Other > Suggestions

Farming, shops and the economy

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Nice_Boat:
People have been complaining about crafting timeouts, gathering cooldowns and the game being inaccessible for newbies and laborous for advanced players for ages. Here's a solution I suggested in the mutie nerf discussion (it's mostly copypasta so feel free to delete the old post, as Surf Solar and I think it probably deserves its own thread):

Imagine if you were able to farm mediocre stuff (normal miniguns, ammo, LSWs, lasers) from caravans like it was before the wipe while having the new crafting in place for starting and top-tier equipment. Wouldn't that make everyone happy?

The idea in general is to get all the people who want to PvP some basic stuff to do so (shotguns sadly won't do) without spending half of the day crafting while keeping pure powerplayers in a position of slight advantage. It worked really well before the wipe when CA was just painful to get - most people were running around with metal armor mk2 and generally good guns, there was a lot of action and fun to be had and the real hardcore ones that'd spend half a day looking for plasma rifles or CAs would be way better off but still very much inside of reach of more humble fighters. Since crafting CAs and the best weapons is almost just as painful as it used to be to hunt for them, it'd be pretty much the same but with an additional option to craft instead of treasure hunting. That'd make the 2238 society divide somewhat naturally into 4 layers:
- newbies/bluesuits - nuff said. They never really get any stuff until they learn to play. If they do, they lose it in a matter of minutes.
- beginners - pistols, jackets, shotguns... you've all seen it, you all know it. Beginner crafters and so on, with no real game knowledge and/or companions to go farming with.
- the middle ground - they have their gangs, they farm stuff, they get the "standard issue" generic BG/EW/SG from caravans, wear leather or metal armors, can PvP without risking to lose very important stuff in a matter of seconds
- top-tier players - they want best gear, they craft it. They don't die that much anyway, and even if they do they don't get eliminated for long hours after a skirmish gone wrong.

What it does, aside from giving everyone more fun and removing the GRIND FUCKING EVERYTHING phenomenon is making PvP accessible for everyone with mediocre knowledge of the game and up. Currently there's a sharp barier between people who know how to PvP and people who don't and there's no real means of breaching the gap. Now if some of the required stuff (it's just weapons and ammo anyway) is farmable, they can learn without being hurt too much. That's a good thing. They won't start wearing best stuff until they're sure they can manage without losing it.

This of course would make NPC shops easy dumping grounds. So just make farmed weapons have a visible tag and make them dirt cheap. I mean "this laser was made in the NCR, I want no trouble sir" kind of thing. Or make the shops stop buying after, say, 5 duplicates of a given weapon are in stock (weapons only, what kind of a nutjob would sell ammo anyway?) so that they don't get flooded with farmed stuff. It'd do good for having a nice selection of common guns if some crazy loner wanted to buy them too. Another problem would be the fact that miniguns, lasguns and other mid-tier weapons wouldn't be crafted anymore. A possible solution would be to make farmable caravan encounters about 2 times bigger or stronger so that they're doable only for organized groups. That way we would have both crafting and farming (and perhaps some trade or charity) going on.

A simple solution - and the problems most people have with this game are gone... voilla 2238 is awesome once again. I mean... why wouldn't you want to do that?

blahblah:
I'm afraid devs may not like this...
The whole 'economy' thing was introduced so that items can appear at a steady pace. If you see a Sniper Rifle, then you know X time was spent on making it. With items farmable from caravans, a Sniper Rifle can appear for the same organized group once every 30 minutes, say. So in the end, a farmed Sniper is easier to get and devs wanted to stop that. That's why encounters have "money pools" and stuff appears only once every X minutes in a given area. And because many players camp on good spots, there's rarely anything worthwhile left there.

So from what I understood of changelogs, caravans are still like they were before when it comes to items, but they have been limited to 1 every X minutes, thus they are equally hard to find as it is hard to simply craft the weapon.

Nice_Boat:

--- Quote from: blahblah on March 14, 2010, 01:11:49 am ---...

--- End quote ---

Yeah, I do realise that the devs may dislike it because it'd be a bit like admitting that their idea of "player-driven economy" (hey, farming is player driven too, it's just faster!) failed. And of course by "allowing to farm" I mean removing the caravan pools, for reasons stated above. And honestly, I don't even have to try hard to prove my point here. It's all evident. How many people are using autoclickers to get the stuff they need right now? The situation really is bad when you seriously start wondering if it's over a half of the playerbase or something closer to 2/3. How many people are actually playing (as in enjoying) the game when working for their ammo, armors and weapons? 1 out of a 100? Is there anyone thrilled by the need to alt-tab every 10 minutes to click the button? Is anyone really holding his or her breath waiting for some complications of the crafting procedure (cause that's what "making it more engaging" means, folks) that are going to make it even more mundane and unbearable? How many people are actually AFRAID of playing the fun parts of the game because they could lose their precious items? Something's wrong when the leader of one of the largest PvP factions admits it's a problem.

People don't want to do stuff like that. They want to interact with each other whether by hunting together, fighting against each other or roleplaying. Even crafters probably dislike the procedure of gathering and waiting for the cooldowns to stop and really enjoy only the final effect of their hard work (ie. fresh stuff on their shelves) instead.

And let's face it - farming for guns and ammo is fun. It may not be the most realistic thing in the gaming world, but it's a semi-believable way of getting your basic stuff in an efficient manner that offers some sense of progression and achievement. When you kill a caravan, you're happy cause you've won the battle as evidenced by dead bodies lying around you. When you hit that final mineral pile and go crafting those precious bullets you're just tired and amazed you've been actually doing this crap for an hour or so. Both actions are essentially repetitive and ammount to a few clicks here and there, but they are perceived in a completely different way. I really don't know why, maybe it's something having to do with people enjoying blood splattering their screens or maybe it's just the fact that fights require your attention cause even in repetitive engagements shit does indeed happen.

Either way, there are 2 ways of solving this issue - either continuing to cheat ourselves that bumping a virtual hammer against a virtual rock can somehow magically become fun, or admitting that it's bullshit and should be an occasional activity performed mostly by people who just got in and didn't tire of it yet and people who want something a bit stronger than everyone else.

Drakonis:
Ah same old sh*t, diffrent day.

I guess I have to agree with both of you.
- Bumping virtual hammer is boring and so on
- Changes were made to increase realism and to introduce new economy as blahblah said

Main purpose of this thread is to bring PvP for medicore and up back. right?

Well making items farmable like it was before wipe is a bad idea in my oppinion(just like blahblah said- same argumentation)... so we have to find a way around.

The main problem is that people loose their crafted stuff(hours) in matter of minutes.. once again I could suggest the most hated suggestion ever, haha.


Maybe making %(+-LUCK) chance to drop your weapon(1st slot only) and armor if you did not attack anyone first in past 15 minutes?- of course items should be unrepairable after x repairs(just as it is now= but more harsh and your weapon should eventually become unuseable even if your repair is 300%). This could work- would reduce fear of loosing their precious items for medicores- but it will work only if people will still DO have to change their weapons and armors due to detoriations and damages. OH and of course RED(full drop) MAPS if this idea would kick in. This suggestion was really hated before but think about it- it could work now with the new economy...

Nice_Boat:

--- Quote from: Drakonis on March 14, 2010, 02:47:12 am ---Well making items farmable like it was before wipe is a bad idea in my oppinion(just like blahblah said- same argumentation)... so we have to find a way around.

--- End quote ---

What argument? That there's more variation involved in farming? Take the median than, you could get a statistically significant sample from a single day of play. Or maybe that farming's faster? That's the point, mid tier stuff should be fast to get but not really useful outside of the area of mediocricity in PvP.

You're suggesting some funny super-dangerous high-tension red full-drop zones in a thread that's all about letting more people play with less stress in the areas that would be first marked as such. Effectively, you're just trying to ninja your way in here with an idea that's going to cater only to carebears getting shot in random places with their best gear on (because it essentialy comes down to "no loot unless I allow it or I'm shit out of luck") which wouldn't affect the problem of lack of action and overemphasizing bullshit repetitive tasks in any way.

Why wouldn't it affect those problems? Let's see. You enter a red zone (ie. a PvP zone where PvP is actually happening and not some random encounter that's going to get omitted by other players 99,9% of the times) - you drop everything. Nothing changes. People still fear PvP. Actually they fear it even more because you're saying repair should become a chore with time so the value of a single working piece of equipment increases.
You can't farm ammo? Well than, you have to craft to shoot. Dang, more boring shit to do if you want to participate in anything aside from goofing around.
Can't farm basic a weapon once you're capable of PvPing as a player? Oh wait, it's crafting time again.

Since we've already established that your idea has nothing to do with mine (and in fact both could just as well coexist without interfering with each other because they're about different aspects of the game), please start your own thread and stop interfering with mine. This is too serious of an issue to have the discussion lose focus.


But hey, you did say something valid after all:


--- Quote from: Drakonis on March 14, 2010, 02:47:12 am ---Ah same old sh*t, diffrent day.

--- End quote ---

... yeah, it's a different day and nobody's so enthusiastic about "realism", "important time sinks" and "new awesome crafter economy" anymore. It's a good day to remind all those guys how much better it all used to be and how much more time were they actually spending playing instead of waiting to play. A good day to decide to stick to what works and forget about utopian theorycrafting. I'll say it again. Spending "realistic" ammounts of time crafting is bullshit. If my gamemaster in a pen and paper game told me to take an hour to describe in detail how I make each of my grenades and then resolved the combat sequence in 5 minutes I'd simply tell him to fuck off and seek a better one. It'd be naive to think that the reception of this crafting system is any different - people are doing everything they can, including cheating, to avoid wasting their time like that. Dunno about the devs, but I can't really blame them for that.

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