TLDR: will their be a bazaar/trading post? Will their be a mentor system like where you can level down to another players level or a way to level up with lowbies? Will items be no trade/attuned or will they always be unlocked? Will item be level capped or no? Oh, 1 more thing. Will there be secret/special spells/items crafting wise? Like special books that are very rare that need to be learned, so only a select few people can craft them?
Long version of why I'm asking these questions.
Ok, so my very first mmorpg was EQ1, but I didn't play for the same reasons the vast majority of people played. It set the standard in a certain, very unique play style that very few games can match. My top 3 mmorpgs all have 3 things in common. They would be EQ1, EQ2 and Conquer online. I know, none of the 3 seem to have any relation in terms of play style, but I assure you they do and EQ1 is the reason they all played the same for me.
So, I learned very early on in EQ1 that I wanted to be a merchant and it all started with a scam artist conning me out of all kobold plate gear that I worked very hard to get. After my gear was stolen, my best friends brother ended up giving me a full set of bronze armor, which wasn't worth much and not even as good as the kobold armor, but it was better than being naked. A few hours after he gave me the armor I saw someone looking to buy a full set of bronze armor for a whole lot of platinum, not knowing the value of what the bronze armor was worth didn't matter. All I know is that he was willing to buy an entire set for 100plat and I could buy kobold armor for 2-5 platinum per piece, so I sold it, bought a full set of kobold armor and had a nice chunk of change left over. The next day I asked my friends brother how much the bronze armor was worth, he said around 5plat for the whole suit. So I told him what happened, and asked if he could get me another set. He did not gave any more, but he did have a full suit of lambiant armor he was willing to let go for a nice price. I accepted his offer and even threw in 5 extra Plat for the bronze armor he originally gave me. Within a couple hours of receiving the lambiant armor I had it sold for 10x what I paid. After that I was hooked on selling things for profit!
I would sit in the common lands for hours a day(belive it was in the elf city on some servers) just buying and selling items. People in EQ1 were always looking to unload items fast and buy items fast. Sometimes I would have items flipped before they were even in my invintory(aka the middle man) very rarley did I over pay for an item and sell it for a loss, but I admit it happend a few times, especially when some items weren't in high demand.
within a month of playing(my highest character was probably only level 20) I had thousands of platinum(this was during ruins of kunark). My friend was shocked. Within about 3 months I was sitting on about 500k platinum, just from buying and selling stuff! By this time I had tons of low level alts, all twinked out just for the heck of it. My main was only maybe lvl 35. My name was well known on the server and I even got in to the best raiding guild as a server, pretending to be one of the leaders alt chars. The guild and I would benifit from eachother once they learned I was not an alt. I never raided with them, but my merchant skills came in handy for them and I would make periodic donations to the guild, just because.
The downfall of EQ1 for me was due to 2 reasons. Item stat changes(around PoP I belive) and the introduction of the bazaar. I quit doing merchant things and focused on the playing aspect, but it just wasn't fun anymore when my favorite pass time was now a thing of the past. Never got in to the core gameplay of eq1, although I did manage to max out a few chars and did enjoy power leveling people much more than actual grouping. I just really enjoyed helping people(btw I should mention a large portion of all the money I made from being a merchant was given away free to random people for answering random questions I would ask)
In Conquer online I basically did the same thing. In eq2, I did the same thing, except I was also the rank 1 warlock on my server because I really did learn to enjoy raiding with friends and learned how to profit even with a trading post.
But basically to sum things up my favorite things to do in an mmorpg are 1) make $$ 2) give $$ away free, just because 3) power level newbies. Oh and in eq2, crafting was the best, had every crafter class max level :) only game I've ever enjoyed crafting in, so I have high hopes pantheon will get it right, because new world faild hard at it imo.
To answer some of these questions based on what has been stated.
1. There will be regional auction houses where players can post items for sale. No news about where these will be located at. Don't know if that answeres your question about trading posts/bazaars or not. If it doesn't nothing has been stated about a zone that functions like the bazaar in EQ.
2. Pretty sure some sort of mentoring system is in the works, but nothing has been stated about how it works or if it will allow you to level down.
3. Most items at this moment will be subjected to free trade and not bound when picked up. There may be a few exceptions to this rule based on the item in question.
4. Item level cap I'm not sure if anything has been started on what the max is. All that has been stated is that a level 1 could use a level 50 weapon however the stats would be squished down to an appropriate level for that character and would increase as the player's level increases. The devs are being cautious about extreme stat inflation. Again probably doesn't answer what I think your asking about but hope that helps.
6. There will be epic spells/abilities that you have to go out into the world and find. As for crafting the crafting system is still being developed but I would assume that there would be rare recipes that drop in the world. On the same note of crafting there are special areas in which players must travel to craft specific items/ sets.
Hope these answers help.
Exarch said:Will item be level capped or no?
I may be misunderstanding the question. If you mean 'will items have a level and no one under that level can use them' then the answer is no.
FatedEmperor's description is accurate as to what is currently is expected.
FatedEmperor said:2. Pretty sure some sort of mentoring system is in the works, but nothing has been stated about how it works or if it will allow you to level down.
A mentoring system for allowing high level players to 'scale down' their abilities so as to play with low level friends was in the works for a long time, but I believe that recently it was stated by someone from VR that said system is no longer planned. That was probably in a stream or a Developer's Round Table, but I don't know which one. So I'd suggest not taking it for sure until someone else can verify.
VR has often repeated that any game mechanics currently planned could change radically or disappear completely before release.
Welcome to the forums!
Sweet, thanks for the answers! Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of locked loot, unless it is like from a contested mob/raid. The level lock is perfect, I'm somewhat ok with scalled down items, because I like to "twink" alts, so it's nice that a level 1 for instance can use a level 50 weapon, because I'm sure it will still be better than a low level weapon of the same quality, even if just very slightly.
I prefer the trading post method to the bazaar method, I've played 2 games with the bazaar method and wasn't a fan of that style at all. I do wish that it was like old school eq1 where you were forced to go to a common area to sell all items in person by shouting, but that's something I definitely see a lot of people not liking, so all good there. I'd assume that trading posts might be alliance locked, but with the special vip zone that is planned (if I got the details right) I should be able to easily remedy that, unless they make different vip zones based on alliance or zone chests aren't shared between alliances/alts(but that's what friends are for)
Been wanting a game with this kind of free trade system for a LONG time, glad to see it might actually happen! Not to mention the "themepark" style and tab targeting that I like so much, everything now a days is "skill based" aka gotta click for every attack/block and very pvp focused. No thanks.
Jothany said:FatedEmperor said:2. Pretty sure some sort of mentoring system is in the works, but nothing has been stated about how it works or if it will allow you to level down.
A mentoring system for allowing high level players to 'scale down' their abilities so as to play with low level friends was in the works for a long time, but I believe that recently it was stated by someone from VR that said system is no longer planned. That was probably in a stream or a Developer's Round Table, but I don't know which one. So I'd suggest not taking it for sure until someone else can verify.
VR has often repeated that any game mechanics currently planned could change radically or disappear completely before release.
Thanks for sharing this info, in all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if it was no longer planned (at least for release). Mentoring is a good system to have, but it's also a system that is typically implemented after the game has advanced in age as a way to help new players. Having one at launch really wouldn't make a lot of sense since most of the community would still be green themselves and there should be a healthy spread of level ranges that the de-leveling aspect wouldn't be needed right away.
Adonhiram said:That's a pity if they abandonned the mentoring system. It certainly was a funny and smart way to play with friends who don't have the same play rythm/time. I hope we'll have an alternative which works in a similar way.
Well, there still is the concept of the progeny system which I'm fairly sure is still in the plans. However, the specifics of this system are still unknown and it could be possible that this system could complement a mentoring system. Like Johnny said anything can change during the pre-alpha and alpha phase. We won't have a decent idea of all the systems that make the cut for launch until beta.
FatedEmperor said:To answer some of these questions based on what has been stated.
1. There will be regional auction houses where players can post items for sale. No news about where these will be located at. Don't know if that answeres your question about trading posts/bazaars or not. If it doesn't nothing has been stated about a zone that functions like the bazaar in EQ.
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4. Item level cap I'm not sure if anything has been started on what the max is. All that has been stated is that a level 1 could use a level 50 weapon however the stats would be squished down to an appropriate level for that character and would increase as the player's level increases. The devs are being cautious about extreme stat inflation. Again probably doesn't answer what I think your asking about but hope that helps.
6. There will be epic spells/abilities that you have to go out into the world and find. As for crafting the crafting system is still being developed but I would assume that there would be rare recipes that drop in the world. On the same note of crafting there are special areas in which players must travel to craft specific items/ sets.
Hope these answers help.
Just a note, these are all things they have said in the past they would like to do, but they have not stated that any of these will actually be this way. It all depends on how it plays out, if it's fun or not, the amount of time it takes them to do things, etc.
At this point most of these questions are very much subject to change based on feasibility and gameplay feedback. Different goals have been stated at different points over the years but even the scope of those goals could be scaled to release features vs post launch features.
Technically a Player -> NPC -> Player commerce function can wait till after launch but with the size of the world, time to travel and limited inventory space it would really hurt the player economy. EC worked, sorta, because it was central, the world was not very big and the number of unique items was relatively low. The ridiculous level of inconvenience that EC represented opened the opportunity for players to focus 100% on trading, I tried my hand at it for a while when I was grinding monk faction on my Iksar. The EC trader is an example of emergent game play but I don’t think it would fly any more except for perhaps top tier items that you do not want an auction house taking a % cut out of.
The mentor system I believe last we heard from CP is on hold. Logistically the mentor system is less important than the primary adventuring system and will likely not be used until characters are high enough level to trivialize the level 10-20 content. It is a pretty decent feature to push to the first content patch in order to speed up getting to launch. I would not want to wait too long to add it in though as Pantheon will likely expand through word of mouth and that usually includes an experienced player bringing in new players. That experienced player may not have enough time to also make an alt so a mentor system will enable them to group with the new players, increasing new player retention.