List of suggestions and salutations

[Ina Blackwood]

Hello there, first of all I'll apologize for my bad english; I'm still learning and I do a lot of mistakes while writing. I hope I can make things I want to say understandable (I'm using google translator right now xD). The second thing I'll do is to say hello all with this first post I do in the forum.

I've been playing Fonline Reloaded for two weeks and I can say that, as a Fallot (1, 2, 3, Tactis and New Vegas -moded-) player that's all I can expect: truly challenging and exciting, different of many MMORPGs in many ways and full of details, and I'm sure I've not seen the bests things yet. I noticed there's a wipe coming soon and I'd like to suggest some ideas I'm thinking about since I started exploring the wasteland. If I'm saying things out of the ordinary or some of them are extravagant or impossible to implement you can call me noob freely. I'll hunt you ingame... someday  . This is just a brainstorming and I'm sure that many of you (developers and players) will find a lot of them a real shit or you thought it before.

The idea of this list is not only make a better game experience but to characterize much more the roles of the characters. By now one single player can be all he wants, and reach everything by all the ways he want. A good rpg (by my point of view) is that one where you can reach succes by many different ways. In addition, if we avoid the idea of making a one-man-army character, we force all players to collaborate with each other and make a perfect online rpg. Here goes the list.   

Economy, crafting and profesions.

- Initial crafteable objects depending on skills: I don't think everyone is capable of making 10mm bullets or pistols, lighters or healing powders. Those initial crafteable objects can take much more value if we make it not crafteable to all kinds of character, and can introducte them in the NPC vendor economy. So you must waste some of your caps in basic equipment instead of creating it by yourself if you are lacking of some skills as outdoorsman, small guns, first aid, doctor or traps.
   
- Professions: It's easy to reach 100% of doctor and repair. And this means you can have 4 of 6 professions of the game. By other way, taking a profession is so easy: just 4500 caps and you can craft high level items. Making a "crafting quest" to do it could be much more interesting, like delivering to your crafting teacher some object (for example a unique or advanced 10mm pistol for reaching first level of gunsmith, crafted by yourself or liying him with speech about the crafter). You should have higher conditions too: good doctor and first aid for doctor profession, good traps and repair for demolition expert, good small (or big) guns and repair for any kind of gunsmither. By other way, people usually speciallizes in one profession, reaching all 6 its not realistic. Maybe 2, but not 6... or having more than one profession without reaching the second level.   

- Vendor stock: I've seen the main way to make money is to sell your crafted items to vendors before other players take all their caps. It could be good to make a limit for each item for every vendor and make him not interested in some items when he reaches this limit displaying a message like "im not interested in that" instead of having a cero value in trade window. This can force players to trade among them, and make weapons and other items take a real value. This makes people search for other ways to get items, by bartering with other players and NPCs (not vendors), working or stealing. Remember that in the wasteland the real value of an object depends on his utility. The goal of bartering shouldn't be to get big amounts of caps, but to get useful equipment. The real currency in a dangerous post nuclear land are not the caps but the ammunition.   

- Other ways to earn caps: Yes, I know that if you want good stuff as cars, implants, private mines or bases you need a lot of caps, and we make it much more difficult if vendors don't want all crafted items of all players. The actual quest are good, but not enought to reach that amount of caps we need, so the answer is to make better cooperative quests. For example, trading with the Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel, NRC, New Reno mafias with big amounts of weapons, ammunition, drugs, medicines or basic goods, making special (and hard) missions for some of these factions. Town control would become a very imporant way to earn caps too. All of these things would affect reputation, a system that its not very useful now, but it can become important when it depends on wich quests you can do. 

Game system 

- Loss of experience for death: That idea may be a pain in the ass but I find it very exciting. Maybe not in first levels, but if there is not a level cap, beyond certain level the task of leveling could be very hard. Losing experience don't means necessarily losing levels, means to start again from the same level you reached before. If you are level 100, you'll be never under level 100, but it will be hard to reach level 101.   

- Importance of the age: If your character reach certain age, it means you've done a lot of things. Most of them with reward. But this is the future and we are not interested in retirement plans; we want to life more and burn muties with flamethrowers forever. If there is implants for making you better in physical attributes, there should be implants for making your life longer. Yes, this means characters may die or lose attributes if they reach certain age (depending on their endurance, maybe). This could make all players start as teenagers, but companions, mercs and bartenders maybe are not interested in trading with childs. Well, if someone plans not to play FOnline during a long time, this means his character will lose a lot opportunities of became a good wastelander. But there can be some kind of "genetic preservation" in some place like Enclave or Vault City were you can leave your character when you want to stay in the real life for a while. 

- Penalty for being overweight on turn based: In real time you need to run, but not in turn based. As when you have a crippled leg, walking with overweight should penalty movement with two or three action points per hex movement.     

- Caps weight and other NPC faction currency: Carrying a lot of caps is like carrying a lot of coins and you can't walk freely with 8000 or 10000 coins. Anyway, if caps have no weight, its the same to steal 1 or 1000. Maybe develop some other paper currency (as NCR dollars) could be good and make NPC not interested in them depending on the world zone.   

- Food and alchool: Only beer act as a useful drug, delivering charisma instead perception. Other liquours are simply useless if you only lose perception. Moreover food is useless too, maybe the food can be useful making you getting a bit of some kind of resistance or a better healing regeneration.

 Exploration

- Basic random objects on city and village containers and better private property: You shoudn't enter in houses and opening all chests, boxes and shelves whithout problems. In fact, you shouldn't open all house doors. Some closed items could warn players not to enter in some places or picking some things, or guards can warn players not to do some things. In the other hand, stealing from NPCs could be a good way to take some basic objects you cannot craft... and some caps too. 

- Explode doors and lockers: Lockpick skill is useful, but we can do things in the hard way too: if locks are too much hard to open, let's blow them! Of course there's a risk of destroying the content inside the lockers (making them turn into junk) depending on our traps skill and the power of the explosive used. Dinamite, frag grenade... or rockets. 

- Hideouts: It's important to have a safe place unreachable to other people, but i feel that 10 tents is pretty excesive and make other options discarted. Other options as making a not perfectly safe hideout as city ruins or caves, NPC faction bases (it makes to belong a NPC faction a real advantage). It's good to have a place to hide all the important stuff you want, but its not really challenging to have a lot of places to do it: 10 tents + bases + faction bases...  I know "not perfectly safe" is a term that scares, but it can simply be a place really hard to find where you can put traps, robotic guards, locks or mercenaries and companions. This "not perfectly safe hideout" could be a random place you mark in your map (with a limit as 1 or 2) where you can take benefit of a random place you find in a random encounter as a cave, a hugue building full of doors or a hidden hole between rocks in the desert, and it can be a good alternative when you reach your tent limit (that can be degraded to 2 or 3 tents), and can make the map exploration much more interesting. 

 - Ranger perk: Why ranger perk means to have a workbrech in an upgraded tent? A tent could be upgraded by the reaching of high level on skills as outdoorsman or repair and the accumulation of basic resources as iron, wood and junk. Ranger perk could mean to have better chance to find special encounter, make easier to upgrade your tent or making basic resources appear more often in random encounters. In addition, if tent limit is degraded, ranger perk can improve this limit (and the limit of "not perfectly safe" hideouts). This makes outdoorsman a not must-have skill for some kinds of player.   

- Quality resources in random encounters. Well, maybe finding uranium everywhere is not realistic... but quality iron is possible. 

- Better warded random lockers: It's supposed this lockers you find are the hideout of someone. A simple lock seems too poor as protection and those bear traps are very predictible. I suggest to put explosive traps, worse rewards, closed (and trapped) doors before you can reach the locker, and bear traps not sorrounding the locker but in strategic places as doors or paths. This can make treasure hunting much more interesting.   

- More information taken from NPCs: The best feature of any game is the inmersion, and the inmersion is better when you can find the information about the game inside the game. Make NPCs display information about the actual situation of some player and NPC factions, who is the best gunsmither, doctor or assasin, where you can find the local business or points of interest or interesting people. Of course, the better speech level, the better information is displayed. In other way, a lot of NPCs say nothing when you click on them. I know this feature is pretty good it is now, i've found a lot of things making questions to NPCs, but it can be much better.

Well, thats all. You can fire...


...answers.

[Corosive]

Very interesting!

[Kilgore]

Welcome.

1. Basic items should be craftable without requirements, there is no need to make the game harsher for new players.
2. Limits for professions won't work, it was already like that on 2238, resulted in more alts (many characters of one player, each one with different profession) and unnecessary annoyance.
3. Vendor stocks: again, any additional limits will result in a massive river of tears from those who want caps.
4. There are many ways to earn caps. For now, selling crafted equipment is much more effective than others, but it should change with new session.
5. Loss of experience after certain level, without dropping character levels: I thought about it some time ago, but it would result in less pvp for some players, and more grind, so I dropped the idea.
6. Importance of age: I don't think it would improve anything, and characters dying because of age would be very bad.
7. RT and TB are very different and not balanced, overweight is the last of all problems there.
8. Caps weight: again, no real improvement, but would cause many problems. Bad idea.
9. Food will be used for healing.
10. Basic random objects: already done, waiting for new session.
11. Exploding doors: already done. Destroying locks: there is no reason to make lockpick skill even more useless.
12. Hideouts: you can have many tents with the use of alts. That's why the limit will be increased, not decreased. "Not perfectly safe" means locations that will be useless. If player has to store some items of value in a location 100% safe and 99% safe, then he'll choose that 100% safe despite how cool that 99% location was.
13. The chance for finding special encounters won't be based on any stat. Ranger perk is good as it is. There is no reason to change something that is working well.
14. Yeah there will be new ways to gather resources.
15. Much more interesting locker hunting? Or just more difficult and less profitable?
16. Why would anybody ask NPCs about the best crafters etc. if you can just open pipboy and read it?

[Ina Blackwood]

Thanks for the answers. The "problem" is the possibility of unlimited characters per player. I guess I'm thinking on this by the wrong point of view. Anyway, if professions have harder conditions (like higher skill points and a limit of 1) it could make people to search for other trading alternatives instead of making an "alt" (in this case, various "alts") only for crafting some kind of stuff.

6. Importance of age: I don't think it would improve anything, and characters dying because of age would be very bad.

Allright, but maybe some refection of the age on the game could be good... like "sex appeal" perk doesn't work on a certain age, younger characters are not able to do some things or some NPC answers. However I guess that's an idea that requires a lot of work for something not really important.

7. RT and TB are very different and not balanced, overweight is the last of all problems there.

Well, I was not thinking in balancing RT and TB, just thinking about running back to your base with much more things you can carry from the loots of the combats: I had no problems running back with overweight but it was a real adventure to survive with a crippled leg.

11. Exploding doors: already done. Destroying locks: there is no reason to make lockpick skill even more useless.

Even with a hight probability of destroying container items? It don't make lockpick skill useless, it gives a risky alternative to it.

15. Much more interesting locker hunting? Or just more difficult and less profitable?

Maybe better rewards for higher difficulties. I think something difficult makes it more interesting.

[Kilgore]

For a power player, higher requirements don't mean much, but everyone else would suffer.

However I guess that's an idea that requires a lot of work for something not really important.

Right, better to work on something else.

Even with a hight probability of destroying container items? It don't make lockpick skill useless, it gives a risky alternative to it.

If there was a high probability of destroying container items, then hardly anyone would waste explosives and time on it. Easier to lockpick.

Maybe better rewards for higher difficulties. I think something difficult makes it more interesting.

Locker hunting is just one of many possible activities.

[Ina Blackwood]

If there was a high probability of destroying container items, then hardly anyone would waste explosives and time on it. Easier to lockpick.

But if you have a character without lockpick skill and you find a locker in random encounter, you'll not miss the chance of breaking the lock. What about the possibility of blocking a lock with a failed lockpick chance? If this could happen, many people could try to destroy the lock with explosives: better junk than nothing. I still think thats not a bad idea.

Locker hunting is just one of many possible activities.

Yes, I know, but It can be much better, specially if there are better rewards on harder warded lockers.