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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
A Unique Approach to Gearing
Darkbreaker
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Just recently I read through the post about overgearing, and it reminded me of this old MMORPG I played that I'm sure 95% of you have never heard about(I came by it accidentally nearly a decade ago).
This game had a unique system with gear that solved:
1. Prevented Overgearing new players
2. Allowing BIS Gear Trading
3. Item/gold Sinking
4. Giving Legendary Gear Status
5. Vertical/Horizontal Gear progression
Sounds too good to be true, right?
I'll explain how the system works. Perhaps, with this system combined with the system presented for AoC, might solve even more issues
In this MMORPG I played, you would progress through the levels like a typical game. At a certain point, the player is introduced to open world bossing. Now, you would expect the player to get gear from a boss drop, right? Wrong. The boss dropped an item, which usually new players begin to think as a trash drop, but no. The drop is actually a quest-item. Typically MMORPGs have quest-items untradeable, however, this one didn't follow such rules. Players can either trade this quest-item to other players or they can turn it in to an NPC for a piece of gear. Here is the catch: You must reach a certain milestone(level), to get access to this quest. Every few levels, a new NPC will give a new quest for the next piece of gear for the set. All of these quests were non-repeatable. So, you would either get rich enough in-game to buy-out all the quest-items(very rare), or you simply go bossing to retrieve the quest-items(common method). The gear received from the NPC would always be the BIS.
For the guilds, they would have a bank vault that stored donated quest-items to new players. They never give out those low level quest-items for free, because they had a meritocracy system, even in the non-competitive guilds. All quest-items, regardless of the level you were at, were scarce. You can imagine the challenge of endgame gearing. However, since low level quest-items were still much easier to obtain, new players can still catch up to endgame players relatively quickly, but endgame players were still competing with each other for BIS in the same gear. In other words, there is an endless gear progression, but it keeps slowing down the further you pushed. The last update that added new gear to this game was about 5 years ago. Of the thousands of people that still play this game actively at endgame, there are only about 10 people per server with a complete BIS gear, right now.
You might be wondering to yourself, is this a vertical progression system or a horizontal progression system?
It is both.
Now that I explained the gearing system of this old MMORPG, let's see how we can combine it with the exact profession system of AoC.
Imagine if crafters could make gear that could be used as a quest-item combined with droppable quest-items from the open world bosses, for example, a dragon scale, then turn that it to an NPC for a piece of gear. The quest could be unlocked after reaching a certain milestone(I am not sure what would make a good milestone).
Ex. Steel Armor QI + Dragon Scale QI = Dragon Armor
This will solve:
1. Not Overgearing new players due to quest milestones
2. Allow gear trading via use of quest-items
3. Item/Gold sink because the items are going back into the game
4. Giving Legendary Gear Status due to scarcity and competition
5. Giving another incentive for players to either progress their node or destroy another node for particular bosses and resources
6. Vertical/Horizontal Gear Progression by combining the two
7. Allowing professions that make gear still feel integral for gear progression
Feel free to point out as many flaws as you can with this system.
This game had a unique system with gear that solved:
1. Prevented Overgearing new players
2. Allowing BIS Gear Trading
3. Item/gold Sinking
4. Giving Legendary Gear Status
5. Vertical/Horizontal Gear progression
Sounds too good to be true, right?
I'll explain how the system works. Perhaps, with this system combined with the system presented for AoC, might solve even more issues
In this MMORPG I played, you would progress through the levels like a typical game. At a certain point, the player is introduced to open world bossing. Now, you would expect the player to get gear from a boss drop, right? Wrong. The boss dropped an item, which usually new players begin to think as a trash drop, but no. The drop is actually a quest-item. Typically MMORPGs have quest-items untradeable, however, this one didn't follow such rules. Players can either trade this quest-item to other players or they can turn it in to an NPC for a piece of gear. Here is the catch: You must reach a certain milestone(level), to get access to this quest. Every few levels, a new NPC will give a new quest for the next piece of gear for the set. All of these quests were non-repeatable. So, you would either get rich enough in-game to buy-out all the quest-items(very rare), or you simply go bossing to retrieve the quest-items(common method). The gear received from the NPC would always be the BIS.
For the guilds, they would have a bank vault that stored donated quest-items to new players. They never give out those low level quest-items for free, because they had a meritocracy system, even in the non-competitive guilds. All quest-items, regardless of the level you were at, were scarce. You can imagine the challenge of endgame gearing. However, since low level quest-items were still much easier to obtain, new players can still catch up to endgame players relatively quickly, but endgame players were still competing with each other for BIS in the same gear. In other words, there is an endless gear progression, but it keeps slowing down the further you pushed. The last update that added new gear to this game was about 5 years ago. Of the thousands of people that still play this game actively at endgame, there are only about 10 people per server with a complete BIS gear, right now.
You might be wondering to yourself, is this a vertical progression system or a horizontal progression system?
It is both.
Now that I explained the gearing system of this old MMORPG, let's see how we can combine it with the exact profession system of AoC.
Imagine if crafters could make gear that could be used as a quest-item combined with droppable quest-items from the open world bosses, for example, a dragon scale, then turn that it to an NPC for a piece of gear. The quest could be unlocked after reaching a certain milestone(I am not sure what would make a good milestone).
Ex. Steel Armor QI + Dragon Scale QI = Dragon Armor
This will solve:
1. Not Overgearing new players due to quest milestones
2. Allow gear trading via use of quest-items
3. Item/Gold sink because the items are going back into the game
4. Giving Legendary Gear Status due to scarcity and competition
5. Giving another incentive for players to either progress their node or destroy another node for particular bosses and resources
6. Vertical/Horizontal Gear Progression by combining the two
7. Allowing professions that make gear still feel integral for gear progression
Feel free to point out as many flaws as you can with this system.
2
Comments
There will not be any diminishing returns from a crafting standpoint and a bossing standpoint, since they're both integral for gearing. The soft cap(horizontal line) on the graph represents the challenge for the most legendary gear, due to competition and scarcity of quest-items. Through the law of supply and demand, the further the player pushes their power using gear, the less of a supply of quest-items in the economy. This will open up a way for new players to catch up to older players, while older players still getting a sense of accomplishment.
I have seen it work in a game before, excluding the crafting part, and it was the main driving force for why people played this old MMORPG. It satisfied both casual and hardcore players along with both newer and older players.
Edit:
There is no enhancing with this method
Allow me to explain more about the game, so it can make sense how it worked so well.
In this game, there are 6 difficulty ratings, based on stars, for mobs
(*)Easiest: Solo pretty quickly
(**)Easy: Solo, but it takes significantly longer
(***)Medium: Should have at least 2 people to kill
(****)Hard: Should have at least 4 people to kill
(*****)Challenge: Should have at least a full team of 8 to kill
(******)Legendary: Should have at least a 40 man raid group to kill
This is assuming you are at the same level as the mob
Now, for a mob to be considered a boss, it must have at least 4 stars. There are usually 6 open-world bosses scattered around an area on the map, for a particular gear-set. When you kill a boss, a timer start will start until the next one spawns. Some bosses spawn will spawn in 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, or even 5 hours. This created competition among all the guilds on the server. First, all bosses were in a open world, with no server switching. Second, there was loot-locking, so not only do guilds have to keep track of the timers, but they also have to make sure other guilds do not reach a threshold with the boss, in order to get a lock.
You might be thinking that the system is the same as the tagging system for AoC, however, that would be unbalanced, since high level players could just easily out-lock lower level players. The developers decided to fix this by having the threshold for a lock determined by the highest level player in a group.
If you are within 5 levels above or below the mob, including the 5th, there is no penalty and you lock at 15% damage. For each level beyond that, you get a 2% penalty. For each level below that, you get a 2% lock advantage. For example, a player that is 10 levels over the boss, it will be 15% plus 5x2.0% or 10% so you need 25% to lock. On the other hand, if a player is 10 levels below the boss, they will only need 5% to lock.
The max and min for a boss is 99% and 1%, respectively.
Ex. Let's say that the boss is a level 20
-A solo level 15 will only need to take the boss HP down to 85% to lock and get loot
-An 8 man group with a level 70 as the highest level player will need to take the boss down to 1% to lock and loot.
The interesting thing about this method is that the drop chance for all quest-items is equal(25% chance each). The quest-items were categorized by color for a particular class. Also, the rarity of a quest-item is determined by the difficulty of the boss, called tiers.
Ex.
-A 4* boss could drop a yellow, green, red, or blue tier 1 quest-item
-A 5* boss could drop a yellow, green, red, or blue tier 2 quest-item
-A 6* boss could drop a yellow, green, red, or blue tier 3 quest-item
Now, I will explain how this ties into a curved gear progression system.
The competitiveness/cooperation is what turns this into curved line. If people rush to get the best gear-set for their level(A steep vertical), they will have fewer in numbers when they go for the next gear-set(A flat horizontal). They will either have to wait patiently for more players to catch-up to their power-level, or they could help new players to progress faster. Basically, the graph I showed you is only a small portion of the overall game. You will have power-creeping fluctuating over-time. For some moments in time, the gear progression will be vertical, then other parts in time will be horizontal, but neither will be completely one way or the other for the "endgame."
Think of it like how the floors were designed in SAO. Players have to depend on each other to get to higher floors. This will be like that, but with bossing and gear-progression.
This fixes another issue that I forgot to mention:
-Content completion vs content creation
I would like to see at least some of the systems of this bossing/gear-progression at a much larger scale.
Feel free to share the flaws in this system. I am just proposing ideas that I have seen work before. If no one likes it or it's not implemented in the game, in any form, I will completely be fine with that.
Edit:
Thanks to daveywavey, I corrected it to lock, which I originally intended.
Fixed the mistake
I do like the idea to upgrade X gear via new materials. For example, if I craft someone a top tier greatsword. That player uses the greatsword and kills "X" number of things (for a mini sword quest...like 1000 kills or something quite large). Now they can take this greatsword to a quest giver who gives you a mission to kill bosses in "x" locations and bring him back "X" materials. Once these things have been accomoplished he will upgrade that greatsword into a legendary giving state boost, special proc ability, add minimal amount of particle effects.
This opens up the opportunity for everyone to upgrade an item to legendary. It will give us some natural time sinks to get this item upgraded but also slow us down so only the sweatiest of players like myself will just farm legendaries all day to look cool in town.
This is a very rough idea response to the OP. At the end of the day, crafting SHOULD be the best and most logical way to gear up. This will create a massive value for us as a community to work together. It will promote raiding to gather the materials needed for specific items. It allows for easy loot management from a guild leader perspective. Gear doesn't need to be delivered on the spot after a kill. It can be gathered and what is built can be determined at a later time. Just some thoughts.
First hit lockouts should never be a thing.
Everyone who participates in a battle should get some "loot".
Sure, have a raid every week, or two or three, I am fine with that. Having to ping pong around the map every day to try and catch timers and maxamize downtime between travel etc sounds like the definition of a game turned second job. The difficulty in this system seems to be mostly on the logistics side?
So in this game, late-game progression of the meta requires more people, so you need other players to catch up to you so that you can progress.
Is that right?
I'm not sure how that relates to the quest-item system? They seem like two different concepts that were put together in this game.