DevTracker

[Ronyn]

Sure, and i agree. Finding a middle ground seems the more reasonable solution. But to me it's like the finger and the arm. Look at what happened to FF at the end.

"OMG, Assaults can fly, it's not fair, i want it too" "Dreads can facetank, it's not fair, i want to facetank too". It's a bit crude to express it that way but give people what they want and they'll never be satisfied.

EAT YOUR DAMN VEDGIES!!!! It's like with kids, spoil them too much and you'll end up with a bunch of whiny brats.

Games have rules. Don' like the rules, go play outside with a stick. They are delicate ecosystem, not figments of your imagination where everything goes exactly the way you hope for. Especially MMOs.

What went right and wrong with Firefall and the community at the time is a hard thing to put into words. So I won't try to here.
I will only say that the Em-8ER community has inherited some of the baggage/disappointment along with the hope/joy that firefall's community had. That said, we have to somewhat distance ourselves from certain parts of those old feelings that stem from an old and past situation. We have to let go of what came before to reach for the new.

Going forward into Em-8ER,it's neither about giving everyone what they want (as different people want different things) nor do we subscribe to the "Eat your vegetables" stance (As interactive entertainment is effectively the desert portion of a persons day). Whatever we make... It's not going to perfect, nothing is. Everyone is not going to be happy with every part of it, that's never the case. It's about following a singular unified vision. It's about listening to feedback,taking it to heart, but applying it only when it fits within that vision. It's about creating the kind of experience that is really enjoyable for those who like the kind of thing we are making.

 

[Ronyn]

also this is something i would like to get of my chest. Here you have this awesome game, jetpacks, freeroam, awesome community and developers willing to work with the community... And then you have durability.

I compare it to, having a three course meal, gravy, more stuff than you could eat. At the end the cook brings you a banana. You're already full, this was the best meal you ever had and your first respond is "I D'ONt LIKE BANANS!!!! I HATE YOU!!! And throw a tantrum.

If you were my kids i'd smack ya.

lol. I understand the sentiment, though in all fairness folks have every reason to be particular about how economic models with durability are handled. It can range from being a small thing in the background to being something you have to be very aware of most of the time. Depending on ones personal preferences, that is the difference between enjoying all of the rest of the stuff or having the rest of the stuff ruined. We don't take that lightly.

To use another food analogy, if you like peas, the more the merrier, and you might even miss them when they aren't in a certain dish. Alternatively if you don't like peas, its not that big of a deal if they are just a small portion in one corner of the plate. But if they are mixed in to everything on the plate, you get some in every bite, and that can ruin the whole meal.

Ultimately, since everyone has different tastes, it's about us making a certain kind of dish for a certain kind of consumer.

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Anyway, it's interesting to have these conversations about whether there should be any form of durability, or whether things should break or not. It's mostly to gauge community mindset on the issue. In truth the question was settled months ago in July. It was important to us that we were up front about how we were going to handle an issue that had such controversy in the past. As some folks want it one way, and other folks another way. That is why it plainly states in the initial indiegogo campaign "Durability: Items will not break, but will need to be repaired (at less resource cost than what it was to make)."

Is it possible there will be some change to that? Sure, to some degree. But most likely it would be in small ways, not likely to the degree of the one extreme of getting rid of durability entirely or the other extreme of having gear perma-break.

 

[Ronyn]

I WONDER HOW MANY HOURS YOU WASTED FOR THAT ESSAY. JUST TO GET REKT BY A F*CKING TYPO.

Bahahaha....

 

[Ronyn]

In theory, global resource sinks may be a good idea, but in real life, it will be very hard to do it. You assume, that players will give X% of theirs resources for global goals and using rest of them for crafting, repairing, etc. Players are greedy and don't want to share, unless they have a profit. I have never seen MMO, in which majority of players give away "their precious wealth" without a profit (that includes joining strong guild, etc.). Why should I give resources, when other players don't? They would have the same benefits from bases and vehicles as me.
The only scenario that would make sense to me is minimize gear factor (a few versions of each weapon/ability/armor). Players would give away resources for global goals, because accumulating them would have no sense. But you have to remember, that big group of players love their gear and all things connected to it (resources, abilities, etc.). There are many good ideas and solutions,

Those many concerns, while valid in the general sense, all operate under the assumption that pitching in to group goals would have no direct and personal reward (immediate, persistent and/or long term) for each player who actually participates. As if pitching in and not pitching in offer the same end in ever way execpt expenditure. I believe we will do better than make that mistake. It is well known to us that players tend toward what benefits them, such a basic human trait will not be forgotten during the designing of any system.

Sidenote: I said group goals, not global goals. Group goal could be as small scale as what you and a couple friends do, where global goals would be more akin to a whole shard pushing for a certain purpose. Em-8ER may end up having both group and global goals, we shall see, still it's important to keep the distinction between the two.

but we still don't know what kind of game will Em-8ER be. I think the safest way is to create game similar to Firefall v0.7 and then starting moving toward global goals.

There is much still to be decided on in terms of Em-8ER's design, though there is quite a lot of it it's overall core direction set internally, to which only limited amounts of that are known publicly. For now I can only share bits and pieces here and there. Mostly, in this thread, I have just been talking about the nature and impact of economic model features in general. I will shed light on what I can.

For what it's worth, while I would certainly agree with learning from what went both wrong and right with every era of firefall (Around patch 7 did have some amazing stuff), I do not think starting suggestions from the overall economic design portion of patch 7 is particularly wise considering several points.
1: The patch 6-9 economic design was a very different direction from what Grummz originally intended for firefall's economy. Em-8ER's is meant to be more akin to firefalls original intended design and direction, not the way's that it drifted away from it.
2: As I mentioned before, Em-8ER is meant to have more to spend resources on than just carried/worn gear. If we put too much cost on worn/carried gear, it leaves little to nothing for the other stuff.
3: Something widely unknown about the design goals behind firefall's Patch 6 to 9's economic model, it was intentionally built to push (sometimes force) players to change their loadouts based on resource availability. High granularity in resources, waning resource availability and tight constraints all combined to make a system where replacing things to the exact same specifications was troublesome. That was not a byproduct of the system, that was part of the intent of it. It was in hopes the player would "try" a different load-out because their old load-out was either unavailable or tweaked in some way whether the player liked it or not.
With Em-8ER, we have no such intention. On the contrary, we prefer that if player's like the build they are using, we should not create economic systems meant to yank them from it. That very big difference in goal means there must be some very big differences in core design.

All that said, every person has their own path to discovery. If, for you, starting from what you know of patch 7 helps you find a system that does what we are looking to do...so be it.

Red5 have tried revolution way and how they have ended?

I am sorry, I do not follow what you are suggesting.

 

[Ronyn]

Item decay has always been tricky. There's a third alternative other than decay vs, repairs. Consumables.

It is interesting to examine the various alternatives/methods that can be used. As I mentioned earlier, decay is only a certain form of item destruction. For example a game might have gear that never decay's from use or time, nor does it need repair but it will break completely upon death. Meaning you can have that gear forever if you never die, but if you die it's gone in an instant. That's item destruction, but it's not decay.
Consumables would be another form of item destruction. Because the items (whether mods/gems or guns/gear) still break. Though,as you elude to, it has a certain unique value because it's not the main gear but what powers it. I always did find it a solid idea (particularly the part about overloading the gems) that should be considered. Though it's worth noting that it does not inherently avert discoverability or availability issues. That would depend on what was involved in making a gem which in turn dictates how readily a player could replace a broken gem with an identical gem.

At any rate the below kind of touches on an important aspect of Em-8ER.

Perhaps we can repair our THMPR instead, sounds more reasonable and proper hay?

You're on the right general track there. In the full expression of Em-8ER there is much more at the players finger tips than just what they wear and carry. As opposed to firefall, where nearly all of the economic sinks were limited to just player gear. That limitation was a big part of the reason they put so much emphasis on the cycling of player gear in FF. Em-8ER is a different beast. The full expression of Em-8ER would have the vehicles, bases and larger group goals that will be huge sinks of their own. That puts us in a very different economic situation than Firefall. That in mind, we do not even need to try to create the same level of sinks from player gear as firefall sought to. In fact, we need to make sure that we don't. If too much of players resources were going in to just keeping our worn gear in good shape we wouldn't have enough resources left over to help build bases, call in vehicles, or pitch in to the group goals. We can't let all of those cool things go to waste because few players could afford them!