Goblin Squad Member
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... I'd prefer to keep things looking real.
So would I.
I really don't need a light show to distract me. My wife and some friends of ours keep talking about how beautiful Aion and TERA are. I find them annoying. Yes, the character models are good, if somewhat stuck in a style I don't really care for, but the world itself is alternately utterly bland and small, and utterly overwhelming with light shows and particle effects. No thanks!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm fairly certain Aeioun Plainsweed's suggestion was in reference to the way the item names are usually color-coded in most games. I don't believe she was suggesting the items themselves should have a color that was visible in-world.Apologies to Aeioun, if that's the case.
I've just been scarred by some really horrible eye-blistering adverts for other MMOs, with BESM avatars frolicking in dayglo panties, and I'd prefer to keep things looking real.
No problems. I meant the name/icon border color-coding like Nimimon said. The color-coding imo is a kind of meta-game feat only to help the player identify the need of an item faster and I don't understand why that is standard stuff. It takes away some of the excitement of finding a new item and checking it's properties.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Instant identification of magic items and immediately visible color codes are very meta, but some MMOs have successfully avoided them, to some extent.
When you get a legendary weapon in Lord of the Rings Online, you instantly know what kind of weapon it is (sword/axe/bow) and whether it was made by the elves (an artifact of the First Age), the Numenoreans (Second Age), or modern men (Third Age). You don't know what its powers/effects are until you take it to an expert for identification. The rest of your loot still comes pre-identified, though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Instant identification of magic items and immediately visible color codes are very meta, but some MMOs have successfully avoided them, to some extent.
As a Wizard who hopes to specialize in Divination, and who tries valiantly to resist despair at the thought of whether or not that will be viable, I am highly in favor of requiring explicit identification of magical items.
Of course, it won't matter in PFO nearly as much as it does in other MMOs because we won't be seeing tons of magic items dropping from mobs...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, if items will have 'keywords' that take up valuable 'threads', then why not the ability to discern 'keywords' on random items found off a hostile creature?
Likewise, a friendly creature/PC might decide to not let the new owner know what all the 'keywords' are involved in the weapon in an attempt to pass off a fraudulent item, or perhaps to sneak an 'Epic' weapon past a blockade by using a ignorant courier to carry the 'patterned steel broadsword' past the guards.
Use of an item might help eventually unlock WHAT the item is, but unless the abilities of a weapon are tied to obvious motifs on the item itself, it adds a whole 'easter egg' surprise to every item that is 'randomly' found.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I doubt GW will do the same thing WOW has for resources. We have to remember that the themepark games need to come up with new garbage to throw at their subscribers to keep them busy enough to stay. If the people are not kept busy they will find something else.
In PFO we will not have the problem. The players themselves will keep each other busy. Thats the glory of a sandbox and open world pvp.
Eve has added a few resource patches. Stuff they talked about adding from the beginning like moon and planet minerals. Thats about it. I do not expect PFO to be much different.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Early iron-forging techniques were so bad that they occasionally made steel accidentally.I do wonder if that's where stories of magic swords originated - fluke weapons that were better than most other weapons.
It's more likely it came from people coming across swords of more advanced technology. The one steel sword in a region of people still using bronze, or a light flexible Viking sword with fuller pitted against heavier more fragile conventional weapons.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As far as the rarity of items on the high or highest end of a crafting item list, I can see (and have noted a few times elsewhere) that it makes sense for the longevity of the game and the demanding expertise for a Master Craftsman to reach the pinnacle of his/her skill set to require the same amount of time as a Master in a class skill, in Ryan's early examples that would be around two years real time.
So, the really rare materials wouldn't likely even be seeded early on. Rather they would be "saved" for future seeding when it would make more sense, and would save development time not worrying about the artwork, mechanics, or additional programming time to deal with the highest end gear until much later. The seeding of raw materials would possibly run say, 2 years out when the most skilled harvesters and gatherers would begin to have the skill to identify and extract these materials, and the refiners and crafters are just getting to the point in their crafting career when they can think about creating a masterpiece. These should all really be masterpieces, after all. Mithril and Adamantite aren't sitting around in large piles in the treasury. More likely there are only a few small precious ingots waiting for en extraordinary craftsman worthy of such a task.
The rarest materials will be very rare, hard to find, worth fighting for, and carefully extracted under heavy guard. Getting the materials would be a huge project all by itself.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's more likely it came from people coming across swords of more advanced technology. The one steel sword in a region of people still using bronze, or a light flexible Viking sword with fuller pitted against heavier more fragile conventional weapons.Early iron-forging techniques were so bad that they occasionally made steel accidentally.I do wonder if that's where stories of magic swords originated - fluke weapons that were better than most other weapons.
In most cases, it wasn't the case that a 'people' were still using bronze when their enemies were using iron. The technology spread but the people didn't (en-masse, anyway), so most societies tended to be of a similar technological level, with some individuals using iron and some using bronze. As mentioned earlier, bronze was actually superior in many respects, but was more expensive.
There is no evidence that any bronze age people was ever overcome by enemies because of a technological inferiority. The old example often quoted is the spread of Celtic people and their displacement of older societies. This has been examined genetically and no evidence has been found to support it. Given that the culture of the old late Neolithic (and hence 'Bronze Age') populations was almost entirely wiped out, the old argument had the people themselves being subverted in the most part by the Celtic (read 'Iron Age') invaders.
This is not shown by the DNA, however. The people of Ireland, for example, have far less evidence of population change since the Neolithic than those of the east coast of England, who are themselves still mainly of the older genetic stock. Yet Ireland is thought of as a prime example of a Celtic people (the Celtic upsurge was post-Neolithic). The 'Celtic' change had less impact on the UK population genetically than the later Viking invasions, and we know that they did not supplant the existing population.
The phrase 'Celtic' should be thought of as a cultural and language group, and not as a genetically-similar people coming over and physically subverting the existing people. Instead it was the spread of the language, technology and culture that is seen by the archaeological evidence.
There were no iron-wielding peoples rampaging about the place slaughtering bronze-wielders. What there was was a rise in technology and culture which slowly subverted bronze weapons and armour within the existing populations.
Think of it like the spread of US technology and culture in the C20th. Faster, because of modern communications and transport, but nonetheless you see US technological and cultural impact in places as far away as China. That doesn't mean that the USA has invaded and wiped out existing technology and culture, but that the existing people have adopted it to replace and supplement their own.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The origin of magic items is probably oral tradition, many people tend to exaggerate things and the light can do tricks to your eyes. Also some truly exceptional people live in the world and existence is vast beyond human senses and knowledge. Every human being him/herself is the most sophisticated particle accelerator in my opinion.