View Full Version : How to make gold relevant.
dontbelievethehype
03-07-2008, 14:57
The title says it all, how can blizzard make gold relevant in Diablo 3?
1) Gambling definitely needs to make a comeback.
2) To steal an idea from Hellgate, perhaps a donation system that triggers an entire server buff of some sort. It doesn't work in Hellgate well because of the lower playerbase, but the numbers would definitely be there for DIII.
3) Perhaps gold can be transmuted or tempered into something worthwhile.
4) Allow for unlimited growth of personal storage space, however make the gold cost of additional space grow exponentially.
5) Take the customization of mercenaries one step farther, and create a system of 'purchasing' enhancements for them with gold. Extra life, extra armor, extra damage, different haircuts, tattoos, voices, titles, skin color, faces, outfits... Since we will be unable to customize our characters, let our mercenaries become our dress-up dolls.
#4 and #5, in my opinion, would be the best sinks for gold.
To steal an idea from Hellgate, perhaps a donation system that triggers an entire server buff of some sort. It doesn't work in Hellgate well because Hellgate has 14 active players, but the playerbase would definitely be there for DIII.
ouch:)
That aside I like all of your ideas. 2 is fun and I particularly like 4 and 5.
But hireable mercenaries haven't been mentioned by Blizzard yet.
ouch:)
That aside I like all of your ideas. 2 is fun and I particularly like 4 and 5.
But mercenaries haven't been mentioned yet.
Haha, yeah.. edited to be less bitter. :whistling:
mouseman
03-07-2008, 16:54
1) You could buy maps to nearby areas from town. The townspeople would know the areas near the town well, but the further you want to travel the more the maps would cost and they could even have gaps and mistakes in them.
2) Have respeccing cost a lot.
3) Have gold as a trading currency.
4) Restrict the way you get gold. You could get gold only from chests, humanoid monsters, rewards from quests and so on. Why (or how!) maggots carry on gold, anyway?
dontbelievethehype
03-07-2008, 18:43
No respecs please.
Making gold harder to get would help a great deal.
Also maybe do something like Sell AA points for insane amounts of loot.
Rentable Billboards in town :).
Seeing the currency is Perfect gems and then runes, what you must do is tie gold to these two currencies. So gamble for flawless gems and runes, then you have it. A million gold is some gems, or maybe a good rune, prolly only ****ty runes but at least some gems, it's your gamble.
patriach owen
05-07-2008, 13:38
DONT LOOSE ANY WHEN YOU DIE!, thats the main problem... if gold was usefull in DII, then you wouldnt be able to loose like 20% of youre wealth whenever you get Soul Jumped.... lol thats it basically imo... (also and unlimited gold amount in stash could help... i always filled mine...)
Then though, the good old GF baba would be such a played build... you would be soooo rich...
Then you could make some of the better/best items soulbound like in WoW then you have to rely on gold as the best titems wont be tradeable... Eg, SoJ...
just my 2C :D
Two ways I thought of were to be able to upgrade your magic items with gold.
First, have an enchanter that can add mods to an item, up to a max number, say 3 for uncommon, 1 for rare etc.
Second, have a way to increase the mod's value through a different type of enchanter. For example you get your soldiers sword with 23% enhanced damage, you can pay an amount of gold to make it 24%, or further depending on how much gold you spend.
Rashiminos
05-07-2008, 23:58
Um..., remove that silly sell limit of 35K?
Have more items at vendors worth buying,items that dont drop.
voraginous
06-07-2008, 10:50
LONG POST AHOY
Ways to make gold relevant (AND OTHER RANDOM IDEAS):
1. Do what they did in WoW. Gold is relevant in WoW but not in D2, so they should follow WoW's example here. :thumbup:
2. Make sure there are a lot of mandatory day-to-day costs of adventuring. Between potions (if they are making it back), armor/weapon repair, tp/id scrolls, spell components etc., players should spend most of their money on upkeep after a battle.
Addition of spell components should also make the less item dependent classes like the sorc and necro more in line with the poor melee classes :yes:
3a. Make all items wear out each time they're repaired (like the warrior's skill in D1) so characters need to continually be repairing weapons and armor, and looking for replacements. This continual decay will keep players' money cycling back into the economy, instead of letting them build up huge amounts of money.
3b. Make players pay a large sum of money to prevent item decay; perhaps through an enchanter in town who prevents your items from losing durability for a temporary period. So high level characters can keep their stuff forever as long as they keep spending the money to enchant it with temporary indestructibility. This enchanter would charge a % of the cost of the item to enchant it, so high level items cost more to save; therefore higher level players will shell out more money to keep their gear. Maybe lower level players will constantly cycle through gear. But once you get your endgame stuff and have a lot of money, you will be forced to spend a lot of your money on this durability enchantment if you wanna keep this endgame set of gear.
4. Make gold hard to get. Like mouseman said, there's no reason for most of these monsters to be dropping gold, let alone as much as they do.
4) Restrict the way you get gold. You could get gold only from chests, humanoid monsters, rewards from quests and so on. Why (or how!) maggots carry on gold, anyway?
Also reduce the amount of gold players get from selling items back to vendors. Why would Charsi want a low quality club of worthlessness? Or even a regular voulge? In a world where everything of use is highly enchanted anyway, it makes no sense that vendors should pay you even a dime for the cr-appy quality stuff you haul back from the dungeons. Anything you find that the vendors would want should be so good that you wanna use it yourself.
Also creatures can drop only items they could concievably be carrying or hoarding. So like skeleton captains drop those shields they carry and a low quality sword. Fallen drop little tiny daggers and tiny shields. Zombies and most animals drop nothing (except spell components). Gold and good items will come off of humanoid monsters and uniques. So if you fight a goatman archer with flaming arrows, if you kill him you get his flaming crossbow of fire. Or if you kill a monster guarding a hoard of items, you get all the items he was collecting (dragons like to collect phat lewts, so no reason other monsters might not want to). But it makes no sense to have a quill rat carrying around a voulge, and it makes items drop too frequently, which helps the economy get out of control.
This system of sparse drops might seem to make stuff you find worthless, and they probably won't sell for too much, but combined with the item decay from earlier, you probably will need a lot of the stuff that drops, since your armor and weapons will be breaking a lot. Maybe fallen drops won't be useful to you, since their items are so small, but killing goatmen or other humanoid demons should net some weapons and armor you can use in a pinch.
So under this system most of your good drops come from bosses (who will use the enchanted weapons against you) or be bought in town or crafted. Not much different from current D2, just removing a lot of the senseless junky drops that just fill up the screen. When you see a drop under this system, it should generally be good, and you'll know its coming, since you beat a hard *** boss to get it.
5. Make enchanter NPCs/or an enchanter class that can imbue like Charsi, so we increase the flow of magical items in the game (since many of my changes reduce it) while decreasing gold players have. So players can still have all the 1337 stuff they're used to from D2, but it'll cost them money from town; instead of being free (stolen from monsters).
tl;dr: make items decay, sell for less, and drop less often
1. Do what they did in WoW. Gold is relevant in WoW but not in D2, so they should follow WoW's example here. :thumbup:
What do you mean by emulating WoW? WoW's main money drain is mounts, and I'd hate to see those carry over into Diablo. If you're talking about how the Auction House economy revolves around gold .. I think DII's system of bartering is a little more "Diabloesque." It works for WoW, but I'd rather not be able to find gear for my character by simply typing in the name of something in the Search Bar and clicking "Bid!"
2. Make sure there are a lot of mandatory day-to-day costs of adventuring. Between potions (if they are making it back), armor/weapon repair, tp/id scrolls, spell components etc., players should spend most of their money on upkeep after a battle.
Addition of spell components should also make the less item dependent classes like the sorc and necro more in line with the poor melee classes :yes:
3a. Make all items wear out each time they're repaired (like the warrior's skill in D1) so characters need to continually be repairing weapons and armor, and looking for replacements. This continual decay will keep players' money cycling back into the economy, instead of letting them build up huge amounts of money.
3b. Make players pay a large sum of money to prevent item decay; perhaps through an enchanter in town who prevents your items from losing durability for a temporary period. So high level characters can keep their stuff forever as long as they keep spending the money to enchant it with temporary indestructibility. This enchanter would charge a % of the cost of the item to enchant it, so high level items cost more to save; therefore higher level players will shell out more money to keep their gear. Maybe lower level players will constantly cycle through gear. But once you get your endgame stuff and have a lot of money, you will be forced to spend a lot of your money on this durability enchantment if you wanna keep this endgame set of gear.
I'd prefer spending as little time as possible having to worry about whether or not my gear is going to crumble apart. I'm a frickin' beast on the battle-field, wielding magical weapons of immense power .. Constantly watching my weapons and armor degrade detracts from that sense of strength.
I used to play a game called Gemstone III, and at one point, the developers introduced "weapon breakage." This system made it so weapons had a chance to break or be damaged if they made contact against a stronger metal than itself .. Cool idea that made for terrible gameplay. They opted to remove the breakage system post-haste.
4. Make gold hard to get. Like mouseman said, there's no reason for most of these monsters to be dropping gold, let alone as much as they do.
Also reduce the amount of gold players get from selling items back to vendors. Why would Charsi want a low quality club of worthlessness? Or even a regular voulge? In a world where everything of use is highly enchanted anyway, it makes no sense that vendors should pay you even a dime for the cr-appy quality stuff you haul back from the dungeons. Anything you find that the vendors would want should be so good that you wanna use it yourself.
Also creatures can drop only items they could concievably be carrying or hoarding. So like skeleton captains drop those shields they carry and a low quality sword. Fallen drop little tiny daggers and tiny shields. Zombies and most animals drop nothing (except spell components). Gold and good items will come off of humanoid monsters and uniques. So if you fight a goatman archer with flaming arrows, if you kill him you get his flaming crossbow of fire. Or if you kill a monster guarding a hoard of items, you get all the items he was collecting (dragons like to collect phat lewts, so no reason other monsters might not want to). But it makes no sense to have a quill rat carrying around a voulge, and it makes items drop too frequently, which helps the economy get out of control.
This system of sparse drops might seem to make stuff you find worthless, and they probably won't sell for too much, but combined with the item decay from earlier, you probably will need a lot of the stuff that drops, since your armor and weapons will be breaking a lot. Maybe fallen drops won't be useful to you, since their items are so small, but killing goatmen or other humanoid demons should net some weapons and armor you can use in a pinch.
So under this system most of your good drops come from bosses (who will use the enchanted weapons against you) or be bought in town or crafted. Not much different from current D2, just removing a lot of the senseless junky drops that just fill up the screen. When you see a drop under this system, it should generally be good, and you'll know its coming, since you beat a hard *** boss to get it.
I agree that gold should be harder to come by. However, I disagree that junk items should be absolutely worthless at the vendor. I'd much rather them regulate the prices of certain overly-valuable items, such as wands and staves. Items with +skills always sell for an inordinate amount of gold, even if the item is a "cracked yew wand." I'd definitely be in favor of lowering the sell-prices of those few items, so if you want to make some extra gold by scavenging the field, everything's fair game .. not just a handful of things that don't necessarily make much sense.
I think it'd be a terrible mechanic to make monsters only drop what they logically should be able to drop. Realism can only go so far .. item-hunters would bypass or blow by huge areas of the game if they were full of monsters that didn't drop anything they needed. What point would there be for a Barbarian killing floors full of skeleton archers if the Barbarian doesn't need anything bow-related, for example? A few specific quotes of yours:
"This system of sparse drops might seem to make stuff you find worthless, and they probably won't sell for too much, but combined with the item decay from earlier, you probably will need a lot of the stuff that drops, since your armor and weapons will be breaking a lot."
Bottom-line here: Does that seem like a fun mechanic? "A lot of that stuff seems like worthless crap, but because your items are going to be constantly disintegrating, you'll need that crap!" Your suggestion here destroys almost all motivation for killing monsters in DII.
"So under this system most of your good drops come from bosses (who will use the enchanted weapons against you)"
We already have a problem with the frequency that bosses are killed for their loot. This is just another reason for people to farm bosses and avoid other content.
5. Make enchanter NPCs/or an enchanter class that can imbue like Charsi, so we increase the flow of magical items in the game (since many of my changes reduce it) while decreasing gold players have. So players can still have all the 1337 stuff they're used to from D2, but it'll cost them money from town; instead of being free (stolen from monsters).
How is this an improvement? I think anyone would rather have the exhilarating rush of finding an item drop on the battle-field, opposed to...buying it at a vendor.
I don't mean to tear into your ideas, because a lot of them are great and make a lot of sense on paper. None of them, however, seem at all fun to me, and I think that should be the utmost consideration here.
AlabasterFilth
07-07-2008, 21:11
I agree with everything kaeros said, and disagree with almost everything voraginous said, with the exception of the concept of removing junky item drops.
However, the idea of tying it into a system of item decay is definitely the wrong way to go about eliminating junk drops imo.
I like where gold is in D2 right now in many respects, all I'd like to see done directly to gold more user friendly is:
making it possible to store about 100x as much as you can currently (replace 1 mill gold with 1 platinum or whatever to make it easier to read amounts);
not lose cash in the stash on death; and
no limit on how much gold you can trade at once.
Gambling, the current use of gold other than minor irritations such as repairing stuff (I don't think that should go, if only because I really like the current ethereal property, OP as it is) is very worthwhile both for the high level player and the untwinked player, especially in classic. It should be speeded up tho, with a system along the lines of ctrl+clicking an item offered fills your inventory with items of that type assuming, gold allowing. Gambling and gfing is a very viable alternative to mfing in D2, especially pre 1.10 crafting. Buying gold to gamble on a high level char has better returns, at least excluding time taken to gamble/trade, vs buying pgems to roll gcs imo.
Butfor gold to play a major part in D3 (which I don't necessarily like) it simply has to have one single significent use that's seperate. Respeccing could be an appropriate gold sink, though whether/to what extent respeccing should be included in D3 is another topic in itself. In D2c it's pretty much the only way to get +2 amus (1 enemy also drops them, Diablo), which could have made gold in D2c a viable alternative currency (it is traded more often than in d2x but only for basics such as shard), if not for the trading and carrying restrictions and unecessary risk of carrying around larger amounts in SC. GF mod should be toned down if gold is given a significent new use.
Angularfocus
08-07-2008, 00:19
The difference between WoW's economy being gold based, and Diablo's economy being Barter based is a result of two things.
Lack of Gold in WoW, and an abundance of gold in Diablo. There's so much gold flying around in D2, that its not worth anything.
WoW's Soulbound system. In Diablo you can trade hand-me-downs. You can trade BoE items in WoW, but once you use them, they're no longer worth anything but the shard or vendor cost you get.
To make gold relevant in D3, there needs to either be some sort of limit on each. Either limit the item availability, or the gold availability. I think Diablo will always be on the bater end of trading, but with a little tweaking, it could move more towards the center.
-edit-
Another thought would be to use a copper -> silver -> gold -> Platinum system to condense things. I suppose if WoW used only gold, without the condensed increments, things might be different. Would it be easier to keep track of 100g in WoW's current system, or 1,000,000 copper?
voraginous
08-07-2008, 01:26
What do you mean by emulating WoW? WoW's main money drain is mounts, and I'd hate to see those carry over into Diablo. If you're talking about how the Auction House economy revolves around gold .. I think DII's system of bartering is a little more "Diabloesque." It works for WoW, but I'd rather not be able to find gear for my character by simply typing in the name of something in the Search Bar and clicking "Bid!"
Neither. I don't think mounts or auction houses should carry over into Diablo.
I'd prefer spending as little time as possible having to worry about whether or not my gear is going to crumble apart. I'm a frickin' beast on the battle-field, wielding magical weapons of immense power .. Constantly watching my weapons and armor degrade detracts from that sense of strength.
Well you wouldn't have to spend time worrying about it, just like you don't spend time worrying about repairs now. You just click a button and it's taken care of. Right next to the repair button you have a "durability enchant" button and a "durability enchant all" button which you use periodically to stop decay. This is purely a gold sink for higher level players who are on their final end game set of items, not an upkeep cost lower levels really need to worry about. But I can see how it doesn't fit the frenetic pace of the game. It's more of a roguelike type mechanic, where you have to worry about hunger and such.. it's more of a nethack of diablo 1 mechanic than a diablo 2 or 3 mechanic
I used to play a game called Gemstone III, and at one point, the developers introduced "weapon breakage." This system made it so weapons had a chance to break or be damaged if they made contact against a stronger metal than itself .. Cool idea that made for terrible gameplay. They opted to remove the breakage system post-haste.
Well weapons wouldn't break instantly, but over time you would have to either a) replace your gear with new gear or b) pay large amounts of money to keep your gear from decaying.
It's a goldsink, nothing more. Functionally it's the same as increasing repair costs to a large % of the items's value to prevent too much gold building up. In fact, I think that would be a better system, since it uses what we have in Diablo 2 and simply changes some of the background numbers a bit.
Reading your arguments makes me realize that a decay mechanic can be replaced by a slightly retooled repair mechanic instead; with no need for using crappy items. It makes some sense: your nuclear broadsword of destruction can't be sharpened with a normal whetstone, it needs a nuclear enchanted whetstone and an enchanted lead scabbard and trace amounts of phoenix feathers and so on and so forth. So the bigger the item, the higher the repair costs.
I agree that gold should be harder to come by. However, I disagree that junk items should be absolutely worthless at the vendor. I'd much rather them regulate the prices of certain overly-valuable items, such as wands and staves. Items with +skills always sell for an inordinate amount of gold, even if the item is a "cracked yew wand." I'd definitely be in favor of lowering the sell-prices of those few items, so if you want to make some extra gold by scavenging the field, everything's fair game .. not just a handful of things that don't necessarily make much sense.
This makes sense, though I do like the idea of being able to tell what will and won't sell at a glance. Hrmm.. I think I'd prefer if less junk dropped in the first place. Not sure though.
I think it'd be a terrible mechanic to make monsters only drop what they logically should be able to drop. Realism can only go so far .. item-hunters would bypass or blow by huge areas of the game if they were full of monsters that didn't drop anything they needed. What point would there be for a Barbarian killing floors full of skeleton archers if the Barbarian doesn't need anything bow-related, for example? A few specific quotes of yours:
"This system of sparse drops might seem to make stuff you find worthless, and they probably won't sell for too much, but combined with the item decay from earlier, you probably will need a lot of the stuff that drops, since your armor and weapons will be breaking a lot."
Bottom-line here: Does that seem like a fun mechanic? "A lot of that stuff seems like worthless crap, but because your items are going to be constantly disintegrating, you'll need that crap!" Your suggestion here destroys almost all motivation for killing monsters in DII.
"So under this system most of your good drops come from bosses (who will use the enchanted weapons against you)"
We already have a problem with the frequency that bosses are killed for their loot. This is just another reason for people to farm bosses and avoid other content.
Well I'm thinking champions and uniques that spawn on the map or in adventures, not bosses like Diablo Baal or Andy. You wouldn't do runs to get gear, you'd go out into the world and kill uniques where you ran into them. In fact there might be less boss running since you'd often simply be targeting uniques and their packs. It'd be a lot closer to today's system than I think you're envisioning except that a lot of the crap drops would be standardized. So fallen always drop crappy daggers and bucklers instead of dropping crappy voulges or spears.
But as far as crappy drops you're right. I think it's cooler to have more people running around with hugely magical weapons (and it fits Blizz's philosophy) rather than having 99.99% of people be mundane.
Anyway I thought it was a cool idea, but after looking at it again the current system is probably a lot more fun--though I still think my ideas could work.
How is this an improvement? I think anyone would rather have the exhilarating rush of finding an item drop on the battle-field, opposed to...buying it at a vendor.
I agree with this too. Vending is less fun than questing probably. I don't know what I was thinking here :P
I don't mean to tear into your ideas, because a lot of them are great and make a lot of sense on paper. None of them, however, seem at all fun to me, and I think that should be the utmost consideration here.
No most of your points are spot on. I think you misunderstood me in some placed, but many of my ideas weren't well formed and you attacked those with some efficiency.
The difference between WoW's economy being gold based, and Diablo's economy being Barter based is a result of two things.
Lack of Gold in WoW, and an abundance of gold in Diablo. There's so much gold flying around in D2, that its not worth anything.
WoW's Soulbound system. In Diablo you can trade hand-me-downs. You can trade BoE items in WoW, but once you use them, they're no longer worth anything but the shard or vendor cost you get.
To make gold relevant in D3, there needs to either be some sort of limit on each. Either limit the item availability, or the gold availability. I think Diablo will always be on the bater end of trading, but with a little tweaking, it could move more towards the center.
-edit-
Another thought would be to use a copper -> silver -> gold -> Platinum system to condense things. I suppose if WoW used only gold, without the condensed increments, things might be different. Would it be easier to keep track of 100g in WoW's current system, or 1,000,000 copper?
I think you hit the nail on the head with your reasons that WoW has a controlled economy. But IMO the BoE mechanic doesn't fit Diablo (neither do mounts) so we're stuck with limiting the availability of gold by making it very scarce. The problem with this is no matter how scarce you make gold, people will have a lot of it without gold sinks.
I don't think the copper/silver/gold system is even needed if the amounts of gold are controlled enough, but I suppose it's OK.
Also important are controlling hacking and macros.
Sein Schatten
08-07-2008, 01:59
Decrease need to repair (Nobody likes to run to the town every 5 minutes) but increase repaircost.
Death costs money, like D2.
Gambling.
Respeccing. Cost increases exponentially with a max and decreases slowly over time.
Buyable buffs. Costly, thus only real use if a boss is too tough ATM. (Lineage 2 ;) )
sicilian
08-07-2008, 02:52
A few ideas, some have been mentioned:
1) Be able to gamble on ANYTHING. You can gamble on rings, even though those are magic at minimum, why not gamble on charms? Just make it so that most come out as +1 to light radius, or similarly useless mods, and make the price HIGH.
2) I like the idea of purchasing mods, but there should be a limit of one per item, and it can never be removed. And once again, the price should be high so it's something you have to work for.
3) Status symbols and visual customizations. People are vain, and they'll spend money to color their character's armor a certain way, or get some sort of impressive looking robe or totem to show off in public games.
4) Add a trainer for each class to the town of the last act. Make it cost a LOT of gold, but let the player purchase up to three skill points with exponentially increasing costs, something the D2 equivalent of millions of gold. Putting it in the last act lessens the chance of twinking the gold from other characters.
5) Make gold one of the requirements for unlocking D3's version of "Uber Tristram". Not the only req, but maybe one of three. One is random drops, one is a character level, the third is a massive donation.
All of these ideas were thought with the idea that someone will now accept gold in exchange for high level items. If someone can get enough gold by selling a high level (but useless to them) item to unlock special things, rather than grinding for days, they will.
Have more items at vendors worth buying,items that dont drop.
There ya go. I think that if they made it so vendors actually carried godly items for x amount of gold, that would single handedly create our new currency. People would be looking for gold everywhere
PLEASE, nothing from WoW. PLEASE.
The mention of a Witch Doctor is already too much for me! No more Warcraft! No AH, or creepy things like that! Do not make gold hard to get, repairing shouldn't be any trouble for a wild men slaying everything that's evil in sight, can you imagin that poor triumphant Barb going back to his base but Charsi felt like ripping him off for some reason? Come on. We don't need currency! Farming gold is just too much... MMORPG!
Angularfocus
08-07-2008, 05:30
PLEASE, nothing from WoW. PLEASE.
The mention of a Witch Doctor is already too much for me! No more Warcraft! No AH, or creepy things like that! Do not make gold hard to get, repairing shouldn't be any trouble for a wild men slaying everything that's evil in sight, can you imagin that poor triumphant Barb going back to his base but Charsi felt like ripping him off for some reason? Come on. We don't need currency! Farming gold is just too much... MMORPG!
As simple and straightforward as it is, Diablo is an MMORPG. WoW had MANY elements from D2 in it, so expect some to carry over into D3. The point of this thread is discussing ways to make gold relevant in D3, aside from repairing and rezzing a merc.
What's the difference between farming for gold, and farming for items? Gold would be something universal, instead of having to farm for specific things to trade, and it would make it quite a bit easier to acquire items, and track what things are worth.
lionheart
08-07-2008, 10:59
I personally would love the idea to be able to buy from vendors items that are worth my gold. All that gold stacking up for me its useless, i've maxed stash and inventory on all my characters and it just sits there...
Sein Schatten
08-07-2008, 15:28
I personally would love the idea to be able to buy from vendors items that are worth my gold. All that gold stacking up for me its useless, i've maxed stash and inventory on all my characters and it just sits there...
Yep. The items need to be very expensive. Basically, if you want to keep up with merchant items, you are constantly broke and/or can't afford one of the new items. And the higher you get, the more expensive are the items. But those items should not be super powerful items, that ruins the item drop game. They just must be useful for you or your merc.
lionheart
08-07-2008, 20:36
Yep. The items need to be very expensive. Basically, if you want to keep up with merchant items, you are constantly broke and/or can't afford one of the new items. And the higher you get, the more expensive are the items. But those items should not be super powerful items, that ruins the item drop game. They just must be useful for you or your merc.
Yea. To take from the d2 rarity system, at least they should sell some exceptional uniques and not the elite ones. Anyway something of that sort that can actually help you in the game if you have the worst luck in finding good gear
Truly Ancient Deep Crow
08-07-2008, 22:20
To make gold useful: 2 words: free markets!
in detail:
1. do not take so much away when you die (maybe even none)
2. eliminate limits to how much gold you can have or transfer
3. initiate gold sinks: Gambling, Inventory slots, crafting ingredients, full rejuvs, customizations, etc (curbs inflation). Most of these must have a moderately high price relative to gold/time that a new player can expect to earn in order to impart value to the currency.
4. have an auction house, or at least an auction website - this will impart global (or at least regional) market prices to items.
5. revalue sale of items to vendors correctly... uniques and sets should give you a high % of last auction sale, with no cap, while trashy +skills staffs shouldn't pay out so much.
the one thing that will prevent this from becoming WoW is the speed at which you can earn gold and buy items and services. Instead of weeks for an epic mount, prices should be adjusted so that things like crafting ingredients for low level items and the first couple extra inventory slots can be purchased almost immediately. ALSO, the main source of gold for higher level things (your 50th extra slot, elite crafting ingredients) should come from resale of valuable items, NOT gold dropping by itself. Let blizzard figure out what a good balance is.
Now, the question is, how do you prevent goldfarming and duping?
HeavyMetal
09-07-2008, 03:43
How about tying together purchased mods, gambling, and repairs? For example have a weapon's performance (damage, speed, etc) dependent on how well kept (repaired) it is. Allow a player different options for how often to repair and how much to spend on each repair. Regular upkeep with no expenses spared gives a chance (gamble) of getting a special mod. Require continued high cost repairs to keep any uber mods. Perhaps make the best mods all require charges and a high cost to recharge.
5) Make gold one of the requirements for unlocking D3's version of "Uber Tristram". Not the only req, but maybe one of three. One is random drops, one is a character level, the third is a massive donation.
I recall something in a game...I think it was Fable...where you would drop a certain quota amount of gold into a well and get to fight some crazy monster that dropped something really good.
I'm thinking they should have something similiar to this, but the level of monster that spawns would be relative to the amount of gold you donate. And the monsters which comes out of this "portal", whatever it may be, will have a greater chance of dropping G0dL33z than your typical "Geleb Flamefinger" or what have you. Of course the more gold you donate=higher level monster=higher level possible drops.
For the Diablo world it definetly shouldn't be so black-and-white as gold+well=monster for no reason, but you get the idea.
The reason Gold was worthless in D2 was because it only had 2 real uses: repairing, and gambling. But the returns on gambling weren't very good, which resulted in lack of care for gold.
If they want to make gold useful they need to curb the dropping of it some, first, Second, they need to make the items you can buy from vendors better, meaning there should be more balance between rares and magic items. Third, they need more varied ways to spend money, so that people will have to make choices of what to do with their gold.
To make gold useful: 2 words: free markets!
in detail:
1. do not take so much away when you die (maybe even none)
2. eliminate limits to how much gold you can have or transfer
3. initiate gold sinks: Gambling, Inventory slots, crafting ingredients, full rejuvs, customizations, etc (curbs inflation). Most of these must have a moderately high price relative to gold/time that a new player can expect to earn in order to impart value to the currency.
4. have an auction house, or at least an auction website - this will impart global (or at least regional) market prices to items.
5. revalue sale of items to vendors correctly... uniques and sets should give you a high % of last auction sale, with no cap, while trashy +skills staffs shouldn't pay out so much.
I just wanted to point out that your #1 isnt in line with #3... Loss of gold as a death penalty is a very important gold sink. In wow you lose gold, for example too in the form of durability loss on your gear.
Now, the question is, how do you prevent goldfarming and duping?
Well, one way would be to have some sort of human authentication in D3 when you make games. Similar to typing in the random numbers/letters when you join a web forum. That would stop the rampant botting at least, not the chinese goldfarming though.
Duping should really be stopped by Blizz. They have a lot more bandwidth than they did 10 years ago, which gives them more headroom to stop duping.
sicilian
09-07-2008, 17:23
How about tying together purchased mods, gambling, and repairs? For example have a weapon's performance (damage, speed, etc) dependent on how well kept (repaired) it is. Allow a player different options for how often to repair and how much to spend on each repair. Regular upkeep with no expenses spared gives a chance (gamble) of getting a special mod. Require continued high cost repairs to keep any uber mods. Perhaps make the best mods all require charges and a high cost to recharge.
Problem with this is it would encourage people to stop fighting and go back to town to repair. If the longer you're out the less effective you become, town portals will become the number one item bought in the game.
I like the idea of higher quality items being sold by vendors. Make it rare, like a unique will show up as a special offer once every 1000 trips to the vendor (maybe even tie it into time played, so you can't just keep leaving town and coming back to refresh the wares). Make the price extremely high, several millions. It would give people a reason to go back and at least check on the vendors to see what kind of fun stuff is there.
Or the simpler answer, make it possible to gamble uniques and sets again.
CultOfPpaatt
09-07-2008, 17:35
Seeing the currency is Perfect gems and then runes, what you must do is tie gold to these two currencies. So gamble for flawless gems and runes, then you have it. A million gold is some gems, or maybe a good rune, prolly only medium runes but at least some gems, it's your gamble.
This is a teriffic solution. I would love to see this happen. One other thing that ought to change is how you lose gold when you die. It feels terrible when it just dissappears out of your stash, but if you think about it, that's how much it costs to revive you, just like it costs loads to revive your merc. It's a penalty, but it shouldn't be automatically withdrawn. If this were just a patch to d2 I would say make the character into the hardcore death art when he dies, then make him pay to revive himself.
I didn't know something was wrong with the Gold system, neither was it useless. You could gamble items, that is what your gold is good for.
Nilaripper
14-07-2008, 03:48
I didn't know something was wrong with the Gold system, neither was it useless. You could gamble items, that is what your gold is good for.
The rarest items are the currency in D2Lod. NOT gold. As mentioned before gold has to be tied to runes and extremely rare items. It must be possible to get high runes for gold, high-end items for gold.
I like the gambling/crafting/rerolling options in D2Lod very much. It should be possible to get +3skillamus only by crafting/gambling. If +3 is too high then just the +2 amus/items by gambling/crafting. Tied to gold it will make gold the currency it should be.
Most important: If they make a WORLD event on D3, -tie it to gold and not to the soj or other rare items.
Tying gold donation to a world event vs soj sales (or similar,) is brilliant! I vote for that one!!!
I posted this in a different thread but I'll repost here.
Here is what I would do for gold in D3, to give it some value, but not supreme value. Gold should be useful, but you shouldn't be able to get everything with it.
Get rid of useless gold sinks:
1) Get rid of item durability/repairs (they're annoyances that disproportionately punish melee builds, and not conducive to fast-paced gameplay; ethereal items would need something else to counterbalance them)
2) Possibly find an alternative merc resurrect penalty
Reduce the supply of gold:
1) Reduce gold drop frequency
2) Rarify the %goldfind affix
3) Drastically Reduce selling prices of items (gold piles should be worth more than most white/blue items); also, uncap selling prices
Increase the demand for gold:
1) Improve the odds in gambling (not by too much; e.g. sets 1/500, uniques 1/1000)
2) Reduce the amount of high level items with useless magic affixes, and allow vendors to frequently sell viable "second-rate" gear at high but affordable gold prices
3) Allow unlimited inventory space in a shared account stash to be bought at a fixed rate (In D2 terms, around 50,000 - 100,000 gold per item slot)
4) Allow respeccing at an increasing gold-cost (in D2 terms, 25,000 gold for the first skillpoint or 5 stat points, with a 10% compounded cost for each additional 1 skill/ 5 stats, capped at around 1M gold; stats and skills would be separated for respec purposes, so respeccing a ton of stats wouldn't increase the costs of respeccing a skill, and vice versa).
5) Allow common cube ingredients to be bought for crafting purposes, such as pgems. This is really just a different version of gambling.
6) Allow items to be unsocketed (returning all the ingredients along with the item) for a decent price (in D2 terms, 50,000 gold for normal items, 100,000 gold for exceptional items, 150,000 gold for elite items). Runewords would have a higher cost to unsocket.
Other things this thread has prompted:
World event or something like it with randomized high chance for good items instead of guaranteed specific reward is a great gold-sink.
I say "no" to repairs because they disproportionately favor casters and punish meleers, who are already among the weakest. Plus they're just annoying. Kinda like stamina.
Death penalty should be related to player level and number of deaths with that character. No minimum cap either, so you could go into debt for deaths (no buying anything but scrolls, keys, and potions until you repay that debt).
You should not be able to get everything with gold. The best items should be drop-only. This is because gold-farming is much less exciting than item farming.
Status/customizations that have no influence on power are a good gold-sink as well (recoloring armor)
Paying to reroll (rare only?) items is another possibility.
Chiodos Guitar
26-07-2008, 01:56
How to make gold relevant?
How many times have you seen this:
Armor. Defense: 150. Sell Value: 35000
Skin of the Vipermagi. Sell Value: 1500
How about making unique items actually worth something in gold? An Enigma should be a few million, not just 4000 or something like that...
Because I didn't want to read 4 pages of ideas, I'm pitching mine with an apology if someone already stated it.
I think Blizzard needs to take a page out of the WoW gold system. And by this I mean a 3 or 4 tiered currency. Copper / Silver / Gold / Platinum with a ratio of 100:100:100:1
I hate dealing in terms of a million gold. GOLD IS HEAVY! LOL no one can carry that much.
Next, create an auction house where items can ONLY be sold / traded for currency. This will create a HUGE demand for the currency. Last, STOP TAKING MY GOLD WHEN I DIE!!! No one deals in gold in DII because they take so damn much after a death that was probably cause by the lag on their servers.
Just my opinion.
CombatShrine
28-07-2008, 22:23
Its easy.
they just need to increase the return-on-investment from gambling, and the vendors in hell should sell rare (rare as in yellow text) items that spawn with good mods.
maybe even let them sell runes and charms too.
Enjoy most of the ideas...mainly the gold sinks. A decent idea for a gold sink would be a begger.
Begger asks for gold...you give begger gold...there is a 10% chance the begger will give you an item. The more you give the begger in one load the better the item might be. Although, gold does not collect over time.
So you can't give the begger 20,000 in one load and then give it like 500 several times in a row and expect an item worthy of the 20,000.
Sort of like gambling, but a bit more random. If you get an item on 500 gold you might get a sword with 1-3 fire damage added. If you get an item on 20,000 gold you have a shot of getting a powerful item. If you get an item on100,000 the item might be godly.
The chance of getting an item is so low that it won't undermine the characters finding powerful items in battle, but also if the character is given an item in return the character will at least get an item equal to what they paid for in gamble.
Also, to make it more likely for players to return...the item handed out is random. Sometimes it might be a ring, sometimes a helmet, sometimes, a sword, but it wouldn't give a character something that is class specific to another class. So witchdoctors aren't worrying about getting a barbarian specific item.
GforceXYZ
01-08-2008, 16:22
Gold's is already relevant in the Diablo series...
The question to be asked is... "How to make gold important?"
One great way to increase gold's importance is by making it the main resource for getting your hands on potions. If potions were harder to find, then players would be forced to collect gold to ensure their survivability. Gold would be associated with things that the player cares about, rather than simply gambling for junk. Furthermore, making gold less available would also boost it's importance. Players would be forced to cherish every gold coin that they find since it is the best way to gain access to potions.
Gold should also be considered a limitless resource. In other words, the maximum amount of gold a player can keep in his/her stash should be so high that it is almost impossible to reach. If it were possible to remove the gold limit, then i would rather that be implemented. This doesnt require an immense amount of memory or graphical modification. So i think this is a feasible modification to D3.
These changes could potentially turn D3 gold into the currency of the game. I would rather gold be the new currency, which would replace Sojs and high level runes.
Thanks for reading... Gforce...
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