Curse

Goonter · Jun 18, 2005, 04:12 AM // 04:12

First of all, the ideas here dont take into account the insane math required to pull this stuff off with proper balance. So any numeral here is just a number Im using to help explain myself. Also, I realize these ideas may be hard to change into the game as it is now. But I dreamed them up anyways.

I tried to devise a way in which farming for gold wouldnt not be impossable, but undesireable. And also a way to even the grounds for which all players can get the equipment they want thier characters to have while have also having equipment and items that was rare enough to be make players work towards having them.

Here it is:

Your characters pocket is 50k.
The Xunlai storagers would allow you to bank but for a percentage of what you bank at a cap of 150k.
All money earned by you on missions that you could not pocket would go directly to your bank.

There would be 3 storage/bankers in game. Each with an intrest rate for storing money. You could change banks every 48 hours.
Xunlai 20 slots | 33% intrest
Yankee 20 slots | 33% intrest
Zulu 10 slots | 15% intrest
Ill call them X, Y and Z.
So now it cost 250k (x,y) to 223k (z) to horde 200k. Perhaps with future slot upgrades for each bank. 30 slots (x,y) 15 slots (z)

The intrest rates for X and Y can go down to 10% and Z can go down to 5%.
So you can minimalize your cost from 215k (x,y) to 208K (z).

The way the intrest rates drop is for players to donate money to the storage/bankers. Any player that donates works towards the reduction of intrest rates for everyone that banks with that particular banker. The intrest drop would work on some equation: amount money donated = percentage lowered for x amount of time.

But why would anyone want to donate thier money for the benift for everyone else?
Heres why.

If you add a player to your friends or ignor list you are also given the option to rate the player, one point up or one point down.
This would help people keep track of a friends vs. acquaintances vs. people that you have poor relations with.
There are additional effects of rating someone too.
If you are rated with so many points (lets say 50) then in pve areas only you will recieve a karma bonus for a 10 minute duration that would only count down while your in pve mission areas. A nice bonus for people with good ratings.
The opposite would happen if you had 50 (maybe less) points down. Then youll have a 10 minute curse.
The rating can be taken away or changed. If you drop the person from your friends/ignore list the rating will be dropped. After the blessed or cursed character has been effected by your point (the game would provide a way for you to know), your next point to that same person well cost for half value.

A ten minute curse would suck, so it would be wise to be a proper pve player. However, if you would find yourself cursed then you could donate money to your bank. The amount you donate will help towards reducing the time of your curse. A donate can also increase the time of blessings. Also a reset donation (set price) would allow your half value point return to full value.

Now, how do I allow money sinks in the game, but at the same time allowing every player to have a shot at nice equipment, and then having rare equipment at the same time?

Rune traders would only sell minor and major runes. But could upgrade minor runes to major and major runes to superior. There would only be minor and major drops.

Weapon traders would use rare materals to craft any kind of basic weapon with any varity of upgrades. The higher or better the upgrade, the more rare materals and money will be needed. You can recustomize any weapon for upgrades until its been customized for you. Then your weapon is set in stone, used only by you.

So now, like armor, runes and basic looking weapons of every sort are excessable at a base price.

This could kill the pve market, except, we introduce pve only items.

Be it potions or food, the rarest drops would be 1 part of a 2 part combonation that makes potions you can use in pve only. The potions would add a sufficant bonus for a reasonable duration.

More money sinkers? Hair customizations, costume color customizations. But more notable, emotes that you can purchase.
The prices would handle as so: 10 base emotes for purchase of 1k each. 1 would unlock 3 alternate emotes for the price of 3k each. The purchase of 1 of those 3 would unlock 2 new emotes for the purchase of 8k each. The the purchase of every emote possible you would have 100 emotes for 580k. With a 200k money cap and plenty of other money sinks, this would allow for some unique characterzations.

So whats selling on the market in pvp? Cheap items that everyone can get on thier own semi casually and still be complete and competive, but nothing special.
Whats selling in the market for pve? The same thing, but also lots customizations that would set you apart from everyone else and bonuses that would help you get an edge in pve gameplay.

With this system we have tools to encourage players to play nice, encourage the people that work the market to stay within reasonably low prices on items that would benfit pvp gameplay. The market that benfits pve gameplay or is just for flash could be more volitale, to keep life in the pve market. People that like to farm can if they find places that farm, but at the sacrifice of nothing important and still at the benefit for themselves.

To little to late?

Here is an idea that would work well in conjunction with the ones stated above. I dont even know if this is technically possable though, and it would be extremely hard to implement with the games current state.

The only way to earn money would be on completion of missions, quests and jobs. Monsters would not drop money. NPCs buy everything at a highly reduced price.
Money is made between player trading and adventuring almost completely.

Edit: Money along with skill points should be earned in pvp matchs to pvp characters. Pvp characters can purchase to unlock runes and weapon mods that arent offered them in character creation.

Then, there would be the addition of a loooot of jobs. These jobs would be offered by some npc.
You can only take 1 job for every person on the team. When your with a group, you can select 1 job per person (job stacking) to complete multable jobs in where everyone shares the rewards.
Jobs would be balanced in risk vs. reward.
So say your team takes 8 1k high risk jobs, at the end of your teams run everyone recieves 8k. However, if you want to earn more exp points than money, you bring 1 friend with you and earn 2k but 4x the experince.

If jobs where balanced properly then making money would be easier for people that adventured together and harder for farming. Farmers would only farm for the items that sell well over the market.
The most anyone should hope to sell and buy items for would be 50k because that as much as anyone would have on them at one time. The most money a person would desire to make would be 200k (or up to 250K) because thats all they could store.

This would be balanced such a way that missions and quest plus a few jobs with finding crafting materals along the way could easily equip your character with the upgraded armor, runes, and one (maybe 2) weapons with your preferred customaztions up to max armor and maxdmg weapons with customaztions by the time you get to ascension without having to go to the market. It would be when you decide to change your mind about what armor, weapons, runes you want, along with the addition money sinks that you would feel the pressures to run jobs and aquire money.

Adraeus · Jun 18, 2005, 04:14 AM // 04:14

Diablo II has a gold limit... so many players decided to use real money instead.

Wind · Jun 18, 2005, 04:15 AM // 04:15

I don't particularly like the idea of expensive money sinks, as regular players who don't make that much money won't be able to afford them and will miss out.

Goonter · Jun 18, 2005, 04:30 AM // 04:30

People use real money with this game too, already. Though its probably not as bad as diablo.

Heres the thing - Game money for real money would be at a deflated price. You actually lose money if you transfer more than 50k. So, ideally, real money would be used for equipment only, right?
Then the only equipment that could not be bought easily with ingame money of casually playing and beating the game, would be the money that you use to change your weapons or armor or look nice or that added a nice but unnessacry pve bonus. Changing your mind about weapons or armor would add some but not much grinding. Anything else could be godly insain because it would imbalance anything.

theclam · Jun 18, 2005, 04:38 AM // 04:38

Wind, money sinks for high lvl players are a good idea. If they aren't in, then inflation will rise, lowering the worth of gold, making it so that newbies can't participate in the economy. With a money sink, the worth of gold goes up, so that newbies can participate. For example, look at D2. There is so much cash in the economy that gold is worthless. The main unit of currency is a ring called the Stone of Jordan (SoJ). Now, it's fairly easy for newbies to acquire gold, but difficult to acquire SoJs. There are so many SoJs in the economy that some items cost dozens of SoJs. It would take hundreds of hours for newbies to accumlate enough SoJs to actually participate. If, say, every day 1% of the SoJs disappeared (there's a money sink where players can pay SoJs to attract a boss), then SoJs would suddenly become more expensive. Instead of 100 SoJs buying a great item, 10 might do it. Therefore, if a newbie managed to find a SoJ, then it would be worth 10x as much as it would without a money sink.

While money sinks are good, money sinks are only good when you get something for your money. An account that charges interest would be a bad thing, seeing as how we already get an account (a larger one at that) without paying interest. I also don't like the rune trader change, because you don't gain something, you lose something. Plus, rune traders already serve as gold sinks, because the merchants skim off a profit on every transaction.

I don't like potions or food. Unlike scrolls, they actually give you a tangible combat bonus based upon how much you grind (equipment already does this, to a certain extent, but that is necessary for this type of game).

More aesthetic gold sinks are a good idea. Hair dressers, buyable emotes, etc. would encourage people to spend cash. However, we do need to have money sinks that actually give a tangible benefit to your character, without unbalancing them in combat. Scrolls already do this, but it's difficult to think of something else that fits those requirements.

As for your idea of rating players up or down, that's a bad idea. What if someone got pissed at me because I told him that he shouldn't pull mobs before our Monks regained their energy? What if he rated me down and got the rest of his guild to rate me down? I could have a -50 rating for no fault of my own.

Goonter · Jun 18, 2005, 04:52 AM // 04:52

In this example you would need 50 griefers to actually grief you. If you can find 50 griefers all at once, in one clan, then dang.
The ratings would stand for a popular opinon. If the numbers that where high enough, then I would think, it would be more of a reflection of who you are and not so much how many people are out to get you.
So the numbers that would require some sort of bonus +/- in your game should also be high.
Also, these "curses" or "blessings" would require to be less punishing than death penalities and less rewarding than boss killing bonuses, something visual and creative but not crippling or making one godlike.

Perhaps something that stacks like, -2 health -1 energy for 10 minutes. And a second offence would be -4 and -2 and you would eventually cap at -8 and -4. That would take 200 voters to put you at -8 health -4 energy and 400 voters to keep you there. But then you have a nasty (yet cool) looking karma arua that people can see too. However, whatever addtional balancing would be required.

Also, about tangable benifts, I hoped that the potions or foods I was referring to would do just that. The words "potion" and "food" seem so tright that they might be shot down as they are read. But they could be another kind of scroll. They would provide a dmg, armor, speed, heath, energy, regen, attribute, etc bonus, for some duration in pve areas alone.

And yes, like I said earlier, some of these ideas are just too late. A bank that charges intrest would just piss everyone off now. But the idea would have been to discourage hording.