05-30-2009, 02:21 AM
Slamz Wrote:I think I would simply tie gear into the economy and make it come from resources, not unlike shipbuilding in POTBS -- your armor is your ship. Whenever you lose it, you have to buy a new one. Some will be common as dirt and very affordable, others will be better but more costly to produce in time and resources. If your town has access to bamboo, you can make bamboo armor all day long, very cheap, very quick to produce, but not overly effective stuff. If you've got access to mithril, you can make mithril armor, very effective but it represents a lot of work to replace. It's not necessarily "expensive" in the literal sense. It's actually free. You just set up a mine and it digs it up for you. But it may be expensive in the sense that mithril mines work really slowly, so that breastplate may represent 3 real-life days of letting the mine run. If you're losing it faster than the mine is replacing it, you'll have to start wearing something else until your supplies build back up.
So there is a sense of investment, and a sense of loss, but replacing lost gear is a question of real-time hours as automated mining operations do their thing. You wouldn't actually have to go out and farm your own mithril. You'd build the mine and wait. Or pay/trade for it.
SWG's economy was very similar to this.
Exactly. Let the repetitive and time consuming part (building up labor hours and extracting resources) be non-repetitive and time consuming. Don't make players stand there and do something for 3 days (i.e. build up labor by clicking buttons over and over).
I agree, SWG (with factories and autonomous resource extractors) and POBS did this right IMO. In SWG, you had your mineral extractor running all day. You only stopped by and picked up the resources every so often and supplied the thing with power. This ties into Griz's point. While you didn't need to sit and press "g" every 30 seconds to extract minerals, you still had to run out to the mineral extractor, or run out to a certain player city to get a certain item etc so it brought people together. Certain player cities had the best armor, while others had the best guns etc.
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