I would imagine a loot system will be one of the later factors to be hammered out (not last, by any means, but 'later'). Once you decide WHAT crafting system you will have have. What kind of economy you want to have. How you want to deal with it. What kind of storage there is going to be, how much you're going to provide.

See, as much as I hate 'gray loot', I love picking stuff up, giggling like a school girl, and seeing just how crappy my loot luck is.

I'd like some sort of...I dunno, auto-loot? If we have more than one big inventory slot (i.e. 'bags'), then let us designate what bag what type of loot goes into. Maybe Bag 1 gets all my gray 'crap' that I use just to put a little coin in my pocket. Maybe Bag 3 gets my enhancements automatically. Maybe Bag 4 gets my crafting materials.

I wouldn't mind seeing this follow through to any 'bank' space I can get. Let me label and designate what goes where, then maybe give me a button that transfers loot from my bags to my bank. If I want to sort it from there, a couple drop downs on a bank tab for sorting by name, level, type, whatever.

Redlynne wrote:

A lot of people hated the "Tetris system" of inventory management in Diablo 2 where the "shape" of the item in your inventory mattered. I always thought that was a rather clever bit of design, since it meant that rather than just counting the number of items, you also had to consider the "bulk" of the items in question too.
1x1: rings, amulets, jewels
2x1: belts
1x2: daggers
2x2: gloves, boots, helmets, small buckler shields, horadric cube
1x3: quivers, most 1h weapons
2x3: 2h weapons, torso armor
The design turned Inventory Management into a mini-game of its own, so naturally people hated it.

This kind of system gives the game more design space to work with too. It creates a set of rigid rules that you can then use to give some items advantages and disadvantages. One Augment might be really clunky to have to haul around, but REALLY good once slotted, giving people the desire to stop what they're doing and craft it and slot it right away. Another might be really small and take up very little space, etc.

This is the kind of thing that makes games more interesting to play, for the PVEers at least.

Perhaps the solution will be an electronic market place. You can buy and sell without having to quit the mission.
We have EBay in real life. free up that inventory space. It would be nice to buy some greens on the fly as well.

It's been said before that they don't want to make this game a simple gear acquisition chase, so Diablo-style (Diabolic?) inventory tetris might not happen for the sake of that. I don't have a problem with that really, but I would also point out that inventory systems and so forth are generally designed to NOT be as efficient as is technically possible. The game designer is designing that part of the game (the inventory game within the game) to have some "meatyness" to it, in and of itself so as to engage the players and force them to play the inventory sub game by making meaningful decisions withing the framework of what is allowed.

Complaining about that, to me, is tantamount to saying "I like chess, but wouldn't it be BETTER(TM) if we could move the Rook in the same way as the Knight, in addition to his normal move modes?" My answer to that is "No, it wouldn't be better, it would make the game rules less restrictive, but that's not the same thing as making the game better." A "better' game is one that's more engaging and interesting to play, and thus one with more detailed rules, not a game with less restrictions and more freedom. Added freedom and power only feels good for as long as it takes to become the new norm (a week, two tops), at which point it only adds boredom to the game, ultimately.

Of course, we all have parts of the game we enjoy and parts we think are a bunch of drudgery. PVPers just want to get to the level cap and get the best gear on the best build of the best class so they can dominate in PVP, and as such all other parts of the game that they have to participate in to make that happen are "work" while the satisfaction that comes from being unbeatable in PVP matches is "the fun part". I'm not inclined to make all of the PVE a total Easy Button just because that segment of the game population wants it. This isn't Doom, Quake, or Unreal Tournament. If you want total parity and no need to build a toon over time, go play one of those games. I like the RPG aspects of the PVE game, that's what I play for, and frankly making it all a lot simpler only makes me more bored with the game faster.

Edit: As far as I'm concerned, just give people a limited inventory to the point the it's often an excruciating decision to have to decide what to drop and what to keep, then offer added storage space to people for money somehow. In the "low space" default deal, people might actually swap stuff back and forth among eachother when space get's tight.

Personally - I'd prefer the inventory system to be as simple as possible. Auto pick-up, no "looting corpses", and I'd rather not play the Diablo inventory jigsaw game - just give me x number of slots with one item per slot. Clean, simple.

As for selling the stuff - I think we should have to go to actual in-game stores/markets to "sell" or trade. Tossing something out of your inventory for no benefit is one thing, but I think stores and markets would become natural player hubs - which are good for MMOs.

" I get it, we're stuck with having loot. We're gonna be stuck with rifling through the pockets of the thugs and demons we defeat in order to collect enough loose change so simulate an economy, so that gold sellers have a market to harass us over.

So if we're gonna be shackled with an economy and inventory, can we at least make it as unintrusive and non-frustrating as possible? "

Hey Starhammer...I think you're holding back. Tell us how you REALLY feel! ;)

I agree that I want a simple inventory system. To me, counting my stuff is NOT part of the game. Efforts to make it so will make Comicsluvr angry... I don't care how much cheese you put on my asparagus...I still don't like asparagus

I can appreciate if the inventory gets expanded later via Accolades or whatever. I'm sure that some of this is ripe for microtransactions and I'm OK with that as long as the base inventory isn't so small that I feel I HAVE to have the expansions just to play.

I see nothing wrong with autoloot. I also see nothing wrong with having a small bag/belt/thing with 4 slots in it. Anything you put into these 4 slots that drops later is automatically sold and the proceeds go to you. For example: I know I already have a suitcase full of Pistons back at base. I put a Piston in one of the belt slots. Well now I'm fighting Androids and they drop Gears and I know I have a ton of those too. Gears go into the next belt slot etc.

In this way I still have to accumulate loot because I'm limited to 3-4 things to autosell and in an hour I might see 20 different kinds of loot. So I'll still be encouraged to interact with others at the Market, the Vendor etc. However I can also juggle the autsell as necessary if I start REALLY piling up 1-2 common things that I don't need

I won't mind if the Crafting system itself is a bit intricate. Hell, crafting SHOULD be intricate. However when my friends and I are rolling through a TF the LAST thing I want to worry about is missing prize loot because I forgot to empty my pockets last mission.

It might be helpful if the rewards come more from accomplishing missions at the end than from dropping the mobs during. I think that's been floated as an idea, not sure how it would work specifically or what the relative percentages of XP/IGC from mobs versus from mission completion would be though.

But if that is the deal, it might be as simple as "let's not start the next mission until I get to the vendor NPC/auction house to sell stuff off" so instead of getting overfilled during a mission, you'd have to just maybe be careful right before one's about the be completed/started.

In CoX, it seemed to me that the vast majority of "good" items did not come from mobs dropping them. While it was true that Purples were the exception to that rule, they happened only very infrequently and the VAST majority of stuff that dropped from mobs was crap. It was crap you could sell off at a vendor for over-inflated prices (especially generic IO recipes), but crap nonetheless.

It COULD be the case that in CoT, you get only XP and IGC drops from mobs when you defeat them (which cuts down on the inventory worries) and then at the end of the completed mission you get a randomized drop of something that might be "good" (in addition to maybe more IGC and XP bonuses). It could also be true that there aren't nearly so many totally useless, but high resale-value items to have to schlep to the vendors too.

Making the vendors "smarter" in the sense that they won't offer artificially high IGC rates for crap that can be generated in high volume (like Generic IOs in CoX) is another idea that has been mentioned. This probably means less items dropping overall (so maybe just at the end of completed missions) and if the vast majority of items that do drop are valuable enough that they would need to be sold on the auction house to fully exploit them (or else get crafted and used) then I think people will be far more willing to stop and figure their inventory out when they need to, and I think the times when they need to will crop up less frequently in mid-mission anyway.

Of course, this is all just theoretical.

In most other games I've tried, there is also tier 0: Things that have literally no use in the game other than to take up inventory space until you can sell it to a vendor. If CoX didn't have that, I see no reason to add it. If it did, I think not having it should be considered.

Foradain wrote:

In most other games I've tried, there is also tier 0: Things that have literally no use in the game other than to take up inventory space until you can sell it to a vendor. If CoX didn't have that, I see no reason to add it. If it did, I think not having it should be considered.

That's commonly known as "vendor trash", and CoX didn't have it since it didn't have a traditional inventory or equipment system.

Vendor trash can add a "fun" touch to the game depending on how it's implemented, though then we have the games who implement it purely for the sake of having vendor trash.

And I would vehemently disagree with such argumentation.

By that argument then effectively all common items (usually white) in effectively every other game with a gearing system would also be vendor trash, since they are almost never used. There is a difference between items whose design purpose is purely to be sold to a vendor (and sometimes give you a chuckle) and items who have "dipped" below a usability criteria but are still technically usable.

To take that argument to its logical conclusion one is effectively stating that unless an item is an upgrade (regardless of if it's for one self or someone else) then it's "vendor trash".

But one of the reasons for 'material' rewards, rather than just IGC, is that those don't inflate the economy as much. They don't inflate the 'floating cash supply' at all, unless they are sold to a vendor and the vendors never give full value in the exchange. So, 'stuff' is a safer reward than 'cash'.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Fireheart wrote:

They don't inflate the 'floating cash supply' at all, unless they are sold to a vendor and the vendors never give full value in the exchange. So, 'stuff' is a safer reward than 'cash'.
Be Well!
Fireheart

As long as the stuff is potentially useful for something besides selling for cash, this is true. But when you add in stuff that can only be sold for cash, it doesn't even slow inflation down as much as a sleeping policeman.

I like the idea that a stack of widgets could be converted to a 'super-widget'. Of course, if none of them are useful anyway, then there'd be no reason to collect them.

What if such widgets could be broken down into some base, common, currency-like stuff... call it 'technology', or 'magic', or 'aether', which one could store mass quantities of, and use to acquire, or in place of, some Specific item needed in a crafting recipe? "Hmm, I don't have any chubnuts, but I do have 20 units of aether, so I'll use that instead."

Be Well!
Fireheart

100% in musing mode. This is not, to my knowledge, related to extant plans. What if you didn't get "drops" at all, but just got a "counter" of foes (divided by type) you've defeated (whether that means "killed," "arrested," or whatever)? For game mechanical discussion, let's model this as gaining a "token" for each foe you defeat, and that token identifies what that foe was.

These wouldn't have a cap; you could keep track of as many of these as you wanted.

When you go to a vendor, that vendor offers you IGC and/or "drops" for each token you want to cash in with him. In essence, you're selling the tokens, but the fluff is more along the lines of the vendor being so impressed with your exploits or the faction or whatever that he represents having gotten some cool stuff from their job of cleaning up after your fight (e.g. if Tyrosine cleaned up a fight you'd had with the MechanoMonster from Mars) and offering you something "interesting" they found there. Heck, take the token to a different vendor with a different set of interests and you might get a different slate of possible "drops."

Now, you don't have as much immediate inventory management, but to get "stuff" from the fights you go to an NPC. I think this also cleans up the "but I don't want HeroDude to rifle through thugs' pockets" issue, because it's NPCs who're doing the rifling. The NPCs just offer you a cut of it. Or, if you're a hero, think of it as the NPCs offering you something in gratitude for your help defeating that foe.

Repeating for emphasis: this has no dev backing. I am musing out loud, here.

How is that different than "Defeat warriors, and they drop blue rocks?"

The question is not rhetorical; I'm interested in the analysis others will provide.

Radiac wrote:

Another REALLY interesting (to me) idea that crossed my mind was this: don't charge real world money for subscriptions, don't force people to pay any real world money for anything, just don't have IGC drop or be created ex nihilo, ever. Make people have to pay real money to fund their characters in IGC. Pay $10, get X amount of IGC. In other words, just run EVERYTHING on Stars basically. Augments and craftables and salvage and recipes or whatever would still drop, but you'd have to either sell the stuff you got on the market for Stars to raise capital to buy the stuff you want or else just dump some real cash into the game to get your toons some Stars to buy Augments etc with.

No, please no.

I don't want RL wealth to directly reflect ones potential for in-game wealth.

I'm fully expecting that there will be IGC that drops or is generated ex nihilo, but nonetheless the thought had crossed my mind, and I still find it interesting to think about here.

If the only in-game currency is Stars, and Stars are generated by paying real money, it would SEEM like people are going to have to pay a lot of real money to make their toons "good" quickly and that one could just back up the money truck and dump money on a character in order to become really well-built in a hurry. That said, in theory that still requires the items bought to have been generated ex-nihilo by some person somewhere who got that random drop and sold it on the auction house. Therefore, the people who spend a lot of TIME grinding for random drops could generate enough "income" from selling their swag to the "rich kids" who have a lot of MONEY (and not time) to keep their own toons in good shape as well. In a way the rich would be playing in such a way as to subsidize the poor. The rich in this case would then be able to win more in PVP and or do more high-end content, which will likely have rewards of its own though, and that's a bit of a problem.

I think everyone, rich and poor will eventually reach a point where their toons are more or less done and they don't need $12 worth of stuff for them every month and they keep generating swag by playing for free. At that point everyone just plays for free, more or less, but for the cosmetic stuff they might buy. So I feel like in the long-term (and the long term might be like three months after roll-out) that system doesn't make money except on the newbies that come in, so you're dependent on having a constant influx of newbies. Also, swag starts to pile up with nobody there to pay Stars for it. So newbies are not just the only ones apt to play real money to "buy in" but they're also the only "customers" for the veterans that have lots of Augments etc to sell. The question becomes, why does the veteran who has lots of Augments lying around even want to sell them to the newbie for Stars, unless he can get real money (or something else he wants) for Stars somehow, and then the black marketeers come in.

In a system like that, I think there would need to be a Star sink capable of getting the veterans who have everything they need to continue to pay real money (maybe $5-10 per month, on average) for Stars just to buy some consumable item or other with, thus giving them a reason to want to sell that stuff to others for Stars. Besides, the auction house doesn't destroy Stars, so something else would have to in that scenario.

In think in an economy like that, if there were no Star sink and augments keep dropping ex nihilo, the street prices of augments will start out high and then monotonically decrease over the long term as the population's demand for more augments tails off and the supply rate of them continues to remain the same (rate being how many augments, on average, are generated per day). Thus, for that to work the Augments themselves would have to expire or erode or something over time so as to create a replacement economy for them.

This is essentially the same as Magic online. They let you play for free, but getting and keeping the cards you need to play in tournaments is going to cost money. So no subscription, just a lot of small transactions where you have to keep getting new things to replace the old, unusable things you had paid for previously.

So to summarize the "No IGC drops" or "Magic Online style" model, it would probably have work something like this: People play for free, which play generates randomized drops of salvage and recipes (a la CoX). People can create Stars by paying real world money in the cash shop. The randomly generated salvage and stuff can be either crafted to make useful Enhancements, which process destroys Stars (cost to craft), or it can be sold on the market for Stars (with an auction house cut of all transactions, a la CoX), or you can craft the thing and then try to sell the ready-made Enhancer for Stars at a profit somehow if you want. Each enhancement, once crafted, would then have a limited life time in the game, measured in either real time, logged-on time, or actual number of uses of the power the Enhancer is in. Then, when the Enhancer expires, you discard it (or it simply disappears) and you have to get a replacement.

Thus the continual play and continual payment of real money create a constant stream of random items and a constant stream of Stars which eventually find each other via the market and combine to make useful Enhancers, which eventually burn out and disappear, creating a vacuum and a market demand for more random drops and more Stars. If you can keep the generation and erosion rates under control somehow (crafting costs, auction transaction costs, rate of Enhancer erosion), you've got a decent chance at maintaining a reasonably stable economy, I would expect.

But CoT will never be that game, as they've already said they don't want it to be a constant gear grind or make it too "all about tha phat lootz", like WoW, ironically is, despite being the subscription model prototype.

Radiac wrote:

I'm not particularly fond of the "total liquidity" option you're talking about. For one thing that's what selling the item on the market is supposed to be for, and if people can just liquidate stuff for "aether" instead, you've got that currency competing against the IGC market, which I don't like.

Alright, but my point would be that 'aether' would be a non-tradeable commodity. So, any item you convert to 'aether' is no longer available for sale on the market and can Only be used in Crafting. So, instead of throwing away excess widgets, or destroying them, you'd render them down for 'aether'.

Alternately, of course, we could have some method of selling/marketing inventory in the field and/or dumping items into your Garage so you can deal with them later. Gods, my garage is Full of stuff I was going to deal with later...

Be Well!
Fireheart

Segev wrote:

How is that different than "Defeat warriors, and they drop blue rocks?"
The question is not rhetorical; I'm interested in the analysis others will provide.

Just pointing out that the circumstances you describe amount to creating different currencies for each potential Foe Group. The net result winds up being a multitude of currencies that all function as "permission slips" to exchange for STUFF™ at the appropriate NPC Commerce Point.

I think the best way to handle it would be to have the NPC that gives you the mission tally (with a number visible to you) the number of minions, lts, and bosses you defeat during the mission, and then when you complete it and return to talk to them, they then generate a randomized set of loot for you (like the proverbial treasure chest at the end of the dungeon) and say "Here's some stuff you can just HAVE, anything you don't take delivery of right now will be kept and sold at auction, proceeds going to ME, the NPC." And then if you have a personal lair or SG base with storage, you can maybe grind for enough clout with that NPC that they'll deliver stuff to your lair, assuming it has a "loading dock" with enough storage space to be of use.

Edit: If every NPC is going to have an "attitude" toward you that is kept track of in some sense (like in DnD, attitude adjustments affect ability to persuade NPC to do stuff for you, etc) then maybe letting them keep a lot of the loot will improve their attitude towards you in most cases (especially street-level criminal villain NPC contacts). Not that they'd necessarily give you harder missions, just like you better, maybe let you call them on the cell phone instead of hoof it back to have a face to face, etc.

Izzy wrote:

I wonder if some of the NPC contacts will be informants, snitches, etc.. that you can Bribe or Threaten even?
This might have been covered some time ago, i just dont recall where we left it. :<

It's amazing how many different kinds of attitudes can be adjusted with a large wrench. ^_^

I understand your argument, but I think ultimately the low rollers having LOTS of items and there being SO few Stars creates a market pressure on Stars that would prompt people to cash in and create Stars because of the HUGE amounts of items you can get for SO FEW Stars in that market. You'd expect the going exchange rate there to be "tons of great items for one Star" which makes Stars VERY valuable as they can buy you a LOT of randomly generated stuff that other people have that YOU need. So you pay for some Stars and use them to get items. If your saying "what about people who plan on NEVER EVER paying money to make even a single Star?" I expect there might not be so many of those people as you might think when the value of Stars get's to that point. Also, those people are playing for free, so there is that. The game devs, theoretically, have almost no fiduciary responsibility to ensure that they're having as much fun as they possibly can. In fact, offering them MORE fun if they pay for Stars is the transaction that keeps the game running.

If, in the player's mind, the idea that they might have to keep paying money to keep playing the game is so horrible, then that person expects a free ride, and worse they demand that the ride be no less fun than those paying money for rides, and that's just fundamentally so wrong I don't think anyone can reasonably expect it. I think everyone knows free rides suck compared to the ones at, say, Disney World. But you have to pay money to get into Disney world. Paying a subscription is the same deal, you pay money to play the game. In this system you only pay as much as you want to keep your toons well-equipped and you can play as much as you want without spending any money if you don't want to. Or maybe you can grind 24/7 for items and sell them to people who have no patience or free time and get your Stars that way.

Remember it's not like the randomized items themselves can actually DO anything, you still need to craft them, and that costs Stars too. So all players need both items and Stars to enhance powers.

Also, remember it's entirely possible that based on the actual prices and burn rates you might end up only spending like $5 per month to play the game at a pretty competitive level in the long term. That's a better deal than $15 a month. It's like infinity percent more than "free" but I don't think any game company should have to maintain a game infrastructure that includes updates, new content, people troubleshooting your technical problems, etc just to make zero money on it.

At the end of the day, you probably end up paying some kind of monthly subscription to get some amount of Stars every month. Maybe you get bonus Stars for hooking up a year by year sub instead of going month to month, etc.

Segev wrote:

Perhaps. The thought behind it is more, "does it matter if you get the inventory items at the moment you defeat the foe rather than next time you go talk to a vendor?" The goal being to reduce the inventory-cluttering nature of things and let you deal with item-shuffling only when you're already back at the vendor you want to work with.

That essentially converts the (entire?) Inventory System into being the equivalent of multiple streams of AE Tickets, with the practical upshot of Choose Your Own Drops as a result (again, using the Ticket System model).

On the upside, that would certainly take care of the problem of needing to manage Inventory DURING adventure time, and also deal with the problem of what to do with Drops when your Inventory is full. Simple ... there are no "drops" that take up Inventory space that result from defeating Foes.

Which loops back to a question I posed a while ago ... [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/what-if-foes-simply-dont-drop-loot]What if Foes simply DON'T DROP LOOT?[/url]

So ... been there, asked that?

(I realize my theoretical no-IGC utopia/distopia has derailed the main thread, and for that I apologize, if you don't care about that particular tangent, you should probably stop reading this post now)

In the game as I'm envisioning it, you'd probably be able to survive on the cheap (basically free) if you set your difficulty to "low" and are content with having like Double Origin Enhancement type gear in all of your powers, all the while knowing that you're in a world where a lot of other people choose to use Invention Origin stuff that is way better. I'm also assuming that the purchase price of the game will include a lot of up-front Stars to get people started.

Also, the definition of "adequately competitive" is a relative one. People who PVP want to win and as such will want the best available gear, or else try to create "low gear level leagues" where you can't bring good gear, etc, which I'm fine with. People who solo PVE a lot might be fine with low end gear as a permanent solution too. But people who want to "pwn" shouldn't be surprised to find that they're going to have to invest some real world money in that. Even then, you might only push money in once in a while when you have it to spend, play, dominate PVP, do all sorts of fun PVE stuff at high difficulty, etc, then when the gravy train runs out of steam, you decide to just bum around doing cheaper, lower difficulty stuff again for a while, like leveling up new alts, etc. There's be an ebb and flow. The fact that you're not paying a monthly sub (though I'd still offer one for those of us who just want to support the game and play like high rollers all the time) means you can spend or save money at will,on the fly, you just have to adjust your expectations or play style accordingly.

So drawing on the parallel of AE Tickets again (because that's familiar to a lot of people reading these forums), it would be a lot like using the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Ticket_Vendor]Ticket Vendor[/url] to redeem Tickets. Limit things to random results, instead of Choose Your Own, and the whole system works as a Delayed Gratification means for Inventory Management. You still "get your drops" ... you just get them "later" when you can guarantee you have room to receive them into your Inventory.

Structurally speaking, it's not a bad idea.

Interestingly enough, we already have a system that would allow players to decide when they get drops, during combat or when they complete challenges earning an achievement. This includes obtaining specific rewards instead of random drop rolls.

The dual concerns of inventory and salvage are already addressed in how the crafting system has been designed. Most of the suggestions have danced all around the system.

Radiac wrote:

I have mixed emotions about offering people a way to get the exact thing they want in a non-randomized way. On one hand, I worry that giving people a "do this content and you can pick your reward, anything you want" type deal will make the market kind of obsolete.

+1

CoT shouldn't Require casual players to craft a single thing. But those that want to treat crafting as a separate game, shouldn't be able to get materials so fast and easy. It should be a few steps, and it becomes a more satisfying experience* for the player when they finally succeed.

Izzy wrote:

Radiac wrote:
I have mixed emotions about offering people a way to get the exact thing they want in a non-randomized way. On one hand, I worry that giving people a "do this content and you can pick your reward, anything you want" type deal will make the market kind of obsolete.
+1
CoT shouldn't Require* casual players to craft a single thing. But those that want to treat crafting as a separate game, shouldn't be able to get materials so fast and easy. It should be a few steps, and it becomes a more satisfying for the player when they finally succeed.

While there is room for clarity in explaining every nuance of a system, there is a time and place for such. While the system we're looking at which allows players to determine when they earn rewards and what type of rewards they earn, including up to getting specific "things", does not mean "all things" and does not rule out that getting "a specific thing" would take longer / have more investment involved due to not getting other "things".

Just becuase (and this is a loose example) that players were able to get certain rare recipies using alignment tokens did not make the market obsolete. It offered a way for people to get what they wanted without having to necessarily rely on a drop or deal with the market. The system we're may implement does things similarly but is much more involved in standard play and comes at its own "price" to earn specific rewards, namely time, and not utilizing as much of a resource to get other rewards. Everything has a trade off.

Cinnder wrote:

Segev wrote:
Perhaps. The thought behind it is more, "does it matter if you get the inventory items at the moment you defeat the foe rather than next time you go talk to a vendor?" The goal being to reduce the inventory-cluttering nature of things and let you deal with item-shuffling only when you're already back at the vendor you want to work with.

If Augs and Refs are to be 'dropped' by mobs, I would not want these drops to be deferred till later, because it precludes the ability for me to slot them during the mission. Crafting materials that I couldn't use till I visited a crafting station wouldn't matter so much if they were deferred. Unless one could somehow acquire a portable crafting table (a la CoX), in which case I'd want the items as I proceeded with the mission. I have no problem with mission or arc completion rewards being deferred, but in general I would want regular random mob stuff to be 'drop as you go.'

I understand the desire to be able to craft or start using drops immediately, but I personally feel that the actual chances that you'd be able to use stuff that drops are fairly low. For one thing, players will likely be running around with mostly "full" slots most of the time, so you might likely have your powers fully slotted with very good stuff already, which lowers the odds that what dropped would help you right away, and for another, a lot of what drops might be stuff that your powers simply cannot slot at all. Where that is a concern would be when leveling low level toons without the help of a "sugar daddy toon" to pay for cheap stuff for the new toon.

On a separate note, what are we really trying to represent in the role play immersion sense with these drops? I know CoX had them, but I think it's more likely that my hero character is getting that stuff from his NPC contact friends in support of his cause or as thanks for his actions, and as such it makes sense that you'd go to to the NPC to collect the stuff, or maybe talk to them on the cell phone and ask them to deliver what you want to a location of your choosing. I think that could apply equally well to villains doing jobs for NPC bosses.

Now, I have no problem with the dropping of objects vital to the story inside the mission, like when you click on the computer you get a drop called "data disk" which you'll need when you do the next mission, etc. If that takes the form of things that are viable swag, like Augments and IGC, fine, but I would prefer that it happen only in stories where it moves the plot forward, not just be an ingrained part of the reward mechanics.

So maybe at the end of the arc you stop Dr. Evil from constructing his Doomsday Device and when you click on it to defuse it you get a drop that's a piece of very rare salvage, or something. you could pepper stuff like that in there in places.

Of course, trying to justify how your altruistic hero character is earning tangible in game currency from defeating badguys is still somewhat sketchy.

IGC is a difficult thing to incorporate into a superheroic story without it feeling like an intrusion of game mechanics onto the narrative. I've so far found only one way that satisfies me, and it is... a hard sell.

Due to the difficulty of making IGC into anything that fits, fluff-wise, into the world without making the world feel like it has been shaped and molded to include it, I tend to think it's probably best to acknowledge that it's a game construct, and leave it unaddressed in setting-fluff. But that's me; I am still not speaking with any dev authority.

My own opinion is that if it is used as currency: that is used to purchase "items", access a convenience capability, trading, and is the main driver of the economy in that it must not only be managed in how it is generated but also removed from the game world, then it is currency no matter what it is called. So, might as well call it a form of currency. The most generic term I've referred to is Resource, a more specific term I've used is Affluence (though I'm applying a broad use of the term as in little Affluence, or much Affluence).

My personal favorate as suggested here on the boards is to literally call it IGC. I believe it was Izzy that coined the phrase (pun intended) Interchangeable Global Currency for a "game world" use. I rather like that it came from the players on these boards. Again, this is my own personal opinion, and while I vocalize it when we discuss the topic internally, it does not necessarily reflect the final approach.

*edited to correct the term given for IGC (interchangeable global curency)

I like calling it IGC too, but I prefer the name "Intentionally Generic Currency", which someone (not me) suggested way back when.
I also agree that just making it an unexplained thing, like XP and hit points, etc, is probably good enough.

Insidious Global Corporation?

Wait.

The thing is we already have a reputation mechanic for character interactions with npcs. Trying to both cover something like "favors" for those who want their character to be helped or help others without use of currency and also prove a currency for those who want to be someone for hire or earn a currency (legitimately or otherwise) is why I originally offered Resource. It leaves things open enough to interpretation what the source of the character's ability to help, be helped, currency, or literally any other form of material or otherwise type of source. But there are those who do not like such nebulous terms for what basically amounts to what the mechanic is literally being used for, it is a form of currency in every way.

To be honest, there are a lot of plot holes in comics involving money. I mean, Peter Parker rarely complains about having enough money to keep his webshooters functional, but he never has money to go on a date with the girlfriend, whomever it is at the time. Also, regardless of age, he appears to always have the time to to fight badguys and still manages to make enough money to make rent every month.

Also, nobody really enjoys playing a "broke" toon if that means not being able to put Augments in powers etc and thus being badly nerfed on your DPS or resistances or whatever. It's not like Spiderman's punches or spider-sense work any less well based on how much money he has, or how good/bad his reputation is, etc.

Tannim222 wrote:

The thing is we already have a reputation mechanic for character interactions with npcs. Trying to both cover something like "favors" for those who want their character to be helped or help others without use of currency and also prove a currency for those who want to be someone for hire or earn a currency (legitimately or otherwise) is why I originally offered Resource. It leaves things open enough to interpretation what the source of the character's ability to help, be helped, currency, or literally any other form of material or otherwise type of source.

"Resources" works as well - ambiguous enough to represent a wide variety of interactions.

Quote:

But there are those who do not like such nebulous terms for what basically amounts to what the mechanic is literally being used for, it is a form of currency in every way.

Ultimately it IS a currency, yes, but thematically, portraying it as straight up cash just doesn't work in the supers genre - as Segev just said a couple posts up. Best to leave it general and open to interpretation by the character in my opinion.

I personally enjoyed the idea of Influence, but even that might not make sense unless used correctly and you've stated that actual "influence" will be something similar to faction rep in other games.

"Resource" IS a much more flexible term, however personally I think it's a term used to death in so many other games (especially RTS).

I really like the term "Assets". It, like "Resources", has a lot of flexibility. An asset could be something of monetary value, a contact that is extremely helpful in procuring information or items, etc.

I don't think it's hamstringing ourselves to leave IGC as a pure game construct, no more a part of the setting than hp or level. I agree; we won't be able to grant every PC the ability to choose to have a mansion on the outskirts of town at the start of the game to support their "billionaire playboy" backstory, but that doesn't mean we have to chain an in-setting money to their in-setting net worth, either.

Tannim222 wrote:

Assets is not so good when players tend to shortern terminology into a single syllable word, Influence became Inf. Assetss becomes...

Bottoms? ;)

"That villain, Lord Nightmare, crashed into my base and took my A..." "... he burned my A...!" "I lost my A... at the Arena."

IGC as a game mechanic and currency surrogate makes sense. Let it be (officially) undefined and people will auto-fill the acronym.

Be Well!
Fireheart