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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Material Scarcity for Repairs.
Sathrago
Member, Alpha Two
So naturally we don't know the full details on the material/gathering/crafting process, but I foresee a potential issue that would cause problems for repairs and crafting in general. If materials and certain items are region based exclusives, this will really impact the crafts and repairs for people who move out of their native region. An example of this would be you finally make the rare craft sword in the desert node, and travel away from it to do what you want. One day your sword is low on durability, but in order to repair it you will either have to hope that the items have been shipped to this region or travel all the way back to that desert region for those specific materials.
I can see this causing a major time sink where most games just let you walk up to any town and repair the items so you can go on your way. If we just take the fact that Bosses will be dropping high quality resources as well, If the items are unique to those bosses it causes the same situation.
Now I understand that this adds movement for both players and the economy, granting merchants an avenue to use the caravan system for greater profits. My question is this, is it worth the extremely tedious increase in time and effort to repair items? Assuming that there are material "exclusives" for different regions.
To be clear, I don't have a problem either way. It was just a question that popped up for me while reading another thread.
I can see this causing a major time sink where most games just let you walk up to any town and repair the items so you can go on your way. If we just take the fact that Bosses will be dropping high quality resources as well, If the items are unique to those bosses it causes the same situation.
Now I understand that this adds movement for both players and the economy, granting merchants an avenue to use the caravan system for greater profits. My question is this, is it worth the extremely tedious increase in time and effort to repair items? Assuming that there are material "exclusives" for different regions.
To be clear, I don't have a problem either way. It was just a question that popped up for me while reading another thread.
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Comments
Intrepid wants us to be super loyal to our nodes so, in theory, you should spend most of your time within or at least around it. So if your weapon used mats from your node - you'll be fine. And if you used items from a far away node, you might want to contract a merchant to get you those items in a timely matter and agree upon the fee for doing so. This way you have your repair mats and the merchant gets an assured income.
And the "equipped time" thing would also allow you to only use your superior weapon in special situations, while you could be using a mid-tier weapon for everything else. This kind of design would also level out the pvp playing field a bit, cause not all players would be willing to use their best weapon in pvp because the risk of speeding up the decay might not be warranted, while people with "regular" weapons would be closer in power to the "elites" with the cool but unusable toys.
P.S. I can definitely see how this kind of system could be seen as tedious to a lot of people, so it might be far from the perfect solution. But one of the later L2 updates had super cheap timed weapons that allowed poor people to go up a gear tier w/o going completely bankrupt (if they even had the money) and people used those weapons in exactly the manner I described. It didn't really feel tedious there, which is why I suggested this in my original thread.
The "time-based" system you talk about could be reasonable if its applied to in-combat time rather than just at all times. I wouldn't want my fishing pole rotting away just because I have it equipped. This reminds me that they actually did that in Archeage but worse, once you got a pole you had to "unpack" it. Once open you had x amount of hours before it broke itself. Regardless of if you were online or not, using it or not.
Why wouldn't you just buy a new 'locally sourced' sword?
At its core, this is the same as having your gear decay "on use", but it's way easier to track than some arbitrary equation of "t3 decays by 0.1% from each hit against t3, but by 0.3% when hitting t4". And then you have the mob variety and the whole mess of how exactly does your gear decay in pve use across that variety. Imo that's just an overcomplication of the system, though we have obviously not seen what Intrepid has planned currently so they might've resolved that issue already. Stats, looks, personal attachment, costs, availability. Those are the first reasons that come to mind.
I mean to use temporarily.
It's one of those situations where I can't find the downside that isn't a natural gameplay challenge. If you 'chose to move away from the node where you got your awesome sword', in terms of 'gameplay challenge and story', wouldn't it make 'more sense' for you to have to have the experience of dealing with that?
There are many situations where I wouldn't ask this of a player. But 'spending money and interacting with the local economy of the new node' and 'not losing the current sword' seem more like an inconvenience than anything else, and MMOs need 'inconveniences' sometimes, I think. This one seems precisely as though it would lead to standard gameplay/a good experience or loop, not 'man this sucks the game has locked me out of content because I have no sword'.
Another 'catalyst for change', if you will.
I know not many people like it these days, but I've preferred them.
Especially SWG with the material parameters being random. While having prototypes and blueprint that were unique and limited crafts.
Just scrap it to the Smelter.
Given Intrepid will be using lower tier items to make higher tier ones it makes perfect sense that they just get scrapped rather than repaired.
Enchanted items are always good for enchant reagents to reuse or whatever the hell.
This timer stuff is a bit crazy though.
I think players will have many swords and and armor. And mounts.
Not all in good shape.
The problem will be that artisans will just repair them than producing new ones.
There is not enough item sink in the game.
Swords shoud break completely and mounts should die, if not repaired.
Each time an item is repaired the maximum durability should be lowered. Players could carry them around for emergency repairs. Repairing inside a node or a crafters freehold/shop should give better results.
I like this, as an emergency repair kit.
The master artisan should be able to do a better repair.
Well...just my opion
I also have concerns over not enough item sinks. The game is set up to support full time artisan players, but is it a fun gameplay loop/fantasy for most of their work to be repairs?
My opinion is no. Personally, I'd like to take orders for full items most of the time, and maybe scatter a few repairs here and there.
Hi can you click this item for me.
- Sure it will cost 500g
WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT COST MONEY can you do it for free
10 mins of back and forth.
OMG you broke my item
Crafting repair kits keep crafters in the loop of repairing. Which gives more stuff to craft/sell in my shop. Items should lose total durability every time they are repaired and eventually break or become not worth repairing.
Better repair kits should require more/higher tier resources to craft.
Emergency field repairs could be worse than in node repairs. Freeholds/shops could offer the best repair chance.
So... items should break at 0% durability?
That is like dying if they don't get resources. Scarce resources would kill all items.
Scarce resources will also prevent producing new items.
That means some will fight naked like monks.
Or only a limited % of players will have high tier gear. Always the best.
And players will not fight until resources spawn?
As soon as high tier materials spawn randomly somewhere, those who still have high tier gear will pillage the node which got them?
I think there are many ways to tackle this problem. I'll write more thoughts I have.
Assuming the game will go with fairly standard durability mechanics (ie: an item's durability goes down the more you use it, and you eventually need to repair it.) I think this is a good step in the right direction of creating an actual item sink.
There are also ways to make item sinks that don't interact with the repair system.
There are pros and cons to all of these design choices, I'm just looking forward to testing the dev's ideas and iterating on them.
Used in real life.
Wood armor should be a thing too. Of various crafting [quality] levels. And layering available to make it pretty good. Metal on non-splintering flexible Wood on Wool would probably absorb hits better than anything else.
Making things repairable is a design choice in real life; when built from sections/parts it can get a section replaced much of the time. Weapons generally can't be repaired and need to be reforged entirely; hence SELL THE SCRAP. Every cost of repair can be mitigated when talking about metal since metal can be Smelted. And Leather/Wool is just not that expensive when there's plenty of skinners, tanners, and breeders I guess.
I've seen players often saying let's test first. I think ideas should be analyzed well in advance.
Once Alpha 2 hits, will be harder to change.
But the game is being planned since +7 years already so things should be clear already.
Many MMOs choose to give players permanent weapons and mounts, even without durability loss.
Those however also chose to make many items bound to the character.
So a player who makes an alt might have to produce or buy them again. And new players too.
If AoC will allow selling everything, then everything should die.
I realized these days that if resources are scarce, weapons can lie useless with 0 durability in our storage for a long time, until we win a siege against a rich node.
Same with mounts: Mounts have tier and also rarities.
I expect the rare mounts to require rare components for resurrection.
Storage may be unlimited. I doubt it is a technical problem for the server to offer unlimited storage.
Players can collect many mounts and gear, all with different skins and properties and those might end up with 0 durability in their storage.
This would be consistent with the wiki so far and no big item sink would be needed.
When the player would manage to gather enough high tier resources to repair a piece of gear, it could chose which one to "activate".
Deconstructing items can help crafting new ones so players might be tempted to do that instead of grinding to get more rare resources.
A similar process could be implemented for mounts too.
Finally, what Intrepid Studios should do, is to find a nice rewarding repair process, as fun as the production itself.
But my first choice as artisan is to be smelter, caravan builder and siege weapon builder (which I hope includes traps too). So I might be protected from such issues.
Those who make food and potions are safe too.
Only armor and mounts seem to cause much attachment, because are hard to obtain.
If one could obtain them easily, then playing the game many years lies only on the caravan and node wars system.
it can also run into the stuff crafted has a large variety of potential stats and whatnot it will feel super shitty when the one you felt was perfect for you expires (although i think they stated the crafter has full control of this so i dont think this will be an issue)