How is durability broken? Who needs to leave a group to repair? Your items are fully effective until they reach zero durability. Are you planning on dying 9-10 times every time you’re in a group?
The game needs moneysinks. Does anyone think differently? Without them the economy will be owned by high level players and low levels will be shut out. Moneysinks are no fun but what’s the alternative? A broken economy is no fun either.
The rez thing isn’t all that bad either. I misunderstood it. I never use the spirit healer anyway until I hit level 60. Now at 60 I won’t use it anymore.
It’s actually more benign now because you don’t lose XP. If I don’t feel like making a corpse run I can spirit heal and just do something else for awhile, like check auctions, chat, etc.
My biggest complaint about this patch is the increased XP requirements past level 30 and the increased pressure to do instances.
When you play an hour a day, that equates to two more months. It is a game breaker to me. Mostly because it’s not needed. They added it in to slow progress. I am against that because slowing my progress makes the game less fun. I like knowing I am making progress, the more of a grind there is, the less chance of making real progress.[/quote]
If you’re playing an hour a day it’s going to take you a loooong time to reach 60 regardless.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t feel like you were making progress. You can still log on for an hour and complete a quest or two.
Anyway, I don’t like it either but I don’t see it making a big difference in the game.
Is the purpose of durability and reagents to allow low level players to participate in auctions, or the economy? If so, I think they failed.
These moneysinks apply to everyone, the guy playing 40 hours a week is still going to have tons more money than a casual player. So what is the point? Its just tedium from my perspective. If they really wanted to put the squeeze on high level players than they ought to add some kind of raid tax. Not that I would like that, but to me these changes look global and I dont see them doing anything to help the economy that supply side changes couldnt have accomplished.
Having to keep track of reagents, having to go and get your gear repaired, neither are fun, both are unnecessary.
Yes, in PvP that’s common. When I wrote they didn’t say that the penalty was going to be removed for PvP.
Anyway. Just SLOW DOWN the damn decay. BY MUCH. And boost up the cost. So I’ll need to repair every, say, 10 hours of gameplay. This leaves the moneysink INTACT. And doesn’t make it awfully annoying.
It’s too much to ask this?
The game needs moneysinks. Does anyone think differently?
Me. But it’s not an easy issue and it’s way too complex to explain here. As a basic, YOU CANNOT have an economy in a PvE game. You cannot even TRY. So make this clear and go in the right direction. In a game where your equipment will come from questing and drops, WHO CARES if an idiot puts a sword in an auction with an insane price? Noone will buy it.
As I wrote months ago. Keep the money AWAY from a game like WoW, it adds nothing fun or interesting to it. Keep things on a simple level and DO NOT add reasons to link “power” with “money”.
This is how you fix economy in this type of game: avoiding the money to take the lead on its mechanics.
HRose, players like to craft and an inflated economy will have a negative impact on this too.
Sure, if 100% of your equipment came from bind on pickup drops and quests there would be no need for moneysinks. However, players like to make things. They like to sell things. They like to buy things. You have to have an economy for those kinds of activities to take place.
Olaf, I don’t know if item decay will work, but they really do have to take money out of the economy. You played EQ. You saw how inflated that economy got.
One thing Blizz could do is simply let you repair on the spot. I bet players would be happier with that.
I don’t see anything in that article that argues against moneysinks. You can have moneysinks that aren’t oppressive, you know. Here’s a WoW example: Every other level I have to buy new abilities, and the cost is such that it drains the better portion of my money. Is that a terrible burden? Not really. In a sense it adds perceived value to the new abilities I have. They didn’t come cheap.
If you read what I wrote here you see that what bugs me isn’t directly the moneysink (aside that it’s a huge issue for a newbie more than it is for a level 60 player, so it’s obviously unbalanced as it is now). But the gameplay-breaking effect it has. I also said how I’d fix it. Slow down the decay and push up the costs. No hit on a death.
If you read what Lum wrote, instead, you should have understood why fixing the economy isn’t possible and it only breaks the game more and more, till the money becomes the main purpose of the game.
And I finished saying: the way to not fall into this whirlpool is preventing the money to take the lead and drive the game mechanics. Ignore the money, nerf it value and effect into the game. Money is no fun in a game like WoW and its importance should be secondary to the gameplay.
As I said, players like to make things, they like to sell things, and they like to buy things. Explain to me how you let them do that without having some kind of an economy.
If you don’t let players do that, many of them will be unhappy with your game no matter how good the rest of the experience is.
The decay has been meaningless to me so far, and that’s with a level 19 character that doesn’t have any money. It’s a few silver once a day. I don’t even have to repair once a day, really. I just do every time I’m in a town, which is quite often.
It’s not a gamebreaker by any means unless you continually meditate upon it until it balloons in your imagination to much more than it really is.
I’m not saying to remove that part. But it must be solved on its own. Crafted items must compete with PvE items. I’m all to give crafted items a small advantage. But if this follows this plan you’ll have a game where you can choose to buy items or get slightly better items from players.
If at some point someone will sell something overpriced, the players will ignore him and use the PvE equipment. The PvE drops will directly balance the economy this way. If I can buy a +4 sword from a player for 10 gold and I have an NPC selling a +3 sword for 2 gold I’ll have the possibility to choose, ok?
The more the economy goes inflated the more the player crafter will push further the price of its +4 sword. Till the point I’ll say, “who cares?” and I’ll go to the NPC and buy the +3 swords with which I can still play the game nicely.
This type competition makes the game balanced. If there are players with millions of gold, who cares? If the game works you simply have worthless money because the money MUST BE WORTHLESS. The meaning of the money is to buy the stuff you need. If you have too much of it, again, who cares?
The release policy to respec talents is a new moneysink. Each time you respec the cost goes up.
And this is bad? In beta you had people respeccing talents for an instance, then respeccing once they were done for PvP, then respeccing again for normal PvE. Fine in beta, but for character-defining abilities, that’s bogus for release. So the graduated system–free one-time respec, then something like 5gp per each time until you hit a max of (I think) 50gp), that’s fair. Gives you insurance against screwing up totally but makes it very expensive to respec for tactical gain.
No but I would have choosed another direction. For example letting respec once a month and for each attempt the possibility to correct it within 48 hours.
They are trying too many cross references between unrelated systems to solve completely unrelated problems. The economy must be fixed with the economy, not with the talents.
EDIT: And I think you are too optimist if you think there will be a cap.
Fun Fact about durability: there’s four or five blacksmiths huddled around the big forge in the middle of Ironforge. None of them can repair your gear.
Apparently blacksmiths are too busy? Well, player blacksmiths can’t repair gear either. Only NPC vendors can. I think I might prefer it if they just called it “virtual property tax.”
There’s two questions here, whether the durability/XP/money triangle needs redesigning, or just retuning. I’m tempted to say that it just needs tuning, but I sympathize with the people who are pushing for redesign.
Because, frankly, one of the things that I like about things breaking and money being scarce and XP being hard to get, is hearing from all the people complaining about their stuff breaking and them not getting as much XP as fast as they’d like and them not having enough money.
It’s not because I feel the idea of items wearing out or experience points actually meaning something or money being valuable are important to a game. Those are valid points. But mostly, it’s because I like their pain. And having been in pain once or twice before myself, I can sympathize with their desire for the hurting to stop.
It’s an online game, people. Pain of some sort is compulsory and inevitable. There are three options. Don’t play the game. Suffer. Rise above it.
My point that I’m getting to here in a roundabout way is that all this talk of redesigning stuff is utterly laughable. It is what it is and it sure as hell isn’t going to be overhauled anytime before launch and certainly not any time soon after. Instead, what can happen is “tuning.” So if you’re unhappy with how things are, the best way to deal with it is to (not play the game, obviously) provide insights into “tuning” the system as much as possible, so if it is shown to be an obvious failure later, the likelihood is greater that a significant redesign will happen.
You’ve got to figure that, present company excluded, absolutely all people playing WoW are masochistic, ignorant smacktards. Try looking at things from the other side of the table if you want to either understand or impact how Blizzard is going to implement their pain. Er, I mean, plan.
Olaf, from what I saw the preist fortitude spell only requires reagents after it reaches a certain rank. So, it only taxes the high level players if that is the consistent model for all players. Assuming they do this for spells that are going to be used the most often or moderately often (depending on how hard they want the tax to be) it sounds just fine IMO.
Also, Hrose: I was going to write out a long point by point analysis of all your solutions but I don’t care. Fact of the matter is, in this thread, and others you state unfounded opinions as facts. To add insult to injury you pontificate these points like you have real clout in the industry and we should just take your word on it because you have the background to back these less than empirical posts up. You don’t have that.
In this, and many of the other threads I’ve read you post in you have said “No you don’t understand at all” many times. And you talk down to the people you’re engaged in conversation with occassionally as well. It looks like you’ve completely ignored the consensus Mark Asher and the other people involved in the conversation have come to (that time sinks are necessary), and once again referenced another unfounded opinion as the basis for your unfounded musings.
And you know, Lum is a good person to reference. He’s an MMO luminary, but I believe even another thread people have pointed out that with games in general you’re really just poking at what your best guess to what “fun” is anyways. Completely ignoring empirical research and data in such an unexplored and misunderstood field just makes your opinions even more difficult to swallow.
Example: Planetside, to my knowledge, is the only MMO out there without a PvE component, yet it has NO economy. You said an economy is impossible in a PvE game? What are you talking about? Where is your evidence aside from random musings on the subject matter? Don’t link to another blog or another opinion article. It doesn’t count for jack diddley.
Example 2:
Anyway. Just SLOW DOWN the damn decay. BY MUCH. And boost up the cost. So I’ll need to repair every, say, 10 hours of gameplay. This leaves the moneysink INTACT. And doesn’t make it awfully annoying.
This doesn’t address the problem that Fury pointed out what-so-ever. Players need to be disqualified or hindered from throwing corpse after corpse during a siege somehow.
IMO, the only time you can make an unfounded opinion like that is if no one contests it, or the basis for it is held to be general knowledge: Which generally isn’t the case with your posts. Instead, you talk down to the other participants in the conversation, and speak with authority that you don’t have. That’s not a cogent arguement.
Because of this, I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying. It sounds like it’s confusing to most other people as well.
That said, you do sound like you do follow the market very closely - which is a very good thing. I don’t follow the news or features of these games near as closely as you do. The foundation of a good analysis is going to be a larger sampling of data and better education on the rote knowledge involved with this. On average you post interesting ideas, but those ideas are not facts, and they are indeed contestable despite your bombastic responses stating otherwise. I think, because of this deficiency the research and other reading you do is all but worthless once you begin analyzing it. You need to either A) post concrete support of your ideas instead of adopting meandering rationale, or B) attain a position in the industry and prove to everyone that your guesses are accurate representation of how things really work.
Saying you “will” achieve the latter doesn’t help your current arguements ,and IMO you need to adopt the former method into your posts or find an equivalent alternative to validate your ideas. Right now it’s just ridiculous rambling.
A- How? Suggestions and critics I write are about my reason. It’s all about knowledge, learing and logic. It’s nothing concrete that I can concretely demonstrate. And I don’t have an army behind my shoulders like Lum nodding to what I say.
B- I’m not in the position to do that.
When things go bad it’s with the mind that you can figure out how to fix that. Another mind hearing your ideas can demonstrate to you why it is flawed. All I can do practically in a forum is explain my ideas and confrontate them with what other peoples think.
Btw, just to conclude. I said above that systems must be fixed inside themselves. The problem that Fury pointed out is a PvP problem. I criticize when you try to solve a PvP problem with a moneysink. Again because they are unrelated.
In my website I wrote pages and pages about what Fury points out because it’s a big a legitimate issue. I just believe that there are better way to fix it.
So yes, my suggestion to the item decay doesn’t fix the PvP. But it fixes the moneysink itself. I never even tried to fix the other problem.
Letting you repair stuff in the field would go a long way with making it easier to swallow for me. Also, just let me hit a button and let it repair everything on me, equipped and in bags.
As for EQ’s economy…yeah it did get inflated, I guess. I mean over the course of eight expansions, there was bigtime plat inflation, sure.
Even so, some stuff held a consistent value for months, even across multiple expansions. Were newbies priced out of the economy? I dont know, I was not a newbie for long. Maybe? But its not like they were priced out of being able to PLAY. So they couldnt afford the best twink gear, big deal. And with a new expansion every 6-9 months, there was always plenty of stuff to buy dirt cheap.
I still dont see these moneysinks in WoW as something that is going to allow the 10 hour/week gamer to compete with the 40+ hour/week gamer for any limited resource in the AH.
I can’t see having players being able to fix their own equipment anywhere being workable for a number of reasons. I like the idea of allowing PC blacksmiths to be able to create one-shot repair kits that can be sold to other players, though. That could easily meet the goals of the current system and offers additional benefits.
