CMaff
09-02-2009, 01:11
Bashiok's most recent post on gold sinks got me thinking about incentives for gold and how to effectively manage gold's usefulness. My basic conclusions:
1) Repair costs and mercenary costs should return, because durability contributes a unique strategic aspect to items, and merc deaths should hurt. The more epic your gear or dominant your merc, the more you should have to spend on keeping them functional. This means that every player, no matter their level, will need money on hand in order to play, and any quantity of money can be useful.
2) Money should only contribute to the player's ability to destroy enemies. Buying pretty cloaks or turning your fire-defense boots from red to blue is dumb and unnecessary. It is the DIII team's responsibility to make each item contribute to the appearance of your character, so that every character looks unique according to the unique combination of items and skills they use. This also adds incentive for people to blaze their own trail, so to say.
3) Buying temporary buffs is a good idea, but might not work. I like the idea that before an epic boss battle I can get back to town and pay a mage NPC to give me a health or exp boost for a hefty sum of money. After a while, though, might it simply become tedious? Would some people obsess over buffing themselves, and always be buffed? Then isn't the buff just a cheap crutch that some people depend on? I think there should only be a certain number of buffs allowed or something, but I dont want to talk about buffs anymore.
4) Gambling should be the primary means of gold use. When I think back on my DII days (hey-days), I used to love getting up over a million gold and then blowing it all on rings, ammys, gloves and boots. It is gambling, and gambling is fun. Some people didnt like this, because it was so hard to get good stuff with gambling. Simple solution: scale the amount of money gambled with the chance of getting a good item. Make it absurdly expensive to gamble for an elite sword, but you are guaranteed an elite sword, etc etc. There is a balance, and the dev team can find it. And there should be a second form of gambling:
DUNGEON GAMBLING.
There should be areas where you can pay a certain amount for a guaranteed quest or unique monster appearance. Examples:
1) A bridge on the outskirts of Tristram has a troll taking a toll. You pay the toll (to the troll's surprise) and there is a guaranteed random special dungeon or mini-quest to complete.
2) An abandoned mansion in Caldeum has a caretaker guarding the door. You bribe the caretaker to allow you inside, and any number of challenges might face you.
Lets call these random events challenges. Each entrance point would have maybe twenty possible challenges, some of which are better than others. One might be a countess-like challenge, where you are guaranteed a rune. In this way, you are gambling for the quality and difficulty of the challenge first, and then you have the second unknown of how lucky you get with drop from completing the challenge.
Why will this work? People already collect body parts to take on uber-tristram. This is the same concept, there are just many different possible uber-tristrams and you can access them much easier. And wouldn't gambling for items be more fun if you had to kick Gheed's *** before he coughed it up?
If you don't agree, that's fine, just say why you don't think it will work. If you do agree, share your support and ideas. Where could the "entrances" be? What kinds of instances would you want to see?
1) Repair costs and mercenary costs should return, because durability contributes a unique strategic aspect to items, and merc deaths should hurt. The more epic your gear or dominant your merc, the more you should have to spend on keeping them functional. This means that every player, no matter their level, will need money on hand in order to play, and any quantity of money can be useful.
2) Money should only contribute to the player's ability to destroy enemies. Buying pretty cloaks or turning your fire-defense boots from red to blue is dumb and unnecessary. It is the DIII team's responsibility to make each item contribute to the appearance of your character, so that every character looks unique according to the unique combination of items and skills they use. This also adds incentive for people to blaze their own trail, so to say.
3) Buying temporary buffs is a good idea, but might not work. I like the idea that before an epic boss battle I can get back to town and pay a mage NPC to give me a health or exp boost for a hefty sum of money. After a while, though, might it simply become tedious? Would some people obsess over buffing themselves, and always be buffed? Then isn't the buff just a cheap crutch that some people depend on? I think there should only be a certain number of buffs allowed or something, but I dont want to talk about buffs anymore.
4) Gambling should be the primary means of gold use. When I think back on my DII days (hey-days), I used to love getting up over a million gold and then blowing it all on rings, ammys, gloves and boots. It is gambling, and gambling is fun. Some people didnt like this, because it was so hard to get good stuff with gambling. Simple solution: scale the amount of money gambled with the chance of getting a good item. Make it absurdly expensive to gamble for an elite sword, but you are guaranteed an elite sword, etc etc. There is a balance, and the dev team can find it. And there should be a second form of gambling:
DUNGEON GAMBLING.
There should be areas where you can pay a certain amount for a guaranteed quest or unique monster appearance. Examples:
1) A bridge on the outskirts of Tristram has a troll taking a toll. You pay the toll (to the troll's surprise) and there is a guaranteed random special dungeon or mini-quest to complete.
2) An abandoned mansion in Caldeum has a caretaker guarding the door. You bribe the caretaker to allow you inside, and any number of challenges might face you.
Lets call these random events challenges. Each entrance point would have maybe twenty possible challenges, some of which are better than others. One might be a countess-like challenge, where you are guaranteed a rune. In this way, you are gambling for the quality and difficulty of the challenge first, and then you have the second unknown of how lucky you get with drop from completing the challenge.
Why will this work? People already collect body parts to take on uber-tristram. This is the same concept, there are just many different possible uber-tristrams and you can access them much easier. And wouldn't gambling for items be more fun if you had to kick Gheed's *** before he coughed it up?
If you don't agree, that's fine, just say why you don't think it will work. If you do agree, share your support and ideas. Where could the "entrances" be? What kinds of instances would you want to see?