Let’s Talk Enchanting!

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It's partially the opposite, from the designer perspective.

There are four metrics designers are 'supposed' to use when making these systems, and player retention is the WEAKEST of them, so 'people leaving' is not the thing you focus on. The fourth does not apply to Ashes, we'll ignore it.

Attracting new players is the first, and it's tied directly into the second, maintenance of power gaps. The third is player behavioural type in game.

A game with BDO's system attracts new players by offering catchup mechanics, and the P2W is part of that. Players can make an initial investment as 'part of their game purchase' and count on all the ingame catchup mechanics to get them to a mid-level. I don't spend money on BDO, for example, I just leverage all their 'daily logins' and 'free stuff' to power up. The important part is that if they did not offer those things, I would not PLAY.

Maintenance of power gaps is the second issue but it's the PvE power gaps. You must retain the gap between a player at X level/skill and the mobs, or everything becomes easy. While item destruction prevents market saturation and seems to cause this, it also causes something else, because of the third thing.

Player behaviour type is what destroys games like BDO and ArcheAge. The player feels that 'not having X tier of gear implies that they are wasting their time'. This leads to doubly avoidant behaviour, where players who don't have the time or wish to achieve that tier at the moment, don't want to join growth-based guilds or groups because they don't want to feel like they are holding the group back, and those groups start to be taken advantage of by players who DO leech off them.

Players quitting isn't the problem that is actually created. Its entirely possible that more players play the game, but what 'the game' is, changes, usually for the worse, in this design, by creating a real incentive for players to be risk-avoidant.

"Why even buy blue gear and enchant it? Just grind with the bare minimum until you can afford better/low meta gear?" - This sort of thing resonates with a lot of people.

A lot of BDO's 'history' also is hard to find because the game has transformed so much almost entirely due to the enhancing system, yet there are many players out there like myself who never spend any money, and can't even 'complain' that others spending money matters, because the catch-up is so strong. The RNG though, is just 'a hurdle that some people push through or get RNG-carried through' and for everyone else it might as well be randomly swimming in shark water. Sure, USUALLY you won't get bitten, but when you do...

Some people just don't enjoy gambling enough to play these systems the way they are 'meant to be played', and this skews the outcome of the system. If the target audience was more predisposed to gambling like yourself, it would work better and be a flatly positive addition to the game even though this design style is unnecessary.

As it is, Intrepid will need to consider the fact that they may be enforcing a risk-avoidant mechanic in a game that is supposed to encourage it.

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The corruption system is meant to stop all those 0.01% of people who'd be willing to PK someone else multiple times. But it's still one of the core systems and gonna be tested extensively exactly for its purposes, so I dunno why OEing can't be similar to that.

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And Ashes will be the same. Hardcore players will still kick your ass even w/o the OE, so again, I don't see an issue here. OE would only influence the top lvl pvp (that is if it's super rare and expensive as I'm suggesting it to be). And in my experience, due to L2's gearing system, dude in C grade could still kill a dude in B or A grade gear. Mainly due to RPS combat balance of 1v1 pvp (which Ashes also has). And if that C grade was OEd, that player would not only spend less money on shoulshots (same would be the case with item decay upkeep in Ashes) but would also have more chances against those people in B and A grade gear.

Now obviously not everyone would have the ability to OE their low tier gear while leveling, but that's where a guild would come in and help promising players to be on par with people in better gear. I've done so multiple times in L2. And again, if the OE methods are expensive and rare, you'd still have most people running in base armor, while only a chosen few would be above them in power at the same lvl.

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And I've played old versions of L2 for 12 years and I don't remember a single person leaving just because of it. Most people either overprepared for the OE with backup gear or would be ready to lose their gear just because they were that kind of person. And L2's OE is way more overabundant than what I'm suggesting for Ashes.

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And Ashes already has that kind of system. But how I see it panning out is people who have that kind of gear would not use it until they had the resources to repair it. Instead they'd be using pre-top gear that's way easier to upkeep. Same situation played out on L2 server releases where people wouldn't have soulshots for their new tier of weapons, so they'd just keep using the old one. But because of that, they couldn't just go clear new content that was lvl-appropriate. And OEing their older gear allowed them to do just that. And once they had enough resources to upkeep the usage of the higher tier - they'd either sell their old OE item or pass it down or lend to a guildmate, which would increase overall guild power lvl.

You suggest having some safe vertical enchantment system, but if we do, then all the base gear at pretty much all tiers would become useless (well outside of deconstruction for repairs). The cost of that base gear would be on the floor, while any higher enchanted gear would cost quite a lot (exactly because it'd let you farm harder content while having low upkeep). And now any new player who comes to the server will see that they can easily buy some shitty gear while everyone runs around with OEd uberguns that cost as much as a new car.

Having a super exclusive OEing system that also has a chance to remove that powerful weapon from the game is a nice power balancing tool. The base power lvl of most people at any given lvl of progress would be pretty much the same, while those who can afford to try and OE their stuff could be just a bit stronger (because I support OEing giving only 1-3% of power boost).

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Which is why I want to prevent those gambling addicts from having the opportunity to throw it all away as much as possible. But I want to do that w/o overboosting the whole server in the process. And potential removal of super strong gear sounds like just the perfect thing. It's not that I live in the past, it's that I prefer this particular system over anything that I've seen suggested so far or any other OE system that I've seen in other games.

Also, as I've said in a later comment, if repairing an item after a failed OE costs exactly as much as crafting and OEing the same item again - I'd be completely fine with not destroying said item (in the context of you losing all OE lvls and the broken item being unusable until you fix it).

@Nikr the problem with everything mentioned, that I'm unclear on how you wish to solve it (and don't know enough L2 history to know how it was solved in L2), is that the luckiest player 'wins' once they reach the 'end of the path'.

And then 'the amount of effort to reach the end of the path' is vastly different between players. I'm not clear on what prevents this?

Even if it is a massive effort to OE to max, the first person to get 'RNG-carried' there is strong, that's fine, people are meant to be strong, but what of all those who end up 'RNG-kicked'?

When one person invests 2 hours and gets something and another invests 200 hours into the same activity and still doesn't have it (this is straight from the standard bell curves of these games in general), it's that more and more people become risk avoidant, and worse, build up negativity towards the successful.

There's also POSSIBLY some confirmation bias, in that people who don't like these systems quit quite early, or quit trying and the game changes.

So for my education... what does L2 do to stop this aspect, JUST the 'I can spend 2 h and you can spend 200 and I get the thing and you don't'. Not talking about 'server gear sinks' anymore, just... does it even bother to address this other than to tell the player 'well you took the risk that it would take 200h so that was your choice'.

Azherae wrote: »

So for my education... what does L2 do to stop this aspect, JUST the 'I can spend 2 h and you can spend 200 and I get the thing and you don't'. Not talking about 'server gear sinks' anymore, just... does it even bother to address this other than to tell the player 'well you took the risk that it would take 200h so that was your choice'.

Nothing really. It just accepts that some people will be luckier than others and become stronger because of it. Yes, it's unfair, but it's no more unfair than some person having 16h a day to play the game and grind out any resource that they might need to overpower everyone else against a person that can only play an hour a week and not defeat even the weaker mobs, let alone people.

The main thing that can prevent that disparity from happening is the amount of attempts someone can make to get an insanely OP item. If the availability of required resources is low and the chance to get super high in OE is low, then statistically it's more likely that anyone who tries to get that high would just fail. And only after years of attempts made by everyone on the server would there be a person who has some ultimate super OEd weapon that has maybe 5% more power than its base version. And at that point, would anyone even care about that kind of difference (well outside of said person, who can now win potential 55% of pvp instead of 50%, when fighting an equally skilled player)?

The only times I ever saw +10++ weapons in L2 (with +3 being the safe limit) was on servers that let you OE your stuff hundreds upon hundreds of times. People would just be sitting in town OEing their gear over and over and over again for hours until they'd get to a super high stage. And from what I understand of BDO/LA/AA systems, that's roughly the same issue they had. A lot of people had a lot of access to a lot of OE resources, so statistically there'd be quite a few people who got so damn high that they could beat anyone w/o a problem. I might be wrong in that assumption though.

But if the availability is super rare to begin with, the chances of someone getting super strong are abysmally low. And it'd take a ton of time for a few people to get to some low OE stages, at which point you'd get someone them wanting to go even further, and they'd fail and go down in power. Alternatively they might succeed which would push others to try and catch up to them which would increase chances of powerful weapons leaving the game (or getting broken and "recrafted" and re-OEd).

Also, this was in the context of boosting top lvl gear. If we look at lower tiers, just as I previously said, there'd be a few more OEd weapons there just because resource availability would be higher, so there'd be more chances to succeed. It was still in the hands of maybe a dozen or a few of people out of thousands on the server, so the overall influence wouldn't be that high, but it also allowed those people to compete with higher tiered enemies or harder content. Quite often those weapons would be used to fast level some alts within a guild, but that's a separate discussion of movement of power among people/characters.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

So for my education... what does L2 do to stop this aspect, JUST the 'I can spend 2 h and you can spend 200 and I get the thing and you don't'. Not talking about 'server gear sinks' anymore, just... does it even bother to address this other than to tell the player 'well you took the risk that it would take 200h so that was your choice'.

Nothing really. It just accepts that some people will be luckier than others and become stronger because of it. Yes, it's unfair, but it's no more unfair than some person having 16h a day to play the game and grind out any resource that they might need to overpower everyone else against a person that can only play an hour a week and not defeat even the weaker mobs, let alone people.

The main thing that can prevent that disparity from happening is the amount of attempts someone can make to get an insanely OP item. If the availability of required resources is low and the chance to get super high in OE is low, then statistically it's more likely that anyone who tries to get that high would just fail. And only after years of attempts made by everyone on the server would there be a person who has some ultimate super OEd weapon that has maybe 5% more power than its base version. And at that point, would anyone even care about that kind of difference (well outside of said person, who can now win potential 55% of pvp instead of 50%, when fighting an equally skilled player)?

The only times I ever saw +10++ weapons in L2 (with +3 being the safe limit) was on servers that let you OE your stuff hundreds upon hundreds of times. People would just be sitting in town OEing their gear over and over and over again for hours until they'd get to a super high stage. And from what I understand of BDO/LA/AA systems, that's roughly the same issue they had. A lot of people had a lot of access to a lot of OE resources, so statistically there'd be quite a few people who got so damn high that they could beat anyone w/o a problem. I might be wrong in that assumption though.

But if the availability is super rare to begin with, the chances of someone getting super strong are abysmally low. And it'd take a ton of time for a few people to get to some low OE stages, at which point you'd get someone them wanting to go even further, and they'd fail and go down in power. Alternatively they might succeed which would push others to try and catch up to them which would increase chances of powerful weapons leaving the game (or getting broken and "recrafted" and re-OEd).

Also, this was in the context of boosting top lvl gear. If we look at lower tiers, just as I previously said, there'd be a few more OEd weapons there just because resource availability would be higher, so there'd be more chances to succeed. It was still in the hands of maybe a dozen or a few of people out of thousands on the server, so the overall influence wouldn't be that high, but it also allowed those people to compete with higher tiered enemies or harder content. Quite often those weapons would be used to fast level some alts within a guild, but that's a separate discussion of movement of power among people/characters.

Thanks for clearing it up, sounds like my general approach will work well, if the system is kept as is, so at least from the 'me gaining power' side, I don't think I have much to worry about.

For reference for others, to the 'market controlling magnate that manipulates the psychology of other players for her own benefit', this system sounds great. Deflate the economy by funneling liquidity to myself or my guild, gain surreptitious control of two things, pressure the players with specific psychological triggers into going broke doing this, in chat, and then swoop in.

If this sounds like something you WANT me to do (or want to join me doing, guild is open) then let's rock.

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I might be? If you're talking to me, that is. Which part?

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Oh, yeah, then by that metric I'm definitely nuts. I want ALL of the money. Control of entire economies. Psychopathic enough to take control of it by manipulating other people to make them hand over their real-value items to me, the whole bit.

"Economic PvP" is the name of the game.

I could be 'nicer' about it, but then I'd lose to all the people like me who aren't. And there's no way I'm losing to them, they're mean and will make my people suffer (yes, I claim the people too).

I guess based on your response that you're not joining my Merchant Guild?

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Have you ever watched a high level economics focused player explain their stuff in BDO? I think it's fair to say that's an accurate description lol.

Azherae wrote: »

If this sounds like something you WANT me to do (or want to join me doing, guild is open) then let's rock.

I'm friends with multiple people that used L2's market to make themselves insanely rich w/o even touching a mob. So yes, I do in fact hope that you are able to succeed in your goals

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Yeah, just think like that. My 'competition' in 'the part of the game I'm playing' are the sort of people who will scheme an idea so close to broken that they have to LITERALLY e-mail support in advance to verify that what they are about to do is not against the ToS and will get them banned'.

Then using this method and a ton of spreadsheets, buy half a server for their guild. Bonus points if they have a stream and can use it to manipulate the market more.

The times, they are a-changin'. Back in MY day you had to track FIFTEEN economic flows, BY HAND, in Excel, with NO developer-provided Marketplace APIs!

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Nah, nah, I mean like:

(indepth explanation version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGhgkc-MKAQ
(shorter meme version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPZiKnIymOI

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Oh, since you were talking to my 'economics dev', I figured I'd draw the parallel. But as for the topic, you (Neurath) don't really want power increasing enchants anyway right? Is that why mentioned 'shame'? (I wouldn't thought of it as shaming since I think BladeBoques is awesome and a content creator I respect quite a bit. That was one of my favorite vids by him.)

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People will always go for the easier route if given the opportunity to do so. That is why WoW blew up so much, when the alternative was hardcore somewhat grindy mmos from all sides. And after WoW any new mmo tried to copy it and then add even more ease of play. And WoW itself simplified and streamlined its designs (outside of overcomplicated systems of later updates which I attribute to the loss of good developers along the way). And now all we have is treadmill-like mmos that present most of its content on a silver platter w/o too much (if any) hardships.

And when multiple gamer generations have grown up on such ease of play, you'll be very hard-pressed to even try making a game that's more difficult and hard on the player. And that's one of the main reasons why I'm afraid Intrepid will have to change their core designs or just fail due to its hardcore features. I hope I'm wrong though.