Item loss / decay ? (Dev) Replied

I am curious what the dev team is planning on doing regarding item loss or item decay. In your typical MMO there isn't much room for crafting and a vibrant economy because your gear stays with you forever, never gets destroyed, and consumables are few and far between.

1. Will magic abilities consume reagents like in UO (or need to be made ahead of time like in U4)?

2. Does your equipment take normal wear and tear? And if so, will repairing eventually cause the item to lose enough durability to be destroyed?

3. What happens to gear on death, do you lose it?

I am hoping that with the importance of crafting and businesses, that there will be enough mechanics in the game to create enough demand for equipment that the economy will be healthy.

 

You know what I hope so. Games that don't have any wear and tear tend to just leave you looking for something better all the time. Always need an upgrade to a new item with new properties.

I rather enjoyed crafted items with your grandmaster mark on exceptional quality items. I hope there is decay and loss of items to keep it interesting. Also that the crafted items have the possibility of being as good as a decent magic item, or even enchanting the items in some way to make them more unique.

I'm not a fan of ever increasing powered items. I rather that it be the character and the unique skill set be the focus. Also having timing and mobility playing an aspect instead of just standing and letting your items do damage per second.

Having different fighting styles such as one guy likes high offensive damage per second, but another person might like jabs, evasion, and counter strikes to be their style. I also enjoyed maces had different properties than swords etc such as breaking armor...

 

We definitely plan on durability/wear and tear being a big part of the crafting game. We have not yet resolved specifics of repairing but the goals is to make items eventually become unusable after enough wear and tear even with repair. We recognized the implications the design of the durability and repair mechanic will have on the life of a crafter.

As far as death, you will not lose your items. We have not finalized specifics of what happens when you die but I can assure you it will not be a situation where others can loot or steal gear. A durability penalty is highly probable however.

 

Please think about bonding magic items to characters as well. I think this is a valuable tool to keeping items moving through the game. Thanks!

 

Sweet! Back to the days of Smithing Can not wait. Sitting in town taking orders and chatting for hours. Thats a game

 

I'm hoping that pretty much everything that you wear will suffer from wear / tear / decay: if you keep on fighting with the same gear & clothes - for example the robe you've got on will tear and it would be awesome if it showed, after a long battle your gear would look worn, at least some visible part of it.

This would create a need for the tailors / leatherworkers / other crafters to keep repairing or making new pieces of clothing and armoring. I'm hoping that when struck to death some of your gear will break depending on luck, just get torn or cut, perhaps it could be repaired, perhaps not. If not it might be still useful to turn into some crafting material... As long as there will not be indestructible gear. (apart form the KS goodies! however they are starter level gear I suppose..)

 

Any reason why you cannot loot a body??? If that is the case if they resurrect they can start attacking you again immediately. Part of the reason for PvP is so that an enemy is gone. At least for a while. It would be annoying if we could be bothered by the same exact guy "AT FULL POWER" right after I finished him off a few moments ago.

I don't like de-buffs just make it that they lose their stuff.

 

There's no point to PvP if you don't gain something after fighting a good opponent. The loot was part of the fun. If you just get gold... what is gold??? ... gold has a variable value due to inflation or deflation.

Armor has real value. Ore has real value. Gold has no real value.

 

I'm really disappointed after coming across this thread and reading @B the moderator said.

 

Well it seems full loot is out of question (at the moment at least). I just want the gear not to be like in most of the mmo(rpg's) nowadays. I think it's awesome that you don't get attached to your gear, like in UO you knew you might lose it. There should (and hopefully will be) to be a need for new stuff & repairing old stuff, because commodities don't last forever! I'm also afraid of the inflation... but we'll see what happens.

 

I'm still upset about this. I hope they change this. However I do agree that it is good that they will allow for item decay etc. You're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about games these days you get attached to your items.

That's another BIG reason losing your items is key. Not everyone will have to PvP so what is the problem with losing items... it goes hand in hand with the crafting game!

 

Kickstarter items should be exempt from decay because it would be wrong for people to pay for items only for them to be gone a few weeks after playing. If players chose not to use them because they get better that's fine but 6 months, 2 years, whatever down the track people should be able to CHOSE to use those items again

 

If they continue down the path of not losing items, then I foresee moving to some insanely hard to understand system where items become the focus of your character not your skills.

Eventually people will have enough skills after episode 5, then if your items stay with you a long time the game will not be as interesting. "Enter the modified item system that ruins the game".

I'm not a doomsday person if you've seen my other posts!

In my opinion UO de-evolved by having weapons and items have an elemental type of damage system. I was so glad I stopped playing before I saw that. Also WoW has all those attributes to their items (ever increasingly powerful items) you never know why you need an item and you need some calculator to try to make sense of it.

Decay is not fast enough! if it is that would suck too!

 

I used to like PvP because if I was good at it I could use the same armor and weapons for a while. It was fun to see how long I could go without dying. I'm certain every other person who liked PvP in UO would say the same!!! without question!

I'm not one of those no opt out PvP guys. I like the system you guys have for us. It's the looting that isn't good in my opinion.

We could forge 20 swords in how many minutes, but if somebody needs a sword once a week or once a month who cares!!!

 

Let the kickstarter items have decay (except for the indestructible tool). That will make mine more rare when other people blow theirs up.

 

I certainly hope SoTA will not evolve into an item-grind game; I share your concern and opinion about the balance of crafting & using the items! There needs to be a more or less constant rotation of stuff that players use and need when these items break and decay. At this point losing gear to players isn't part of the economics so I'm curious to see how it'll work out...

I do hope that the KS items will not be very "efficient" in use, I mean they're for display, of course having indestructible items will save time with crafting, but I believe it will not be something useful at higher skill levels of crafting. As for the weapons, they shouldn't be very effective especially if indestructible. I'm getting them also and I hope not to get any special gameplay advantages.

 

Problem SOLVED!

Chris said in chat that there will be an option for Guilds to have Full Loot PvP. I'm satisfied with that!

 

Hear, hear

 

It would make the most sense for the KS weapons to be basically "starter" weapons and as such not very powerful. Just strong enough to be useful if you need a backup. Making them decay or breakable though would defeat the purpose of having them at all.

Good crafted gear should overpower the KS gear any day of the week. I don't want to be handed a particular combat advantage over anyone just because I forked out some cash.

 

I dont see full loot being very relevent in the game..
Because what would happen in UO is that people would only pvp with items they were willing to lose.. this resulted in most people carrying bare mininum consumables, often no armor and a simple GM weapon.. and if u did wear some cheap leather armor it resulted on most people cutting it up with scissors to grief you when you died anyway.

From what Chris has mentioned.. SOTA is going to have a deep and heavy itemization system.

Im sure no one would want to lose an item the spent 15 hours to collect the resources to build simple to lag in pvp and lose it. so in conclusion i feel full loot will lead to people generally not using their best items.. and really not added anything to pvp.. i always found beating a well known pvper reward enough and would often never bother to even loot their corpse.