments rot for awhile or else respec into a different set of gear.
This could end up causing more people to buy respecs and to buy more added storage space for the three or four builds worth of swag they might try to acquire per toon so they can reslot every so often. It gives people something they can always spend IGC on if they want to, but it isn't mandatory to do so at all.
Fourth, I think it is very "Square peg in a square hole" to simply handle it upon log-out of a toon and have the game ask you "What are you doing in your downtime? Are you training/reading/hitting the lab/meditating or just enjoying some well-earned rest and relaxation?" If you choose "Rest and relax" you DON'T spend any IGC on upkeep of your Augments, if you choose "train/read/meditate etc" you DO spend the IGC to pump the Augments back up. That's VERY immersive, to me.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, you think gear degradation is a good idea. I don't. Segev and the rest of the devs have listened and responded to your ideas. It may be time to let it go.
I had to stop this quote right here. The main reason Cityof had rampant inflation was not due to those other factors, they're were contributors but not I. The way you believe them to be. The main reason rampant inflation. Existed in the game was becuase there was't a player economy from the outset and when one was put in place it used the same currency that the game had before there was a player economy.
Players were already filthy rich when the economy began. It was easy to maintain that wealth afterward. Sufficent sinks would not have resolved the problem of a vast amount of accumulated wealth already in existence, it would have only sufficed for new player entering the game because the sinks would have to be created around the outset of game play throughout the levelling process. The sinks would have to be so diverse, and enticing to old, wealthy players that they would practically feel compelled to spend their accumulated cash - a dubious venture on the devs part at best.
The other part was in how the cash generating system was already in place was woefully set up for dealing with the player economy becuase it wasn't originally designed with one in mind. Players could generate casts amount of wealth in very short periods of time.
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In terms of whether or not the game will actually DO this, I already HAVE let it go. In terms of just having the academic discussion of WHY it should or should not be let go, I'm still thinking about this from so many angles I find it interesting just to hear and respond to everyone else's ideas.
I'd also point out that the challenge of coming up with something that sinks IGC this well that ISN'T gear degradation has yet to emerge. So if you want to shut me up, tell me all about YOUR preferred method of sinking IGC and how it will work. I really and truly would like to hear any ideas anyone has that they feel is MORE efficient at sinking IGC and doesn't have the drawbacs that gear degradation has, AND doesn't take away IGC from the poor and rich alike. Because I've thought about this for a long time and from every angle I can think of and this is where that thinking left me. I'm not one to just give up and say "okay, I'm going to stop trying to solve this problem now and wait for the game to come out." because we're going to be waiting like a year or more for that, so there will be time to revisit this more than once.
Fro what it's worth, I feel like most people who hate gear degradation who have responded have not replaced it with anything else that sinks IGC very well. Bases? Personal lairs? Can't I just NOT BUILD THAT in the first place? Those things were really complicated to make in CoX and I never wanted to bother. I still don't. If it saves me IGC and I can be richer in the game while being homeless, so much the better. Or else let someone else design the SG base, I;m fine with that too.
If you try to lower the rate of loot drops, you're punishing the newbie who just started playing for that fact that thte 3 year veterans all have 1billion IGC they don't need. so that;s no good.
Having the NPCs play the market and then deleting their profits from time to time only works if they;re successful and who knows if they will be? Also, it means that people are somehow getting less back for their swag when they sell it and having to pay more when they buy it. Doesn't that just mean that players will be able to undercut the NPCs and trade better, all the while they;re shifting IGC and recipes and stuff back and forth and none of it is leaving the economy, except for the auction house's cut on all transactions. That, by the way probably ought to be like 20% of the gross if you ask me. Haviogn it at 10% didn't do enough in CoX, clearly.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Okay, I'll agree that the preexisting amounts of INF when the auction house rolled out were a problem, but I got my account back from a friend when the game went F2P and had almost no INF on him, then in a year I had over 2 billion INF laying around, plus a pile of Purples and stuff in storage. It didn't take that long to get rich in the system that was in place for the newbies, and as you said the sinks in place were insufficient, for that reason. Of course I had a Mastermind....
But that's the old game, for the NEW game, I gotta believe that giving people a place where they can always spend some IGC but don't HAVE to has to be a good thing. Plus, the newbies in the gear degradation system don't get taxed as much as the veterans because they don't start out at level 1 having all the high-end swag, they need time to grind for that, and while doing that grinding, they'll likely gather up a lot of IGC like we all do.
Instead of a game system where all level-capped toons are basically always self sufficient, you can offer people the OPTION of going into the red on IGC to keep their powers totally maxxed to the hard cap, make the break even point somewhere high up but not quite there, and then make turning a profit over time in thing that requires low overhead costs (either by letting your uber Augments decay to cruddyness worse than a common generic SO, or by putting those expensive toys on the shelf until needed again and replacing them with low-rent substitutes for the time being).
I don't hate that system, as I've described it, and I think it would sink IGC pretty well, because people like to have their powers maxxed or close to it.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
And yet your proposal does nothing to address the many issues surrounding the implementation that I stated. If anything it exacerbates them. Its based on a false set of assumptions and accounts for zero practicality of parity between what degrades, how, or why (other than a poor attempt at curbing inflation).
Can defeading gear be a useful tool (one of many) to provide a currency sink? Yes. Though there are many games that use this tool that still experience inflation and this one tool either results in problematic for the genral player or is negligable for them. The main point is the game, including its setting, has to provide sound reasoning to the player for what os happening to their gear, why that it happens, and have irs repair methods fall in line within context to the game world.
This game isn't being designed that way mechanically because it isn't supported thematically (throughout the game world or for the player).
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The way I envision the gear to wrok is like this, I guess:
There would be 3 tiers of Augments/Refinements: High Grade, Middle Grade and Low Grade.
Low Grade would be like SOs in CoX, no sets, no set bonuses, they just enhance one aspect of the power and even then not as much as the higher tier stuff would. BUT they're not only cheap and easy to obtain and craft, but also very economical to use. Maybe they cost very little to maintain at peak levels, or maybe they don't bottom out very far below their max and as such don't really require upkeep if you don't feel like it all the time. With all Low Grade gear, you can maybe solo at +1x2 max, so your earning potential is limited by what you can defeat and how fast, but the IGC you get per mob defeated is pretty good, you just can't defeat them fast enough and you might have trouble with Elite Bosses and Archvillains.
Medium Grade would be like yellow and orange sets in CoX. Rarer and harder to get, but you get way more from them because they can enhance more than one aspect of the power at a time, they enhance the powers more than the Low Grade ones for the same amount of slots spent, and you get some set bonuses, BUT they can get very IGC-intensive if you use too many of them. If you have all Medium Grade gear in all powers you're probably able to go at or close to +4/x8 and you may well have one aspect of your powesr hard-capped (just defense or just damage, etc) but you'll be carving through those mobs at a loss to your own personal supply of IGC if you try to keep them maxxed. If you don't keep them maxxed however, they decay to the point of being a little worse than the Low Grade stuff.
High Grade stuff would belike the uniques and purples of the CoX. The rarest but also the best. It gives the best bang for the buck in terms of IGC cost-to-operate and if you have mostly all High Grade stuff you can now carve through those +4x8 maps AND turn the best profits doing it due to the difficulty level and quantity of mobs you can burn through, the low nunber of actual power clicks you have to use, and the short time it all takes. The drawback being that it will take a long time to get those High grade items because they'll be so in-demand that people will ask a fortune for them up front.
So early on in one's career, one uses strictly Low Grade stuff in the beginning then moves up to a mix of Medium and Low then later hopefully moves further into a mix of Medium and High until finally getting all High Grade stuff as the ultimate goal, which might take months if not years to actually do. All the while you're getting a lot of fun out of your toon as you keep trying to get more powerful while still making a profit at the same time. This igves long temr playability to the process of trying to min/max a toon and hopefully provides some kind of decent IGC sinkage. After all, people will want to go "full power" sometimes just for short term stiff like getting badges or defeating the giant monster solo, or whatever.
I also like that this system makes you not have your toon at 100% power levels 1o0% of the time. Nobody can really do that, so it's immersive that you'd need to save up for the big weekend of fun once in a while and then go back to "play for profit, not max damage" later on as part of the long-term strategy of getting fully purpled out with High Grade stuff. you could also just use Stars to buy IGC to maintain powers if you wanted to.
Also, as for the problem of not wanting to use powers because they cost IGC, the missions being back-end loaded could help that. If we all need to pull together to actually successfully complete the mission, there's your incentive to not hold back right there. Getting the bonus IGC at the end of a mission would be the way to minimize losses or maximize profits in that system, so settling for a non-win of a mission is no good. Therefor you have to keep buffing and healing because that's your job anyway the Scrapper and Blaster are your "DPS pets" and you're the mastermind :)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I am sorry but none of that remotely addresses a songle thing I am talking about.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
My suggestion?
Stop responding to him and just ignore his posts. Then maybe he'll go away.........
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
The fact that IGC doesn't represent actual "currency" in the immersive RP of the game (if in fact it has a definition at all) but is in fact a currency in the game nonetheless is already a place where the whole system lacks thematic support in the game world, if you want my honest opinion. We're also not really telling anyone what the Augments and Refinements are supposed to actually represent, because that's basically different for different toon concepts. For Captain America it's probably some new way of throwing a punch, for Iron Man it's probably upgrades to the armor, for Dr. Strange it's probably learning new spells or better ways to cast the ones he already knows.
So there's no attempt to explain what the Augments are for everyone because they could be different things to different people, so the idea that they might need upkeeping is also left totally ambiguous, in my opinion. Nobody's saying we should get rid of IGC and Augments because there's no thematic support for them in the game, and yet the argument still applies there as much as it does to gear degradation as far as I can tell, because there really _IS_ no thematic support for IGC or Augments in and of themselves from what I've heard. All of that has been a hand wavy "It's whatever you think it is, use your imagination, but it works like money if you want to know the mechanics of it." and I don't think it needs to be any better defined and I like IGC and Augments and I don;t think it breaks the fourth wall any worse than we already have to make them degrade over use. I really don't.
I know I'll want IGC and Augments ofr my toons, I know I'll be able to trade one for the other, and I know I'll want to make my powers more powerful, beyond that what they represent in the abstract is left unsaid, which is fine, and as such I don't see any problem with making them degrade over use and having that be the mechanic by which fatigue and "loss of sharpness with lack of practice" come into play in the game.
You're telling me that I'm ignoring the drawbacks of the gear degradation system, and to that I respond with "I can see the drawbacks, but I don't see a better IGC sink anywhere, do you?" and I have still not heard one from anybody.
The other knock was something like "accounts for zero practicality of parity between what degrades, how, or why (other than a poor attempt at curbing inflation). " which I take to mean "It won't work because it will be too hard to get the numbers right for each Augment for each power for each class." To that all I can say is, you, the devs, are on the hook to make those decisions when designing the game, and then to tweak them later when they end up needing that tweaking. With or without gear degradation, not all classes will be slam-dunk easy to figure out, I realize, but at some point you're going to have to figure out how the inter-related classes, power sets, powers, augments, refinements, currencies, storage slots, real world money, and so forth all interact, and it will be a big, complex problem and I don't envy you, but that's ultimately the job in front of you. It's going to be complicated, with or without gear degradation, I think you can bank on that. Also, I don't think anyone has demonstrated that the other IGC sinks mentioned are going to be any better at sinking IGC or any less onerous in the minds of the players or any more immersive and thematic either.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
No, you're ignoring that Augments and such [i]do not operate[/i] as "gear." Gear can be easily changed out for spares; augments cannot. Gear unused takes inventory; augments don't. Gear can be bought and sold and crafted by folks other than the user; not augments. And so forth.
Also, absence of evidence of alternative IGC sinks is not evidence of absence of alternative IGC sinks. There are nowhere near enough public details regarding the game system to even assume we've covered a significant amount of the possible sinking mechanisms.
And you should note that they have, and the answer is "no degradation." Which somehow comes across to you as tantamount to a violation of a physical law.
And on the flip side nobody has demonstrated that the other IGC sinks mentioned are [i]not[/i] going to be any better at sinking IGC etc. ad nauseam. Again, insufficient data. Don't hold up pouring the foundation because you haven't decided on the paint colors.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Over the past three months, Radiac, you have certainly posted dozens of unique ideas governing game play. However, very little that you're proposed has been appropriate for this game. I'm not making a value judgement here. It's neither good nor bad that the other forum members and the dev team have objected to almost every proposal. The problem is the sum total of your proposals, as well as each individual proposal, simply do not pertain to the game being made by Missing Worlds Media.
However, there is a solution for this conundrum: grab yourself one of the free game engines out there and make your own game. Show us how it's done. I'd be more than happy to beta test it and offer constructive feedback. I'm sure many others would, as well.
Put all those ideas to use and let's see how well it works out. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd kind of like to see what you can come up with.
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One of the concerns that has been brought up about in-game economics (I forget where) is the simple fact that Players NEED to be able accumulate wealth in-game. If cash flow within the game itself is not positive then it becomes uneconomical to continue playing the game using that character.
Tabula Rasa suffered from this sort of economic fallacy with some of its weaponry ... specifically the [url=http://tabularasa.wikia.com/wiki/Torqueshell_Rifle]Torqueshell Rifle[/url] (which I later renamed the "Tickle Rifle" after they got nerfed too hard). Torqueshell Rifles fired Rockets, the most expensive to purchase ammo type in the game. There was almost nothing you could One Shot with a Torqueshell Rifle, meaning you needed to use multiple Rockets per target in order to score kills.
Long story short ... it was extremely common for Snipers, the only character class that could use Torqueshell Rifles in the first place, to actually [b]LOSE MONEY[/b] by using their signature class purpose weapon. It typically cost more money in ammo resupply prices than you'd get for actually defeating a Foe. This meant that by continuing to use the weapon, you just go broke and can't afford to maintain your gear or buy more ammo for it (and without ammo, you've only got Logos abilities to fight with, not weapons).
Indeed, for quite a few character classes in Tabula Rasa, it was perfectly possible to have a build that was "powerful" on paper but uneconomical to play because of ammo resupply and maintenance/upkeep costs. Needless to say, classes which [i]typically used NO AMMO[/i] (Guardians and Spies) had something of an unfair advantage in this regard. For them, fighting trash mobs was extremely economical, because they hardly ever used (much) ammo.
So cash flow for Players needs to be net positive ... and it needs to STAY net positive over the long haul, otherwise crime fighting (or crime committing, if you prefer) becomes uneconomical. And if something is uneconomical to do ... Players will stop doing it.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
You keep using using the term immersion and then cite ambiguity of design to obfuscate lack of detail to support immersion. It doesn't work that way.
Take a look at any game that uses gear degradation. The gear itself is represented in the game world as items, from armor, to weapons, ornaments, to vehicles and more. The world itself is designed around the support of the degradation mechanic thematically. Combat provides a decisive direct causal link to degradation. The game world provides thematic reasons for the necessity if repair and more.
Gear in this games are an extension of what the character is capable of they are external and many times can change.
Augments and Refinements are not represented as gear in the traditional sense. Powers are not an extension of the character's capability - they are the character's capability. The game world is not being designed thematically to support the concept of constant degradation because someone improved their ability.
Yes you can cite any number of reasons why it may be plausible but the game has to be designed to show that plausibility. In this case every suggestion boils down to a tax on power use once you get "powerful" which is rather nebulous term if the game is designed with these "upper limits of power" in mind. It is so completely devoid of immersion that it leaves the vernal player with no understanding of why they are experiencing the system other than "cool stuff costs lots of money to keep using, because". A good game uses good game play to mask the mechanics of a system so that the player doesn't end up questioning the existence but instead so intuitively understands it and it doesn't conflict with anything else the game imparts into play - like our character design and power improvement system would be in conflict with a completely devoid of meaning tax on power use.
Yes, I do but I'm not at liberty to go into details. But allow me to highlight a couple of things you've glossed over.
First, the main tool for dealing with inflation is not currency sinks, but proper implementation of currency gains over time. Once you understand the nature of the generation model, you look at the type of game being designed, the desired game play, and target your areas of sinks and design the game world around those sinks so they make sense.
Some stuff that's been posted on the boards that touch on currency sinks:
base upkeep
Useful temporary powers (this is the closest to our version of gear).
Empowerment Stations (further buffs that may not be covered by the temps).
Bribes / Bail on capture when defeated
Transport back to extraction site post med-evac (teleport back to mission entrance after a hospital trip).
There will be crafting costs and it's more than what you are thinking of if you are referencing Cityof
Transaction fees on the market.
NPC marketeers being used to accumulate and over-flow of currency which is then removed from the game.
There is more that I could say but I'm rather fond of working on the game and uphold myself as a man of my word and since I'm not cleared to discuss certain things...
Please don't refer to my refutes as knocks, it implies a negative bias on my part I never intend to intone. If I have Or misread the use of the term, I apologize. I like your enthusiasm for this game and believe you are sincere in your belief that your suggestions are in the interest of making this game the best that it can be. My refutes are purely on the basis on the validity toward this game.
That being said the last point out balancing numbers is accurate in that it is upon the devs to do a hopefully more than adequate job. When specifically in reference to degrading Augments and Refinements in powers for this game it's more than just the numbers, but in also the game play surrounding those numbers always provide parity in how it affects the character so that it always makes sense to the player.
The challenge of designing a cohesive power design system took us a good part of a year and we have an amazing Lead in our Tech team that specializes in designing systems in the way I just described above. I still would not expect to provide proper implementation to the mechanic due to the nature of the difference between what typical gear is designed for in games that use degradation and what powers represent in this game.
Lastly I will leave this with you. If the goal of degradation is to create a currency sink in that in the examples you provided indicate it would be a regular occurrence to repair and that remaining at "100%" is an impossibility, there are a couple of points I have for this.
One, energy cost of a power and energy loss for use along with cool down times are a direct indication a character is not operating at their maximum capability. In order for that to be true, the power,s energy cost would need be instantly negligible and the cool down just as instant so that the character can continue to perform their function again. The fact that powers cost energy and it must be managed, and powers have cool downs that encourage strategic use are balancing factors in performance.
Two, if powers are meant to perform at peak only on occasion and require constant upkeep to reach this performance, the the performance is temporary. Which is why well designed temporary powers and useful Empowerment Stations already will provide this function and act as an game supported currency sink.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
*cough* I've listed what I think will be some of our bigger IGC sinks. Bases and things associated with them will be a solid place to start. We'll need others, as not everyone will care about bases, but bases provide us with something that we can apply a polynomial or even exponential curve to the cost of (as it gets bigger, the cost goes up faster and faster to maintain) on several fronts: physical size, location, power consumption, and even special reagents to activate and control base items that do stuff.
I also think crafting will be a valid place for it. Whether it's maintaining a crafting center in one's base or renting craft-table space from other organizations, it can provide a sink for IGC. It might be delicate to balance it such that one can make a profit in IGC off of crafted items in the player-to-player market, but the beauty of it if we can pull that off is that it allows the crafter to make a net profit while still net sinking IGC out of the system. The IGC gained by the crafter wasn't generated directly by his crafting the way IGC gained by an adventurer is generated directly by his adventuring. (Which is the problem with gear degradation effects.)
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Bases have natural polynomial costs: surface area (n[sup]2[/sup]) or volume (n[sup]3[/sup]). Add maintenance costs on top of that for the things that are put into it (another natural n[sup]3[/sup]).
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I want to thank the devs that have posted here on this thread and assure them that it was not my intention to get anyone fired over information security, and for that I apologize if I have crossed the line or asked anyone else to cross the line.
Second, I want to reassure everyone that I'm treating this as a purely academic, hypothetical, "what about this? Why not that?" type of discussion at this point and NOT, repeat NOT an attemt on my part to convince anyone that they ought to design CoT "my way" in spite of their own knowledge to the contrary. We're just talking about ideas, not deciding the fate of the free world here, at this point, as far as I see it.
Third, Lin Chao Feng wrote: "No, you're ignoring that Augments and such do not operate as "gear." Gear can be easily changed out for spares; augments cannot. Gear unused takes inventory; augments don't. Gear can be bought and sold and crafted by folks other than the user; not augments. And so forth."
Can any dev confirm or deny this statement? I was under the impression, from the one Kickstarter update regarding powers, Augments, and Refinements, that the powers would have empty Augment slots, those slots would accept Augments, like the slots in CoX accepted Enhancements, and then the Augment you place into a slot might bring with it one or more Refinement slots into which you'd drop a Refinement. So the Augments and Refinements would basically be items you'd craft with the usual IGC and components, and then you have an object, the Augment, that can be placed in a slot to buff a power. The market would be a place to sell components, Augments, and Refinements, among other things, for IGC. Is this not the case?
In response to the Tabula Rasa point that Red made, the problem there, which I think the system I proposed does not have, is that the snipers only had two options given to them, both of which were bad: 1) Go broke using the Torqueshell Launcher or 2) be severely underpowered using the only alternative. In my proposed system, you can mix your combination of Low, Medium and High Grade Augments and Refinements as you like and it doesn't change the fact that your powers are what they are. Also, you could run with almost all Low Grade and save up IGC over time then switch to more Medium Grade if and when you want to go all out, but at a loss of IGC, them you could save up IGC for a while again while letting those Mediums rot, then over a LONG period of time you might be able to replace you better Mediums and worse Lows with High Grades that are just as powerful as the Mediums if not more so and still ver economical too, thus giving you the ability to make IGC over time by cranking up your difficulty to +4x8 and ripping through the missions like that. This gives people the freedom to CHOOSE how much IGC they want to spend on their character's overall power levels instead of boxing people into one of two bad choices.
In any event, I'm still stuck in the CoX mindset because it's the only MMO I ever spent any real time playing, and my love for it was why I supported the Kickstarter in spades. In CoX you could use all SO enhancements at level 50 and still do your missions just fine. You wouldn't be able to win anything in PVP and you wouldn't be able to plow through a map at +4x8 at all, but you could play. I see the Low Grades being like that and having really low cost of maintenance, like so low they wouldn't make you think twice about paying it. You could even make sub-level-cap toons exempt from Low Grade IGC costs to maintain if you wanted to. Then the Medium Grades would be the quickest, most easily obtained path to power, but use too many and you coulds start to go into the red. Then the High Grades would be like Purples and Uniques, a lot harder to get and very costly to buy up front, but way more economical than the Mediums and as powerful or more so. This gives people a use for Lows, MEdiums, and Highs in the Very Sort Term, the Medium Term, and the Long Term, which seems good to me. Like anything else people will find ways to optimize for IGC costs and performance, and I think it wouldn't be a bad thing to allow people to choose "most bang for the buck available, more bang is available for WAY more bucks if you want to spend it, or you can get more bucks for significantly less bang too". Nobody can give you an all-out effort all the time, so that makes some sense to me. You could even use one toon as an IGC machine while running another as an IGC hog and then transfer IGC from one to the other. You could name them "Primadonna" and "Sugar Daddy" :)
Anyway, that's a system I think COULD work if a dev team were willing to go to the mat for it. Whether or not the CoT teams feels they need to is entirely up to them, and I respect that and support it.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If you think gear degradation didn't matter, not in MMOs but I played a couple of RPGs where I got characters into holes I couldn't get out of and had to quit/restart/beg due to it.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
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Yeah but in a game where you can trade away something akin to Stars to get IGC, you could get out of the hole that way, or as I've described, you could just go with the cheapo Low Grade stuff for a while to rebuild wealth.
The idea of letting people live beyond their means if they want to and then letting them have to deal with the unwanted consequences is not something I personally have a problem with. Especially not when the toon in question could just settle for less power and be less "baller" while "ballin' on a budget" in order to rebuild IGC. In the proposed system, even the most expensive to maintain stuff would bottom out at a level that is above "zero benefit from having this slotted" but just low enough that the cheaper Low Grade stuff would be more Augmentation than you get by leaving your Mediums in there and letting them rot forever. So even the guy that had ZERO IGC would be able to play missions on low difficulty settings and make IGC by NEVER refreshing the Augments, then after getting back some IGC, they could either refresh the Augments finally, or buy some new ones and refresh others, etc. In the meantime, you might have gotten a High Grade to drop for you and that might help a little. Some people with enough High Grades and Low Grades might come to the conclusion that the Mediums are a sucker bet entirely and just avoid them, while the people who are fairly new and see a shiny Medium that gives huge buffs would think of that as a bargain, as they're not that expensive now because the High Grade peolle are getting rid of them. So the newbs buy a Medium, then more, then eventually start to get strapped for cash and have to learn to regulate their power trip buzz.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, the problem you're running up against is that it is ABSURDLY DIFFICULT to fine tune the rate of IGC supply to be ever so slightly over the rate of IGC consumption in all cases. There's just too many variables.
I'm also looking at the Enhancements system (ie. Refinements/Augments) as being something of a One And Done type of system, where once you slot it you don't NEED to replace things until you WANT to replace things in order to do something different (or you've gotten a better drop, or whatever). Consequently, although the Enhancement system has the potential to act as a sink for IGC, I wouldn't want to count on it being a "major" sink of IGC. A minor sink is much more likely, in my view, simply because the "demand" for Enhancements just isn't going to be all that overwhelming [i]nor constant[/i] ... and it is that lack of being a constant demand that makes such an angle a poor IGC sink to rely upon.
Now ... needing to make use of IGC to assemble [b]Clues[/b] to generate Missions with ... *THAT* would make a terrific sink for IGC! In fact, it could even be done on a sliding scale ... such that the more Clues you have available for assembly, the lower the IGC cost to generate (or "craft" if you prefer) the Mission. Rig things such that with enough Clues the IGC cost is zero, so that people don't lock themselves out of being able to create Missions for themselves, and you're good to go. That way, a PC that is fantastically wealthy might need as few a 2-3 Clues and a pile of IGC to burn to pay a bunch of supporting NPCs to do all the legwork for the PC so as to assemble/craft the Mission into a state that's good to go. If on the other hand, the PC is horrifically poor, they can just go and do all the legwork themselves, gather up all the required Clues and spend ZERO IGC on assembling/crafting the Mission(s) that they do.
In this case, "spending" IGC is a convenience step and effectively used as "wildcards" to fill in the blanks between the Clues that you've already acquired. Set things up so that the IGC cost increases on a curve (I'm thinking exponential, for what should be obvious reasons) and you'd have a pretty decent IGC sink. Because the demands of the sink are variable, there will be a decent amount of "slosh" available in terms of being able to match IGC supply to a necessary IGC demand so as to keep things from hyperinflating way too quickly. It would also give Players the opportunity to decide for themselves how much degree of "hassle" they want to go to in order to assemble Clues to begin Missions.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Hm. That's an interesting idea. It would make NPC "detectives" or "agents" into a sort of "clue vendor" to spend IGC with and buy the leads you need to build the mission you want.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
It is an idea that are similar in construct to other aspects we are planning for the game so it wouldn't be too out of place either. I'll plug it into my design doc for Schemes. and Investigations.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I honestly think that he thinks Refinements and Augments will be easily added and removed or exchanged out when newer, better ones come along. I don't think he sees them as a permanent thing like enhancements were in CoH, where if you put a new enhancement in it would destroy the old one. I also think he may think that enhancement unslotters will be common and easily obtained. THAT is why gear degredation works in other MMOs. If an item starts to wear out, you just keep another on hand to swap it out with and continue on until you can repair all your gear. I don't imagine CoT working that way, and that is why everybody hates this stupid idea.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
That seems like an excellent idea, redlynne.
To devil's advocate it, how would CoT handle the multiple incompletion model of the unai or television farms?
I like Red's idea, and I will point out that depending on the IGC costs for the clues, you could end up spending more IGC to get a mission than that mission actually rewards you, based on difficulty sliders you have set and other factors, etc.
To Red: Are you envisioning this clues system as being a thing that unlocks a repeatable mission that you can keep redoing forever after it is unlocked, or just a a thing to open a new story line for an arc of missions, or just a "one and done" mission that you do one time?
As for other comments, I'm not actively trying to make people cash-poor in terms of IGC, I just want to allow them the option of letting them spec out their toons so that they COULD see that to happen to them if they're power hungry enough and reckless enough about it.
As for how I understand Augments to work, I see the Augments and Refinements as a thing that would operate like Enhancements did in CoX, that is, things you'd have to either spend unslotters to pull out of the slots or else do a respec just to empty your slots and refill them. I fully understand the implications this has in a game where the Augments & Refinements degrade over repeated use. I think it would give people a good reason to buy or rent more Inventory space so as to be able to keep a backup set of cheap Low Grade items on hand, possibly in "account storage" so as to be able to allow all the toons on the account the ability to fall back on them in "lean years". This system would probably also end up giving people more reasons for needing respecs and/or unslotters, and I think that's an ancillary benefit (in the sense that you can probably sell people more of both in the C-store). You might need to allow people to drag and drop Augments and Refinements back and forth between inventory and the powers during or immediately after the respec for that to be more user friendly.
As for trying to fine tune the supply and demand for IGC, I'm not trying to do that, I'm trying to allow the players to decide on an individual level, on their own, how much IGC they want to spend on keeping up their power levels, how high they need their power levels to be, and how much they want to either tighten their belts and live within their means versus going bankrupt and spending money on Stars to then sell for IGC to cover the costs of the degraded Augments and Refinements. In that system, people want Stars to use to buy respecs, unslotters, and inventory space and they want IGC to pay the overhead costs of the Augments and Refinements they have slotted. This, to me, gives people an unlimited amount of stuff to spend money on and to spend IGC on, but doesn't require it at all, and can still allow for short term "powerfulness" for the occasional big event or pre-planned raid or badge run without bankrupting anyone. You just end up needing to spend some IGC to defeat that Hamidon or whatever. you might earn more at the end of the Hamidon fight, for all I know.
So like, if the game is seeing a glut of IGC on the market and it seems to be getting devalued, they'll probably start to buy and use the more IGC-hog type Augments and Refinements that have the high upkeep costs, but if the economy goes the other way, they'd need to go with more High Grade and Low Grades because they have lower overhead costs. In that sense the "expensive to maintain" Medium Grade stuff acts as a feedback for inflationary pressures, when IGC starts to pile up in the game, then it will get burned off more rapidly when people realize how cheaply they can fuel their toon's extra powerfulness with it by using the "IGC hog" Augments etc. But here again, nobody's being forced to be poor all the time or to be underpowered all the time, you can waft back and forth between "saving IGC, somewhat underpowered, low difficulty settings" mode and "spending IGC, higher power, higher difficulty settings, " mode. And then the Nirvana is the point where you have enough High Grade (very rare) items that you can be really powerful almost all the time and still make a profit too.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
That's a tad bit narrow focus on the face of things there, Segev. For one thing, I'd want Clues to function in a way essentially like Salvage ... ie. as Permission Slips. Gather up enough permission slips and you can start the Mission, and the types of Salvage that you use determine some of the variables about the Mission (so as to get that Choose Your Own Adventure feeling).
However, I'm envisioning Clues as being something that is either dropped or "mined" out in the wild and has an Inventory system. Furthermore, I'm envisioning that these Clues can be traded on the open Market ... AND ... if there's a shortage of them in the game economy (for whatever reason) then they can be bought for 1 Star apiece from the Star Mart.
All of these channels for acquisition then make it possible for the Clue Economy to run at a slight [i]deficit[/i] so as to put some pressure on IGC stockpiles and the quantities of Stars currently in circulation. Research and Development should then be able to datamine/market watch to determine if the Clue Economy is getting out of hand, and do whatever tweaking is needed to drop rates for Clues so as to keep the Clue Economy "hungry" without tipping over into "starvation" or whatever.
Furthermore, I'm thinking that all Clues are in effect "commons" as far as rarity goes, but different Missions will require different quantities of Clues in order to "make" the Mission. So rather than having Common/Uncommon/Rare Clues, instead you just increase the quantity of Clues required for particular things (pick your Gearing Ratio). Something like 1 Clue is an easy requirement, 4 Clues is a difficult requirement, 9 Clues is a hard requirement.
So you could require an Easy Photography, a Difficult Interview and a Hard Rumors to be able to craft a Mission. That would require 1x Photography, 4x Interview and 9x Rumors Clues for a total of 14 Clues ... simply for the purposes of illustration of principles and operations. If you don't have enough of the requisite "types" of Clues in your Inventory, you can just pay IGC to have your Contact "fill in the blanks" for you and get the Mission crafted so you can go do it. You could even set things up so that you need to have a minimum of at least 1x Clue in each category in your Inventory to enable the "fill in the blank" option to be available for that "stack" of required Clues. And, of course, the more "wildcards" you need to fill in the blanks, the more it's going to cost you in terms of IGC. If you've got them all, of course, then it costs you no IGC at all and you're good to go.
As far as Inventory Management goes, this sort of arrangement would obviously lend itself to stacking and you'd probably want to have no more than 10 types of Clues to go around ... which could cover such topics as stuff that goes into newspaper reporting (photography and interviews), socializing (rumors), computer hacking (data files), magic (ceremonial discovery), genetics (DNA traces), sciences (energy readings), technology (unusual materials), even "training" (background knowledge). Heck, you could even do a "Wildcard" Clue that can be any of the Clue types ... which if you use my kitbashed back 'o the napkin list here would amount to a total of 10 Clue types.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Glad to be of service.
Let me know if there's anywhere on the team I'd be of use. I volunteered to join long ago.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I like that idea.
Puny Heroes.
That is not incompatible - at least not entirely - with what I've been thinking of the clues/leads system as being. I've been thinking of them as being more heterogenous than not. They're not fungible. They're more like crafting ingredients. Still, yes, tradable and accumulated as part of normal gameplay activities.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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We make every pretense of competency around here. ^_~
No idea. As you might imagine, I haven't exactly run every single edge case to ground with this idea, since that sort of thing would require working with specifics. At the moment, all I've got is a sketch of a conceptual framework and I'm just stress testing it to see if it'll collapse under its own weight before trying to load things up onto it.
Potentially, yes, that's always a possibility, in which case the system would act as an IGC sink that drains [i]the impatient[/i] ... which seems perfectly fair to me ...
I was thinking more in terms of One And Done for each and every single Mission in the game. That way there would be a [i]constant demand[/i] for Clues (that never hits a Level Cap) and they could be supplied through either Drops, the Market or through the Star Mart. With redundant channels to obtain supplies, it is unlikely that the Clue Economy would ever completely dry up. Note that if the default drop rate for Clues during a Mission was slightly below the number of Clues you'd ideally want to receive in order to craft the NEXT Mission you want to do, there is now an excuse/reason to go Street Hunting for Clue Drops (or whatever).
So I was actually thinking in terms of effectively "crafting" each and every single Mission in the game. Something like a Task Force, however, which would be a chain of Missions would have a very large up front "cost" in Clues ... perhaps even several from each category of Clues, and joining the Task Force might require everyone on the Team to kick in to the Clue Pool before the whole Task Force can get rolling. Sort of a Team Trade window, in which everyone kicks in their contributions (minimum 1 each in each category?) ... and if you, personally, don't have enough, you'll have to kick in some IGC to cover your obligation in Clues (on a sliding scale of costing more IGC the fewer Clues you put into the pile).
Then as a sort of balance for this requirement, Task Forces could potentially award a higher drop rate for Clues during the Task Force's Missions, which might leave the entire Team "in the black" on Clues after completing the entire Task Force (ie. economic incentive to run Task Forces).
In other words, there's plenty of opportunities for [i]Fiddly Bits[/i] hither and yon all over the place such that there are a lot of variables to mess with and frobbish so as to tweak what needs to be tweaked in reaction to how the game evolves and how the Player's "play" the game over time.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
And just so we avoid future confusion of termonology Clues are currently considered to be part of our Contacts system.
Leads are the bits of info that you find / earn for crafting missions - what is currently labelled as Schemes and Investigations.
They are intended to be tradable on the market as well. Small IGC sinks can provide Leads too like pirchasing a newspaper from a vendor, puchase of anpolice band radio, etc...
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Other than the fact that you DO want to change the Devs' minds on the whole gear degredation idea, there is NO reason to keep bringing it up and arguing for it if they've already said it's not going to happen! Argument is pointless at this point. So drop it, and move on! Although, I hate to see what you come up with next that will attempt to divide the player base and be detrimental to the game.....
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
to oOStaticOo: I don't find anything I've written on this thread pointless. The original title of this thread was "Outside the box idea concerning IGC inflation" and that's what that is all about. Discussing "outside the box" ideas is bound to lead to a lot of stuff that get's mentioned, discarded, brought up again, reworked, etc. Whether or not the devs have already come out and said they're not using any one idea, it's still a reasonable thing to think about all of them and kick the tires on them. I'm personally all for having so-called "meaningless" discussions simply to bounce around ideas and see what other people come up with when thinking about them, whether or not anyone is ever going to act on any of it is not my concern. Nothing about this process is detrimental to any game that currently exists or ever will exist, in my opinion, because healthy, honest dialog can only be helpful, I feel. And if people respond to any idea and say "That idea has this problem." I think the person who came up with the idea ought to be allowed to reply back with their ideas on how to alleviate those problems.
As for the places where you've tried to order me around ("So drop it, and move on!"). My response to that is "No." I will continue to speak my mind and elicit meaningful reactions from others about my ideas, whether you think I should be allowed to or not, as is my right. That's what forums are for, the free flow of ideas.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
To be honest, I can't say I'm currently in love with the idea of having to piece together bits of stuff to make missions with if that's the ONLY way to get them in the game. Also, if the cost of that in IGC makes the missions less profitable than just street sweeping mobs (assuming there are any to street sweep) and doing raids/TFs/Trials on other people's clues, or whatever I've managed to gather of my own is a doable thing, I'd probably do that instead. I had no great love of individual missions in CoX, I just did a lot of TFs to try to level fast and get drops at the end. I did solo my MM through tip missions in the last year or so to generate massive amounts of INF and swag, but that was a means to an end, if it were more profitble to do street sweeping in high-risk zones like the crash site, I Would have done that instead. The draw to those missions was the Hero Merits in that case.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If the two of you don't mind giving me electrical AND radiation burns at the same time when I get between you ...
If Radiac hadn't been so ... determined ... to find a decent IGC sink then I probably never would have chimed in with an idea that may influence how certain structures in the game get built. Although Radiac's choice of notion to get behind may not have been acceptable, the mere discussion of it prompted something which actually did have merit and might even wind up being useful. This is an example where even Failed Proposals can still result in advancement of ideas and thinking beneficial to us all.
So Static, I have to say you're taking things a bit far to the point of edging towards calling for censorship ... which is not inherently cool. It's fine however for you to say that [i]in your opinion[/i] Radiac's ideas are lacking in merit (a position I'd substantially agree with, although not entirely, obviously), but you shouldn't be trying to proactively shut down conversation(s).
And Radiac, I think it's fair to say that at this point the notion that Static is objecting to has been somewhat thoroughly vetted and found wanting ... and I say this as someone who has also advocated in favor of having Enhancements "degrade" over time in a way that merits a "maintenance" function of eventual replacement, so as to maintain a degree of necessary Creative Destruction and "churn" in that specific item economy so as to allow it to act as a sink. The notion has been, for the time being at least, rather effectively tabled.
As far as I'm concerned, the better question is ... what other mischief/damage can we get up to?
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
The more appropriate way that I feel this could have been handled would have been to acknowledge the fact that Gear Degredation was something that was NOT going to happen in this game and say, "Okay, now that we know that will not be included........what other ideas might we have that could possibly work?" And then NOT continue to keep arguing the idea that Gear Degredation COULD work, then go on to accuse people that keep saying it's not going to work of just being greedy children that want to keep their stuff. I don't wish to Censor the forums, I just wish that once things have been discussed and tabled that they stay tabled. There is no need to keep trying to kick the dead horse once it's dead. I keep seeing the same ideas being brought up over and over again, supposedly with a new TWIST, that were shot down before and were terrible ideas to begin with and the supposed "twists" really did nothing to change that except possibly make them even worse.
Unfortunately, there may be a need to censor some discussions on this forum. Censorship isn't always a bad thing sometimes. There are some things that I feel strongly shouldn't be discussed on the forums. Monetization happens to be one of those things. Yes, people should be free to express their ideas and talk about things they feel they should talk about, but at what cost? When does it become hurtful to MWM to have these things being talked about in the open? What happens when the player base becomes divided and MWM starts losing people that may have been potential customers because of something said taken the wrong way? It's almost happened before. I believe that this forum needs Moderators. We need some people on here that will hop in and douse a fire that might get out of control and end up doing more damage than good.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
We could just give an IGC fee to the bacon overlords to watch out for us? They keep us safe and provide yummy bacon at the same time. Everyone a winner. Sorry vegens and veggie people I have no answer for you when it comes to the bacon overlords.
39 paragraphs from Radiac since he said he has "already let it go"
Then let us hope the 40th one is the charm, eh?
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
And people wonder why I get so frustrated.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Bacon should cure that for you static.
To be fair, 39 is a SMALL number of paragraphs, for me :)
Admittedly, I have let it go in the sense of expecting to sway any dev that it's a good idea, on the other hand, I still find it fascinating to think about and mull over.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Bacon cures everything.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
So going back to the Leads or whatever we're calling it, is this envisioned by anyone as being the main source of missions to do in the game, or like an ADDED way to get missions in addition to getting them given to you by contacts?
If it is the main source of missions, then what gets you more Leads to get missions from? Street Sweeping?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Can we start a different thread for this? I feel like it would be better suited if Leads had their own thread to work off of.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I nominate Redlynne to start that thread.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I already started it.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
didnt read ALL.. sorry if someone already had the same thought.
Hmmm. Can we instead have Craftable clue finding Gadgets that can be traded that take time to gather parts for, instead of having clue be the main tradable items?
For RP'ers, it might make more sense this way. ;)
Some of us don't.
Strip it for parts and kitbash it into something else. ^_^
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Hmmm, not that I or any player would like these, but....
1) Set up a "central bank" that effectively steals money via inflation.
2) Taxes. The government may even need to charge an extra amount based on all the collateral damage you dealt. They certainly need to charge you a higher percentage since you're a 1%er.
3) Credit cards that charge interest rates. Why use a card? If you get taken down while carrying cash, it gets stolen. Better keep that cash in the bank. Of course the bank always finds ways to get your money too...
Obviously these "sinks" are so much fun in real life that I'm sure everyone wants to escape to a game where it's all the same. That being said, it may be no fun if there are no challenges. It's kind of like the first matrix where it was nice and happy, but no one would accept it. There needs to be struggle so that there is a feeling of accomplishment when one wins.
It's a balancing act. "Easy" is no good even though I miss my fire/ice tank and MM and so on. "Obstacle" is no good. I'm thinking of my first blaster here. "Challenge" is where it's at. Good luck to the contributors on figuring out how to manage it all.
"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"
/em grumbles
The things I (gotta) do for you people ...
If no one does them for me, first ...
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Yeah, the one upside these things have is, as you said, they're the same ways the big banks, big gubment, and big corporate all try to squeeze money out of people in RL, so they're not totally foreign concepts. On the one hand, they might make a game just as dreary as doing your taxes in RL, on the other, there's an educational component to that in the sense that you're exposing kids to things we all hate like late fees, transaction fees, taxes, early withdraw penalties, etc.
Part of my reason for challenging people to come up with sinks was because it dawned on me that almost any attempt at IGC sinking will most likely be met with comments like "I don't like that." simply because nobody likes losing anything they gained, ever, in any way, for any reason.
I don't know that any one IGC sink is really immune to that, therefore there's a certain attractiveness in IGC sinks that allow newbies to go more or less unscathed while the high-rolling veterans have to pay more. You retain new players better I would expect, and nobody new ends up getting the impression that they had to have gotten in on the ground floor early to be able to make enough IGC to play and have fun.
I also like the idea of something that you can spend extra IGC on as wanted, like a luxury item, so as to give people the ability to burn through IGC when IGC get's to be really undervalued. Since most of us want to build the best-slotted toons we can get, the natural idea there was to make toons "power-up-able" with an infusion of IGC so as to allow people to burn excess IGC to get some temporary power to have fun with. Since I hate feeling like a power-pill addict, I wanted to go the other way. Sort of addition by subtraction.
So taxing all toons the same, or even all accounts the same, even the same percentage, might not be good, because you want to lend support to the newbies and put p some resistance to the veterans ability to get richer faster. That said, I don't think it's technically unworkable to do it in such a way as to not hurt the newbs too much.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I like the collateral damage bit, little more immersive. One thing some people forget, there will be a minority that will horde IGC. To them its a milestone to get to whatever cap the game sets. A goal on to itself to have it
Problem with taxing players I see, is they take a break from the game, do the taxes keep building. Say a person stops for 6 months and then comes back. They just came back to massive debt. Granted if the debt does not affect anything then no problems. If the debt starts to hamper play in some way, run the risk of player walking away again.
I system would have to be made to split the causal player from the daily player.
Although I was kidding about taxes and whatnot, I do think it could be interesting if a failure to pay taxes lead to an alignment change. Wesley Snipes comes to mind.
As far as affecting noobs differently than vets... taxes in the states are generally graduated. In fact, in some instances "citizens" with low enough income get money instead of paying.
I could see how something like INF could diminish over time.
BOTTOM LINE: You are absolutely right that no one ever wants to lose any thing in any way whatsoever. As a result I don't think there's any sink that anyone is OK with let alone likes.
THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!
So if we can agree that people generally dislike all sinks, then I think the next logical step is to accept that and then compare all available types of IGC sink not to what it would be like without them, but to the other sinks that would be needed to replace them (in terms of sinking the same amount of IGC). In other words, saying "I like this sink better than that one." is only a fair side-by-side comparison if the two sinks will be about as effective as each other. If the one can be demonstrated to sink less IGC than the other, then that fact alone will make it more attractive and as such the comparison is not fair, or really valid, because it's like saying "I like the one where I lose less IGC better" which is obvious anyway. Sinks should only be compared to each other in terms of what it would take to make one sink about the same amount of IGC as the other, then talk about the differences in how they do what they do.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
OF COURSE people hate sinks in games! Heck, they even resent the amount of time spent traveling around inside the game (hence, time sink). It's just simple selfishness. Everyone likes to GET, and hardly anyone likes to FORK OVER. Blanket hatred for sinks of various sorts is simply a matter of Working The Refs so as to convince the Devs to nerf the sinks down to a level where they can be safely ignored.
C'mon Radiac, this is basic (human) Player Nature 101 here.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
It is a catch 22. IGC is an unlimited resource that if not expended then inflates, however the only way to control said inflation is to convince the player it is a limited source. IGC sinks will always be disliked because the player is having to give something up merely because they either have too much of it or are trying to be kept from having to much of it.
Supply, demand and desire rule auction houses. Inflation only allows for the ease of high price tags. Having enough IGC sinks will never control a person's wishful thinking of listing something a 1B IGC.
So this leads to the inevitable conclusion that the future players of a game will try to win it in the design phase and as such their opinions cannot really be trusted. So what are we all doing here, really? And why should anyone developing a game ever listen to the future players opinions when it comes to stuff they know the game needs and the players will most likely dislike?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
CoX had posting fees to try to encourage/force people to ask what they felt might be reasonable prices for things up front. If someone ever posted anything for 1Billion on CoX it was, more likely than not, because they thought they'd actually get it, not just to throw it out there and see what happens. I'm pretty sure that was actually the stated intention of the posting fees originally.
And the reason to curb inflation, to me, is to ensure that people don't need to pay more IGC than they can carry for one item, if at all possible. By 2011-2012 I was happy to give people INF or use it as the FIRST thing I would use to buy stuff, because I was able to regenerate it fairly quickly. Had I sold all the purples I was getting with my MM I would have had more than 3 or 4 toons with 2 billion each, but I decided to squirrel away the purples instead for "later" when I needed them for some other toon, and as such "later" never happened.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Posting fees were to curb high pricing not to rethink reasonable price. If people are willing to pay $100 mill, people will post at $100 mil. The posting fee actually hurt the little guy who was blessed by the RNG to have something of high value but didn't have the fee to post it at current rate.
Agreed, and due to the double blind system you could end up getting "expensive stuff" for a song just because the other person couldn't afford to post it up at the going rate.
I would very often just throw stuff on the market for like 1 INF when they were selling for 100million, and end up getting like 60 million for it. I didn't care. Even after I had the posting fee money I still didn't care. It only takes ONE big ticket item to drop for you to get a ton of INF for it and then you're set up to sell all the ones that come after for higher prices if you have to.
The problem of posting fees causing INF-poor newbs to get rooked on sales of Purples/rares was therefore not that big of a problem, because as soon as it happened to you once, you had the INF to post them after that and could move the INF and/or the hot ticket swag to toons that were able to offload it better. It was a "one time hit" for the player, not a constant source of frustration, or at least that's how it should have worked.
I can't imagine a toon that's constantly INF-poor despite selling some rares and purples for less than the going rates because of posting fees. You eventually get paid, maybe not the highest price possible, but you get there.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
You can't image a IGC poor player? I can, when I first started I was poor all the time. Wasn't into teaming and on a face planting blaster. Didn't know what I was doing with the enhancements, so spent in wrong areas. Didn't make squat in missions, since soloing. Plus on top of any other IGC sinks that ran next to posting fees. If we look at one IGC sink without adding in others that parallel, sure posting fee was not bad. I love an analogy made in another MMO forum.
"I have a sandwich, so you can't be hungry."
Now I learned and stumbled my way through it all. Started teaming, learned the market and so forth. Player curves differ. Put a hill in front of someone however small, you will find someone who will consider it a mountain.
In addition to your getting 60 mil after posting for 1. Some marketeers loved people who did that, so they then could flip it and not only make their 60 mil back and gain additional 40 mil. To some playing the market is their mini game.
But he got 60 mil and would have the IGC to post future items at the going rate
Not always sadly
I can imagine INF-poor players. We ALL were INF-poor on our first toon, especially in the first 2 years of CoX. What I had meant was was that I can't imagine an INF-poor player who got that way despite getting and selling many rares and purples for less than the going rate because they had to post them for 1INF at the time. For one thing , as I said, once you had that happen to you ONCE you'd have a bunch of INF now with which to use to post the next big ticket item anyway. For another, as I also said, I personally still sold stuff for 1INF even AFTER I had 2billion INF just because I wanted to sell it quick and not have to wait like a week for it to move on the market.
The fact that there were other people buying and selling to try to make as much INF as possible didn't bother me, even in places where they traded sharper or got people to pay higher prices. That didn't cause me to shake my fist at the posting fees. In the end, the BUYER paid you back for those eventually anyway. As I recall, what the AH did in CoX was they charged a 5% up-front fee to post something as a seller, to encourage low selling prices. Otherwise you'd get people trying to sell some thing or another for like 1 billion when everyone knows it isn't worth that. It was a way of getting people to figure out the approximate value of their swag BEFORE trying to rip everyone else off for the heck of it.
In the AH system they had, when someone bought a thing, the seller got whatever the highest offer was at the time and the AH gave the seller their original posting fee BACK along with 90% of what the buyer bought the thing for and the AH kept the other 10% a sa pure INF sink. As INF sinks went,t his wasn't bad, and maybe it could ave been raised to something closer to 20%, but in and of itself it was not going to solve the inflation problem in one fell swoop.
I still think the best IGC sink is one where the players choose to buy for IGC from an NPC or something and then you use it up and it's gone after that. Some sort of temporary thing that the NPC sell yuo, they delete the IGC you gave them, you use the thing and have your fun, then it's gone forever. Then you can go buy another one if you want to. Since buying a mission or a TF or a costume in a "pay to unlock, own forever" sort of way DOESN'T lead to any repeat business, I think what you need is something that DOES lead to repeat business. What that might be, I have my own ideas about, but we've already discussed that elsewhere.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Sorry in my mind the only way to discourage high priced items on an AH is to not pay the asking price. If some pays 1 Bill IGC for a white common enough times. It's not the seller's fault for out of whack pricing. It's the buyers market for showing the willingness to pay that much. Price tags are what I sellers wants combined with past sales. The true value of anything is what a buyer is willing to pay for it. Are posting fees an IGC sink? Yes. Will they curb high priced items? No. Potential to hurt the little guy? Yes. Potential to hurt the IGC whale? No.
My 2 IGC on it. Am I going to advocate posting fees not be used, no I am not. It is simply my view of the posting fee sink.
Viva La debate!
One of the reasons I wouldn't pay more than a set price for a Recipe in the Auction House, was the actual price of the same Recipe for the Vendors, in this case in Steel Canyon, in the University, the Crafting tables.
If there's ever an alternate way to get the same thing, the Auction House item prices wont go above that too much! It should Hover around that price.. in theory. ;D
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