Criticism and 5 Suggestions on the Economy/Vendor system post 0.9.5 playtesting

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Strill wrote:

It's in the OP.

He didn't mention anything about automation. His scenarios involved people putting in the time to manage multiple accounts through different systems. Sure, there is a clear benefit to automating the process, but you can't avoid that with any system. Every part of every game gives benefit to the player who uses automation. Being easily automated is a flaw, but benefiting from automation isn't. If anything, creating systems that don't benefit from automation would make them insanely tedious to the real player.

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Strill wrote:

I didn't say bot, I said automate categorizing and managing. You can certainly write a program to track your inventory without it being a bot.

Bot: an autonomous computer program that performs time-consuming tasks

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WhiteBoy88 wrote:

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Strill wrote:

I didn't say bot, I said automate categorizing and managing. You can certainly write a program to track your inventory without it being a bot.

Bot: an autonomous computer program that performs time-consuming tasks

I mean bot in the context it's almost always understood to mean - A program that plays the game for you.

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WhiteBoy88 wrote:

Right now, the only reasons we have are simply to alleviate intentional restrictions of the current system like space limitation and item shuffling.

Actually, there's good reason to fix that, there are a lot of people unhappy with the current system. There are some easy tweaks/changes they can make to this system to make it enjoyable for the vast majority of players and my guess is they're working on that right now. They're very good at listening to the overall message of testers and I'm sure they're aware of the issues of the current system.

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Rippster wrote:

Actually, there's good reason to fix that, there are a lot of people unhappy with the current system. There are some easy tweaks/changes they can make to this system to make it enjoyable for the vast majority of players and my guess is they're working on that right now. They're very good at listening to the overall message of testers and I'm sure they're aware of the issues of the current system.

True, but they're also keen on sticking to their own vision of the game. That's why I say the chances of them changing to a new inventory system are very low.

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strill wrote:

I mean bot in the context it's almost always understood to mean - A program that plays the game for you.

Well, that's not how I used it when I first brought the term into the conversation.

Good Post. +1

[/quote]True, but they're also keen on sticking to their own vision of the game. That's why I say the chances of them changing to a new inventory system are very low.[/quote]

That is unfortunate, since they really just copied old systems that have been in existance since Diablo and before.

Their inventory system is one of the most uninspired, poorly thought out I've ever seen. Characters should onlyhave to share the final tab in the inventory, the rest should be open for each new character, and that is just one simple example.

While I will buy the "Sticking to their own vision" argument for gameplay and graphics, I think it is complete non-sense when we are talking about inventory systems. I highly doubt the creators had a deep and compelling vision about where we would keep our crap.

Lets not be afraid to challeng GGG folks, there are too many people defending everything they do. This is a BETA, we need to give them constructive criticism or we won't be doing our jobs as we help develop this potentially superior game.

Thanks,

Dar

You can provide constructive criticism, and people can still disagree with you. Doesn't mean they are fanboys.. and even if they are, that doesn't matter either.

Ultimately it is up to GGG to look at what people are suggesting and to make a call, and if you think that having an alpha/beta member disagreeing with you lowers the likelihood of that happening, you're wrong.

What we need is a game design Apple: the company that takes existing ideas and makes them user friendly and accessible for the masses.

The inventory can be made much more accessible. Item tetris is outdated. Hell, moving items around for 10 minutes when your stash is full is outdated.

I'm not being paid for it, but please think outside the box. For all of its console-ness, Skyrim has a completely different inventory system, there is no reason why GGG cannot come up with something even more different based on iPhone design values.

USER FRIENDLINESS
INNOVATION
CREATIVITY

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BrotherLaz wrote:

What we need is a game design Apple: the company that takes existing ideas and makes them user friendly and accessible for the masses.

The inventory can be made much more accessible. Item tetris is outdated. Hell, moving items around for 10 minutes when your stash is full is outdated.

I'm not being paid for it, but please think outside the box. For all of its console-ness, Skyrim has a completely different inventory system, there is no reason why GGG cannot come up with something even more different based on iPhone design values.

USER FRIENDLINESS
INNOVATION
CREATIVITY

Skyrim style inventories with weight and or how handy an item is, being the primary selection-criteria could be very interesting. I imagine 5 weight-categories you can open for a tetris with that category of items and with the existing artwork and functionality for all items. of course making for say a maximum of six heavy items (12x4 matrix with 2x4 items) and then only a few category 4 (2x1, 1x2 and 1x1 in a say 8x2 matrix) items and unlimited or close to unlimited category 5 items (yxz matrix with currency-items and maybe skill-gems). It would give rise to parameters like limiting lower tier matrix-sizes with higher level matrices getting filled and generally a lot of backpack-upgrades. I do not think it needs to be more complicated than the belt-system.
This kind of system would make it easy to still keep prioritizing pick-ups as an important feature, while giving the possibility for carrying more of the currency-items, without game-overing in Tetris.
Compared to the existing 5x12 tetris it would be a long step foreward.

I do not like the presentation in MMO-generic style with one item, one slot, since that discourages prioritizing based on anything but need and greed. Item Tetris is actually not worse than that in my opinion.

The problem with the current recipe/vendor system is it's just a slower, more annoying but slightly more glorified version of the Horadric Cube from D2 which is archaic.

It'd be a direct copy of D3 but I believe items should be transmutable on the fly as crafting materials which are then taken to vendors and for a cost (in scrolls I guess) to create the expensive currency items. You can then dramatically lower or just plain eliminate those currency from dropping and focus on drops being weapons, armor, scrolls, skill gems and flasks which need to be transmuted to make the currency items.

As for the actual current recipes, they require far too much hording - eg 5 rare armors of the same type to trade for 1 rare armor of the same type unidentified is plain stupid, selling the 5 separately is bound to be more valuable and without eating up half a page of the stash in the process of hording the 5 armors. All recipes should be from combinations of the transmuted crafting materials or currency items, nothing else.

Strip it down.