A case for "soft item" breakage

After listening to the 4.8.13 hangout I'm in rather slight state of shock. RG and Chris described the current thought process regarding item decay.

To sum up. PCs gain weapon affinity during use. The cost of item repair increases over time and items will NOT break.

One of the reasons stated was vague but to me seemed obvious that a primary concern was how not fun it is to die because your weapon or armor completely broke during combat. That much is true. It's NOT fun.

Unfortunately and I mean this with the utmost respect, this is NOT a good idea.

1: If soft items never break entirely.. meaning they can always be repaired. How then will they be removed from the world economy? Randomly generated loot also falls into this catagory. Are we expected to simply toss our old gear in a magical trash bin when we're tired of paying for its upkeep? Are we to put it on sale for a random NPC to come pick it up? At what point do repair costs overwhelm player sentiment for their favorite weapon?

Simply not allowing these items to break will lead to item inflation which will likely cause major challenges to the world economy. Why will crafters need to make a steady supply of weapons or armor if people only need to repair? Trust me, a lot of folks will pay a lot to keep their gear, especially if weapon affinity affords them an advantage they don't want to lose. This would be a big hit on crafters. It would be hard to sell new gear with a lot of old gear lingering around.

2: Increasing costs for repair. The only way to do this is to pass a base repair cost to the crafter who then has to pay directly out of his or her own pocket either in terms of increasing material use or direct gold payment on the assumption that that cost will be passed on to the player they're repairing for. Both BAD.

A crafter buys a shop.. buys the best crafting station available. They need to fix their armor and already have all the necessary material to do so.. and in the privacy of their own home they STILL have to pay gold to repair their armor?? Or will they eventually have to use up more material in repairs than it took to craft the armor in the first place?

It's a weak solution to a minor problem with a heavy negative influences on the economy and likely crafters also.

How else could you possibly impliment increasing repair costs per additional repair/over time?

Now I'm not one to criticize and not over any solutions.. and oh yes.. I have them.

1: Items will not break until AFTER X number of repairs. (One or two repairs minimum).
2: Items will not break unless below a certain 'health'.. ie 60% decay.
3: Players will recieve a warning when the item is in need of repair that it will become in danger of breakage.
4: Items will not break DURING combat but will enter an 'unrepairable' state. Possibly breaking completely upon entering a town.
5: Finally upon entering town the player will recieve a reminder that the item has broken. (Optional?)

For one this addresses concerns that players will become randomly vulnerable because of item breakage during combat and ensures they are well aware they need a replacement.

This allows "soft" items (including loot) to leave the world economy through a natural process without endangering players.

It eliminates what item inflation would occur as a result of no item breakage.

It does NOT affect the idea of weapon affinity.. which should have a natural cap that is easily reached long before the weapon actually breaks.

Discussion?

 

Oh.. I forgot one thing.. chance of breaking should increase slightly the more times an item is repaired. This should still be a slow process but an inevitable one.

 

I strongly feel that items need to break in order to have a robust economy without runaway inflation, whether that inflation is gold or item related.

I understand the problem of dying because your armor breaks in the middle of combat, but rather than ruin the economy with unbreakable gear, there are better ways to go about it.

1. Item wears out over time, rather than a random % to break each time it's hit. Give armor 100 health, and each time it's hit there is a % chance to lose a bit of item health. Give players PLENTY of time to notice their armor is damaged and repair it. This also adds to the feeling of risk as you're deep in a dungeon, armor at 20/100 health, and you know you still have to fight your back up.

2. Allow swapping to a backup weapon/shield during combat. If your sword breaks, good thing you're carrying that backup dagger!

3. If you die, your equipment has a chance to get destroyed. This way you're not dying because your armor broke, but you still have a function in the game to remove items from the economy. It also gives death meaning, which is desperately needed in MMOs these days.

The 'building of affinity' worries me. If we need to spend weeks killing orcs to have our orc-affinity mace maxed out, how is this going to be any different than other gear-grind games? I would much prefer that the game treats equipment as consumables instead of worrying about adding gear grinds. Focus on making the gameplay fun and lets move away from worshipping gear. As long as I'm having fun breaking my sword and armor, and they're easy to replace thanks to a vibrant crafting community and strong economy, I don't care about losing my sword.

 

@Bowen,

I feel you're adding some extra qualifications that don't need to be there. If you know you're going into battle with a poor quality, 60% worn sword, why would you act surprised if it breaks in the middle of combat?

The point is, you don't need to mollycoddle the players to make the game fun. Realistic outcomes are not unfun if they're handled properly by the game; if a player is aware that he's playing with fire by using a bad sword.

It worked in Ultima Underworld!

 

By the way, I think its entirely reasonable for the weapon to still exist and still be reparable even if in too poor shape to be used in battle. A broken sword can still be remoulded. That was the case in UU.

What do you do with a used up sword that you don't want to repair anymore? Salvage it for the raw materials, smelt the iron, etc. You could sell it to a blacksmith for the raw materials, and the blacksmith will take the item and smelt it.

Don't know what you could do with broken bows though, they'd just be useless; can't stitch together broken wood unless there's pulp processing. But iron tends to be more expensive anyway...

So I'm not against infinite reparability, I was just responding to the "its not fun" critique of weapons breaking in the middle of battle.

 

I did overkill my solution for the sake of showing that there are alternatives if the goal is to avoid sudden break during combat that could work. If it were my call I would be happy with a warning an item is in danger of breaking. Even that is more than what people get in real life. If there were some message in my head "warning! Your dagger hilt is in danger of suddenly snapping into 3 pieces" I might still have a usable dagger today.. nope.. just POOF right in the middle of practice.. what the heck?? pieces of cross guard all over the floor!

At any rate, I'm not fond of a simple precentage odds of breakage either. I personally would stop after #3 of my suggestions with a minimum of 1 repair before breaking is possible and then requiring an items health to be at least below 40% before it breaks.. then raising that by 1-5% each repair up to a max of 70-80% which I think is more than generous.

 

Kickstarter weapons should be exempt though, just like you shouldn't be able to steal something that someone has paid $100s of REAL money for, it also shouldn't just disappear either. In fact my preference is that kickstarter weapons all have a fix cost to repair rather than increasing over time (or at least that there be a cap on inflation) because you have forked out real money for this item

 

The cost of repair should be entirely in the hands of crafters who themselves should not have to pay a single gold to repair any item. Forcing increasing repair costs over time is an artificial gold sink that punishes crafters who shouldn't have to pay a single gold to repair items in the privacy of their own homes.

Agreed though, obviously KS / donation items should be exempt from breakage but likewise less powerful than crafted gear.

 

I agree with needing to have a break point to get items out of the game once used so much. I always remember dungeon crawling with a few weapons because some monsters would just really burn through that durability while you have more stones to carry loot with. It was a way to balance risk vs reward as well. Do I plan on bringing equipment to last hours until I'm totally stuffed with loot, but risk losing that much more gear should I die and get looted or not make it back to my body in time. This ensured crafters were always busy making new items which helped keep gold and resource inflation under control. I think allowing a simple macro to swap between 2 weapon sets would alleviate the real problem with weapons breaking mid fight.

Although KS items should be except or near to breaking, I think the quality of the item should be distinctly different from the "GM" crafted weapons. In fact, I hope "GM" crafted weapons have the same value offered as they did in UO. GM weapons had damage of the mid range magical items and durability to boot, they lacked the other bonuses provided by some magical items: silver, spellcast on use, +tactics mod, etc. I think it really helped balance risk vs. reward for PvP because magical items of high quality were rarer and priced accordingly, but they weren't overpowered as to being unfairly matched.

 

In UO a repair would slightly lower the stats on a weapons or armor. A Grandmaster Blacksmith would have a less chance of this happening. So the unique weapons and items were used rarely. Weapon and armor sufered damage in battle so you would check it on a regular basis for wear and if 100% was 200 armor at 50% you would look to getting a repair or buy new.They did have trash cans in town and you houses to throw out junk.

 

I don't think I like visible stats degrading when repaired.. but perhaps having an upper limit to the number of repairs an item can have before parts need to be replaced?

 

You don't need breakage. RG said gear would be modded and able to be improved over time. I like the SWTOR model. The skin of the item you can retain forever but it does need to be repaired to keep it useful, just won't poof when it gets to 0/100 durability.

Gold sinks could occur for removing / changing mods and repair. Weapons or armor would bind when equipped so they will be taken out of circulation.

How would a smith stay in business if items are not lost or broken? Maybe repairs, making the mods (hilt, type of metal, adding a gem etc.

Its not like your gonna lose a sword everyday to have it need replacing. Even in real life, some swords are over 400 yrs old and hold up. Your not swinging around a stick. These things were built to last. Most heroes in books and movies were bound to their weapons or gear. So if you find skins of items you like , its nice to just have that set but the mods and everything else to enhance them will constantly need upgrading.

That's how I feel the crafters will be needed. Of course potions and foods will be consumable so there isn't and issue there. But you have the handle the weapons and armor differently and from a unique perspective. I'll try to come up with some idea for a later post.

 

I how long those 400-year-swords were used in actual battle...

Anyway, I consider the affinity vs repair cost model quite sound. Use the item for a long time and it will become stronger. Use it too long and it will be useless for everyday use due to maintenance costs, but it will still be quite useful for some situations, e.g. a guild battle. Or as a special-purpose weapon for strong monsters.

However, I agree that there is a problem with implementing the repair costs. How pays and how? I agree that direct money costs would be anti-immersive, thus the cost would have to be in terms of material.

One possibility would be to allow making the repair a multi-step process. E.g. using one metal bar on a new sword repairs it by 80% of the full durability, a very old sword only by 10%. It would then be a matter of previous negotations to limit the repair cost, by telling the smith "I don't want you to use more then 5 bars."

The rest depends on the details of the system. Can the smith judge the repair cost beforehand? If not, maybe he can try using one bar and then estimate from the change, whether the requirement can be fulfilled. Afterwards it would be a matter of renegotiating whether the unrepaired or partially repaired sword is kept as a memento, whether the customer invests into a full repair after all or whether the sword will be salvaged for materials.

On a side note, I don't see a problem with lockers and houses getting cluttered by old equipment, whose maintenance has grown too expensive. Why not? If they cannot really be used anymore for day-to-day use, they are no problem for the economy anyway. Of course, the possibility to salvage old gear would help to reduce the problem, as there would be an incentive to destroy the gear instead of keeping it as a memento.

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Regarding the salvaging of Bows: While it would be rather weird to salvage normal wood from a broken bow for building a new bow, you CAN salvage a bow for other purposes. The wood may still make good kindling, the string may be reusable (though maybe not all of it). If the bow was made from magic wood and 5 pieces of dragon's sinew, salvaging some magic kindling (a reagent?) and 1 piece of dragon's sinew (for a new bow) would make sense both economically and role-play-wise.

 

To me it sounds like that if you keep a sword around for a while, upgrading and repairing it, eventually the cost of repair is going to be greater than the total value of the sword so the player makes a decision. Overpay to repair it, hang it on the wall, or sell/recycle it and buy a new one. It basically slows the replacement of gear down so it is not a completely new set of gear every death, and your character gets familiar with their trusty weapon, then eventually replaces it.

 

@Bowen - I don't understand your argument against increasing repair costs. Why would you assume the cost would be in terms of gold, instead of material? And why would you assume the crafter would be the one paying it? It seems to me the obvious model would be crafters charge based on the resources, skill, and time it will take to repair the item, either through direct negotiation or some sort of vendor system (repair deeds that repair, as discussed above, for some number of ingots, so the more you need, the more you have to pay).

This seems directly analogous to an economy where armour/weapons are fully replaced, just instead of using resources to place fully new items into the world, there is more of putting the same items back in. Repairs for better/older weapons require more materials and skill, just like better weapons would require more expensive materials and more skill. We're taking some materials out of the game to put eq back into it, and that cost would almost certainly be passed onto the user by the crafter.

 

Wow, I read all your guys comments, I had things I wanted to say but everyone hit any topic I would have brought up about this topic. @Bowen, I like this idea, really do! I think weapons and armor need some viable way to slowly break down, I remembered in UO and some a other games, I would carry around 2 or 3 of the same type of weapon knowing eventually it might snap. I like that sudden fear of hitting an enemy, they block, and my weapons blade pops off and you immediately think "Oh S....!" and figure out another way to win, or just run so you don't lose all you've got in your bags,

However I still think they should break and then just the hilt or the blade remain in your bag, that way you can give it to a crafter and they can reseat it or turn it into something better.

I also understand why it would be on the cost of the crafter, because they are the ones with the materials and the repair window (if that's how they do it), so once the repair starts it is the crafters expense, HOWEVER, they then turn that expense, maybe add a little to it and let the customer know their price before giving the item back. (Or before the transaction even takes place so a fair price is figured out). But ultimately it would be on the crafter first since they will be performing the work and using their things.

Again I love these ideas, this community keeps me pumped!

 

@Alayth Items require a certain amount of material to create.. to increase the cost through material you have to increase the amount of material used to repair. Eventually the amount to repair will either exceed the amount to create or you'd have to cap it before reaching that point.. but a cap would negate the whole purpose.

The majority of the players would rather simply buy materials to bring to the crafter than harvest them for free and crafters couldn't be expected to keep up with the demand in materials by harvesting. They'd eventually have to purchase the materials to keep up.

Gold is simply the easier of the two options to impliment which makes it more likely. Either way, both options have the same end result.

 

Ya, my assumption is repairing is basically reforging something. As something gets a lot of use, you're really making a new thing, preserving the name and spirit of the old one. This is all the mats of the original (or nearly), rather than a time/gold sink.

 

Ok let's say the initial forging of the origina item costs 100 gold worth of materials. The amount of materials per repair increases to the point where it's an equal amount. Now let's say you want to keep repairing it.. the current plan was for increasing costs.. so now 150 gold in materials? 200? How about 500? 10 times the amount of materials to repair an item than it took to create it? How does this make more sense than just taking gold out of the pocket?

Not only will this inflate the number of items in the economy in general but it assumes behavior from the player that will force these items into retirement within a certain cost threshold. Affinity with weapons or armor will encourage players to hold on these items beyond reasonable use and increasing costs encourages gold farming and hording.

 

@Bowen - Okay, let's assume we don't want a cap on repair costs. What's wrong with requiring more material to repair an old item than to create a new one? Is this a realism concern? Repairing might be a more delicate procedure, and so there is more waste, so more resources are used. I see no problem with having absurdly large costs - in fact, I believe this was the idea, to make items eventually "emergency only" due to their extreme repair costs.

Sure, maybe some players will buy materials to provide to the crafter for repairs. Why is this an issue? I think this really just depends on how the economy turns out - how expensive resources are, how likely crafters are to be gatherers, how much demand there is for repairs. But no matter what the balancing point is, I don't understand why this would be an issue.

I don't see why you would assume using gold makes more sense. It makes it easier for the crafter if they are going to be buying resources anyways, but 1) I don't see why you make this assumption and 2) I don't see why it would matter even if in 100% of the cases crafters buy resources - it makes more sense to repair an iron sword with iron, and harvesters are part of the economy too.

Your original post cites economic concerns. Let me sum up how I see it. In both the soft-items-break and the growing-repair-costs models, we have resources (ingots) constantly being added to the economy.
In the soft-items-break case, the demand is for more weapons/armour. Resources are taken out of the economy through the creation of weapons and armour. The result is demand for resources goes up, weapons and armour have some cost tied partially to the cost of resources.
In the growing-repair-costs case, the demand is for more repairs (maybe in the form of deeds, maybe in the form of player-to-player transactions). Resources are taken out of the economy through the repair of weapons and armour. The result is demand for resources goes up, and again repairs (as well as newly crafter weapons and armour) obtain some cost tied partially to the cost of resources.

These seem to have the same effect, at least qualitatively, on the economy. I still fail to see the issue here.