[CF List] The 'dis'economy of crossfire
Mark Wedel
mwedel at sonic.net
Mon Aug 26 23:25:32 CDT 2002
cflist at gmx.li
wrote:
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Hi,
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Mark Wedel <
mwedel at sonic.net
> wrote:
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>>
But is weight of the money any real issue? Would reduced weight (or
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say yet
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another higher denomination coinage) really help out this problem? If
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anything, I think it may be worse because large sums of money would be
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that much easier to carry around.
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No, I didn't propose this as part of the solution (except for some reasons
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described below), but because I find it annoying to run around a dungeon,
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get tons of money (especially silver), then have to run to a bank and very
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soon have to run home again and drop the money there. Therefore I would
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prefer to be able to simply throw my money to a bank (to be made available
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in all towns) and don't have to care about it any more. I do not buy
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significantly more or less because I can carry only a finite amount of
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money (for all purposes I can carry enough money).
Note that the bank won't really solve the problem of getting so much coinage
in the dungeon that you need to carry it back to town. All it really solves is
that you then don't need to drop that off at your home base.
But right now, there are solutions to that:
1) Most all towns I think have permanent apartments available - buy one in the
town you are in.
2) Convert that coinage to something easy to carry, like gems. I think all
towns have coinage -> gem converts, so an infinite supply of gems are available.
If you getting that much loot, that extra service fee (5%) probably isn't that
significant.
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I said the rent should have to be paid every time a player logs in,
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thinking of people playing infrequently, so this player would have to pay
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less, I agree with you that it should be possible to play only
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infrequently. The payment of rents is something which would be solved best
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by the bank idea, as it could just go automatically. I agree to you that
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this should not lock out a player from his items within the apartment.
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Maybe a player who loses his apartment just gets access to a single-square
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room without a bed to reality into which all stuff is thrown. I think most
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players would attempt to get their apartments back as soon as possible.
Most players probably would buy back their apartment. But I'm still not sure
of a good way to do this. If simply based on logins, players are more likely to
not log out if they are only going to be away for a short time. It would also
penalize those whose connections are more prone to dropage. Also, unless the
fee is very high, I'm not sure if this would have much effect on amount of money
player has.
Also, if cost is based on size of apartment, I could see many people wanting
to downgrade their apartment to be smaller after they realize what the fees are.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to handle that.
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Of course real trade at a second hand store starts only when there is much
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activity on a server so that there are many players putting different
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stuff in there. Nevertheless there is the problem that indeed there is no
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great variety in items that players find. Mostly you might find the 15-20
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random artifacts in there plus some other stuff, that mostly everyone can
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get anyways. We could think of these stores as some kind of trading
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between players - or that would be what we wish to achieve. But you can
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only get that if there are some powerful items that are very very rare.
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You might take a look at the "yellow" items in Diablo 2. These are
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powerful randomly enchanted items, more powerful sometimes than the well
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known random artifacts. If one might introduce something like them there
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might be achieved some real trade between players.
I think there are some things like that in crossfire - randomly generated
artifacts that are very useful. But these are also very rare.
One problem here is mentality of the players. I know that for myself, I'm
more likely to keep one of each interesting item I have, simply because selling
it doesn't do me much good.
You could do something like have a curio shop. Need to pay money to get
inside, but you don't know what is inside until you pay your fee (thus, just
those looking for something burn up money) - this fee would be per player - it
wouldn't be something like one player pays the fee then everyone can get in.
This shop may then have some of the 'more common' random artifacts that people
generally look for and keep. This at least helps out in the mid level range
(<20 perhaps), where players have money, but don't have all the coolest items yet.
But in the long run, the problem is that there is just a lot of money out
there. You get to level 20, for the most part have all the 'normal' items you
want, so you sell most everything you get, but have nothing to buy. Even my
above example doesn't help out - you probably won't see anything in the shop
that you want to buy.
One question may be - what do people in general think of having some of the
random artifacts available for purchase? I know with the removal of potions,
the idea is that we wanted players to have to go out and find items. That is
now the case, but doesn't leave anything to be bought.
Another idea may be the ability to buy experience with money. Maybe 1 pp = 1
exp in skill category of your choice. I don't know how much money the really
high level characters have, but I don't see this as being all that unbalancing.
On the bright side, it means that this is useful at almost all levels -
especially if you can increase some of the skills that you are otherwise having
troubles to increase.
pc-crossfire at crowcastle.net
wrote:
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On the other hand, it makes it easier to have things in stores that cost
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huge amounts of money without having to use a separate mechanism (gems).
But are gems really that hard to use? You see how much the item costs (and if
you don't have enough coinage, the game will tell you how much you are short
when you try to leave the store), and drop enough gems to make up the
difference. Or drop all the gems you have if you don't care.
Perhaps the one 'problem' right now is that there is typically not a large
supply of the high priced gems - you can buy as many emeralds, diamonds, etc as
you want, but finding of 'great beauty', flawess, exceptional value, etc come in
limited supply. So you can still get stuck with having 1000 normal diamonds or
something.
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Personally, I think it would be cool to have a bank in some hard-to-get-to
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location that would convert to mithril pieces or something like that.
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Shops would accept the coins, but you could only get them by converting
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them at that one bank.
would anyone bother? As said above, is using gems really that difficult? Is
losing that 5% that big a deal (the price you pay for buying/selling gems is not
based on your charisma - it is a fixed price). I know for myself that if I had
a pile of loot, I'd go to the local gem shop and convert it to gems before
taking a long trek to a special bank to get mithril pieces. Especially if the
amount of loot I have is such that my movement rate is somewhat slow.
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While that makes sense, I'm not too excited about the idea as a player. If
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you have to pay for transportation to a given land, we need to be sure that
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the land has everything a player would need for a while; players won't be
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moving between lands as frequently. On the other hand, this would help
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keep players from town-hopping to search each shop for that odd scroll or
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potion.
As said, it really depends on the price. If the price is somewhat low (<100
pp), it really doesn't do much at all - rich characters probably won't care
about that amount of money with you ahve 20,000 pp. However, if it gets too
expensive, it will probably put of players from traveling there (why pay 1000 pp
to go to wolfsburg? I'll adventure around here where it is cheap).
Note that one of my long range goals would be to change the game/movement so
to go to wolfsburg, you would buy a boat and have to navigate it yourself to
wherever you want to go. Thus, you now have some real travel time, and you
would chew up money buying a boat. Some of the very old ultima games did this.
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Ultimately, an appartment or house is a place for storing stuff. It can
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also be a place for conducting party business if you let multiple players
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share a single space, which is cool, but has problems with new players
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finding everything already bought up. Perhaps we should have a separate
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discussion of what would make for the ultimate house, and then we could
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design one with separate parts with exponentially higher prices to open up
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the parts.
I know guilds have been added, which multiple people can access the same
unique map. I think at least 3 players are needed to make a guild - haven't
played with them much, so I'm not sure how they grant access to additional players.
the per player unique apartment was added to some extent because the common
apartments did get filled up (and the fact that on some servers, that map get
very large as everyone stored huge piles of stuff in their apartment).
However, with the maps-bigworld, the city maps are placed directly on the
world maps - if you wanted to, you could create urbran sprawl outside the city
walls - eg, people go to the town hall to buy a house, and said house is put
someplace on that map around the city. More money perhaps means bigger house,
better sight, larger site, etc. But this starts to get somewhat tricky to do.
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You could have a set of statues that could be modified for a price. Every
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time someone makes a change, the price to change that one again goes up.
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On a popular multi-user server, the high-level characters could go back and
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forth bidding up the price to have their own statues.
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On the other hand, we're not a massively-multi-player game like Ultima
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Online, so things like that won't suck money out of the economy as
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efficiently as they do in that environment.
and some of these points requires the players to care. Eg, if I don't care
about having a statue with my name on it, that doesn't suck any money out of me.
And I can predict players saying 'what, the only way to use up this mass of
coinage is to just buy a statue for myself?'
The biggest problem is just the large amount of money available at higher
levels. That is what really needs to get cut down.
temitchell at sympatico.ca
wrote:
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It would be fun to implement a new action and skill - gambling. Anyone
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could gamble but higher gambling skills would add to your success. Luck
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comes in too. You could move a lot of money around this way and a whole new
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profession would be born.
The house may take a cut, but if two players are playing, it just shuffles the
money between them - doesn't really take it out the game (so the new player is
now just richer and still doesn't have anything to do with it)
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Things should cost more in general. Food should cost more, skills should
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cost more and some skills like magic should cost way way more (like 10000
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diamonds or something).
But its difficult - you don't want to starve the low level characters because
they can't afford the food.
The skill scrolls are relatively cheap. Perhaps if they were very expensive,
people would really consider the race/class they choose even more. As it is
now, you sort of know that by level 15 (probably even earlier), you can pick up
all the skills you want, so what you chose when you created the character
doesn't mean too much.
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Item repair is a great idea - it works well for another game I know of.
I think we are somewhat agreed that this is a good starting point. We should
really do this first and see how it effects cash for the players.
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Tithes should be part of any religious order. Paladins in particular should
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have to pay through the nose. I don't know how you would calculate the rate
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for this however, cash on hand calculations would just encourage stashing
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the cash somewhere. Maybe an amount based on level.
Maybe. PRoblem is that most of the classes tried to get balanced. If
paladins now have to pay some large amount of money just for being a paladin,
that class probably isn't worth playing anymore.
Note that with some code, it would certainly be possible to track how much the
player has earned (eg, anytime he picks up money, add it to some value in the
player structure. Whenever he sells something, add those proceeds to that same
total). The players wisdom exp could then hold how much he has donated in his
career. Depending on the percentage changes various things. Eg, praying at an
altar won't get you much if your donated percentage is 0. If you donated
percentage is say 50%, you would get some really good stuff. Perhaps some of
the special prayers/items are only given if you donation percentage is about
some value.
Note that some trickier still exists - you could sell a minimal amount of
items so that the amount you have 'earned' isn't that high, even though your
stash of items may be worth a lot. However, if you ever do sell that stuff,
your in trouble them (if for example you need a 20% donation percentage to get
cool whatever, if it drops below 10%, maybe the god takes it away).
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Training is an old standard - you pay to level up once you got the xp.
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Would be tricky to implement perhaps.
could add training centers. You don't get any advantage of a new level until
you go and train. However, you'd need to make sure one training center is added
for each city.
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I like the idea of citizenship too, or at least town papers and entry fees
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for some towns.
But like above for ship passage, getting a good balance is difficult.
Especially since the problem is really high level characters. I don't think
there is too much a problem below level 10.
But more importantly, I really don't want to discourage people from going to
certain places - there already is some shortage of good maps out there, and if
people won't go to XYZ because they don't want to pay the fees, it only makes
things worse.
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All this is cool, but the basic problem is that it is too easy to get money
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in the first place - especially the random treasures in certain maps. This
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could be said of experience as well however - having a player get to level
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99 in three months is aceptable for a singleplayer campain type game but it
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pretty bad if you are shooting for a multiplayer persistant type world game.
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I think that this identity crisis is the heart of the problem. The whole
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game could be said to be monty haul - this will be a long fix to correct it.
That I think is the real problem. But analysis of the causes is what needs to
get done.
Are people getting to level 110 because monsters give too much exp? Or is it
they can just go to the right dungeons where there are 300 of the right monster?
For money, is it special artifacts, or is it more the fact that the random
generated items jsut really add up - thinks like +2 x of lythander can be worth
a lot of money, due to the multiplicative effects.
At the same time, this is sort of tricky - the rare find that is worth a lot
of money is sort of cool - I still remember when I found a +2 crown or something
in the basement of gorks - worth a lot of money for that character, and still
sticks in my memory. If all you ever found at the dungeon was just stuff you'd
expect for that level, it would be sort of boring - that one exceptional find is
what makes things interesting.
The trick of course is that find should be exceptional, and not a common
occurance.
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