Taming and Resurrection.

I've noticed that the prices for tamed pets have been going down in the various markets. With the changes benefiting tamers and pet users (not the same group necessarily), what do you think about the possibility that a pet doesn't resurrect after a certain chance or a certain number of res's? Armor and weapons have decay, should pets have a decay too? Especially after talk about getting them bonuses for training and experience?

 

No, nothing should have decay. Decay is a constant fun-suck that holds the enjoyment of casual players hostage for the exclusive benefit of a tiny entitled minority of people who like to grind for profit.

 

No, pets should not have decay.

 

Nope.

Fenris

 

Unlimited leveling takes the fun out of the game. I am a causual player and things do decay in the game. Just very slowly with potions. The same potions could be a protection for pets.

 

Potions that cost real life money you mean? No thanks. That just proves that it's an awful system if people will pay $$ to be affected less. Not a single top tier MMORPG has the inevitable destruction of everything you own as a feature because it's simply not fun.

 

The fun with pets is taming them for the first time and leveling them once.

No disposable pets who forget and decay.

How would @Chris like if he had to buy a new mojito every week and train him to the same level in one week then mojito dies/decays only to have to buy a new mojito pet and start over doing the same thing each week? I thought not.

 

The cost of pets has gone down due to skill levels of tamers going up, spawns being more plentiful and also more people becoming high level tamers. If something takes me an hour to find and tame, I'm going to sell it for more gold vs something I can tame in a few min of game play. I for one try to keep pet prices low enough for newer players to buy so everyone can afford to have a pet as a hunting buddy (also great for dance parties!) No need for decay or anything like that.

 

These sorts of things naturally fluctuate. Recently, taming has gotten some significant love, making more people interested in levelling taming and using pets.
I'm against adding arbitrary loss mechanics in general, game already has far too much time-wasting in this regard.

 

It's the same story. Because virtually no loss happens in the game, it's impossible to have a functional economy that runs under its own power, and isn't artificially kept on life support by those who dont' mind selling wands that cost 200k gold to make, for 2k gold.

It's constantly baffling to me.

We're running a restaurant that serves the same 20 people. The pizza lasts forever, and each person already has 6 pizzas each, and they don't need or want anymore. The chef in the back is still making pizza, not because there's any economic drive to do so, but because they just like making pizza. It costs $100,000 to make a pizza because 98% of the time the food disintegrates before it's completed. That pizza is then marketed for a fraction of the price to the same 20 people who already have more pizza than they know what to do with.

The only times when new pizza can be made and sold, is when a new kind of pizza is invented. Briefly, it'll sell like hotcakes, before those same 20 people have all of the new type that they want.

And all the way, these same people are complaining about no one buying pizza. Well, of course not. Not until there's a sink for every faucet - for everything.

 

People need to stop acting like the game is eternal and there is no player turnover or need for new content. Reality is that the one thing that is consumed at a steady rate in games is CONTENT, and you cannot replace that with items and expect people to suddenly be entertained forever. Pretty much all of the most popular MMORPGs out there give you a steady progression toward the best items without constantly taking things away from you to force you into an endless loop of repetition. The way they keep you hungry and playing more is by adding new things to work toward when they expand their content, which they have to do anyways in order to sustain player numbers over time. There is nothing wrong with making crafing and trading a big part of people's progression. It doesn't even have to take less effort to get the best items, you just have to acknowledge that every tier of items has a limited lifespan through content consumption, and doesn't need to be slapped with another one through item decay. That way it's a steady progression, you're always going after something better, and treading new ground, as opposed to simply being put on a treadmill and having to run just to stay in place.

 

I don't fundamentally disagree with anything you're saying. We absolutely need consumption - or a viable sink for produced goods. The problem is that because things are so, so expensive to make, and still contigent on blind chance/luck, having them decay too fast makes them pointless. Nobody's going to pay 200k for a sword that becomes scrap metal after an hour's use. This constant create, recreate, consume mechanic works in the survival genre where you go chop down a tree and smack a couple rocks and make yourself a new sword. It does not and cannot work in a game that requires WEEKS of harvesting to MAYBE make the item you want, if you're lucky today.

Originally when they announced crafting spec would remove RNG, I thought we'd finally seen sense - I assumed that cranking the decay rate would accompany this and we'd have a functioning economy. Instead we're in a worse position than we were before (if you look at resource prices as any indication) because while we have reroll capability we also have rare effects that is the new base standard to have.

So, if we're not going to adjust the input, making things break even faster is not a viable solution, either. The main reason why there are 20 pizzas is because there's nothing to DO with that pizza. If the restaurant can't sell the pizza, then it piles up, and then they can't even give it away. They keep making pizza because its the only way to get better at making pizza and they need to make 500 pizzas to maybe get a really nice one that someone might actually eat. The remaining 499 sit and rot on the countertop.

If we could disassemble said pizzas, or turn them into something else (gold and silver scraps was another missed opportunity here), or even ...gasp...sell them for reasonable return of their cost to the npc and let crafting at last have a gold faucet of its own since it has 95% of the expenses...well, we'd be on to something. Simply making them disintegrate is going to exacerbate an already incredibly wasteful/lossy/demoralizing system.

If you want things to break faster, they need to be replaceable.
If you don't want things to break, you need to find some other way to consume/remove them from the economy. Making salvage or vendoring viable, making junk gear a component for something else, donating it to the guard barracks for some materials/recipes/etc. or adding some sort of crafting quest system that can consume unwanted stuff are all viable options.

If we just make things break faster, we've already seen what happens: You accept mediocrity, and go mining in your founder gear until it gets fixed. People want to have nice things, its one of the few progression paths available in Sota once xp becomes meaningless. If I'm just going to bang around in crap because its too expensive to make nice stuff that falls apart faster than I can replace it, the whole point of being a crafter is gone.

Plenty of MMOs have strong economies with no permanent gear loss whatsoever. Many use bind-on-equip mechanics to keep items from being passed down/recycled. Others simply rely on extreme customizability / variety to keep crafters employed making this or that variant. That and a robust market for consumables, repair kits that can't be gotten except by being manufactured (instead of dropping like candy and everyone's got thousands packed away that they'll likely never use), keeps things going. Perma-loss, of any sort, is simply not necessary and is likely to do harm to player retainability except for the small % of hardcore who enjoy the punishment.