Before anyone panics, I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT PANTHEON SHOULD DO THIS.
But, I want to ask the question and see what interesting thoughts or ideas people have about it. The reason I am asking is that crafter types (like me) tend to spend a lot of time thinking about itemization and how it should work, and then debating different pros and cons with each other. We can get lost in our preconceptions and debates about numbers really easily. Sometimes it's super useful to turn things completely on their side and think about how people actually behave in games.
So, What If all the items in game were completely disposable? What if you routinely lost them as a matter of course - when you died, or maybe they broke or wore out, or whatever. You still need the items to be effective, of course. You probably don't want to send your tank into a dungeon without armor, and unless you're a monk, fighting bare-handed may not be the best idea. And you still can get the items the same way you always have - through looting, through buying them, through crafting, etc.
How would you, as a player in this game, adapt to a reality where you might constantly need to replace your stuff? What are the things that you would do to insure that you could still be successful in the game?
And please don't say "I wouldn't play". That's not really an answer, and that's not what this thread is trying to prove. So for the purposes of this thread, assume that you would play and talk about what you would do to compensate for this. This isn't an emotional question, it's a logical one. I'm hoping that by thinking through this scenario, all of us, or at least me, will have some of our preconceptions challenged.
Thanks in advance and I hope everyone will answer the question in the spirit that it's intended :)
Didnt someone already propose something similar to this in one of the big threads. Where you can only repair your gear so much and eventually it will break? Trasak maybe? I forget what thread it was...
But to play your game... if I had to play in this world, I would just collect multiple pieces of gear to allow me multiple sets of armor. I would roll need on items that I literally just won because I dont know when I would have the chance to farm that item again. Overall I think this would severely hurt gameplay.
I agree with Porygon here. (And that was a thread about item breakage/repairs)
I've played games like this and you end up carrying around at least one spare of everything, just in case one breaks -- or even just wears down reducing its effectiveness. The game turns into an inventory management game rather than one about adventuring. In short, it sucks.
I have played games like this, that have item breakage, and for me, it was less fun than games that didn't have this. As most have already said, in most implementations, it simply becomes a tedious annoyance, and the reasons are pretty well established.
In short, in order for it to be effective as a money sink, it has to be punitive, which isn't fun. It also drives negative emergent behavior, such as: I don't want to adventure anymore because my gear will break, or I don't have replacements, or I would have to travel to get replacements.
I think a sacrifice driven mechanic that drives positive emergent behavior is a better choice, and would result in more items & money removed from the economy, if that was a design goal. If removing currency or items from the economy isn't a design goal? I guess that would depend on the specifics of the hypothetical design.
Porygon said:if I had to play in this world, I would just collect multiple pieces of gear to allow me multiple sets of armor. I would roll need on items that I literally just won because I dont know when I would have the chance to farm that item again.
Thanks Porygon! This is exactly the type of information I'm hoping people will post.
I'm interested in how people would "deal with" such a system, because understanding what players do when faced with this sort of challenge is really helpful. I get that no one likes the idea of item destruction/decay and I'm not proposing that we do that for Pantheon. But I want to understand how players would behave if it were there.
*in his best Lurch impression* You rang?
What Porygon is describing is likely the main way people would deal with item decay in a game built around unique and non interchangable items. If your build required you to have "Bobs Hat" then you would always want a backup or two.
In a game more focused on basic items made on demand by crafters it would be a lot less important to have spares on hand. This would be doubly true if an item had say 100 hours of functional life and functioned at 100% up until the last 20 hours and only drops to 75% Effectiveness before perma breaking. One could wait until they hit sub20% before commissioning a replacement.
Both SWG and DAoC focused on player crafted items and had permanent item decay with mob drops having some player value if you do not have access to good crafted items but primarily most drops are salvaged for materials. Neither item hording nor carrying redundant item sets was a problem for either game.
Another key factor that affects player hording behavior is the % of power items contribute outside of their primary implement. The greater the % the more important upgrades are and the more likely players will feel the need to always have spares onhand.
SWGs was a bit different. The best in game items were drops, but they were random drops. That is you get a drop and there was a chance it was legendary. Then the actual stats were random as well. So the best weapons from random drops were exceedingly rare and unable to be farmed in any meaningful sense. You might get another that was exceedingly good, but the stats would not be the same.
It was something akin to add 1-10 damage, if 10 then add an additional 10 damage, if 10....
Some drops would be exponentially more powerful then others, even if both were the same weapon and both legendary. My friend had a polearm that had like 5 different dots attached, someone else had a t-21 rifle that was roughly 10 times more powerful than any other I knew of.
What happened in these cases is that the item was virtually never used. There were certain very specific times. It also drived up the price for resources while driving down prices on the best in slot crafted or looted gear.
Then SWGs introduced anti-decay kits, I believe as a 10 year reward. These became very expensive very quickly, I know I payed over 10m credits apiece for about a half dozen of them. (I luckily forsaw the value and had bought about 20 for under 10m very early on.)
Now without these extremely overpowered random items, I think would be mroe like the others said.
If the items are crafted, the crafted prices would decrease due to needing to buy multiple copies, while resource prices increases because more items were needed to be made. If the items were drops, it would make it more difficult for non-first tier raiders to have a chance without variable instancing. The top tier raiders would farm those raids more often to get the extra copies needed.
@alephen
What stage did the random power level items start showing up? Last i played was when they rolled out the class system and killed off the skill tree system and I do not remember those droping at that time. My TK Pikeman buff tree doctor and my roommates pistolier combat medic cleared the Kashik spacestation to get my quested pike. It was the best in the game at the time and our guilds master weaponsmith was mad he couldnt turn it into a scematic.
The best of the best resources were stupidly rare and worth an insane number of credits, especially the lightsaber material as great material could make items ten times more powerful than average material.
Well, items getting destroyed is one of the two reasons I can't get into the Fire Emblem series...and SJRPG is my favorite genre of games...you're telling me no one in the kingdom is able to fix a simple iron sword ? Sigh...
I think if you make my weapon break, I think I'd like two things to happen.
First, a crafting class whose sole purpose is repairing everything.
Second, my broken item should produce at the very least most of what is needed to get the weapon repaired.
Bring everything needed to the player whose sole crafting purpose is to fix things. Make it a cooldown, I dunno, like 8 hours after the "craft" is made to make the weapon usable again.
Have another crafter class that can create magical powder to coat on your sword, that way maybe it's protected for a finite amount of hours without decay.
Have perhaps the Enchanter have a spell that does something similar, but there is a small chance the sword breaks still, and if it does, less components are retrieved for repairs.
All of this would help with interaction between players. I'm pretty sure that even with a system like this, the good items would be camped 24h a day though, unless crafted items are the strongest in the game.
I don't have a problem with having to repair normal items. I think magical items should not ever wear down, they are magical afterall.
Now you may say, well after a certain level range then everything you have would be magical. That's not necessarily true, a game could have non-magical high-end items. They just usually choose not to.
I'd level up a class like a druid who didnt take damage very often, make money, and then support my melee character.
I would aim to become self sustaining in the way that I can provide myself with decent replacement gear set if needs to be.
Aside of that, I'll memorize or take note of where certain items came from in the world. Those would be items/gear that I want the most.
At the point that, when my gear breaks down, or is about to, I would venture to those places to get myself a fresh drop.
If it's difficult to reach, depending on the guild opportunities or available cash, I'll work my way there or buy my way to my loot.
Items *do* get worse when subjected to wear and tear - and battle imposes a lot of wear and tear. Broken items cannot necessarily be fixed well and often will not provide a large percentage of the materials needed for replacement.
What we would do depends in large part on how other parts of the game were set up. Also in large part on how the breakage system worked.
1. Let us assume that items decayed fairly slowly so that you knew going into a dungeon that your sword at 92% was not going to break that day. Let us also assume that item decay did not affect performance - so you did not need to carry spares in case your damage dropped from 92% of nominal to 80% of nominal that day. These two assumptions in and of themselves would tend to make item replacement a longer term consideration. You might plan to do a few runs to replace items sometime over the next few weeks - or if they were crafted items you might plan to have new ones crafted - but it would not be an emergency unless you waited for the last minute and you would not need to carry duplicate gear.
Such a system would have advantages. It would enhance the importance of crafters and would give a reason to do more dungeons/raids beyond the totally artifical system many games use at level-cap of requiring 2,000 runs to get some valuable item or having to do the dreaded "dailies" every day for 12 years (okay slight exaggeration). It would be slowly and mildly punitive, yes, as noted above. But not so severe as to impose some of the negative consequences correctly noted above. And not as punitive as the death penalties which most of us strongly support though we disagree on details.
2. Alternatively, let us assume that there were limits on what you could carry. Either a limited amount of inventory or wieght/encumbrance limits. So you *couldn't* carry too many duplicate items and if you went into a dungeon with some duplicates you might not be able to carry much loot out. A bit self-defeating. Combined with a harsher item decay system (faster decay or chance of breakage at any time or significant impact on combat effectiveness as items decay) you have turned Pantheon into, in part, a resource management/strategy game.
Scenario 2 above may be what most of the above comments envision and I share the consensus feeling that this is not the way we want Pantheon to go.
Scenario 1 above - which may be what Nephele had in mind though equally it may not be - I am not at all sure the positives do not outweigh the negatives.
In this hypothetical world, I would not play a tank... I would likely play something like a monk or DPS caster to avoid dealing with gear repaid/replacement as little as possible. Alternatively, if it was a durability hit (like in WoW) this could be a decent money sink that lends to the game immersion and could create a significant death penalty/fear of death that VR wants to instill without having the god-awful EQ1 corpse run equivalent. Maybe a balance of the two... when you take damage your gear takes durability hits, when you deal damage/heal your primary weapons lose durability and if you die you take a large durability hit... but if your durability is ever 0, you respawn without that gear equiped and then have the potentially naked CR. That would also give incentive to have crafters in your group that could repair durability in the field depending on their craft and the type of gear needing repair.
Porygon said:But to play your game... if I had to play in this world, I would just collect multiple pieces of gear to allow me multiple sets of armor. I would roll need on items that I literally just won because I dont know when I would have the chance to farm that item again. Overall I think this would severely hurt gameplay.
This pretty much sums it up.
Appreciate all the responses so far folks :)
For anyone wondering - what I'm really interested in here is player behavior, rather than "how the system should work". I purposely presented an extreme example because if we can learn how players would be likely to react under such a system, then we can be much more realistic in discussions about Pantheon's itemization :)
In the systems I've experienced, players are discouraged from playing the game, due to item breakage. Why? Because the action of playing the game, in the most effective implementations, ends up costing you gold.
What I mean by that is... say the end result of the damage you take in combat (regardless of hitting or being hit, or healing, casting, whatever) is that a single creature costs you 1 gold to kill, in repair. Doesn't matter how little or much you contribute, because otherwise, you could game the system, right? If healers don't get have to pay as much as tanks, or casters never pay? Well that's not "fair"... ;) In fact, in one such case, item breakage was tied to XP gain, to ensure there was no way around it. If you got XP from a kill? Your equipment was damaged, full stop, no exceptions.
Now, if you don't get 1g in value, at least, from that creature, you're now in the hole. Players know this, so .. unless you're fighting creatures that drop a lot of gold, when they go back to town, it's not a good time. Similarly, adding more players to the group increases the split, in games that don't have personal loot (like pantheon), so that 1g is split 6 ways now. Well, for sure, then, adventuring with a group is a loss. You only make money solo'ing greys. So, it can, if effective as a money sink, also discourage grouping. Also, the amount and frequency of XP->damage was normalized, such that there was no advantage or benefit to fighting a bunch of greens versus a few yellows. You/your group still felt the pain.
In one example, they went so far as to put cash shop items in place as the only way to repair gear. So, if you wanted to keep your gear, you could buy these crafting components that had a 0.00000001% chance of dropping in the real world, for $1 from the cash shop. Pay? Keep your gear. Otherwise, it degraded by ~1% per fight, and the maximum repairable value also degraded by a certain amount per fight. As a result, your gear had a known fixed finite life, and a known fixed finite cost. For some players who weren't fighting the "right" creatures, well... get ready, because you can't make money. And those creatures that all dropped enough gold? They were perma-camped 24x7.
The situation was further exacerbated by "special" gear or Pledge rewards that didn't suffer damage or never broke, or whose max repairable value never went down. Well holy crap, that's like a license to print money, right? Yes, yes it was.
I've never seen a logically sound hypothetical implementation of item breakage that is simultaneously fun and effective. But I'm willing to give it the ol' theorycrafting logical criticism anytime. :)
@vjek
What terrible game was that? That has got to be the worst item degradation mechanic I have ever heard of and combined with a brutally toxic business model.
There is some room for “you got to spend money to make money” but even in the non unique item system the repair cost per kill needs to be low. The real point is to take items out of the game not take currency out of the game or cash out of the players pocket. Under the xp from kills earned = item wear concept you would not even need to have a repair mechanic just the refurbish mechanic. After X amount of xp earned the item breaks down, at that point you can either salvage it or use the same amount of raw materials you would gain from salvaging it to refurbish it back to no wear.
Basically if the item lasted for 100k experience and you had two copies you could get 300k experience before you would need to get a third one. Other items may be rare enough that you want to get the raw materials to refurbish the item in a different way than salvaging a copy of it. Raid items will almost always be objects you want to refurbish with farmed materials but many common magic items may have low enough value that salvaging a worn-out version is cheaper.
Most of that was from Shroud of the Avatar, some from Pathfinder Online and Project Gorgon. But yes, it was/is horrible, for certain. :)
From what I've seen, though, it comes down to expectations versus reality, and it's always "shocking" to the casual player, how quickly it happens, when it actually matters. For example, say the item breaks completely, as in, is removed from the economy after 100 fights. A fight takes about 1 minute. Ok, so... that's... less than two hours of combat, and your items are broken. Well ok, let's tune that to a more realistic value, you say? No matter what value you pick, if a significant portion of your paying customers lose all their gear, daily, because they're playing say 10 hours a day, they will complain, continuously, about "I have to replace all my gear every day".
Now, I totally get that's unreasonable, and an extreme example, but it's still true. You would literally have people posting on social media: " Had to replace all my gear, again, for the 7th time this week, in Pantheon. #failmmo. "
Any other value, less than that? Would be trivial for everyone, hardcore included, but you can't punish the bulk of your paying customers with an effective mechanic that's overly punitive. It's like the old argument of "How many kills per level". You can't make that number palatable for everyone. Either it's meaningless to the hardcore, or punitive for the casual, and no value in between will be accomplish the design goals. That seems to me, from the implementations I've seen so far, to be the case, universally, with item breakage.
It's fine to make it trivial, and lots of MMOs do, but then.. why bother? Why spend the dev time, no matter how little, to remove a token pittance that makes no tangible difference to the economy? Makes me say 'meh'.
This exactly what happend in Ultima Online. When you died, all your stuff just dropped to the ground and anyone could come by and pick them up. Later on they added a flag on your character if you looted somebodies stuff that temporarily (like 30 minutes) flagged you as evil and anyone could kill you without losing reputation. But still, even with that flag it was pretty standard that if you died, your stuff was pretty much gone. So no matter what gear you got, it only lasted until you died usually.
Even if nobody wanted to loot your body and get flagged as evil, your corpse would only last so long and then it decayed and the items would just appear on the ground and now anyone could take the items without getting flagged as evil.
People used to keep massive amounts of spare gear in their housing, and guilds used to have chests lining every wall of their towers and castles just full of stuff for their members to use when they died. Even houses would decay if you didn't visit them for a week or two and all the items would just drop to the ground where the house had been and become free for any lucky soul who came along.
I'm sure they changed a lot of this as the years went by... but in the days when we played Ultima Online back before Everquest came out, that's how it worked.
I have been a fan of the idea of item degradation as a death penalty mechanic. The thing that immediately turns people off is that they think months and months of hard work to get an epic drop will be for nothing after a few deaths breaks the item. But you could easily design the game so that these extremely valuable items that take an incredible amount of work or luck to get have almost infinite durability. Here's how I would do durability levels for various types of items. Assume the average player's deaths average out to about 100 durability lost per month.
Crafted items: 250 durability (2.5 months)
Average group-level drop: 325 durability (3.25 months)
High-end group-level drop: 800 durability (8 months)
Low-end raid level drop: 1200 durability (~1 year)
high-end raid level drop: 4000 durability (3+ years)
Epic/Legendary items: 15,000 durability (12+ years)
This also helps solve the age old crafted vs dropped loot issue. Crafted gear could compete or even be better than raid level gear, but it's durability is much, much lower. And it also makes super high-end gear more valuable because it lasts so long that you don't really have to worry about the death penalty.
