Goblin Squad Member
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the plan is that threads are a persistent feature of your character and you can bind them to whatever you wish; if you want to change those bindings you can.
This is what I ment that there are no real separate economies. It is not that "weapons are always threaded so they wont be bought a lot".
I say that many people will thread their most powerful items that they don't want to loose and this may not alway be arms and armor.
This may also change as fotm equip (that provides fotm stats) makes it's appearance, so, for instance, swords may go from no demand it to highly sought after to no demand over the course of a few weeks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is what I ment that there are no real separate economies. It is not that "weapons are always threaded so they wont be bought a lot".
I say that many people will thread their most powerful items that they don't want to loose and this may not alway be arms and armor.
Well looking at things off the top of our head, in terms of incentives, we know weapons and armor most probably have the most possible benefits on them, IE huge amounts of keywords, and the potential for multiple keywords on them, Thus making replacement of it significantly more difficult. (IE if there isn't a rediculous level of oversupply, finding a dagger may not be hard, but finding the dagger of returning, backstabbing, and parying that matches the skills you trained might not be so easy). Rings, amulets, wonderous items etc... have not recieved any confirmation of having more than 1 effect, so boots of striding and springing, ring of deflection etc... could (emphasis on could, we have had no anouncement either direction) be far easier to mass produce because the audience for an item that is useful to most people, is far easier to settle than a combination of 4 keywords that matches the skills and training of joe.
Second as ryan mentioned, useful for making a corpse run immidiately. A very large quantity of your skills will be tied to weapon and armor types. Getting to your other possesions when not able to use your other skills, is a pretty big drawback.
Also when it comes to the idea of say storage by your spawn point. It sounds to me like corpse runs will be a decision you have to weigh.
Lets say you could and do have a full set of all unbound items, in a form of storage near your respawn point. You use it to make it to your corpse run... Now you are carrying double your unthreaded gear, you've just greatly lowered your carrying capacity unless you are ready to make another trek back and forth to return your second set home.
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Goblin Squad Member
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UO had item insurance - it was a coin amount paid on the items you wished to insure and varied based on the value of the items. The problem I found with it was that most people could afford to insure everything, which made it a nuisance rather than the kind of tough choice that threading will likely be at higher "levels" in PFO. If this were to be used in PFO, PvPers would have very little, if anything, to loot from their defeated opponents. Not only would that make certain play-styles less enjoyable (bandits, for instance), but very few items would ever leave the system unless they were consumed by the owners.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@Hobs: The way you describe 'insurance' seems different than either of the two other ways I have seen that term used in MMOs.
SWG had insurance: You paid a one-time fee for an/all items you had on you, and the next time you died and respawned at the clone tank, insured items had little damage but became uninsured; uninsured items suffered significant damage.
Eve has insurance: You pay a fee on your hull and equipment, and when they get destroyed while insured money gets created on you proportional to their value.
You seem to be suggesting that UO insurance was equivalent to PFO threading: You insured an item, and the next time you died, you had that item when you respawned rather than dropping it where you died.
Is that accurate?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I guess UO insurance was done after I left, but I was thinking of the suggestion for PFO insurance as working like it does in the real world; giving you the monetary value of a destroyed item. Since it would be trivial to engineer your own death only carrying things you wanted to get rid of. It would end up not as a way to protect yourself from severe losses, but as a way to sell things without a need for other players willing to buy.
The UO system apparently prevents loss, but it seems to be a paid 'soulbinding' system, not insurance. The SWG system sounds like it was a way of prepaying for item repairs, again not much like insurance.
I think GW should leave 'soulbinding' to threads and leave preventative maintenance to buildings; making them of better materials makes them more durable. If GW develops an armour & weapon wear system for PFO, then making them of tougher materials (like adamantine) should make them resistant to wear as well.
As to an actual insurance system which pays you for lost items, no I think that's too problematic for a world where people return from death. You can accomplish the same thing by taking the money you would have spent on paying premiums and using it to buy extra backup gear. For buildings and other non-equipped property, upgrading materials and security makes more sense than insurance. An insurance system could arise from the players emergently, but it's likely to be rife with scams and more trouble than it's worth.
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Goblin Squad Member
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DeciusBrutus,
Here are two different descriptions of the UO system.
Honestly, I didn't remember that there was a way to collect gold from a PvP kill based on their insured items, but then, I didn't PvP. :)
As for the topic at hand, I like PFO's proposed system, in that it helps out the new player (easily threading most of your items) while forcing the more experienced player to make choices. In too many MMOs, the more experienced players have nearly nothing to fear from death - most games don't penalize with experience loss anymore, most don't allow for PvP looting, and with the sting of death reduced to item repair, it's a a slight annoyance at best for characters who often have more cash than they need. If there is no longer any real risk or hard choices to be made, the game is no longer challenging.
Back to the original thread topic after my brainfart about insurance side-tracked things...
(I ultimately felt that insurance is not as good a match for PFO, since it can either just return a stack of cash which you have to go shopping for, removing the benefit of immediate re-equipping in identical gear, ready to return to battle... or if it magically/instantly sources 'compensatory' goods from real markets in the game and warps them to where you are spawned to be re-equipped, it will be violating the locality of transaction paradigm which is otherwise enforced in PFO. not sourcing replacement goods from real production, and not caring about matching in-flows of money with out-flows would be even more disrupting options.)
The current threading system can be retained, but with an across the board 'Item Decay' system (tied either to time or 'usage' of an item), the different tiers of economy (commonly threaded items rarely need replacing and non-threaded items often need replacing) could at least be much less stratified, if not equalized completely.
Items that aren't protected by threads and aren't looted (but end up 'lost'/destroyed) ARE removed from the game economy entirely (faster than the Item Decay rate), and thus this loss will disproportionately instigate new production to 'replace' this class of item, but market forces will make it so any item whose price goes up (which should be parallel to used stock disappearing/being destroyed and new replacement production being incentivized) will be incentivized to be looted with a higher priority (rather than be left to be lost/destroyed), which balances things out.
Otherwise, for non-Threaded items which ARE commonly looted/with high priority, they aren't actually being removed from the economy when they are looted, so there is nothing like the incentive for new replacement production when an item IS removed from the game economy. When items are looted, at the same time somebody loses one item, another character now has that same item and is ready to sell it. There is some minor effects of market churn and inefficiency compared to the Threaded items who tend to stay in the hands of the players who would be a potential market for those items (if they no longer owned the item), but this is a much smaller scale of discrepancy and market distortion than the two-tier economy we currently have with Item Threading + NO Item Decay.
Not relying solely on incomplete looting to remove/destroy (just some kinds of) wealth (which incentivizes new production only for the non-Threaded classes of items), but rather having an Item Decay mechanic which Threading DOESN'T have any special exception from, just seems like a better result for the over-all game, and is fully compatable with the conveniences of Threading. Item Decay also doesn't have to be a binary thing, items in higher decay states but still functional could be 'Repaired' for less than the cost of full replacement (Repair would be a variation of the same skills used to Craft new items), and the economic effect would be similar.
I just think that Item Decay is the ideal scenario here. Having entire classes of items, and associated craft skills, which do not have an effective market incentive, doesn't seem beneficial to any player in the game, and is easy to fix.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In some cases item decay makes sense, but in others it does not. The difference is only in story-ambient believability.
If effect-value is conceived a numberline, it makes little intrinsic difference whether you are starting from zero and adding units, or starting at zero and subtracting units.
The significant thing is keeping the economy churning and providing ways for crafters to make a living between periods of commissioned masterwork.
Some things that make sense are armor repair and others are armor enhancements. Sword sharpening and honing, mace-haft reinforcement, chain repair links, metal enamels, oils, and burnishing abrasives to counter rust, leather dyes, conditioning oil for leather, cloth liners and cushions, various straps, metal bands and shield bosses.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've seen item decay and repair worked several ways. The most common is paying an NPC to bring the items back to undamaged status. UO handled it by allowing master craftsmen to repair items simply with their skill - no materials needed.
How might it help the economy and give crafters of arms and weapons more work if the decay could be repaired by craftsmen, but requiring processed materials to do so? Given that players will likely thread their armor and arms, and thereby lose them far less often, weapon and armor makers may have far less business for these items. I know they will be crafting consumables related to combat, but I'm guessing most people who shine to the skills of weapon and armor crafting want to spend more time making those items. So...if these crafters could repair damage to them, then these crafters would be that much more valued as craftsmen. By requiring raw materials for their repair, you increase the need for such materials, for harvesters, refiners, etc. You could still have threading, but after a while, those threaded items would get pretty banged up and need repair.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've seen item decay and repair worked several ways. The most common is paying an NPC to bring the items back to undamaged status. UO handled it by allowing master craftsmen to repair items simply with their skill - no materials needed.
How might it help the economy and give crafters of arms and weapons more work if the decay could be repaired by craftsmen, but requiring processed materials to do so? Given that players will likely thread their armor and arms, and thereby lose them far less often, weapon and armor makers may have far less business for these items. I know they will be crafting consumables related to combat, but I'm guessing most people who shine to the skills of weapon and armor crafting want to spend more time making those items. So...if these crafters could repair damage to them, then these crafters would be that much more valued as craftsmen. By requiring raw materials for their repair, you increase the need for such materials, for harvesters, refiners, etc. You could still have threading, but after a while, those threaded items would get pretty banged up and need repair.
Actually reminds me quite a bit of a suggestion I had quite a while ago (Please do note this is a very old thread, back then threading was not decided, the description we had to work off was "your weapons and armor are not lost", and nobody had clarification that armor did not include wonderous items rings etc... the general misunderstanding that everyone had at the time was if you have it equiped it isn't lost)
The significant thing is keeping the economy churning and providing ways for crafters to make a living between periods of commissioned masterwork.
Cooking!! Oh please oh please oh please...!
People need lunch whether waging war or walking through the forest.
What would be cool is not simply a 'Decay Level' increasing (or 'Item Health' decreasing) and the item ceasing to function or be destroyed at a certain point, but to have the item's effectiveness/power level progressively be reduced, perhaps after an initial 'plateau' where it functions at 100%. This 'financializes' the system further, most people will end up accepting a certain level of degradation before they decide to Repair or replace the item, but people who want the highest level of effectiveness will pay for Repairs more often. If other cheap means to boost effectiveness (consumables) are available, then players will end up comparing the 'monthly' costs of repair (to restore X effectiveness) with the monthly costs of consumables to boost their effectiveness by X... With full repair + full consumables having peak result, but at signifigantly higher cost, most players will probably decide to simply aim for a given total effectiveness in the cheapest manner possible. This also means that crucial supplies to Repair items may be disrupted without leaving players with unusuable gear (when it Decays), it will just degrade in effectiveness further than they would usually allow, until they can acquire Repair services again.