Item Tiers vs. Resource Types

Commonly games such as SotA have different tiers of items where each tier is somehow better than the last. In UO it was armour crafted from the different metal types, Iron being lowest and Valorite being highest. By the time you reached the end-game only Valorite ore had any worth and Iron was rendered pointless for smithing gear causing all the Iron Ingots to go to the NPC's or stack up in storages.

What I suggest here is to fix this by making each Ore Type useful when creating the Final Tier gear. Iron would be the only requirement for the lowest Tier gear but the Final Tier would require all kinds of metals alongside Iron.

This method would allow keeping the Ore Types simple and perhaps even tied to certain areas of the world. At the same time it'd be possible to expand the list of Craftable Items infinitely without the need for adding new Tiers of Ores. And even the New Players could do something meaningful by selling Iron Ingots in the markets and feel like they're adding something to the world rather than having to throw away their work to the NPC's.

 

Wouldn't this have the effect of collecting low level items in the world where what people (including the devs from what I have herd) want is take gear out of the game in order to stabilize the economy by allowing you a chance to improve or break it. So if you have 100 normal swords you try to improve them you might end up with 1 grand master sword and 99 broken swords. This way the values stay the same because the world isn't being flooded by low level swords because as it starts to be its worth more to risk them than to keep them

 

@?Sir Asguard? MGT470 Honest Ghost Knight: No, it wouldn't. It'd mean a plenty of Iron would be mined but all that Iron would be used to create items of all Tiers. I'm not suggesting on how the Items would work. I'm merely suggesting how creating those Items would work.

To take UO as an example, Iron would not be the only Ingredient to create a High Tier Item, it would also require Valorite, Verite and Gold alongside Iron. I do not see how this would cause a flood of Low Level Items.

To me it is the same if the various types of Ingots are used to create new Items or if they are used to upgrade old Items. That is irrelevant to this discussion.

 

@OP "By the time you reached the end-game only Valorite ore had any worth and Iron was rendered pointless for smithing gear causing all the Iron Ingots to go to the NPC?s or stack up in storages."

I don't know what you mean by "end-game" but what you are describing certainly didn't take place in UO for at least the first three years as I had a gm smith until I stopped playing in 2000.

 

Personally, I don't like the idea of either item tiers or ore tiers. Players I think should be more on an even level and differentiated by skills. They should have an opportunity to have rare magic items but "high tier items" should never be common in the game.

I do like different types of ore, but they should have advantages and weaknesses similar to real world ore. Gold, for instance, is a weak metal, but I liked the Luck element added to gold armor in UO.

By the way, on this subject, this is an interesting quote I found regarding the correlation of types of magic and metals by an alchemist in the 1500s:

'Quicksilver hath power of and over enchanting and enchanted. Led hath power over witchcraft. Copper hath power of binding. Tyne against thunder lightning and diseases. Silver dothe preserve and hath power in magik and enchantment. Yron doth bind and command and threaton.'

This was under his entry on 'Electrum', which referred to the mixture of two or more metals. http://books.google.com/books?id=jtuuM18Uxz8C&pg=PA213

Each of these metals listed, btw, was correlated with a celestial body. Sun - Gold, Moon - Silver, Mars - Iron, Mercury - Quicksilver (Mercury), Jupiter (Tin), Venus (Copper), Saturn (Lead). Bismuth, arsenic, antimony, and zinc were also important metals to alchemists.

 

Hmm.. To clear confusion..

What I'm suggesting is that to make anything of higher quality it should include the most common ore, assumed Iron. It should not exclude every other ore, especially the rare ones, but it should include ore. The point is to get the new people straight into the economy.

I'm not talking about creating weapons or improving weapons. The use for the ore is not the point here, it can be anything. The point here is that however the ore is used the ingredients required for that use should include a mixture of ores, be it improving old or crafting new. Just to keep the Iron and other Ores relevant through the whole game.

To sum it up, The Iron Must Flow.