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« on: June 12, 2014, 03:50:09 am »
The best way to increase the player base of a game, is to make it appeal to more people. At the moment, the game is incredibly focused on PVP. Which is great, but PVP is an elitist sport... The strongest and best dominate, and everyone else has to fight an uphill battle to compete.
This top heavy game model tends to exclude casual gamers, and chokes off a good portion of the new player base. Sure, new players can dick around for a bit, learn the ropes and have some fun... But pretty quickly they run into a wall... All the worthwhile items are capitalized by PVP. So, I'd like to make a suggestion:
Make Crafting a worthwhile and relevant MAIN play style.
Change the dynamic of the game, by making crafting more time consuming, but with more powerful results.
Alot of the changes in the coming wipe focus around increasing player interaction, and reducing larger factions ability to absolutely dominate the entire game. Though we don't know exactly what the wipe will bring, I believe the best way to make the game more attractive to new (and old) players, increase player interaction, and reduce large, PVP focused factions power, is this:
1. Make crafting harder
Leave the lowest level equipment how it is, few materials, minimal cash, and easy to mass produce. But make it exponentially more difficult to make tougher equipment.
For example, a 9mm Mauser requires 1w 2m 3j. Leave that how it is. A 10mm Pistol is 1w 5m 1a, instead increase it to 2w 6m 2a. It's a much better gun, so it should take alot longer to gather the materials for. Getting up in the range of the 14mm Pistol, at the moment 1w 3m 3a 2hqa and an advanced work bench. Though the crafting location, and the hq alloys, are slightly harder to get, you can still craft hundreds of them in almost the same amount of time (in fact, due to the slow method of collecting junk, 100 Mausers would take much longer than 100 14mm Pistols). Instead, make it something like 5w 20m 20a 10hqa.
Make it so that the better items take much longer to make than the easier ones.
2. Only low teir blueprints for NPC sale, mid-upper range blueprints from quests, highest tier blueprints from very tough multiplayer quests/dungeons
Having most blueprints available for sale at such cheap prices makes it way too easy to get. Sure, Metal Armor Mk2 isn't too bad, it's a useful item, but there are much better armors out there. Combat armor on the other hand, should be much harder to get.
Lockers are not the only answer to this. Yes, lockers should still drop them very rarely, but there should be a surefire way to get them aswell... With work and risk. For example, paying for a one time shot at clearing out a bunker for the blueprints. Make it so that players actually have to think and work for the rarer blueprints.
3. Make crafting bonuses rarer
With rarer blueprints, and harder crafting, after the blueprint is used, and resources mass collected, it will still mean a flood of strong weapons into the game. Instead, drop the chances of getting a bonus, and make it so that it is actually rare to get an exceptional weapon. This will boost the value of out of the ordinary weapons by quite a bit, and make them that much more exciting to make and use. I'd suggest 1/4 of the current chance, for all bonuses.
4. Reduce EXP gain from crafting
At the moment, you can level a character in minutes via crafting. Leveling should be a somewhat time consuming challenge regardless of how you do it. I'd suggest putting exp gains from crafting on a similar scale as the difficulty suggested. Lower the exp gains from the most basic equipment, and raise the exp gains on the toughest, depending on the amount of materials required.
5. Let some of the most powerful equipment be crafted
Now, I can see many PVPers having an issue with this, but hear me out. If you are into PVP, you are going to want to have the best equipment to win. If you can get that equipment VIA PVP, why would you want to deal with crafters, or do anything else? PVP dominance should have large rewards, but not to the point where PVP can become almost self sustainable.
If you force PVPers to trade for the best equipment, it'll open up alot more trade and interaction between players.
But this equipment should not come easily... At all. It should be incredibly difficult to construct, with high risks. For example, power armor could be built in parts, all requiring thousands of materials, maxed skills, and some rare collect-able items.
This would make it so that hardcore PVPers would be almost forced to buy the equipment from dedicated crafters rather than making it themselves.
6. Traits specifically for crafters
2 or 3 new traits specifically for crafters would definitely help boost the usefulness and uniqueness of dedicated crafters. If crafting is their main game, they'll want traits to improve the speed and usefulness of crafting. At the same time, crafters should not be competitive in combat. So here are a few traits that could make that tradeoff:
Prodigy: Doubles chance of crafting bonuses, increases AP to fire weapons by one for 1h weapons, 2 for 2h
Reclusive Genius: Chance of using half resources to create items, PP reduced by 100
Mutant Strength: Carry weight doubled, HtH dmg increased by 5, can't use weapons
Gatherer: Reduce AP cost of gathering/mining by 1, reduce DT by 5
7. New Support Skills
There are a few great support skills for crafters available right now, but as a dedicated class, it'd need more.
Lucky Strike: Chance of receiving HQ resources when gathering (science 100<, Luck 5<, level 6)
Hoarder: Carry weight increased by 50 (repair 100, endurance 6<, level 9)
Scrapper: Double the amount of junk found in random encounters (repair 100, perception 6<, level 3)
Iron Fist: Can cut wood and mine without tools (melee 100<, strength 8<, level 12)
In a Pinch: Can use repair tool as a melee weapon (20-30 dmg, AP 4) (melee 100, repair 150, level 12)
8. Crafting Perks
Now, as perks, these will need to be fairly powerful to make them worth taking.
Geologist: Doubles resources gathered when mining (science 150<, Strength 6<, level 10)
Lumberjack: Doubles resources gathered when chopping (repair 150<, Endurance 6<, level 10)
Lover, not a fighter: 6 bonus movement APs, +AP to shoot (science 75, repair 75, level 6)
Maintenance Man: 1/4 max quality loss when repairing (repair 150, level 15)
Sweatshop: Increase slave slots by 2, slaves can use work bench to make metal parts, alloys and gunpowder (Ch 4, Int 8, science 175, level 18)
(My laptop battery is about to die, so I'll cut it off there for now. But I'd like to hear everyone else's suggestions).
I love crafting, I just feel it needs to be more relevant as a way to play the game, rather than just an easy way to level to try new PVP builds.
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but probably it will be used rather to chase than run :/