From destruction comes rebirth: items could "break"
Istaria after Virtrium took place is improving in many way.
It still lacks of something though. It lacks of a "pump", something that makes the gears move.
In real life and in MMOs that something is usually called "economy".
Economy has never been Istaria's strong point, for many historical and less historical reasons.
But economy as we imagine it is not really needed to make Istaria dynamic.
What is needed is to find out what drives or can drive the game and put it in motion.
Istaria has an heavy bias into crafting and creating items. As such, there would be the best place to poke the nose at.
Current state:
- Every crafter in Istaria can learn everything and retain the knowledge forever.
- Every crafter in Istaria can produce hugenormous amounts of stuff.
- That stuff, once made, never dies. The new guy entering the game joins the guild and pronto, another player hands him his *2004* items.
All perfectly working since ever and forever.
Effects:
- The game got slowly clogged with perfectly teched stuff. There's no reason to make more.
- Crafters who wanted to sell stuff they learned to craft, cannot. Because the 2004 set is here after all, why make another?
- Traders cannot exist. Everything is verticalized in the guild, plots explode with unused teched stuff for every imaginable use and left to sit there so newcomers can use it.
- Adventurers just quit. Why bother killing 500 wolves and then have your hands full of no value trophies? No one needs to make anything with them. Pawnbroker timeee! Yawn. Why bother. Why play.
Ah, yes, because we are friends. Oh wait, I am going to MSN my friend, it's really the same, plus we can talk. => /cancels sub.
- Crafters have less and less customers. Why create 6 teched axes when there's 3 adventurers left ask for weapons?
From there, a spiral process starts. A sick process slowly but surely demotivating people to play.
Sure, there comes the new patch. 1-2-10 or even 30 days of fun. Then back to yawn-town. /cancel again /lurk mode on (waiting for anything new to happen again).
Now, the work to revitalize Istaria could include this: gear and weapons can break - up to a point - and spells could also need stuff.
But wait. Having stuff breaking is boring. You have to find that special guy with 118 crafting schools who can redo the super-duper impossible tech again and again.
Plus what if my axe breaks while fighting Godzilla?
So let's give this old, old debate a twist.
- Only items with 3 tech slots can break. Newbies are spared. Your precious tier 2 2004 set safe.
- The break is not a real break. Let's remove the annoying bits off the process, it's not needed that stuff "dies".
Every time you die, on half of your items (number subject to tweak, this is but an example copied off another game), one of the 3 techs gets flagged as "broken" and won't benefit the item any more till it's repaired.
"So, what's all of this blurb for?"
- An item with broken techs behaves like an unteched one till fixed. To fix it you must purchase a repair kit.
Repair kits can be made and applied by the relevant crafter. Example if I break a boot, I go to an armorsmith (the general blacksmith won't do) and he'll use a repair kit on it.
Or I can train armorsmith and do it by myself. The important part is that something "leaves the system", not that it's hard to replace.
The kits are made with:
- 1 recipe/formula (duh)
- 1 NPC bought cheap ingredient (this makes money to go out of the system)
- 1 (not all) of the ingredients of the tech that got invalidated.
Possibly the satyr island component, else everyone will just farm easy sauce animals for that
Example:
I break a boot where one tech was made with 2 ogre toes and 1 wolf tooth. I have to make or buy a kit with the recipe, the NPC bit (1 silver cost, not Nadia pricing) and an ogre toe.
For weapons, the mechanism is the same.
For craft gear it's different. When you die, less than half of it is affected (that is less than combat items). But craft gear wears down even if you don't die (this to avoid people teching craft gear as battle gear or to never leave their basement knowing their gear will be eternal).
The wear down mechanism could be the one experimented for blighted gear. Past 33% weardown or when you die (the one coming first), the item cracks and 1 tech gets invalidated and then is managed as the items described above.
For spells it's different again.
You would use the spell as is like today but its effect is halved.
To use it at full you get a component (like in other MMOs) of the right element.
Example: ice spell. You buy / make an "nuggets of ice" component.
It's a 100 casts, very light use item (so you don't get your backpack drained down) made with
- 1 recipe/formula
- 1 NPC bought cheap ingredient
- 1 ice wolf or whatever ice creature trophy.
In case of epic / event techs, the component could drop off a boss or a named. Call it "nuggets of deity".
This brings more depth to the roleplay and makes both money and item go out of the game.
Consequences of the above:
- No pain and risk to lose the gear for real.
- Crafters have something to do and finally not just trash it in a pawnbroker.
- Adventurers "feel the risk" more (which is positive) and most of all are finally needed to provide for the stuff leaving the system.
- Having adventurers feel useful and profitable, they will grow in number, which will demand for more crafters...
- Players are enticed levelling specialized craft classes and thus stay longer in the game.
- The NPC made bits remove a bit of the massive money accumulated in game
- More recipes to collect
Doesn't this sound good? And part of it can be done by recycling existing code.
And comps for other fun stuff that would be desirable 
Originally Posted by velveeta
