Gear decay and economy stimulation

I know there is a durability loss and repair system that will constitute a resource sync.
But I think for the long term that might not be enough.
Having Items earned exist forever I find weird.
I was thinking what if the more you repair an item the more the maximum value of it's stats drop. Not something you would care for short term, but say in 1 year of constant use , an item would loose 10% of it's stats max value.

That way even the best crafted roll , would not be best for all eternity. And economy will keep churning to replace what was once best and now is aging.

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Kilion

I don't think that is a good idea, especially since peak performing gear is crucial to PvP - hence the stat debuff for corrupted players. Just a drop of 1% could be an issue for people seriously committed to being the best in PvP and the min-maxers would lose their mind completely. And given that we probably might need months to craft the best equipment, having them decay at the rate you suggest would probably relegate them to prestigious museum pieces because nobody wants to see them decay.

I think the way the system is intended is to make gear "situationally superior", no matter the rank. Let me explain:

Lore/PvE
In a situation where the most dominant Node of the region is a metropolis right at the coast and sea monsters are constantly flooding inland to get rid of the bloody earth crawlers, the water resistant hydra gear might be great, but after the city was leveled and the Node near the volcano took over the region, the burning scourges that popped up everywhere made that piece of armor okayish at best.

Infights/PvP
For some reason sociologists have yet to discover sudden hypes can pop up out of nowhere and persist long enough to cause persistent change. Assuming that for some reason the a number of players decide that these Miami-beach metropolis thugs whom I mentioned in the paragraph above are annoying, they could simply say "Oh look, because of all the sea folk invading they tend to wear a lot of heavy hydra armor." Knowing that heavy armor is primarily focusing on physical resistance while light cloth armor will provide more magical resistances, these players either switch to magical classes or recruit a bunch of magicians from elsewhere. This breaks the local "meta" requiring the citizens of the coastal metropolis to switch from heavy hydra scale to for example medium hydra leather to face the dual dangers of the sea folk and the aggressive mages invading. Equally they might change their classes to counter all the magical invaders by choosing assassin secondary archetypes... which in turn would require them to adjust their gear again to have more fitting stats.

Conclusion
While this is largely me reading tea leaves from whatever Intrepid has offered us so far, I feel rather confident when I say: Intrepid intends to create as little money and material sinks as possible to keep the system flowing and aims to create more engaging reason to keep your gear changing.

Veeshan

your better of using mabinogi method, where ur max durability can drop each time you repair it eventually causing you to replace it

Arya_Yeshe

This idea is interesting, but it belongs to a survival game

bluntoze

for me it feels ok in this game also. make it take a long time , but don't add something frozen in time to an ever evolving world.

want it to be museum but also be use , show in the item stats what the max was when new,

and i do mean degradation should happen over the course of a year or more, and maybe cap it a 15-30% loss or something.
specific numbers and amounts is not the point here.
but this would give min-maxers the hamster wheel they require to keep playing to stay on top.
it would also encourage crafters, yes someone made the best sword out there today, but it is much more unlikely it will still be the best in a year or so.
unless you museum it.

Rym

Hello!

Gear, especially good gear is very very hard to come by in MMOs!

Everyone wants the best gear, and the best gear only remains the best for a few months, maybe a year at most.

New patches can always bring out better gear as a progression system, and even then not everyone who farms the best gear will have it until a new patch with new gear is released.

Depraved

bluntoze wrote: »

I know there is a durability loss and repair system that will constitute a resource sync.
But I think for the long term that might not be enough.
Having Items earned exist forever I find weird.
I was thinking what if the more you repair an item the more the maximum value of it's stats drop. Not something you would care for short term, but say in 1 year of constant use , an item would loose 10% of it's stats max value.

That way even the best crafted roll , would not be best for all eternity. And economy will keep churning to replace what was once best and now is aging.

already discussed and no!!! crafting in ashes will be long and difficult.

Diamaht

They do this in older mmos and it works fine. However I don't think today's audience would ever come around to it.

The concept of needing to get it repaired for a time, and resource cost, is a nice middle ground I think.

You don't lose the item you worked so hard for but you still need to make decisions about what gear to use and how often.

The idea of bringing that ultra mega super vorpal nose ring out only for important battles like seiges is a pretty neat concept and adds more importance to the gear and weight to the moment.

Caww

no thank you to complete gear decay leading to mandatory replacement

MrPockets

If this game is hoping to attract players who enjoy the economy side of MMOs, an item sink is required in my opinion. Personally, I don't think just requiring raw/refined materials is enough. If I want to be a full time armor and/or weapon smith, what happens when the majority of the population already has all their gear? I'm basically forced into a different part of the game, assuming I want to continue playing at all.

What's the consequence to an adventurer who needs to replace their gear once in a while? spend a couple hours looking for replacements? They feel bad that the game "took" their gear from them?

I understand that this isn't a popular opinion, but if the game establishes a norm of needing to replace gear...it becomes just that...the NORM.

There are plenty of ways to design a system around this concept and make it where players won't feel bad or quit because some gear broke.

Sengarden

What about this - the higher level / quality the gear is, the more times it can be repaired before those max stats start to decline. This way, the best gear in the game (at whatever point in time it was the best) will likely last most people until the better gear comes out in future patches.

I also think 10% reduction is too much. I think in order for the system to work, you'd have to make the stat reduction only matter to min-maxers. If you make the stat difference very noticeable to casual players, they'll get fed up with it. -5% is more appropriate IMO. Perhaps starting with -1%, then at a continuous rate of -1% per (x) number of repairs thereafter, up to a maximum of -5%.

It should be the sort of thing players think of as, "I don't really notice this too much, it's not necessary for me to replace this gear ASAP, but if I really want to have the absolute cutting edge of gear, I'll replace it when I get the chance." Having the percentage slowly decline gives people time to get it done before it hits -5% as well.

It might even encourage players to keep two sets of gear - one for every-day "beater" type tasks, and another set for highly competitive content like dungeons, world bosses, and big PvP events.

In the end, I agree that letting gear last forever without any stat reduction will inevitably hamper the productivity of crafting professions. Unless Intrepid can keep cranking out new content / resources / crafting recipes for better gear multiple times a year, I think we might run into a wall.

Games like WoW "solve" this issue by making the best gear sourced from instanced raids. So the source of the better gear that comes out every patch is an instance. Almost nothing is instanced in Ashes, so whenever new resources come out for better gear recipes, the open world has to get bigger to accommodate those resources, and the way those new resources are concentrated in newer, smaller landmasses will create a situation where players will be constantly vying over ownership of the new landmasses and leaving outdated landmasses behind, because they no longer contain any of the best resources. Unless every time a new resource is added to the game, it just magically pops up from the ground where it never existed before.

Lots of new obstacles for Intrepid to tackle that I don't think many MMOs have dealt with before...

Ludullu

Sengarden wrote: »

Almost nothing is instanced in Ashes, so whenever new resources come out for better gear recipes, the open world has to get bigger to accommodate those resources, and the way those new resources are concentrated in newer, smaller landmasses will create a situation where players will be constantly vying over ownership of the new landmasses and leaving outdated landmasses behind, because they no longer contain any of the best resources. Unless every time a new resource is added to the game, it just magically pops up from the ground where it never existed before.

New resources just need to be incorporated into the broader structure of crafting. So instead of going "I need to only farm this newest item" you go "I need to go this newest item on top of everything else I was farming before this". And due to your time being limited, you can only choose one place to farm. This would distribute the playerbase across the content and would let weaker players start farming stuff that only the strong players could farm before, because the strong dudes are now farming the newest locations.

Make the older stuff drop just a bit more often and you now have weaker players that are rapidly gaining on the stronger ones, while strong ones are fighting amongst each other for the new stuff, all the while they all still need resources from all the previous locations.

This is roughly how Lineage 2 worked, except its gear tiers were a bit more separated in their core mats, which I think Ashes could change for the better (cause I believe SWG did and Ashes is going for a similar system).

Arya_Yeshe

MrPockets wrote: »

If this game is hoping to attract players who enjoy the economy side of MMOs, an item sink is required in my opinion. Personally, I don't think just requiring raw/refined materials is enough. If I want to be a full time armor and/or weapon smith, what happens when the majority of the population already has all their gear? I'm basically forced into a different part of the game, assuming I want to continue playing at all.

What's the consequence to an adventurer who needs to replace their gear once in a while? spend a couple hours looking for replacements? They feel bad that the game "took" their gear from them?

I understand that this isn't a popular opinion, but if the game establishes a norm of needing to replace gear...it becomes just that...the NORM.

There are plenty of ways to design a system around this concept and make it where players won't feel bad or quit because some gear broke.

This is why in EVE I made literally multiple bilions of units of all kinds of items, from ammo and ship components up to capital ships and fleets of thousands of ships. All that stuff was killed someone or killed by someone.

I have set the challenge to myself in the past just to verify if it was possible making a living in a brutal pvp game with 100% loss. It happend, I made a living by being an industrialist and merchant. Sometimes my wallet started to spam pings, I checked the wallet and there were dozens of people buying cruisers, guns, shields, ammo and an hour later I saw them kill many people and die one by one in another region.

At that time I pushed away all pve and made this goal of being a pvp one man industrial complex, it happened, it worked

Arya_Yeshe

Would be funny if mobs/bosses could reclaim the gear you stole from them. If you stole a purple item from a boss and a week later you died to the same boss, that boss would reclaim it since this item is in the loot table, any other mob that has the same in the loot table would loot it from you. Later on, other player thieves could loot it from that mob/boss LOL

You are not an adventurer anyway, you are just a thief stealing the cultural heritage of those indigenous species

Sengarden

NiKr wrote: »

New resources just need to be incorporated into the broader structure of crafting. So instead of going "I need to only farm this newest item" you go "I need to go this newest item on top of everything else I was farming before this". And due to your time being limited, you can only choose one place to farm. This would distribute the playerbase across the content and would let weaker players start farming stuff that only the strong players could farm before, because the strong dudes are now farming the newest locations.

Make the older stuff drop just a bit more often and you now have weaker players that are rapidly gaining on the stronger ones, while strong ones are fighting amongst each other for the new stuff, all the while they all still need resources from all the previous locations.

This is roughly how Lineage 2 worked, except its gear tiers were a bit more separated in their core mats, which I think Ashes could change for the better (cause I believe SWG did and Ashes is going for a similar system).

Sounds interesting! I guess I should note that I'm not necessarily against adding new resources where they never were before. Maybe there's some new corruption that's begun to spread from a mysterious force sweeping over the landscape that's made its way into the soil and water, so all of a sudden there are new ores, herbs, wood, fish, game, and animal hides to gather, or unique soil to farm in where before it only ever contained fairly generic resources. Because the nodes players inhabit are totally flexible and subject to change based on player decisions, the people already living in that particular area may have to fend off some competing players and might have to relocate. I wouldn't be against that. Only argument against it would be not wanting your home uprooted over resources, but that can happen at any time anyway.

This system is already set to be in place for certain resources at launch as story arcs ebb and flow throughout the world. Post-release expansions on would just be adding new story arcs with higher level resources to obtain in different areas of the world.

Fantmx

I would like to see gear decay in with the ability to repair but with each repair durability declines eventually to a point of no return.

Dezemi

Yes to potentially require stuff to maintain your gear. (Aka, repair, durability and restoration processes.)

No to having an inevitable "due" date on gear that. There are already systems in place to drain the player resources (material drop on death, freehold loot etc) - the last thing I want is for the game to turn into Rust.

Terrifying_Truth

weapons deal critical hits, what if when you land criticals there is a chance of reducing the max durability?

after many hundreds or thousands of critical damage rolls your gear would need restorations, restorations should take many hours to finish the job and bring back the gear standard max durability

at the same time if others hit land criticals on you then your armor would have a roll that will bring the chance of reducing the max durability for your armor

this would bring a certain level of risk reward for the people who set their builds for landing more criticals, you will do more damage but there's a cost to that

Arya_Yeshe

Terrifying_Truth wrote: »

weapons deal critical hits, what if when you land criticals there is a chance of reducing the max durability?

after many hundreds or thousands of critical damage rolls your gear would need restorations, restorations should take many hours to finish the job and bring back the gear standard max durability

at the same time if others hit land criticals on you then your armor would have a roll that will bring the chance of reducing the max durability for your armor

this would bring a certain level of risk reward for the people who set their builds for landing more criticals, you will do more damage but there's a cost to that

That's very unique and interesting, I never seen nothing like this

Goalid

Star Wars Galaxies had a gear decay system that worked. I hope Intrepid keeps the Alpha 2 tests concurrent for long enough to see that the inevitable conclusion to any system without gear decay is that there will be an abundant supply of gear, and crafters will quickly lose their purpose beyond glorified repair men.

People complain about losing something they earned, but really they're just complaining about having to engage in the same game loop to acquire gear. If Intrepid makes the game enjoyable, acquiring new gear to replace gear you gained 3 months ago isn't going to be a big deal, and the economy will thrive. Otherwise, we're all just working towards a boring endgame where we don't need to compete for resources as hard as we did in the first couple months.

Kilion

I'm not sure why so many think there would be one gear set to rule them all. What is singular in other MMOs - the endgame content - is plural in Ashes "endgames". Depending on the Node that is Tier 6 the "best" gear is going to shift. For war there is best gear, if a city is leveled, so will the associated content and its gear requirements and with another Node taking over, there will be completely new gear requirements.
Since we have limited storage space even after 1-2 years there will be no player with a best-in-slot set of gear for every possible endgame scenario.

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