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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.
Gear decay and economy stimulation
bluntoze
Member
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.
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.
2
Comments
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.
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.
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.
already discussed and no!!! crafting in ashes will be long and difficult.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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
You are not an adventurer anyway, you are just a thief stealing the cultural heritage of those indigenous species
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I doubt this to be the case. You will probably have your main PvP set and that will be it. It's not going to be a game like NW or Final Fantasy XIV where you're supposed to have 20 different gear sets.
I'm curious if you can elaborate on this. Why exactly do you feel that the current design might not be enough? Or can you elaborate more on your thoughts outside of it feeling weird? Interested to hear your thoughts!
If you need materials from low level zones to make/repair high tier items, that will work, at least for a good while. Maybe problems will arise once the market becomes saturated and/or bots destroy the game, but I think they can wait to look for solutions for a problem that doesn't exist yet after launch.
what if it takes you 4 months to craft a set of gear? how long should you be able to use hat gear before you need to replace it?
1 month? ill farm for 4 months to play 1 month?
1 year?
somewhere in between?
maybe craft only players arent the target audience. if the game hope to attract other kinds of players, those players will still participate in the economic side of the game, because that's how you get gear.
if the issue is that at some point most people will have their gear and you, as a blacksmith, wont have any more armors to craft, guess what? new gear gets introduced that replaces old gear. level cap increases, etc. you can "fix the problem" without adding gear decay.
to have gear decay, you need gear to be easily acquired as well, which would defeat the purpose of the corruption system, as well as other systems.
Some questions that come to my mind about this:
1) what does it even mean to take 4 months to craft a set? What does that 4 months consist of? gathering/refining the materials needed? The actual crafting of the gear?
1a) if it is the crafting itself, what is that gameplay loop? is it just waiting on a timer? it is repetitive 'mini-games'?
1b) if it is the gathering/refining of resources...well that has nothing to do with the actual player who makes the final gear, in theory they can just buy all the materials.
2) If it takes this long to make 1 set of gear, how on earth is an entire server supposed to gear up at all? Is each individual working 4 months on making their own gear? what about players that want to do non-crafting professions? how long would the waiting list be to commission gear?
I don't think your idea is bad/wrong, it just feels like it would fit better in a single player game.
This is another reason why I think every pvp kill should damage gear, even the events. There is no risk if you can equip the best gear in the game and march into battle without worrying any bit about the cost of it
Any game where you need to craft an item once and you got it forever fails in player run economies. New world for example the person who makes then next tier of tool gets richs and can sell there crafts constantly anyone who come afterward no longer has a market since there tools and never better than first player, when first player gets max level and crafts all the max tools once everyone gets said tool they will never sell another on again unless there a new player so effectivly that market is now dead.
WoW another example the first person who hit max level gets money from selling stuff but once people get that crafted item that craft is now dead since no one ever needs the items again.
Without decay the moment every player purchases the best items they can then there no longer a market until next expansion or major update.
Same can be said with PvE drops when a character aquires their BIS items there no longer a need for them to participate in any raids until the next expansion because there nothing for them there.
the only crafts in MMO that have long lasting player ran economy potentials are consumable crafts aka cooking/potionmaking because they are constantly needed replenished gear crafting is not unless there some kind of gear decay in the game like albion for example
the only gear decay u have atm is corruption system drop which is just trading gear tbh and not to mention if there corrupted they generaly have a shitty gear set that does the job but cheap to replace this is the only time people will rebuy gear from crafters.
I think you better off having gear decay eventually and can only be repaired by using crafted gear of same tier or close to item power bracket and quality so there a constant demand for crafted gear to replensh there BIS items instead of being done with buying items from crafters when u get you item. atm i beleive ur using resources to repair items however that cuts out the gear crafters and move it all to processors ur better off making completed crafted items like a chest plate to be used as the repair mats instead. that way you keep all the crafters in the process in play for repairing so there constant need for crafted items and allows people to keep there BIS items and keep them hard to get instead of easy come easy go you just need some relativly easier version of crafted gear to keep there durability up on the gear. of course higher item power gear needs more expensive crafted items to repair but it shouldnt be a huge headache
Agreed
Every word in this post is relevant and true
If there was restoration of items, the restoration would fully consume gear of the same tier and bring your piece of gear to it's original state
Also, no soulbounds, no account bounds... let people freely trade if there is retoration that consumes items like that
How those items are removed is another conversation.
well, maybe you are just used to mmorpg where people gear up quickly. that isn't the case in every mmorpg, and that has worked fine in those games.
1a- or simply acquiring the materials can take a long time? farming spots will be taken/you might not always have the best spot available for you/amount of materials could be too big/you need boss drops to craft.
1b- you cant master all professions. you might not always be able to buy what you need because other people bought it first and the materials are rare or hard to acquire. people might not be willing to trade with you because of wars with your guild, etc. some guilds don't trade with outsiders so that they don't help them gear up, etc etc.
2- people will basically have to "wait for their turn". whoever is dominating and is farming on the top spot wont let others farm there, so they have to wait until that group stops farming that one item or they have to buy stuff from them.
on top of that, add augments and stat swapping mechanics (check the wiki), overenchanting, etc. gear decay isn't for ashes...it will take a looooong time before everybody gets their final items, and multiple sets for different situations, alts, etc. the whole server might never even finish gearing up before a new patch comes out with new gear or a level increase.