Insurance ?

Acquisition of items is a significant motivator in RPGs. If replacing gear was cheap and easy, why would people invest time in their characters? Why be a crafter if you are churning out commodities? I like having rare and valuable items in the world.

 

@Jonathon.Doran - Would you work the farm in Prada loafers just because they're the best shoe you own? No, so why do you think it is ok to take your best gear out and never lose it? To make more of an apples to apples comparison you don't take hollow-points to the shooting range. You may say this type of system gives an advantage to players that can risk losing more $ and I'll agree with you BUT these same people are going to be the ones out bidding everyone for the best weapon in the game too so they still have the advantage. The difference is in an open loot system you actually have a chance to take that person's gear with your skill. If you're worried that any combination of elite gear is going to give such an advantage that they'd never be defeated then I don't believe you've been paying enough attention to the interviews.

@ElvishDragon - people will still pursue the sword in the stone even if said sword can be taken from them after their retrieval. Yes losing the sword will suck but that emotion, however bad it may be to you, would be missing from a game that you cannot lose your loot. That said the whole 'instanced' world thing makes the idea of being able to come across corpses to loot almost a moot point so I hope the exponential insurance is at least implemented with a dash of open loot in PvP instances.

@PrimeRib - Richard talked about allowing player created tools to be used in the game if approved/accepted in some manner. If there was a auto-loot feature where you could automatically loot whatever items you had chosen from a checkbox list, would you still be against open loot? If so why? There is a thrill of looking through someone else's belonging and observing their organizational patterns (I can still tell you the order I kept my reagents in my bank) giving us this personal glimpse into how they played that character. Without open loot in UO I imagine not nearly as many people would have learned how to stack potions beautifully across a bag or make the observation that maybe you should carry a little food because it helps your character.

 

@Illesac

I'm not strictly against open loot. But to use Owain's socks example. If I take your socks, you've got to go out and buy new ones. But I have very, very little use for your socks. It seems kind of like a system where everyone loses.

On the other hand a particularly good item, something that makes your character stronger, like the kind of thing someone would want to insure, is exactly what I'd want changing hands all the time. Both to take away the advantage of loot and to reward the current "king of the hill" who has the item.


If there us a system where someone gets good loot from another player, I'd certainly favor them being somehow flagged for a period of time where they have to fight their way out to keep the gear. As in maybe it does take some amount of real time to gather their loot and you're now being ambushed and hunted to get away with it.

 

I dont like insurance at all. It is not my playstyle.

It was one of the features that destroyed the best game ever created, Ultima Online.

Casual players not interested in PvP can have insurance all they want but i want full loot in guildwars, there need to be some thrill and consequences in PvP. Make it optional outside PvP and i guess all will be happy.

 

If this is the "Ultimate Role play" game, full loot will have to play some role at some point.

I like the idea that 90% of the time we use normal armor crafted from players and is replaceable and the idea is to have stores of extra armor/items to replace stuff when you die. But 10% (making up numbers) we will have/use special/rare items that yes, we will want to take extra measures to ensure we don't lose them.

Heck if they have insurance I want the cost to be more than what the item costs, and the player that kills them gets the gold. So the person that dies and feels it was worth paying the insurance is happy, but the person that gets to loot them also is happy because he gets more out it than if the person had dropped items.

 

What insurance? You don't lose anything when you die in this game, except losing some durability.

 

@Lord Kei: *LOL* yes, but. Hope seems to spring eternal in some people that they will be able to change the mind of others and turn this into a full loot system. Personally, i have just taken this thread as an excuse to talk about the theoretical benefits of an insurance system and how to make it work in a way that doesn't make it "easy mode".

 

The thing many seem to forget: we will be able to play offline.

So, if the death penalty is too high to a given player's tastes, he doesn't have to put up with it; he can just play offline instead, where - either because the game allows or by backing and restoring save files - he will be able to reverse loses.

In other words, if the death penalty gets to the point it frustrates players, from the point of view of the online game you are likely to simply see many, perhaps most, of the frustrated players vanish. They might still be playing, but they won't be helping make the online world feel more lively anymore, won't be available for group play, won't move the online economy, etc.

 

@Silent: the point you seem to miss is there are multiple ways to play online. A lot of people like a cooperative environment where the only people you are playing with are people that like each other and help each other out. In such a system open PVP w/ open loot makes no sense.

With the dynamic shardding system we get to have all of the options available without short-changing any of them.

 

if you have a PvP flag full loot, otherwise there can be no loot at all. There has to be a reward for PvP otherwise it doesn't make lot of sense!

 

I would only take my rare magical pair of socks in UO when on guild hunts.
If I was out roaming the land with just one or two people I'd take some very well made socks but of course I always knew I could go get them made again if some PK stole them.
I kept many crafters busy in the game.
Who cares where the crafted socks go and if the PK needs them or not.
Maybe he wants to collect them and put the out for display on his porch.
But buy having to get new socks all the time the crafters are needed more.

 

It seems like this game will have no resemblance to UO if it's not full loot, what made UO so great was the risk/reward systems in place.

 

Your best insurance is composed of your individual skills and a reliable team at your side.

 

Yeah I think that talking about Insurance is a little premature, as we are not even sure if there will be item loss on death, or the relative rarity/value of said items.

Also we do not know what type of scaling of items we will see, will items scale exponentially or on a more linear curve? How much better is the worst crafted sword from the best? What is the difference between the best and second best sword?

Insurance is one of many solutions to a problem we dont even know if we will have yet.

 

The short and simple:

I don't like the idea of having insurance for items.

 

What I can say about insurance, or lack of, is that without absolute certainty that I won't lose my items I will never use anything that is not readily available. The same is true for decay, BTW; any item that is not readily available and has decay is about as useful for me as a paper weight.

It doesn't matter if the place I'm at is supposedly safe, BTW; I always plan for the worst case. If there's a 0.1% chance that I will be killed somewhere, I will gear up the same way as I would if I had a 50% or higher chance of being killed.

 

@Stevro - Since the best weapon/armor and other useable stuff will be crafted by crafters and easily replacable like in Ultima Online i see no reason for insurance.

Insurance came to UO february 2003 with Age of Shadows and was a major reason why felucca was abandoned by the old UO PvP players. UO subscriptions went downhill shortly after AoS was introduced.

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png

In PvP there need to be a risk vs reward enviroment with full loot. If insurance is introduced to us that enjoy open PvP and a risk vs reward game with full loot my guess is there will be very few of us that stay arround.

@Silent Strider - You say and i quote - "Apparently there will be no player looting, so I don?t think players will lose their gear on death."

I never heard any developer say there wont be any loot in open PvP? I read one developer saying he liked full loot though. As far as i know there havent been any decision made or?

And i have a hard time understanding why the playerbase that enjoy full loot should'nt get full loot?

 

Lord British informed us abit on his his opinion on dropped loot (NPC) compared to crafted loot in this crafting thread -

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=player-made-vs-game-made-question-and-idea

@Lord British and I quote - "Oh, I also like the idea that dropped loot, is usually far more ?basic?: than crafted items, which gives value to a crafter! - end quote.

I agree with him that the best gear should come from crafters since it would boost the need for crafters. The loot you get from NPC should be less good. That way you wont need to do PvE 24/7 to get the sword of awsomness + 10, you get that sword from your local crafter instead.

That will create a game of needed crafters and a better playerdriven economy. It will also remove the need for insurance since gear is easily replacable. In UO i bought my gear from the local crafter or crafted myself and it took me 5 minutes to regear after i lost everything i had on me. Crafters put up NPC vendors at their house and place there crafted gear on them, very funny.=)

 

Part of the need for item insurance came because of the very rare high level "boss" drops in dungeons and such. It would really suck to run a dungeon 100 times, die a thousand times and FINALLY get that drop, only to lose it to a PK shortly after!

The perceived demand for insurance, was, I think, driven by this massive shift toward emphasizing the very best gear as "rare loot drops" from the toughest mobs, instead of being made by the best crafters!

If SotA avoids the excessively 'item-based' game play, and the best stuff is available from crafters, insurance should be unnecessary. I might make one exception that if there *is* very rare, top-of-the-line loot from the toughest PvE encounters, those could be "blessed" -- so they could be kept or voluntarily traded, but not looted. But if the game avoids a huge dependence on the "very best, very rare" gear, the need for insurance probably drops by a huge margin.

 

@stevro please tell me your kidding .that was one of the things that destroyed uo. I'm not trying to offend but please.... PLEASE keep that kinda thing in PVE ONLY. I mean I'm scared to death right now. That kinda gameplay caused me to leave uo. Again no offense. But no wow gameplay.