It occurs to me that CoT is not the kind of game where making the players run around the open world mining for gold and chopping trees for wood is going to fly, no pun intended.
So with that in mind, how do we acquire raw materials?
In CoX you got them as random drops from defeats in combat, and that's fine. I would expect the drops you get to be depend on the mobs you defeat, like in Cox. Robots ought to drop circuit boards, not magical dust or whatever.
There's also the idea that a lot of mobs may drop pre-made items like Augments and Refinements. Maybe we can de-craft those into crafting materials too, by spending IGC to do it.
Maybe the NPCs that give missions give missions that can be repeated every so often that might get you a lot of raw materials, or maybe their mission offerings are affected by the current state of the game economy, and if the averaged street price of, say, circuit boards is above a given threshold, then the NPCs start offering more "go defeat the robots" missions for that reason.
I feel like defeated mobs don't necessarily need to drop IGC and raw materials and usable items every time. Even the IGC isn't necessarily required to be an "every time the same amount" type thing. In GW2, defeated monsters only rarely drop IGC and frequently drop nothing at all, except XP. This alone keeps the rate of IGC being made ex nihilo under control, if you ask me, because in that game you can still sell infinite unwanted swords to the junk NPCs who will always give you like 50 copper for them, and the games economy seems very under-control still to me.
I'm not sure I would even want there to be a resource gathering operation in CoT like GW2 has. In GW2, you can sometimes get leather by defeating monsters ans getting a pelt, which you can salvage with a salvage kit into like 1-3 scraps of leather, but I think most leather that is sold in the player-to-player market is gotten from salvaging items made o leather that drop. When you get a pair of leather gloves or something, you can salvage it with a kit into a thick leather section. This means there's a use for leather items beyond just equipping them, and that use causes you to spend IGC to turn LEather Gloves into a Leather scrap which you would then either craft or sell, thus deleting some more IGC either way. If we had zero minin nodes etc in CoT, you'd have to make all of the raw mats drop at random off of defeated mobs and breaking down items made out of such mats. I think that would work.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
At the risk of saying "Been there. Asked that." ...
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/what-if-foes-simply-dont-drop-loot
Point being, if "stuff" has to get MADE by the Players, rather than just being random drops, it would mean that the market wouldn't necessarily get "flooded" just because people keep playing the game and "stuff" keeps dropping (whether you want it to or not). Supply and Demand would be better able to bring each other into balance as a dynamic equilibrium.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I can't see absolutely everything being made by players - mainly because, if I recall correctly, crafting is going to be an [I]optional[/I] endeavour. There will be some random drops - but if you want to tweak out your character the crafting system is going to be there for you.
Note that there would be no requirement for anything you slot to be restricted to being crafted by yourself. So in that respect, so long as someone else is putting what you want to make use of onto the auction house, YOU will never need to craft anything yourself ... hence crafting could remain "optional" for individuals, while being "necessary" for the game as a whole.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I recall the crafting from CoH; the only two things I ever made in the game were Rocket Boots and Dragon Wings, for different characters.
The thing is that Crafting in video games is a meta thing. It's a way to limit what you can achieve and obtain by locking it behind a content wall, often a tedious content wall or one that will take a long time. By contrast, CoH made sure that crafting was only for cosmetic items, easy, relatively simple (pick up recipe -> you probably already have most of the parts -> Buy the ones you don't -> find a terminal and craft instantly), and unobtrusive due to the fact that it didn't require much distraction from what you actually wanted to do. As long as you had the Inf for it, you could accomplish all that in the time it took you to get from the auction house to the crafting station.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
I still see no need for any crafting whatsoever in CoT. ...or even a marketplace.
The farthest I would take it is to make augments available for accomplishing known and established milestones. Get rid of the randomness or at least the rarity associated with randomness. Augments would be untradeable but locked behind content, or locked behind tiers of accomplishment, opened up with badges, or restricted to reputation, or restricted to certain NPCs. Once you have the augment you can use it, and not before. So you just select it and you have it. Your augment slots become pulldown menus of the augments available. No crafting required.
I would expect, however, that the game would benefit from having to pay to slot an augment. You would spend IGC for it or you could spend a resource just for this purpose that drops at a known rate as you accomplish things. You could even go so far as to have several different resources that drop depending on the nature of the mission or enemy you are fighting. Such as one magic, one technical, and one biological, but you really wouldn't need to. The reason I mention spending IGC or a resource is because using IGC or a resource makes it so you have to spend time in the game consuming content, which is something the dev's would probably want. Otherwise I would make the slotting of augments free.
This would do away with the marketplace because rarity would not exist and augments would be untradeable. All the code and management and economic concerns associated with the marketplace would go away with it, allowing the devs to concentrate on making the game content. The only reason I see for having any kind of market would be to trade resources for other resources and then you would only need to do that if you had more than one flavor of resource. And since you are trading one resource for another, why do it in a marketplace at all, why not just have a conversion at a rate of 3:1 or something. I suppose someone might want to spend IGC to get more resource, but again, you wouldn't need to create a marketplace for that when you could make it an NPC or a cash-shop item that allows you to trade one for another.
I know a lot of people who are crafters at heart and really enjoy being the masters of their respective crafts. But I wonder if we really need that in this game. Why should we force the resource gathering and gear crafting trope upon ourselves? There are other things to build, like lairs, AE missions and costumes.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
How about this:
When you defeat a mob, you definitely get XP, you might get some IGC (you might not), and you might get a random drop of something.
The item dropped isn't a usable Augment or Refinement, and it isn't a raw material needed for crafting. It's something else. The robot you just destroyed dropped "Robot Junk" which you can then use a special "Extractor Kit" on and convert it into one or more useful pieces of raw crafting materials. When you do the extraction, maybe there's a randomness to what you get, you might usually get low level stuff like "copper wire" but then occasionally you get mid-tier stuff like "RAM chip" and then rarely you get a "CPU" and VERY rarely you get an "Advanced AI". The "Robot Junk" is not a usable item in and of itself, it's a precursor for the mats you need to make your desired Augment, and the rarer Augments require rarer materials and more of them, so you can keep hitting robots over time and hope to acquire some rare stuff, or sell it on the market, etc.
The Extractor Kits would cost a small amount of IGC, thus sinking some IGC in the process of making items. Clearly you should be allowed to sell the materials on the market, as well as the Augments you can make from them. The precursors might be a thing you can't sell to anyone, you either have to Extract them or throw them out, or store them in inventory, and they might have a stacking limit, like you can only keep so many Robot Junk objects in on pile in inv. Or maybe you can sell them, I don't know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Of all the suggestions in favor of farming for resources and crafting, this one has the most appeal to me. I think it would be a crafter's heaven because of all the nifty and obscure recipes you could make with the possble combinations of loot you would get from such a process. The devs could even adjust the possibility outcome tables to fine-tune the market too.
I'd still prefer the game was delivered without this level of complexity, but if we update the game later with an in-depth resource and crafting system, this is something like what I would want to see.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I should point out that each and every Extraction operation you have to perform on an unprocessed Junk item dropped would sink some IGC. In GW2 they have something like what I'm describing. If you kill a Drake, you might get a Pelt to drop, and that Pelt has no uses in the game except to be "Salvaged" by use of a "Salvage Kit". When salvaged in this manner, the pelt turns into one or more scraps of leather, of different level-based types, depending on what level the monster that yielded the pelt was. Low level monster Pelts would yield Thin Leather Scraps, then the more higher level ones might give you Thick Leather scraps, Rugged Leather Scraps, etc. You have to buy the salvage kits form NPCs in a way that sinks the IGC spent and gets you like 25 salvage kits at a time. There are different types of kits, from "Crude" to "Masterwork" which have different yield rates for different things. These kits can also be used on actual weapons and armor pieces to get leather, metal, wood, etc out of them. It makes the crap items worth something for just raw material purposes. In GW2, leather scraps don't have a resource node in the wild that you can mine for them, so you have to resort to salvaging stuff, so the items you might get leather from are generally more valuable on the market than the stuff you'd get metal and wood from. You might get a Leather Coat that you could sell for 5silver, and the comparable "Heavy" equivalent, like a metal plate mail piece, would be so cheap that you would have to sell it to a junk NPC instead of on the market, because there's no market for it, as metals can be mined and leathers cannot.
So in a world where there are NO nodes for anything, this might be good as a general model to go with. Ultimately the IGC and other stuff you get from fighting stuff eventually annihilate each other in the process of making a useful Augment. You can salvage and/or sell everything that drops on you for maximum returns on the market and try to save IGC, which you will accumulate over time, but you also end up sinking some on salvage kits and market transaction fees. plus you'lleventually wnat to make stuff via crafting, which will cost IGC too. You can try to save up materials and items, but that takes up inventory space (you could buy more with real money or make a mule toon or two for added storage) and some items might lose value when the rules for Augments get tweaked. You might have a better way to salvage stuff, like if you pay a sub you get a zero-IGC cost (or just way cheaper) salvage system in your personal lair, etc.
This brings up the question of whether more toons on the same account ought to equate to more inventory space, or if the toons on an account all share the same inventory storage slots among them. GW2 has a combination. Your Bank slots are communal, all of your toons can use them, and you can use them to shuttle stuff back and forth between toons. Your toons also have personal storage in the form of bags, boxes, backpacks, etc that they carry, and there a finite number of them that you are allowed to have, and they cost IGC to make or buy. Maybe the only personal storage you get in CoT is the personal lair space, and the "what you're carrying around on you" spaces are communal? Or on the flip side, maybe the personal storage is personal and the lair storage is accessible to all toons on the account.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
In the system described above, as in GW2, it could still be possible to get pre-made, ready-to-use Augments and Refinements to drop at random, with the idea being that the vast majority of them being low quality stuff the most players aren't going to use for very long. You might use what drops as you level up, then save up for and buy/make good stuff later. Once you have your "good" items, you're really looking for the occasional rare or very rare drop that you might get, and in the process, you end up getting tons of lesser itmes dropping on you. Instead of selling them outright to NPCs for IGC, you'd have to use an Extractor or something to de-craft them into some raw materials. Each item would take far more raw materials to make then it would yield when de-crafted, thus ensuring a certain overhead cost of doing business and a certain amount of entropy in the system.
Say I get a Robot Junk drop. I might be able to use an Extractor to get an average of 50 IGC worth of raw materials out of it, with a chance of getting something really good, but usually getting some lesser quality stuff. Other players, who are paying subs, or paying more IGC to use better Extractors somehow (SG bases, liars, etc) might be able to get more or better materials out of that same Robot Junk item. Thus I might want to sell the Robot Junk itself for more than the 50 IGC that I can get out of it, on average. The same applies to usable Augment and Refinement items. It might be true that basically nobody uses a Medium Damage Augment for very long before replacing it with a better one, but those Medium Damage Augments might be able to be scrapped to yield one or more raw materials that people DO want for making those better items. And you might need a TON of those raw materials to make one such "better" item. So you might even resort to BUYING the lesser Augments for the purposes of Extracting the raw materials you want out of them. This makes the lesser, "mostly useless" Augment desirable for re-cycling purposes and you could therefore get some IGC for selling THOSE on the market too. The system composts itself, essentially, but you have to spend IGC to make that process work.
You might get a pretty rare Augment to drop on you that sells for a fair amount of IGC, then maybe you want to sell it or maybe you want to Extract it using your "Awesome Extract-o-Matic" that you bought in the cash shop because you think you have a high chance of getting a really rare raw material drop from it. Thus, even the "crap rares" have a use, as you might get a bit of material from extracting them that you need to make the really good item you actually want.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think, in the "no resource nodes" system I'm describing, you still want there to be some component to making your very rare stuff that is unique to that specific item and drops very infrequently at random, like the Purple Recipes in CoX, but not called a recipe per se.
So like, hypothetically, to make an "Overclock's Awesome Damage" Augment, you'd need to have some piece of raw crafting material that is necessary to make just that one specific item, and probably a ton of other stuff too. The needed Very Rare unique item (which I'll call "Essence of Overclock's Awesome Damage" just to give it a name) would be the rate-limiting reagent in the process of making such an Augment and cause those augments to be rare and valuable for that reason. All of the other materials needed would be there primarily to sink IGC in the process of making the thing, and to give you a reason to want lesser items so as to process them into raw materials. The Essence would randomly drop and could be bought and sold on the market, presumably for large amounts of IGC, due to its rarity. Whether it drops as a result of fighting mobs and getting rewards or as the result of de-crafting Junk items into raw materials is another question. Perhaps both, perhaps only one and not the other. In any event, you'd need the one "Essential" raw material item that is unique to that Augment in order to make one.
For the sake of IGC sinking etc, it might be better if the crafting process worked such that that raw materials were able to be traded on the open market but the crafted Augments you make with them were not, at least not the most rare ones. Theoretically, common, uncommon, and rare Augments might drop on you occasionally from doing content, and you could either use them, sell them, or de-craft them. The de-crafting process could yield a small chance of getting a Very Rare Essence, which one being random too, and then you could either sell it or use it. You might also get such Essences as random drops directly.
I'm not sure I like the idea of making people grind for Crafting Skill levels like in GW2 either. Since that process only sinks IGC and has no purpose other than to cost you IGC to get to the point where you can actually make Ascended items. If you are going to force people to craft a bunch of lesser junk in order to get crafting levels, then you'd have to let them sell the crafted items, at least the ones of lower rarities, not that anyone should want to buy them, except for de-crafting, so they'll be worth way less on the market than they cost to make. That or make the system work such that you have to make like 100 common items to use as crafting material to make one uncommon, then 100 uncommons to make a rare, etc. I'm not as enthusiastic about the "grind for tons of stuff" approach as I am about the "it's rare, so you have to grind for IGC to buy it" approach.
Ultimately, the "defeat a guy, get a Junk item, then de-craft it using an IGC-driven Extractor device" approach is a way to sink IGC, but it also provides a way to thematically link the defeated mob, which could be anything, to the crafting material you get, which wasn't necessarily something the mob might be expected to have on them in the first place. You can make the Junk item something the defeated mob would likely have, then allow it to de-craft into raw materials which may or may not make as much sense for that mob.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I do support the idea of rendering junk-loot into some sort of useful components. I know there are people who like crafting enough to do a lot of it. Heck, in GW2 I have max-, or near-max-level crafters of every sort. And that's Not because I find the GW2 Crafting system particularly enjoyable, but at least it's not too terrible.
Still, I much prefer the idea of NPC Crafters who are supported by PC activities. "I need about a hundred 'whatchamacallits' for another project, hero. Bring me a boxfull and I'll make that 'nuclear-whiz-bang' for you." This gives you a place to dump your collection of junk, while earning useful items, without having to set up a smelting-furnace in your apartment-kitchen.
Be Well!
Fireheart
It's better to set up a smelting furnace in the bathroom. Because you have ready access to water to cool molds or put out fires. It's usually tiled and therefore heat resistant and there is a fan for venting noxious fumes and excess heat. :P
I get where you are going with the salvage system, but it seems like an abstraction layer between the drop and the desired loot. If there were a way to tune to salvaging device via minigame or something similar to promote the chances of getting "key pieces" then I could support such an abstraction layer otherwise it just seems to be needless complexity. Sure it's a potential IGC sink but you could just as easily remove or reduce the IGC reward when loot drops to offset the lack of a sink later.
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I can think of two primary reasons why this abstraction layer would be beneficial.
I do like your idea of a minigame to render. Everquest 2 and FFXIV do this in an interesting way so that there is a certain amount of skill and effort required to make the best items with the ingredients used.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I like the idea that the NPCs in your lair or somewhere will be the ones actually crafting the stuff, in the lore of the game. I'm all for that. I would envision a system where you drop off raw materials at the NPC's location, then they tell you to come back "later", later being defined in terms of how much XP you've earned (or would earn were you not level capped) in the meantime. That way, you're grinding for XP so as to produce items you want, thus encouraging you to go out and do more missions, etc, not leaving you stuck in the lab clicking on buttons to make stuff mindlessly for hours. I'd rather have to earn XP toward making a thing than have to wait a day to make a thing due to crafting timers like GW2 has.
As for the junk, to be clear, I was envisioning that every type of badguy would drop different types of junk. In some cases, a given target might have the chance of dropping one type of junk or another. If you defeat Dr. Doom, you might have the chance of getting both magical and technological themed junk, as he dabbles in both. You could give every faction it's own type of junk, in fact. Rooks would drop Rook Junk, Aether Pirates would drop AP Junk, etc. And each of those junk types could have different things they could possibly yield (randomly) when Extracted.
This allows you to leave the materials that make Augments incredibly generic if you want to. Aether Pirates drop SteamJunk, which in turn can be de-crafted into generic raw materials that have no real description beyond "It takes 20 Power to make a damage Augment, where you might get 1-3 Power out of a piece of SteamJunk when you Extract it." and maybe SteamJunk is not called that, maybe it's called "Mechanical Junk" or something more flavorful for the AP group. Rook Junk might be called "Lootz" or "Phat Stacks" or "Jank" for example. Point being, the junk item fits the theme of the faction, the stuff in de-crafts into doesn't have to. Also, the extraction process IS definitely an unnecessary middle step, BUT it serves the purpose of making it cost us IGC to turn crap items into useful materials. As such, it makes those items valuable for the purposes of recycling them, but you don't really generate a ton of IGC ex nihilo out of them. Presumably the NPCs buying the materials, junk items, and Augments etc will pay way less than the going market rates, except where the market rate is very low.
So when you are done fighting crime for the day, you take your item drops, Extract them into raw materials (which costs IGC) and use that to make Augments, which costs IGC. You might even buy or sell some stuff you need on the market, and that sinks a little IGC as well. So the rate of IGC being lost due to all those processes should be enough to stem the inflationary effects of the IGC being created ex nihilo by selling stuff to NPCs, one hopes.
Theoretically, the NPCs might buy Augments, but not junk. You'd need to either Extract that or sell it on the market. In GW2 there is a version of junk that can only be sold to NPCs as well, in the sense that they make it drop sometimes just to give you some IGC, but you have to array around an item in an inventory slot for a while then turn it in to an NPC to get the coinage for it. You could do that too, if needed.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
So the only reason to have the junk under your description is for thematic reasons. It's fine if they opt for the simple crafting recipes you propose where everything breaks down into 9 colored ingredients (ROYGBIV+BW) that then feed into a recipe in different proportions to create a augment or refinement or whatever. Lets say it's roughly equal odds to get any color except black and white those are the "rare" pieces. Then you can have some fun with the breakdown process. Say you need 37 red ingredients to finish a recipe. If you pay 1IGC, you get one roll per junk item. If you pay 3IGC you get 2 rolls and can pick one of the results, pay 7IGC and you get 3 rolls and pick one of the results, pay 15 and get three rolls and 2 picks and so on and so forth. (amounts are for example purposes only) Pay more to increase your odds of getting the items you need for crafting.
However, if they plan to have a catalog of ingredients in the hundreds, like GW2, then ditch the middle step and give us the loot directly. I'd rather not deal with breaking down hundreds of APjunk to find a friggin 7 toothed watch sprocket. I'd rather beat the stuffing out of a lot of AP's and AP's bosses to get the loot I need. Rather than piling up several stacks of APjunk and taking it back to the breakdown-o-matic to see if I've wasted 2 hours because the friggin sprocket was in the first piece of junk. Or wasted 15minutes breaking down all this APjunk to find out it's not even there. There's something to be said for instant gratification getting the loot directly would be instant gratification hauling it back to base and breaking it down is delayed disappointment.
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This is a very good point. Although I think it can be mitigated by being able to break things down in the field.
I still think we should not have crafting (see earlier post), but if we do have crafting, or get crafting eventually, then I think this is all a great discussion and I hope the devs are monitoring it.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
For the record, you can carry around the de-crafting tool they have in GW2 (Salvage Kits), and that's the prototype I'm working from here, so sure, let's assume you can extract junk into raw materials in the field. Even if we assume that, the instant gratification is still the occasional rare or very rare you might get to drop anyway, which is more a function of the content you're doing than anything else. If you do a TF, you probably get a randomized rare drop at the end, Like CoX. Maybe every so often you get a Very Rare (purple) type drop, which can happen at any time for any mob defeat, like CoX. Ultimately, you're more than likely not going out to try to get a specific rare or uncommon drop, you're going out to get some amount of loot that you can make IGC off of on the market in order to buy the thing you want, if you don't get on the hard way, which probably has a very low chance of happening. And if those rare and very rare "recipe-like-things-that-are-not-called-recipes" CAN drop out of the de-crafting extraction process, so much the better, we can still do that in the field if we want, but I wouldn't expect to get the exact thing I want that way at random. I would expect to maybe get a rare enough thing that I can sell it to raise IGC, that's about it.
I used a lot of celerity : Stealth procs in CoX. I never once went and did any content of any kind with the expectation that I would get that specific thing to drop so I could then stop doing the content then and there. When I did grind for loot on my Mastermind, I expected to get some amount of INF worth of common IO recipes, level 50 SOs, and the occasional valuable random rare or purple (I got about one per month on the MM) to sell to NPCs or on the auction house for INF, as well as a Hero Merit every two days with which to buy the recipes I wanted at the level I needed it at. I was very OCD about what level my IOs were.
For the record I'm not sure I like the idea of giving people the specific thing they want without interacting with the auction house like that. I thought the BOTLER thing totally made the auction house obsolete.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If CoT's inventory functions the same way as it did in CoH then we won't have traditional slots and stacks but rather just a max amount. Won't matter if that amount is spent on a single item or spread over max possible items, the total will be the same.
From a technical perspective this should be equally doable by just being able to group loot together on the backend and then assign that group to mobs.
Adding in what you said later that maybe one would be able to break them down where ever you happen to be then I don't see a reason to have such junk items since, to me, they will just be an unnecessary step to the "real" loot. Now if there is a way to influence/bias it towards a specific item that you actually want then it could have some use, though that depends on how high that influence/bias could get.