Scaling repair costs

It seems like the early levels in the game can be really difficult for new players. I'm worried it will turn people away. Late in the game it can be easy to get lots of gold quickly. But a low level player attacked by wolves and spiders will find their gear broken potentially without gold for repair kits.

Games like SWTOR don't have repair kits, but they have repair as a gold sink. The repair cost for your equipment is a percentage of the value of your equipment so it scales automatically.

SotA doesn't have an NPC repair function. Repair kits have a somewhat fixed cost (varies with local economy). I propose the following:

* Players have no item degradation until level 10.
* At lower level, repair kits are more effective and at higher levels, they are less effective, forcing you to buy more as a gold sink.
* Since higher level players may need several repair kits to repair a single item, change the behavior of dragging a stack of repair kits to an item. Prompt with a dialogue that asks you to repair once, or fully repair. Fully repair will use as many kits as necessary for a full repair.

 

Balance, this is not yet a thing.

 

I personally saw repair kits as a stop-gap when your stuff breaks in the field and then you visit a blacksmith for repair - with blacksmith repairs being more efficient in terms of resources/costs than using a repair kit. SotA is promoting a consumer culture here lol - don't bother fixing that breastplate, buy a new one!

Right now repair kits only make sense for crafted items, when you have to kill 100 bears to make those pants you don't want to remake them. When you're just wearing some augmented plate and you can buy it again for 200 gold (and sell the broken down one for 30) you skip the repair kit.

 

New players probably can't afford to replace gear either. The devs have also mentioned item affinity, where an item might develop a history and/or even powers based on how it is used over time. If the game forces you to throw away all your gear constantly, we'll never get to see the item affinity system.

 

I know they have big plans for repair kits in the future, but I agree, enderandrew, that to an unsuspecting new avatar, just joining us in R14, this may be frustrating enough to turn them away. They would be wise to teak this in the next patch.

 

I did mean to say in my first post that I liked your idea of no degredation until level 10 for new players, at least during the alpha testing when some systems are a little unforgiving to the uninitiated.

 

I'd like to see the balance tweaked in the future that repairing gear is slightly more expensive than replacing it to encourage buying new gear from crafters, but not so much more expensive that it is impossible to keep your existing gear and work towards item affinity.

 

This seems like a very complex thing to manage. On the one hand you want people to buy new stuff, on the other hand you want them to enjoy affinity items and other gear enough that they don't feel like they're on a treadmill.

I know RG has talked about only being limited in how many times you can repair an item, and that the more you repair it the more it costs to maintain. So I believe the current plan is to not let players get too attached to any of their items, even the ones they may have an affinity for.

 

Just remember this incarnation is not the repair system in the final game. Crafting/Gathering skills haven't even been added yet.

 

Ok since you've brought THAT up.. much like your distaste for current PvP.. the notion of ever increasing repair costs is one of those things *I* don't like.. at all. Chris has said though that if it proved to not be fun they will change it. Personally I think it's a horrible idea from a design standpoint. I'm a strong advocate of item breakage and have offered several ideas for dealing with it such that items would last a long time provided they're properly cared for.

I don't want to go on an extended rant on it now but I'd be more than happy to if the need is apparent.

Ultimately, repair costs should be in the hands of the crafter. Not a system that artificially inflates the costs.

 

I would however expect to be some difference in repair costs between say plate armour and cloth. The type of gear should influence the cost, not the level of individual per se.

 

I think that's a fair point, Bowen. On a micro level, that makes a lot of sense. On a macro level where the devs are trying to control and manage a player driven economy, I'm not sure how it fits in. And this is where I get my feathers ruffled a bit, as I've never liked the idea of the devs being the ones that manage gold sinks using their "magic". I've always felt like supply and demand needs to dictate this, and whatever the devs do to massage input and output is really just reactive to something they shouldn't be attempting to control in the first place.

 

Well it is difficult to visualize how it will all look when the blacksmithing ability is yet in for us to see. I do agree that early on before I leveled up and had little or no money
I was frustrated at the the repair kit cost and their effectiveness. I don't notice it as much now since I have armor and weapon preservation skills that help tremendously.
It is great to discuss it though with different views for how we feel it should look like and give ideas to the best that we can at this point.

 

Ok the whole point of the ever increasing repair costs is that players will eventually decide to "retire" their gear in favor of something new. So imagine this..

Not everyone wants to store their "retired" weapon. So what do they do with it? Use it up and then sell it off? Now we have a worn out weapon floating around the loot tables that is too expensive for a veteran player to repair. It finds its way into the hands of a new player.. who can't use it because it's worn out beyond use.. they can't repair it either because it costs too much.

Now imagine over time.. more and more of these weapons entering circulation. 10s of thousands of practically worthless epic junk finding their way unto mobs and into NPC shops.

What do you do? Reset the repair the costs? Reset the durability so they're at least useful for a time? Well now there's so many of these things floating around that are totally epic because they've been used forever (remember the idea of weapons getting small bonuses due to killing 1000 kobolds and such).. that everyone is finding them as drops.. no one needs a crafter to make them a decent sword anymore. Use it up, sell it off and pick up another one. After a couple of years of this the loot tables would be saturated with this stuff.

Now if items ultimately break.. that's not an issue and players still need to replace their gear. What you balance here isn't the repair costs.. it's degradation. How fast do they break if not well kept.

What else are we to do with 'retired' weapons? Store them in a chest somewhere.. never to be used again? Mount them on the walls to show off to visitors? There's only so much wall space.. so much bank space.. (even more to the point now).. and not everyone is going to have a place to put their old stuff.

 

We melt down the weapon and use a portion of the raw materials to make a new one.

 

By all means I'm not suggesting everything just go *POOF*.. but old items need to be removed from circulation.

 

You need gold sinks anytime you have new money just entering the economy magically all the time, otherwise we'd have mad runaway inflation which would penalize new players.

Since quests and respawning resource nodes are just magically making new money, you need sinks.

 

I'm aware.

I don't like that model, I think the idea that you can effectively manage inflation with behind the scenes dev magic (facets and sinks) is a silly one that has proven over the years to be false.

 

How would you solve it then?

Edit: Long running games like Eve Online show a game that does almost exclusively revolve around economy can be managed quite successfully with gold sinks.

 

There were a few discussions in the past about a semi-finite model. X amount of gold per character.. rather than a 'sink' you circulate gold back into the economy and regulate new gold coming in.

Regardless of the model the trick is keeping the money flowing. If you ask me the biggest challenge of controlling inflation in-game is simply not having enough that players actually WANT to spend their money on.