Tier Replacement #1: Degradation On A Per-Spellgem Basis

[TNSe]

I see "this is just another way of ammo" is already acknowledged so my work here is done.

[tigersfan]

I'm not necessarily a fan of the repair idea, but, if repairing a gem was only possible as a mission reward, and thereby causing the player to lose out on some other loot/bonus, I think it could work.

[x4000]

God damn it, we players are kinda stupid --- if we go to a new area and the the monsters have gone from 120 health to 300 and then we need to find a spell that can do twice as much damage, we feel like badasses, but if the strong monsters come down to meet us then we feel like we're on a treadmill.  Honestly, even though I know it's the same thing really I still feel that way.  I guess on some level I want to look at a spell doing 9999 damage and think "Gosh, that's a big number."

Yeah, I think that's more or less human nature.  I feel the same way, when you get right down to it; that's just how we wired.  I don't think that getting more vague is the way to go, though -- there has to actually BE a sense of progression, and we've got that planned in multiple fronts when it comes to the mission rewards, the ongoing unlocking of new stuff during your first 80ish levels of play during 1.0, and some of the per-persona progression stuff, etc.  Actual RPG-style stat buffs based on the civ level are something we're moving away from in whatever fashions we can, though.

Coming back to the numbers issue I started with, I do feel like the difficulty curve as is is a bit too smooth.  I know I could jack it up myself by playing in higher-level regions, but I don't like dying, so I tend not to push myself very much.  Perhaps the mission system could push us harder?

Oh, you bet, that's the plan.  The idea is that the core missions would be substantially more difficult and something you had to spend a good while prepping for.  The side missions would be more level-appropriate, and would help you in that prep.  So the core missions will in a lot of respects represent these puzzle-y roadblocks that you have to solve in some fashion, kind of like taking a new planet of major interest in AI War.

1. It's preferable to make only some spell-gems become ineffective so the player has offensive options left.
2. How often do we want to force the player to come back to the caves? Can we make it so that the cycle doesn't feel artificial?
3. Is it a good thing to force the player to return to the caves at all?

Quite agreed on #1 and #2 as the goals.  For #3, I think that it's important to make players go all over the place, but that doesn't have to be in a linear cyclical fashion.  Some of the missions will take place underground anyhow, and I'm planning on having players able to find raw gems in interiors (as several players have requested) in smaller quantities so that they can avoid hoarding.

The benefit of the current system with the tiers is that the hoarding is automatically handled; hoard all the lower-tier gems you like, they'll be useless after a while (kind of like collecting basic tonics in Final Fantasy for some random reason).

Thinking through one train of thought:

---

So, one solution would be to make it so that the raw gems still have tiers, and that you can't use a too-low-tier gem for crafting anymore once your civ level gets past a certain point (and possibly that they just turn into coal or something).

Then if the actual spellgems didn't have tiers, though, that would mean no degradation-as-now effect, but rather instead a degradation-with-use effect that would work in multiplayer and which would work unevenly rather than on all spellgems at once (which is definitely important.  The problem with this is that if the spellgems are tier-less, we wind up with players preemptively creating more copies of their spells with their tier I gems right before their tier I gems turn to coal, which just shifts the inventory's form around some.

Sure you could sort of solve this problem by having a limited amount of inventory that you can carry with you for gems, but that is going to feel arbitrary to a lot of players (much as the degradation does now), and it's going to lead to some cases where someone legitimately wants to grind a lot of tier III gems and bring them home, but they can't because their inventory is slightly too small or whatever.

That means, to me, that really both raw gems and spellgems probably need to keep their tiers, and that the problem isn't so much the tiers as it is the degradation mechanics for stuff of an older tier.  So if we replaced the current degradation mechanics with the "wear and tear" model that was initially suggested, that would solve a lot of things in terms of having inventory degrading unevenly.  But we'd have to add in some logic of some sort for making older tiers of spellgems actually degrade faster, or else having tiers on spellgems in the first place is pointless -- after all, the idea is to make people not hoard their stuff (extra spellgems or extra raw inventory) from right before a tier shift.

But then THAT breaks down in multiplayer, because if you've been away for a month and now everything is tier VII and you're still having tier I stuff, you're really freaking hosed, which is part of the problem.  We could make it so that the multiplayer games remember the "tier at the time your character was last in the world," and then have it auto-upgrade your stuff to tier VII so that you're still current with everyone else.  However that leads to all sorts of possible exploits that I can think of, and there's not an easy way to combat any of those that wouldn't leave some players in the lurch a fair bit of the time.

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And that's all getting more than a bit complex, of course.  It certainly would be CLEANER not to have tiers if we were having a degradation model.  And actually, the rings that we currently use to show the relative tiers of items in inventory could be used to show the general degradation amount!  That's pretty cool, and would keep the interface uncluttered.  If you wanted to see the exact percentage you could just hover above them.

The key, I guess, would be to also have the raw gems degrade over time/use if there were no tiers on anything.  And by use, I mostly mean "use of any spells causes all your carried raw gems to degrade slightly.

And we'd need a thing where duplicate copies of fire touch might both degrade whenever you use either copy of fire touch.  That's a bit hokey, but would discourage hoarding.

Then of course you have players who would want to craft a bunch of stuff, or collect a bunch of raw gems, and then they just leave it in a bag at the settlement so that they can come back and get it later without it having been degraded any.  That would be extremely annoying, to say the least, and not something I can think of a way to combat.



So, all in all I'm really intrigued by this whole line of thinking in this thread, and I think this could be a really positive way to both streamline the game and remove some of the linearity of the grind (and to move even further from RPG territory), but there's still at least one key ingredient missing here before this is an implementable system.

[superking]

why not allow low level spellgems to be crafted and combined into higher level or different color spellgems? assumably in a way that is not strictly efficent (so its usually a good idea to get spells of the normal level from them) but does allow players to advance themselves beyond the curve for a short while

[tigersfan]

Maybe we could have the raw gems age even if they are sitting in a bag somewhere? Say for example, I pick up a raw ruby at lvl. 25, I have all the spellgems from rubies that I want right now, so it sits in a bag. If I don't use it by lvl. 35 (or some other span of levels), then it loses it's power and can't be crafted anymore. This would not apply to spell gems, which only degrade with use (IMO, all use, though the basic spells should degrade it less than the more powerful ones).

This way, even if you are on a MP server, and you don't come back for a month, sure, maybe your raw gems in a bag aren't any good anymore, but, you've still got your spell gems that work just fine, and you can go grab a few more.

This would prevent hoarding, since the stuff is going to stop working soon enough, but also allow you to not totally be hosed if you don't want to go spelunking for more gems all the time.

[x4000]

why not allow low level spellgems to be crafted and combined into higher level or different color spellgems? assumably in a way that is not strictly efficent (so its usually a good idea to get spells of the normal level from them) but does allow players to advance themselves beyond the curve for a short while

Because that adds an extra interface that we have to design, code, and debug, and and extra interface that players have to learn.  For this game to remain accessible, it has to be really judicious about when we add a new menu -- when they are needed they are needed, but often there is a more in-game way of accomplishing the same sort of tasks without adding tons of menus.  As one example, Minecraft has I think... three ingame menus?  Inventory (which doubles as equip), craft, and remote-inventory.

Maybe there's something I'm not thinking of in terms of Minecraft, and we're not going for exactly that level of extreme simplicity in the interface. But most RPGs are a good example of the sort of menu bloat we're specifically trying to avoid, given that this game just doesn't have the sort of stats complexity of many of them.  Adding in lots of other processes for reconstituting old gear, doing combinations, and so on and so forth are really not aspects of the design we'd want to get into now.  I'm not saying that we'd never do anything like that (games tend to get more complex with time), but those sort of mechanics really don't belong at the core of the game, which is the mechanics we're trying to hammer out with something like this.

[x4000]

Maybe we could have the raw gems age even if they are sitting in a bag somewhere? Say for example, I pick up a raw ruby at lvl. 25, I have all the spellgems from rubies that I want right now, so it sits in a bag. If I don't use it by lvl. 35 (or some other span of levels), then it loses it's power and can't be crafted anymore. This would not apply to spell gems, which only degrade with use (IMO, all use, though the basic spells should degrade it less than the more powerful ones).

This way, even if you are on a MP server, and you don't come back for a month, sure, maybe your raw gems in a bag aren't any good anymore, but, you've still got your spell gems that work just fine, and you can go grab a few more.

This would prevent hoarding, since the stuff is going to stop working soon enough, but also allow you to not totally be hosed if you don't want to go spelunking for more gems all the time.

That would have to work on spellgems as well, but sure that could do it, potentially.

[tigersfan]

Maybe we could have the raw gems age even if they are sitting in a bag somewhere? Say for example, I pick up a raw ruby at lvl. 25, I have all the spellgems from rubies that I want right now, so it sits in a bag. If I don't use it by lvl. 35 (or some other span of levels), then it loses it's power and can't be crafted anymore. This would not apply to spell gems, which only degrade with use (IMO, all use, though the basic spells should degrade it less than the more powerful ones).

This way, even if you are on a MP server, and you don't come back for a month, sure, maybe your raw gems in a bag aren't any good anymore, but, you've still got your spell gems that work just fine, and you can go grab a few more.

This would prevent hoarding, since the stuff is going to stop working soon enough, but also allow you to not totally be hosed if you don't want to go spelunking for more gems all the time.

That would have to work on spellgems as well, but sure that could do it, potentially.

Well, sure, if the spellgems are in a bag. Maybe the spellgems need to be on a glyphbearer in order to not break down.

The ones in your inventory would have to persist theoretically forever if they aren't being used for the MP person who only logs in occaisionally.

[x4000]

Right, that's what I meant.

[Hearteater]

In regards to the problem of hording low tier gems and degradation:

1) Allow a player to have one crafted spell gem for each spell
2) Use the "repair" concept I proposed earlier
3) Have lower tier components yield less than a 100% base condition (before adding one-fifth the original spell gem's condition)

This means the CURRENT spell gem a player has never suffers from heavy civ level ups, but his stock of "repair materials" does effectively degrade, encouraging him to find new gems of the appropriate tier.

[x4000]

That would work in a lot of senses, and I really actually liked your original proposition for that kind of repair (forgot to respond, sorry). 

But the problem is that then players can just drop their spellgems to get duplicate copies.  If they pick it back up, sure, then we could just recombine it with the existing one that they have.  But that sort of auto-repair would allow them to more or less go over the 125% cap because they could stockpile a lot of copies externally to their inventory. 

And even more than that, if they just wait until their first gem has completely broken, and then pick up the 100%-fine copy they made a long while back, then they've circumvented both the repairs and the need to get higher-tier gems.

All in all that sort of system would lead to us having to keep a really strict leash on the number of raw gems that players could gain access to in any reasonable span of time, which might be a good idea anyhow, but I'm concerned that would feel too limiting to players and I'd rather have something that wasn't relying on gem scarcity.

[Bluddy]

I really like this degradation + aging notion.

Just to clarify, you wouldn't need any tier levels, you'd just look at component gems and see that they're "low quality". I think you should still be able to craft with old gems, but you'd get inferior results. So you could have a fresh gem and let's say all you have is another old gem. Combine them and you'll get a spell that sometimes misfires or hits for less damage (EDIT: it could also have minor bonuses, like degrading more slowly). That's a strategic decision -- you've been made aware of the inferior components and your spell won't get any worse while it's equipped (other than the gem degrading). But in a pinch, or when you don't feel like spelunking, it would do. Eventually component gems get too old and either decompose or just stop producing spells altogether.

You could then play with these concepts and have certain potions that stop degradation for a while, potions that slow aging, rare NPCs that do these things etc.

Just to throw out another idea I had, you could have hoarding increase risk instead. Spell-gems and component gems could be so precious that leaving huge stashes of them in your settlement is risky. Being stolen is the best scenario -- they could also attract monsters, rogues etc. If you combine this with a limited inventory, gem hoarding becomes a calculated risk. As an alternative to limited inventory, some monsters might steal gems off your glyphbearer.

Yet another (somewhat weaker) idea is to make it so that instead of being able to have several component gems, you can only have bigger gems. You can always keep searching for a gem bigger than the one you have, but you can't have several gems of the same kind. Big gems can produce several spells gems. The result is that you're limiting inventory to 3/5/however gems you want, but in a way that's not as artificial.

[Hearteater]

Is there any particular reason spell gems need to be droppable?  Having them be permanently bound to the creator wouldn't be at all a stretch for the genre, and makes it very easy to enforce the single spell gem/spell rule.

[x4000]

I really like this degradation + aging notion.

Me, too.

Just to clarify, you wouldn't need any tier levels, you'd just look at component gems and see that they're "low quality". I think you should still be able to craft with old gems, but you'd get inferior results. So you could have a fresh gem and let's say all you have is another old gem. Combine them and you'll get a spell that sometimes misfires or hits for less damage. That's a strategic decision -- you've been made aware of the inferior components and your spell won't get any worse while it's equipped. But in a pinch, or when you don't feel like spelunking, it would do. Eventually component gems get too old and either decompose or just stop producing spells altogether.

I assume you're talking about visually we don't need tiers?  Behind the scenes we'd still need to keep track of this in some fashion... or keep track of their amount of degradation, anyhow.  Still being able to craft with them makes sense if you're getting a result that is then pre-degraded by a certain amount.

Having random misfires and fizzles strikes me as something that would only be frustrating to players -- I expect to get the result I want when I use something.  I'd guess that maybe when something is "sort of" degraded it should fizzle on every third shot, and when it's "heavily degraded" it fizzles on every other shot, or something along those lines.  That way it's a predictable sort of fizzling that you can work around if you're inclined to do so, but there's a heavy incentive for getting something that isn't so cruddy.

Similarly, having spells just completely break and disappear seems undesirable to me, since then you could get into situations where you have no spells and no way to get more!  Heh.

You could then play with these concepts and have certain potions that stop degradation for a while, potions that slow aging, rare NPCs that do these things etc.

Down the line, various things like that could be interesting, sure.

Just to throw out another idea I had, you could have hoarding increase risk instead. Spell-gems and component gems could be so precious that leaving huge stashes of them in your settlement is risky. Being stolen is the best scenario -- they could also attract monsters, rogues etc. If you combine this with a limited inventory, gem hoarding becomes a calculated risk. As an alternative to limited inventory, some monsters might steal gems off your glyphbearer.

Yet another (somewhat weaker) idea is to make it so that instead of being able to have several component gems, you can only have bigger gems. You can always keep searching for a gem bigger than the one you have, but you can't have several gems of the same kind. Big gems can produce several spells gems. The result is that you're limiting inventory to 3/5/however gems you want, but in a way that's not as artificial.

I'm not really keen on limited inventory, or introducing multiple grades or sizes of raw gems, to be honest.  That just adds complexity into a system that I feel like should be simple.  Where the complexity should come is in the longer-term and middle-term decisions that you're making, which would most manifest in the missions you're doing, what you actually choose to craft, etc.  And even the tactics of larger battles and encounters, or strategies for moving around the world. 

I feel like a lot of the base mechanics need to be pretty darn straightforward so that players aren't overwhelmed with "complexity from top to bottom," instead finding a rich experience that rewards careful thought and skillful Metroidvania play, but which isn't complex in the details of how a lot of the basic decisions are actually carried out.  Hence my really being interested in boiling a lot of the core mechanics down to their essences, to meet all the game goals in the simplest possible way at that level so that the missions seem like fun and not like an extra burden when a new player would already be struggling just to understand, for instance, the crafting system or how to manage their mana or whatever.

And monsters like Like Likes in Zelda tend to be pretty reviled, so I'm not sure about theft from the player.  That could be fun in a side quest sort of fashion, or in certain regions, but as a general game mechanic I think I'd have people after me with torches and pitchforks.

Is there any particular reason spell gems need to be droppable?  Having them be permanently bound to the creator wouldn't be at all a stretch for the genre, and makes it very easy to enforce the single spell gem/spell rule.

It is true that spellgems don't really need to be droppable in the main.  The two reasons arguing for it are:

1. Being able to give a spellgem to a friend in multiplayer, which is all kinds of useful (and which has the same exploits possible as just dropping it on the ground).  I'm not sure how to get around this, but maybe it's not actually a problem.

2. Being able to clear out stuff from your inventory that you no longer want, since there are more spells and items than inventory space.  But for this one, we could simply do something like having the item disintegrate when you drop it, and have the game warn you that's about to happen.

[Hearteater]

1. Being able to give a spellgem to a friend in multiplayer, which is all kinds of useful (and which has the same exploits possible as just dropping it on the ground).  I'm not sure how to get around this, but maybe it's not actually a problem.

2. Being able to clear out stuff from your inventory that you no longer want, since there are more spells and items than inventory space.  But for this one, we could simply do something like having the item disintegrate when you drop it, and have the game warn you that's about to happen.

I don't think #1 is a problem really.  If I want to gear up a new friend, I can always provide the materials to make spell gems.  As a plus he learns the crafting system too.

I think #2 fits with a lot of other games.  Also, locking spell gems to a player is actually a small form of character customization.