Hey krasko and everyone,
I've been thinking about this for a while and the best ways to implement something similar to this in both the long and short terms for Planet Cyrene. While I know that sometimes these things seem sort of "cut and dry" there are nuisances and iterations that have to be gone through behind the scenes in order to for this to be part of the live game, work correctly, and be beneficial for all parties involved. That being said I think there's merit to not only talk about these ideas but to open a discussion about them in general.
- Tokens should be harder to obtain based on real activities (crafting, mining, hunting).
Tokens are based on these activities currently, however, aren't difficult to obtain for mining, but the hunting ones should feel at least appropriate, at least I hope so.
In what sort of context should harder be? Or harder in an attempt to improve rewards? Or some combination of the two?
For example, right now you can turn in 5 Zorn Star Ingots for 3 Cyrene Mission Ttokens. There are several ways to make this harder, for example:
a) turn in 10 Zorn Star Ingots for 2 Cyrene Mission Tokens (more cost for smaller reward)
b) mine up a mining find of X size for 3 Cyrene Mission Tokens (skill intensive for similar reward)
c) head to mining island, mine up a mining find of X size of Zorn Star Ore, refine them into ingots, turn them in at a dangerous place (specific instruction, skill intensive for similar reward)
Obviously this is one instance and there can be multiple levels of difficulty but I'm interested to hear back from the community about "harder".
I also wanted to ask about "based on real activities", this is in reference to the sweat tokens or the tokens from the platformers, or neither? I really liked the idea of more progressive ways to get them rather than always relying on the traditional ways. I'm open to hear your ideas.
- Items and tokens better be non tradable.
I think are many good reasons why these items and tokens could be changed to be bound, however, with so many tokens being out within the game it would be difficult to make tokens non-tradeable as there could potentially be many upset players that maybe didn't want their tokens to be non-tradeable, or who could exploit the tokens being bound before whatever update made them so, etc. It's something that we'll have to talk about internally and with MA before that sort of action is taken.
On the whole, however, Entropia is a game that is fundamentally about buying and selling, markup, and information on how to best do both of those things efficiently and economically. Initially that SCREAMED that items shouldn't be non-tradeable, which was very foreign to us coming from more main stream MMOGs where the majority of items were non-tradeable and only a select few were able to be traded after they were looted (at least the good items).
Over time, this has decayed a bit, not only from our own perspective but seemingly on the whole within EU. So I this is something that I'd like to talk to MA about when the time comes. I think it can sort of tie into the following part:
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Diversity: Levels 5 to 105. Hunting, Mining, Crafting (some exclusive L blueprints).
Everyone gets exactly what they want to use according to their skill level and preferred profession (No reseller camping).
So now this is in reference to rewards, yes? I think, with a token mission and reward over haul like the one we're talking about here, token vendors are not the solution.
My idea is basically mission turn in (both repeatable and not) determined by your primary skill level. For example, a level 20 surveyor couldn't get a level 40 mining amp from this mission turn in, they would have to get the one to match their still level. Although they could still collect tokens from any of the mission types, as splitting the tokens into 3 types I think would be unadvisable.
In this way, players can still partake in many of the different token mission types while at the same time getting items appropriate for their skill level they would use.
I'd like to thank krasko for making this post and starting this dialogue, I'll also provide a shameless link to our Planet Cyrene Discord Server Here:
https://discord.gg/tEc5kzD
Looking forward to hearing more feedback from everyone.
Cheers,
Kris