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Item and Equipment (Long and in depth)
ArchivedUser
Guest
Items and gears are such an inportant part of any MMORPG. They are as important as your skill, ability, end game features etc.. Half the time a player spend in an MMO are spent to aquire better items and gears. Therefore it is not an issue to be taken lightly.
In this post i will only address the issue of ITEMS and EQUIPMENT in game and how it affect the interactivities of players and its impact to the MMORPG world. I may not cover all the issue in this genre but hopfully it is a good start.
ISSUES:
1. Most items are junk: Lets face it, i would say something like 90% of the items in MMORPG are sold as junk items for in game currency or melted down for material. Here is a story: 1. you are near the end of a dungeon, suddenly a berserking Orc charge at you. It took you 5 mins to recover and finally kill him, he droped a spear upon death, You looted the spear, then immediately you look at its stats, but disappointingly it is only a common item. and the numbers are lower than the "Rare" axe that you currently have equipped. So, 10 seconds later after this crazy 5 mins long encounter with the orc , already you have totally forgotten you have ever picked up this new found spear, and the moment you return to town, you will sell it to the nearest vendor. This interaction and relationship with monsters and items is repreated over and over in different forms throughout the history of video games. So let me break down the problem that created this issue.
I. Items drop too frequently ( discovery of items become un-meaningful, Need to reduce over all item drop Frequency).
II. equipment display their name and stats very clearly for all player to see, there is no need for experiment or exploration of equipment choice, and your choice of equipment is judged easily by other players. ( equipment are not interesting: another example, Let say In real life, you see a knife in your friend's kitchen, do you know exactly how sharp it is? You shouldn't, not unless you are a knife expert, or have at least cut a few things with it.
The big issue in equipment system for most MMO is that, equipment are just numbers. Over time, the pursue of items becomes the pursue of numbers. if you pick up a sword, and you are not satisfy with the numbers displayed on it you simply trash it or melt it down. And if the numbers suit you, you will equip it. MMORPG for many players ultimately becomes this cycle in prusues of better numbers, over and over, until they finally reach something call the "META. The META always restrict creativity and diversity in players choice and in long term speaking it is unhealthy for a MMORPG. The META existed for several reason but one major factor is becuase the game has slowly turned into a formular, formular that begins with easily calculable numbers .
One way to counter this META driven tradition and to make items a more interesting object is that, a player needs to use the item in order for it to reveal more of its proporties for that player. So for example in game, you pick up a wield looking shield in a chest from a cave, you shouldn't know right away that you are going to trash that shield without ever trying it on unless you are an expert in shield making or a veteran of shield user, as a normal player, you should need to equip it and block with it. Then look at your health as you block to judge its effectivness, or there is a system in game that will allow its stats and secret to eventrally be revealed as you use it more and more often. which in the end, you might decide to trash your old shield instead. The removal of an equipment's special name can also aid to get rid of WIKI being the ultimate guide for every secret in game)
2. Item are seperated in rarity: common, uncommon, rare: epic, lengendary, divine, etc.. ( Sure a player should feel good about him/herself for finding a great weapon that is also rare. However, such interputation of feelings should be left to the player himself, he should be the judge of his own equipment. So I found a really great bow on a skeleten, it is highly effective in combat for me. But i dont want to use it because it is only an uncommon item. My Epic crossbow perviously looks so much better on me even tho it is inferior in combat. So i rather use my Epic crossbow, simply because it is an epic item, i generally feel better with an epic weapon equiped.
A player should be able to feel good about his own choice in equipment rather than a game designer telling him how he should feel about his own equipment. Whether an item is rare or not is solely base on supply and demand and to some degree in each player's sentiment towards it. An item that is rare for me may not be so for someone whos level is thirty above me, perhaps for him it is garbage because he has tons of it and they never get used.
So as a player, am i to believe an item is rare because it is labled as is?, or because it is a junk item simply because i am told it is junk? Item rarity almost never serve as the sole benefactor of an item's effectivness and quality in any video game. So when all things considered, is this labal really needed in Ashes of Creation? Or have we, as player, got too lazy to figure out our own inventory that we left it to the developer to decide for us?
The point is, If you think you got a great piece of item. you will treasure it. If you dont treasure it, it should be your fault for losing it. The game shouldn't need to tell you that an item is a rare, or it is a legendary, unless you are too stupid to figure that out yourself, in that case play smarter. Having the opportunity to judge an item's quality yourself is also what makes you wants to play a game. Game designer put rarity label on an items was one of the wrose thing ever happened to the gaming industry.
3. NPC Vendor buying/selling unlimited/useless items: this issue has less impact to the overall expecience of a game. Nonetheless it is a very important part in the balance of in-game world economy . And also contribute to the disappointment or excitment from player when browsing NPC shops. So lets break it down:
I. NPC Vendor often has unlimited amount of cash to buy whatever types of item a player has to sell (Ashes of Creation is a game with player driven economy. which means we need to promote player trading with other player. You bargin for a good price, you build relationship with your trade partner with every transaction. This is what MMO is best at, to allow a community to form. With NPC buying everything, basically the game promote individual player to simply grind and then vendor [Gold farmer anyone?]. This can be fixed by first making NPC vendor with finite resource, secondly the trade process to NPC make less efficient. An example would be: cloth merchant NPC will only buy cloth based armor/ tailoring material from player etc... so a player cannot just go to one shop in town and dump all their unwanted items, player would be more likely to keep them and look for potential buyer in the future. But more importantly, there should not be many unwanted/useless items in the first place. if an item is irrelevant, dont create it.
II. Developer can use this delicate aspect of the game to help micomanage the in game economy. if one area of the world gets overly populated but some are deserted. the shifting of NPC resources can always promote player to travel beyound their comfort zone and explore new area of the game.
III. NPC vendor have all the service you need ( Your items need to be repaired? go to a NPC. You need to buy 10 of these ingredients and 8 of those parts? go to a NPC. There are ways to make a user friendly game without sacrificing too much convenient. Start by making NPC less reliable, and player more reliable. we play an MMO to participate with other player, not with NPC
4. In more recent MMORPG games, Items cannot be dropped in world enviornment: Back in the old days of MMO (example: UO or Asheron's Call) items are dropable and moveable. This feature is what allows game such as Elder Scroll Series to craft a world so rich and in depth. It is a very simple concept, when you drop something on the ground and it disappeared, that is like your character is in a surreal space, player can be forced to feel that their character is seperated from their surrounding, and the surrounding seperated from them, since you cannot interact with item within real game space. It also remove a lot of possibility in the core game mechanics. The problem with this function is that player could spam items drop. But with the technology and solution the industry have now, this should be a non issue. This is counterable with a disappearance timer or some active GM who could perform manual clean. There are plenty of ways to make items a dynamic part of the game!
<<MORE to be added later >>
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Comments
If you find your dagger rare thats labeled as junk/grey/common, thats your oppinion right XD Also when your common item is better then your legendary. Use the common one.
We also have weapon skins so if you have a ugly weapon thats better then your current legendary one, you can use skins to make it look better and having the benifit of a stronger weapon.
Also on your 1: I sell them to the general stores if ashes will have some?? for little bit of cash.
It was a huge amount of fun, and a huge part of the draw for that game, that you were constantly tweaking your gear and constantly upgrading. Even identifying items was fun, added a little bit of mystery into it. And the items weren't just +10 stamina, they had a lot of different functions like +leech and + to certain skills. A huge amount of variation.
Not only was Diablo 2 a grind fest (for some maybe a hack fest), the items are all RNG unless people use hack.
Diablo 2's system only promoted more grinding, you dont need to use any of the items you found to know the stats, therefore as soon as you found something that is unworthly you sell them. and what is the point?
See? In diablo 2 you use maybe 1 out of the 100 weapons that you found, the other 99 of those are instantly vendored. so again i ask, what is the point of creating those 99 other weapons? they are just filler. "if an item is irrelevant, dont create it."
However, if item drop rate is much lower, and you need to use the item to some extend in order to know its quality, then items become relevant because people WILL use them, and while players spend time with their new gears, all kind of things can happen. You may get into a pvp situation suddenly without knowing entirely the caliber of your weapon. You new weapon could hits like a truck but its durability goes to zero after 5 swings and your enemy still survive. Maybe it is a POS and you couldn't even put up a fight. Again, there is so much possibility, and regardless of what happen, at the end of the day, whether the item is good or bad, it will provide a unique experience with every piece of gear you find and they will all serve some purpose in the game. and not just random trash you sell to a vendor the moment you see it.
[NOTE: My idea is that perhaps the more effect an item has, the longer the user need to train with it in order to reveal all its effect.]