Goblin Squad Member
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If the best gear is craftable then all you need is gold to aquire it and with the "plex" system you can buy a month of subscription with real money and sell it in game for gold.
How is this a good idea?
Most comments about the Plex system in Eve are positive so I'm assuming it works out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ummm no, you need the best materials to craft the best gear. The only way to get the best materials is to gather/harvest it. The best materials will be rare, and to harvest them you will likely need to go into an monster hex where it will be very dangerous to get them. The crafters will have to be skilled enough to make the item from the materials, and the customer will need to be skilled enough to use it.
That said, they will sell it for gold, but the price will be set by the market basted on the rarity of the materials, the rarity of crafters able to make the item, and the demand from players who are able to use it. The gold cost will be affected by how much coin is in game, throwing money into the game by selling goblin balls isn't a guaranteed path to getting the best gear.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Worth pointing out that, technically you do need far more than gold. The gear will be largely unusable without the training, which requires both time, and community position (the training facilities for higher training forms is exclusively going to be in high level player camps, and They will decide whether or not you can access it or not.
In addition of course to the gear itself, high powered groups who are obtaining the hardest to earn items in the game, certainly aren't going to just hand it over to joe nobody, no mattter how much money he has.
As well you also are neglecting the fact, that the gear itself, isn't safe forever. the better the gear, the more threads it takes to protect a single piece. If we are seriously talking the best gear in the game... you would most likely need to train the maximum threading ability, just to protect one piece of it. Someone with the gear, but not skills (both trained, and player) to back it up, and without allies to run with etc... would go through gear costing real world money fast enough to make bill gates flinch.
Eve has had the model for almost a decade, yet of everyone I know who's played it, some have quit for different reasons, but virtually no-one I know of has had an issue with any pay2win existance within the world.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally, I dislike seeing people buy anything made in-game with real world money. I know it may be the new way for game companies to make income rather than subscription fees, but I still don't like it. I keep my in-game and out-of-game as separate as possible.
I know...I'm a dinosaur.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pay-to-Win is a theme park device, and a pretty lame one at that. Cash shop items should be limited to: Cosmetics, Titles, Bank Slots, Character Slots, Pets, Game Time (Plex), etc,
The best gear in game should be crafted gear. This is a sandbox MMO. Player Characters ( their skills, not their gear) are the end game. The player characters are the content, unlike in Theme Park MMOs where gear is the end game and the content.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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If you can invent a system that keeps people from exchanging real money for virtual goods, while still retaining the idea that characters should be able to exchange items and buy and sell items on an In-game market economy, you will be rich beyond imagining. Every MMO publisher on earth will license your idea - and not a few national governments will too.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not saying it's possible to eliminate, I'm just saying I don't care for it. I have no qualms paying a monthly fee for my MMO entertainment. In truth, it's the cheapest bang for your buck of any purchased entertainment I can think of, but to pay money for extra pixels - for items that I can actually earn through my efforts, while being entertained by playing the game - nope.
I live a pretty minimalist life - even more so in most MMOs I've played. I tend to give much of what I find away and I enjoy learning ways to make do with less. I also value building relationships in-game to help people create things that neither I nor they could ever afford alone. I'm certain that these are some of the reasons I tend to be at least mildly disgusted by those who buy without effort what others earn through real skill and hard work. True, anything is worth what people will pay for it, but promoting "pay-for-achievement" seems to somehow cheapen the accomplishment of those who achieve by actually playing the game - achievement gained by hard work, creativity, and cooperation.
I recall in UO the amount of resources, hard work, and gold it took for a guild to buy a castle, let alone the days or weeks of scouting to find a large enough parcel of available land. It was a monumental task and I applauded those who could achieve it. I also recall running into one player standing out front of his castle who told me he had just paid hundreds of real dollars to buy it...just him...no guild, no other players benefiting from all that space nor having helped to achieve the goal. Just him - all alone - in his big, purchased status symbol.
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Goblin Squad Member
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When all the best gear is created by players and sold, it's kind of impossible not to have a black market... hopefully they include some level restrictions or ability progression so people aren't walking around with Rods of Wonder on day one.
I've got faith and I guess we will see.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you can invent a system that keeps people from exchanging real money for virtual goods, while still retaining the idea that characters should be able to exchange items and buy and sell items on an In-game market economy, you will be rich beyond imagining. Every MMO publisher on earth will license your idea - and not a few national governments will too.
Not allowing cash shop items into the in-game market would be a good start.
I've always wondered if a reputation based economy could work. Not so much for a fantasy game, but in our home Shadowrun games there are things characters can afford but can't aquire because they haven't built up enough reputation with the right Fixers.
Much like Bill Gates can afford a nuclear bomb, doesn't mean he is allowed to own one.
Sorry for the off topic. I know that doesn't apply to Pathfinder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Areks,
If the black market is an in-game venture, I'm all for it, though I'm not certain what would make the items illegal, other than not being allowed in certain settlements. There is the possibility of a fence taking the time to resell the stolen goods that thieves and bandits don't want to bother selling themselves, but that's fodder for another topic. ;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Most comments about the Plex system in Eve are positive so I'm assuming it works out.
PFO will be pay to "win." But what does "winning" mean in this game?
I, like a lot of the future players, do well enough financially, that I could buy all the PLEX I wanted to buy and sell it in the game for the fair market price. I can be the richest in-game character in one day of buying and selling plex. I can pay high prices to other players to make it worth thier while to craft for me anything I wanted crafted. I can buy a settlement by spending enough real world money to have enough accounts to do anything in the game I want to do, even buy a settlement. I can pay guilds high prices to destroy my enemies. IF you mess with me, I just get out my real world wallet and buy enough plex to pay for a massive revenge...
so yea, this game will be "pay-to-win" but there is no "win." You just play. Sand box games have no point unless you assign value to the point. With no ranked PvP or epic gear you have to earn, you decide for yourself what "winning" is then you try to do that. So its "pay-to-win" but you define your own "winning."
Kind of as pointless as life really. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not allowing cash shop items into the in-game market would be a good start.
Depending on the game, the context, the items... that actually can make it drastically worse.
Of course that primarally depends on the existance of items that can improve your effective power, but it is worth pointing out, that even something as small as say, a healing potion that had a cooldown that is stronger, or has a cooldown that is not shared with in game healing potions. In which case, not allowing the potions to be sold, makes the game MORE pay to win, due to people paying more, getting an item that someone paying less has NO possibility to get.
That being said, it varies of course as far as what can help and not. There are obviously 2 things that can work.
1. Absolutely nothing in the cash shop that can influence power whatsoever, and zero trading of decorative items.
This obviously does the job, of course it also offers no support of a zero payment option. Admitted, I am skeptical of GW's current option making zero payment even plausible. In EVE from what I understand, it is just barely possible to buy a months plex in a 3 week timeframe (by barely possible, I believe it requires 1. not to be wasting any time in that 3 week trial learning the game, and 2. working nonstop on money for 6-8 hour days.
PFO I believe the time/earning for training time, is going to be 2-3x higher. Just like eve, training time prices will be effected by supply/demand. When the players aren't kicked out of the game after 3 weeks and continue farming money... the demand is going to go higher than it did in eve, while the supply will remain about the same. As a result I predict that prior to endgame skills, it will take about
400-500 hours prior to high skills and/or great market connections to get 1 months training time.
2. Absolutely no cash shop, just a set fee.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If you can invent a system that keeps people from exchanging real money for virtual goods, while still retaining the idea that characters should be able to exchange items and buy and sell items on an In-game market economy, you will be rich beyond imagining. Every MMO publisher on earth will license your idea - and not a few national governments will too.Not allowing cash shop items into the in-game market would be a good start.
Putting the 'gold selling' in the hands of the developers is a step in the right direction. It does two things:
1. Greatly diminishes the presence of gold sellers.
2. Protects players from identity theft.
But people who are simply angry at people who spend real money to speed up their character's development don't usually make this connection. Good cash shops either provide players a way to get the currency via in-game activities, or don't sell 'better' items. EvE does both, PFO will do the latter.
And if this turns out anything like EvE, buying the best gear will cost a few hundred dollars. So those people will be few and far between.
@Ryan:
1. Hardware and IP lock accounts. (1&2 prevent account selling/power levelers)
----a. Require a CSR, phone conversation, and waiting period to switch computers.
----b. Require prior notification of connection from a different IP, to get a pass for X amount of days to use that specific IP address.
2. Clog all upload bandwidth to prevent remote access.
3. Game regulated pricing on all items, players can't choose pricing.
4. Make 'gifting' against the TOS and have no game mechanics for it, or require a CSR and a waiting period to transfer goods to friends, or other characters. Any and all exchanges must be 0 net gain for both sides.
5. Loot can only come from NPC's(so you can't use a dead body as a gift box)
6. Loot is per character, like Diablo 3. No killing something for someone, they don't get anything if they didn't do anything.
7. Scan all files before every login, to check for unauthorized modifications.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There is a market saturation for goblin balls; it's probable that the first top-tier equipment will not be available for any amount of coin, much less the finite amount available for purchase.
That said, if you're paying the subscriptions of a lot of people for a long time, you can expect to get a lot of coin in return.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Require prior notification of connection from a different IP, to get a pass for X amount of days to use that specific IP address.
My brother has to give me his new IP address, every 40-60 days or so, so we can link to play certain games head-to-head; Comcast keeps re-assigning him. Is that a common thing for ISPs to do?
My isp gives me a new IP every 24 hours. I really dont get this conversation. As far as I know there will be no epics here dropping in raids. It is crafted gear or substandard loot drops. There won't be any grinding instances for gear, it will be amass necessary coin...purchase what you want
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Goblin Squad Member
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I say let people use their real money to buy "plex" then sell for gold, just to turn around and buy some of the best gear. Then, when they become an assassination target, because the enemy knows they "buy" top of the line gear, and I bring my fellow assassins to assist (better to be safe then sorry with tough targets) and he loses it all, we can all just sit back and thank him for spending the actual money to help equip my assassin with ( or resell if its not gear I can use)
I say let people use their real money to buy "plex" then sell for gold, just to turn around and buy some of the best gear. Then, when they become an assassination target, because the enemy knows they "buy" top of the line gear, and I bring my fellow assassins to assist (better to be safe then sorry with tough targets) and he loses it all, we can all just sit back and thank him for spending the actual money to help equip my assassin with ( or resell if its not gear I can use)
An excellent point.
Another thing: some people don't have alot of time to play, and there are some people who don't have great demands on their time and will play alot. If I want something and percieve it to have value, but don't have the ingame resources to acquire it, why can't I pay some person who will spend hours working on something I want? I percieve their time to be valuable and have a need/ want i wish to see fulfilled, they spends their time to fulfil it and I pay them. Why attempt to punish me because some jerk just bought all his gear to attempt to power-game?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Jazzlvraz, yes some ISP's do that. Getting a static IP address can be tough or impossible for residences. I'm guessing the IPs your brother get's have the same first 3 numbers, the IP lock I suggest is to prevent someone from giving out their account details to a power leveler. Using just the first 3 numbers, combined with the hardware locking it would be near impossible to access an account from another computer in, lets say, North Korea.
Anyway, the example is not serious, those kinds of limitations would kill a game and be a community service nightmare.
@Tigari, Don't think that targeting Goblin Ball sellers will get you a good reward, Assassins only break spawn point threads, and hardly anyone will buy a top quality item with out threading it. Some will, but then you also have a low chance to get specific items off their corpse. Player looting is, as described by GW, a lottery.
Bill Gates can afford a nuclear bomb, doesn't mean he is allowed to own one.
The tragedy:
Given his reputation, I don't believe he would even want to own one -- and this make him the very sort of person who should.
But doesn't.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Overall seems to me: If actions put value into the economy without shocking it, then long-term it's a win-win situation. Especially if gear is very narrow in it's perceived value and/or leads to gameplay reactions in-game eg shift in power leads to conflict, market reaction to sudden bulk buying etc.
Account security was discussed in a previous thread which seemed useful.
I like the idea of settlements possibly in communication with a player-run council that also checks on illicit activity for members of communities?? Might be an in-game tool to checking on dodgy activity also?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't know if anybody/some in this thread have played EVE and have seen its Plex system at work... But (though most people were VERY skeptical in the start) it works... and it is not pay to win (although it does give you an advantage).
This is mostly because in EVE (and I think also in PFO) no matter how much money you have, you still need the respective skills to make good use of any gear you may buy. Therefore you have to commit to the game and improve your character.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Being able to drop money into the game will certainly make players more powerful, but with the slow 'leveling' of the game, we're not talking about huge leaps and gains here.
Also we have the PvP system where you could drop $100 real world monies for a crate of adamantium, go out, get mugged and have Lord Doucheadin claim the crate as part of the loot off your corpse, or worse still, it disappears.
Just because somebody can buy an item off the game with real-world money doesn't mean it will STAY with them and unbalance the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Tigari, Don't think that targeting Goblin Ball sellers will get you a good reward, Assassins only break spawn point threads, and hardly anyone will buy a top quality item with out threading it. Some will, but then you also have a low chance to get specific items off their corpse. Player looting is, as described by GW, a lottery.
You are correct about the assasains part, but I have to say you are wrong about the "hardly anyone will buy a top quality item without threading it". If we are talking a character buying 1 super item, while leaving the rest of their gear as garbage... well now we are talking nothing worth even taking notice of. at least I'm going under the assumption that GW intends to spread effective power over many slots, and believe ryan's comments when he agreed that a character wearing only what he can thread, will in general be more or less negligible next to a character who has significantly more than he can thread equipped.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I say let people use their real money to buy "plex" then sell for gold, just to turn around and buy some of the best gear. Then, when they become an assassination target, because the enemy knows they "buy" top of the line gear, and I bring my fellow assassins to assist (better to be safe then sorry with tough targets) and he loses it all, we can all just sit back and thank him for spending the actual money to help equip my assassin with ( or resell if its not gear I can use)
But if I then offered a plex to any guild that would grief you by hunting and killing you repeatedly, are you still glad the game is pay to win? If someone used real wold money to make your life miserable, would you still thank them? IF they spent real world money to buy high bounties on yur head every day for a year, would that be fun still?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Endless Bounty, so far, is a feature that can be suffered by PKers whether the gold, to fund it, is gained through cash shop or real grind gold gathering.
The "endless bounty", also, is only available so long as the target remains on your enemies list. A time sensitive list, so the "endless bounty" is not real.
Excessive persecution will, likely, be quickly curbed by GW.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is where the difference in types of in-game currencies comes in (I posted previously about "parallel currencies” in an AH post). "Coin" is the phantasmal currency currently anticipated. Stephen Cheney has also stated there is a possibility that "gold" may also be implemented as a parallel currency. If training time can be purchased with "coin", but in-game items like fine armor cannot, hopefully the problem is solved. Of course, some players spend all of their time trying to find exploits in order to better their position. (This happened in EVE with faction warfare and faction points.)
But the two concurrent economies idea has merit, as long as there is no crossover between the currencies. Once crossover occurs, it becomes one economy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Bringslite,
My concern with this is the exchange rate in most games between in-game gold and real money. I did a quick search on Google and found that for World of Warcraft, you can buy 1000 gold for $1.40 on some sites. If I were a truly vindictive person, and the exchange rate is anywhere close to that in PFO, I could certainly see it worth $50.00 real cash to put out multiple contracts on someone I really disliked. With that exchange rate, and $50.00 to spend, I could be a real pain in many other ways to my competition, regardless of bounty contracts, and it would take me no time at all to put those nasty plans into action because I didn't have to expend any time or effort in-game to earn that gold. If I had to earn that cash for those same nasty plans the old fashioned way - earn the gold in-game - it would take far longer, making it more difficult for me to be such a jerk.
I can deal with being out organized, out spent, or outworked by people who beat me in a game where the playing field is fair and level for all those competing. Having it happen because someone has a wad of real world cash to throw at the game, to speed up the pace at which the economy should naturally work, is worrisome.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hobs,
GW is most likely going to sell training time in their cash shop regardless of our protests. They are also going to have a FTP model. It is a sad fact that GW is a business and needs revenue to operate. Above that, profits can be turned back in to provide more game features.
Would you rather that gold can be moved around, player to player, through legitimized cash shop procedures or bought from gold sellers that will likely steal your account? The cash shop option will make gold sellers virtually obsolete.
Using real world money to cause trouble for people can be done in sooo many ways. It really isn't a matter of having a cash shop or selling cash shop items for gold. Money has always provided unfair advantage, even if it just allows one player to have multiple accounts.
This just seems, to me, to be more fear based on peoples past bad experiences and a lack of trust in the team at GW.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since I don't plan to belong to a settlement, to craft, to have the best gear, or even PvP (unless forced), I have very little to fear about any of this. Furthermore, I trust GW, or I wouldn't have backed the kickstarter. Perhaps it's more being nostalgic for a time at the very beginning of MMOs when most players (not all) earned what they had and fewer people had figured out ways of taking advantage of the game by out-of-game means.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Those were indeed better days, and I remember my first MMOs with a sense of wonder that is harder and harder to recapture.
That being said, I would rather that GW have a model wherein FTP can buy experience with gold. I may need it for alts as my pockets are not as deep as I would like. ;)
Better that they control the majority of gold purchasing or even that they provide a safe way to do it. Gold will be bought and sold one way or another.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How is this different from giving in game gold to people for harassing said person? Or just paying peoples subscriptions for them for doing it, that isn't illegal in any game. Yet this hasn't happened in any game ever... Its a non issue.
Account sharing is by definition against most terms of service, which is in general a pre-req to pay someone elses subscription.
As I am almost certain, hiring thugs to harrass others has almost certainly happened, in multiple forms. Harrasment in a MMO isn't going to make news until someone dies out of game, but it absolutely happens, and yes I've witnessed people using others to do their dirty work with every method from paying the persons account, flirting/cybering, faking victimhood, bribe of in game items/currency etc... It is more frequent then botting, attempted exploits, and gold buying in my opinion.
But as I mentioned, paying for someones account is only 1 of many ways people can do such an arangement. I would say harrasment via proxy falls more into the category of "going to happen to some extent no matter what, keep GMs alert, keep good logs that can be looked over and have fault actually discovered when the GMs investigate etc..." rather than "Doesn't really happen"
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Goblin Squad Member
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I say let people use their real money to buy "plex" then sell for gold, just to turn around and buy some of the best gear. Then, when they become an assassination target, because the enemy knows they "buy" top of the line gear, and I bring my fellow assassins to assist (better to be safe then sorry with tough targets) and he loses it all, we can all just sit back and thank him for spending the actual money to help equip my assassin with ( or resell if its not gear I can use)But if I then offered a plex to any guild that would grief you by hunting and killing you repeatedly, are you still glad the game is pay to win? If someone used real wold money to make your life miserable, would you still thank them? IF they spent real world money to buy high bounties on yur head every day for a year, would that be fun still?
First, how would you know who I am? I'd have the "Assassin" flag and mask, so all you would know is I'm an assassin.
Second, if you want you may be able to find out who hired me, and grieve them (but why even put that in the game, lets as a community, keep grieving out!). That will also probably require more funds though. so after adding it all up, is it really worth it?
Last, it's part of the game. It just means I need to play safer or roll with a bigger group. If someone is willing to pay enough "plex" to have multiple people hunting me, with me playing safer and moving in bigger groups, then power to them. If that's how they want to spend there money.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You are correct about the assasains part, but I have to say you are wrong about the "hardly anyone will buy a top quality item without threading it". If we are talking a character buying 1 super item, while leaving the rest of their gear as garbage... well now we are talking nothing worth even taking notice of. at least I'm going under the assumption that GW intends to spread effective power over many slots, and believe ryan's comments when he agreed that a character wearing only what he can thread, will in general be more or less negligible next to a character who has significantly more than he can thread equipped.@Tigari, Don't think that targeting Goblin Ball sellers will get you a good reward, Assassins only break spawn point threads, and hardly anyone will buy a top quality item with out threading it. Some will, but then you also have a low chance to get specific items off their corpse. Player looting is, as described by GW, a lottery.
Where is everybody getting this idea that you have to equip garbage if you want to use good items?
The way I understood the explanation of threads is:
Low Level - Everything you own
Mid Level - Everything you use
High Level - Most of what you use
Yes you will have to take some risk at high levels of play, if you want to use all top tier items, but you don't need to equip garbage, because at your level of wealth, you losing mid range gear has less of an impact than a lower player losing lower gear.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I believe it is more of:
low level- everything your wearing
Mid level- most of what you are wearing
High level- only a few things of what you are wearing
That is how I took it. Substituting "wearing" for "threaded"
Threading and Powerful
Items
As mentioned previously, players that die and respawn leave most of their gear on their husks. The only items that remain with them are those that have been attached via metaphysical "threads." Players will have discretion in tying threads and can reassign threads without losing them: one day a player might have 19 threads devoted to her armor; the next day she could switch them to instead protect her gloves, hat, boots, belt, and amulet. (Items require different numbers of threads based on their size and importance.)As a player advances, she can purchase more threads. However, items of higher quality and tier require more threads. A starting character with starting gear has sufficient threads to protect all the gear she is likely to carry (one weapon, a set of armor, and a half dozen or so miscellaneous items). A character that has reached level 20 in a role and has all top-quality gear, meanwhile, may only be able to protect her armor and one weapon, three weapons and a miscellaneous item, or some other combination (but she could protect a larger amount of gear if she were willing to use weaker items for some of her slots). And a new player given a top-tier weapon may not be able to bind anything else but that.
Additionally, players use threads to bind to intermediary resurrection sites: you can always respawn at the nearest big statue of Pharasma (usually confined to rare, significant locations), but the world is also full of player-created or pre-placed smaller shrines to Pharasma. If you bind to one of these smaller shrines, it's likely to be much closer to the place you died.
Effectively, starting characters are going to have sufficient threads to protect most of their gear and rarely suffer major setbacks from being killed. However, as players advance their characters, they'll have to start making meaningful decisions about death: Will you use mostly weaker gear so you don't have to risk much of it on death? Will you bind to a lot of shrines so you're always near your corpse for a better chance to recover everything before it's looted? Or will you bind only your most prized and best gear, risking the rest?
and
Stephen in the Spells blog thread wrote:Yes, only equipped gear can be threaded, not things in general inventory.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good point Valkenr: Sounds like how rich a char (& support network up to a point) will be and how many pvp fights they get themselves in will play a part in how disposed they will be to LOSING NON-THREADED gear.IE how max they decide to equip quality of gear to gain the biggest edge in a combat?
I had not extended the idea to include all those links in the consideration a player might make. Something like their "burn rate" of gear?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm guessing the game will have a very similar mentality to EVE when it comes to what you risk. In eve it's all or nothing, so you don't often PVP in an expensive(relative to your personal wealth) ship unless you know exactly what you are getting into, or know you can escape form anything.
In PFO it will be similar, but instead of 'you don't use', it will be 'you don't put in an unthreaded slot'. I have a feeling most people will thread the items that fill their role, like a weapon for a fighter or the armor for a heavy tanker, and use good, but not expensive(relative to their wealth) items in the unthreaded slots.
The quality of gear you want to use will also be a factor in choosing how you want to spend your xp. We don't know how much, but it seems like a large portion of your threads will be bought.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally I am not worried about any of this for the reasons Bringslite points out - anyone using real money (Skymetal) to purchase top-tier armor and weapons will have little hope of protecting much of their items should they loose a PvP. Add in that T3 gear is likely at least a year away from EE at the least, it will not be a problem as there will be plenty of ways to make in-game coin besides selling training time to those who have in-game coin but little spare money in real life.
Soldack also points out something the OP perhaps forgot - there is no endgame or "Win" in PfO. There is no cap, level or otherwise. If you want to train one "class" it'll take 2.5 years, but that isn't the end, as that PC can keep training in other skills. Factor in the non-core "classes" Ryan has stated he's like to see end up in PfO from the varios Advanced books, and you will spend well over a decade to learn every skill (possibly a couple of decades at least).
While there is an emphasis on PvP, PfO isn't a PvP game only. It has PvE, social interaction, exploration, crafting and a whole host of other Sandbox activities. Focusing on only one aspect ignores all the others and makes a character pretty much one dimensional in a game with many dimensions. Frankly I pity anyone who seeks to have the best gear possible, no matter how they acquire it, for the sole purpose of PvP. Eventually, like the WoW episode of South Park, a group will band together and defeat him/her, and given a limited threading, all that gear is suddenly just armor and one weapon. Better to embrace all of the game and see where it takes you.
Lastly, I am confident that Ryan learned from his tenure over at CCP and how EVE was run to learn from their mistakes. While PLEX selling over there does lead to some issues, the threading concept helps remove a big part of those issues. Even if Player A sells enough Skymetal (experience time cards) to be able to buy the best gear, as noted, it isn't likely to be threaded - you need threads to bind points, and top tier gear requires a lot of threads. This, to me, means GW is already looking at how to keep RL money from having too great a factor on in-game play. So, I salute GW on doing what they are to make the subject of this thread moot.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Where is everybody getting this idea that you have to equip garbage if you want to use good items?The way I understood the explanation of threads is:
Low Level - Everything you own
Mid Level - Everything you use
High Level - Most of what you useYes you will have to take some risk at high levels of play, if you want to use all top tier items, but you don't need to equip garbage, because at your level of wealth, you losing mid range gear has less of an impact than a lower player losing lower gear.
I'm understanding it much differently. No I don't expect 1 good item threading, and all garbage being the norm of equipping, but what I expect even less, is death having no sting. The general concept that I was focusing on is I think people are overestimating threading. I think with the exception of when you are very low level, the idea of losing only an insignificant portion of your equipment is problematic, and in general GW themselves have stated things like high powered items that will take up more or less all of your threads if you chose to protect them.
Goblinworks has stated many times things along the lines of characters who only equip what they can thread plus some completely useless garbage, attempting to gank stronger players with the hopes of getting lucky, will be very ineffective.
The implication that even at high levels 80% of your gear is protected... would be pretty counter productive to that, an idea that is more likely to meet that result
Lets assume for effectiveness, there are 10 slots
Low level 10 expected grade gear items threaded
Mid level 5 of expected grade gear items threaded
High level, 1-2 expected gear items threaded.
No the idea isn't that people will equip what they can thread, and then throw garbage in the remaining slots. Doing so should result in them getting their butts kicked by characters that actually put something at stake. But the idea is certainly not, nobody walks around with anything at stake either.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It will probably be a mix of all types:
People with all the "best" gear that can be had, regardless of threads.
Some with the "best" that they can thread and varying lvls below.
Largely dependent on factors like Ego, what you can afford to lose, what you can afford to craft/buy, even what you can find available, etc...
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There are people in Eve who fly ships that are not by any stretch of imagination a 'small fraction' of their wealth: A titan has an estimated cost of 3400 man-hours to create.
The closest Pathfinder equivalent I can imagine would be an adamantine war golem: Implausibly expensive and requiring roughly ten expeditions to the Plane of Earth or some other outer plane simply to gather the raw materials required for the construction.
One might think that someone controlling an adamantine golem is taking little risk; after all, it is not very likely that it will be on the losing end of any engagement it enters, much less be unable to escape. However, they will only be able to enter battles where the opponent either thinks they have a chance at winning, is willing to take losses in order to inflict losses, or has some orthogonal goal - the only time that anyone will do anything but flee is when they think they can come out ahead. That means that any time an adamantine golem actually engages in battle, it is probably at some significant risk.
Likewise for fully-equipped players; they play with 'house money' in battles that their organization thinks are worth the risk to fight, against other organizations that also think the risks are worthwhile.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The most important thing to know about a Titan is that it's not something you could rationally ever expect to make yourself. Making one requires the labor of thousands of players. That's why they're not only valuable, they're rare.
It may take hundreds of dollars, but I could buy one with real world money. (thousands?)
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Goblin Squad Member
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The most important thing to know about a Titan is that it's not something you could rationally ever expect to make yourself. Making one requires the labor of thousands of players. That's why they're not only valuable, they're rare.It may take hundreds of dollars, but I could buy one with real world money. (thousands?)
Apparently $7600 to be exact, according to this:
http://jumponcontact.com/2010/02/the-ships-of-eve-online/...and might I add: holy s***!