Pretty soon these games will just play themselves. No reason to log on or even purchase the discs/DL.
I like looting crap, even if it's worthless. Some of the stuff I loot makes me laugh. One of my characters has been carrying around a Polished Skull for 2 months because it looks cool in the inventory.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
If it wasn't for games implementing auto-looting, I wouldn't bother grabbing greys at all. Since the advent of auto-looting, I grab everything since these games make earning gold such a chore, I'll work with anything that makes the process a bit faster, escpecially since I do not want to waste my precious game time doing boring crap like farming resources or crafting.
I think the way BW sees it as greys are mostly just cash, mobs will mostly like have a few hundred creds (short for credits, kinda) a storm trooper kneepad and a gun (kneepad is VT and the gun is sellable if albeit for little coinage)
They stated they didn't want you returning back to town just to sell stuff because thats an uneccessary annoyance. So they went with this idea instead.
Personally i'm okay with the companions selling greys, granted you could just cut them out and give you the money instead but then how did the items get sold when you never visted the vendor? am i to believe that every mob in the galaxy has republic creds on them regardless of what it is? In a world stand point i'm okay with VT dropping, the biggest thing i hated was being forced to return to town in the middle of a grind (not that they said there would be one in this game) *covers that base before it sticks*.
Anyway, the way they descirbe this issue they prefer VT to just be a way to get money. I posted a while back the various reasons they wanted you to go back to town and selling greys wasn't one of them.
Always new ways of trying things, glad they are at least trying to change things up a bit by allowing you to sell greys through your companions thus keeping in tune with the world and make sense.
They could expand upon this if they wanted to, or allow you to use those greys if they wanted to. But for now this is a good solution to the problem of people having to return to a merchant to sell. Last thing you want to hear is your healer saying i need a 15 min break to sell to a merchant 3 zones away (this did happen in EQ 1 to me once)
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Heh, this reminds me of what I just said the other day in that backpack space thread:
Originally posted by Disdena
I can't say I really agree with the justification for vendor trash items. We're used to the idea that killing bats and spiders earns you money in video games. It's unrealistic, but it's an acceptable break from reality. Honestly, is it any less believable than the idea that any given vendor anywhere in the world is willing to purchase an unlimited quantity of Chipped Gargoyle Talons from you, each one at hundreds of times the price of a mundane longsword?
But actually, I might have changed my mind a little after reading Gobla's post:
Originally posted by gobla
What greys do is that they delay the monetary reward and instead pay it out all at once. So say I have 50 slots full of greys. 25*50 = 1250 creds. That's 15,625% towards my goal. Even though it took the same amount of time the cash is paid out in a much shorter frame making it feel like so much more.
In addition to that there's the packrat value they bring. It's simply more fulfilling to walk off the battlefield with a backpack full of collected goodies, even if they don't have any use besides selling.
I think that is a better justification than what many other people have said. If you carry around a thing for a while until you've got a whole stack of 50 of them, it feels like you've earned a lot of money when you sell them. Getting the actual cash value at the time that the kill was made would be too small an amount... it would feel like nothing. Even 50 times nothing is nothing. Because the grey item has an icon and takes up space, it's easier to think of it as a reward compared to having 12 gp drop into your wallet (which already has 20,000 gp) with each kill. Even though it has no use beyond being translated to currency, it feels like a thing. Cash does not.
I kind of like game systems that have a little bit more "realism" in them.....
Needing to do support stuff in order to maintain your adventuring has always been something I liked (for the Developer it's also important to slow down the rate at which player burn through content)....
Traveling between points on the map, getting your gear fixed, getting healed, selling loot and trading out equipment from storage.....are all stuff that makes sense to me, because they are part of what an actual character going out adventuring in a fantasy/sci-fi universe would really need to do.
I'd be pretty put off if every time I killed a giant womp-rat, 5 credits magicaly materialized in my bank acount... how would that make sense? On the other hand, I get pretty put off when a giant rat drops a +5 suit of chainmail... that doesn't make much sense either. YMMV
But without the grays, what would motivate you to stop in town as often as you did? Diablo has this same problem. I burnt more Town Portal spells to unload my spoils then to stock up on ammo or potions. Yet in Torchlight, I used my pet's inventory and kept sending him back topside so I could keep exploring. This removed my need to go back to town at all except on the harder difficulty levels and when the story demanded it. However, a side effect of this was that "I wonder what's on the next floor?" eventually turned into "WHERE'S THE F***ING BOTTOM!?"
If you don't have a change in scenery the game wears you out.
I think it all began back in Everquest, the undisputed King of time sinks. Although it does provide for some additional coin to be made along your travels and adventures, I think it was originally designed to eventually fill up your bags, forcing you to stop grinding so you could go to town and sell off all the junk. If you remember EQ prior to all the rapid travel options it has now, anyone that was not a caster class that could bind wherever they wanted, would face a good 20 minute downtime just to go sell and get back to the camp spot.
Although tragic that the practice has survived all these years, at least todays MMO's are far easier to travel around in than the early days of EQ were.
A quote they stated why they did this the way they did. Granted i will say they could do something with these greys that would be great, but if they aren't. I'm all up for a way to reduce the need to return to town every 10 mins as my bags fill up. Anyway heres the quote:
You are right, players need a reason to return to social hubs from time to time.
Here are some reasons why 'selling grays' is not that reason in The Old Republic:
- Players have no incentive to interact with other players when selling grays. You're just forcing them to return to a hub. There are better reasons (e.g. trainers, turning in quests, etc.) that reward the player for doing the same thing, which creates a much more positive attitude to begin with.
- It's something you have to do with high frequency and creates implicit dependencies, that we then have to balance. In TOR, whenever you go into combat, you usually fight a substantially larger number of foes than in other MMOs. As a result, your inventory fills up quicker. We obviously can adjust drop rates down to change that, but that also means that if we address drop rates for any other reason, we implicitly change the frequency at which you have to return to town.
- Frankly - nobody has ever told me "Man, I went to town to sell grays, it was soooo awesome!"
To address your concerns, here's a small list of reasons for you to return to a social hub in TOR, and as a bonus, how we view each reason from a player perspective:
Various vendors. Positive: I get to buy stuff.
Crafting benches. Positive: I get to make stuff.
Banking access. Positive: I don't pay bills there?
Trainers. Positive: I get to learn new stuff.
Quests / Follow-up quests. Positive: I get rewards.
Meeting friends (much easier at a known location than randomly in a snowstorm on Hoth). Positive: I meet friends.
Spaceport access. Neutral.
Medcenters. Neutral, arguably negative (I failed).
Speeder Transportation Service. Neutral.
Your inventory still fills up with items, so it's not like you never have to return to town. Probably Neutral: since I get a lot of credits for the non gray stuff.
Lastly, adding a feature to the game ('companions sell grays') and then balancing it in a way that it becomes undesirable to the player by the meas of penalties ('can't use companion for a long time') would be bad design. When you create a feature for a game, it is either strong, stands on it own and has been designed to account for potential issues, or you don't do it. You don't add it and then try to balance it out with something negative.
Ultimately, it's not like this is a super ground breaking feature. It's just different from what other MMOs do and I can see how that is out of the comfort zone for some. That's fine - every once in a while someone needs to question these kinds of conventions, or we'd still be stuck with 'lose half a level' XP death penalties as the genre standard.
Useless items should not be worth anything. They are useless.
This.
I don't see any reason to have something useless in a game, except in one odd case.
Animals. Obviously, animals SHOULDn't have little bear and spider "wallets", so it makes sense that loot come to you in the form of "monstrous claw" or something. What's odd is many games, despite having those sort of things in-game, ALSO have bears with wallets and spiders carrying a chain breastplate!
A little extra money doesn't hurt, even if its a pathetic amount. It all adds up and since in TOR you don't have to break stride to do so, I really don't mind it. Doing it yourself does get annoying though.
For all we no those grey useless items might actually be worth decent amounts in bulk for TOR.
Yeah, but you would rather plunder someones wallet than taking his boots after you killed him. Vendortrash sucks.
I did not see a single person loot anyone in all the 6 movies, therefor I conclude that vendortrash is against the lore, at least for the good side. Who knows what tghe darkside do?
Really, vendortrash is the dumbest part of MMOs. Only someone pathetic poor individual would loot like this, like the poor people following the armies in the 30 year war.
Of course you would pick up something that looks really expansive from someone you offed, but not junk items. Only cash should drop beside premium items in any game.
You really dont remember seeing anyone loot in all 6 movies? I rember Luke and Han killing some storm troopers and looting their armor to sneak around the Death Star in episode 4. I seem to remember other scenes where someone would pick up a blaster dropped by Storm Troopers too.
I have stopped playing most of these type of games because of this stuff! You get half way through some quest, only to have to go to the shop, so that you can make more room for the quest items, yeah right!!!
How about getting rid of the idea that a character, no matter how physically degenrate can carry around 5 backpacks full of crap in the first place?
Who can carry around 112 swords and still fight bad guys?
Two "fixes" to this issue. Make all the "greys" reduceable to craftable components so there is value to them outside of vendoring trash... DAOC did this with some success via salvage.
Get rid fo the practice alltogether by putting encumbrance back into the game. You kill a baddie, you take whatss useful, pocket his bank notes, and leave the rest to rot or to be picked up by whoever has the time, inclination, and skills to garbage pick the battlefields and make something useful otu of the scrap.
All the perviously mentioned things aside like delayed pseudo-instantgratification i.e. gathering a stack of crap earning the money seemingly all at once when you sell, other psychological reasons that may be ment to get you "addicted" like super markets employ as well, the reason animals shouldnt carry cash, theres other reasons as well.
You gotta decide for yourself if they make sense to you or not but they certainly do to me.
First of all you have to decide what you want and then think it all the way through with all the consequences such a system would have.
Those of you who ask grays to be removed, give this a thought...
If mobs didnt have any grays and their monetary value was just added to the normal gold/currency drop that would mean that there wouldnt be any loot ever except for rare drops.
Does it make sense for a mob, humanoids especially who are packed with gear never to have any loot available? Does it make sense in any way? I don't think so. If someone murdered me on the street I'd have all sorts of crap in my pockets :P Sure usually people wouldnt take most of it but then again thats more the "fault" of our society/lifestyle than anything else. Pretty sure a few centuries ago people took almost anything they could get their hands on be it for trade for something else, to have a backup or whatever reason.
"Realism" aside, Onlinegames are supposed to be RPGs and gray items also give the opportunity to add some fluff items to different mobs, to give them a bit of personality. Maybe just worth a quick smile or a small laugh when you first encounter it...maybe you even decide to keep it around for its funny name or looks (icon). Those may be irrelevant reasons for some or maybe even most people but imo mmos/mmorpgs have strayed enough from the old rpgs/pen&paper without us crying for removal or all non-essential items, texts and fluff in general etc. you can't expect to have a great experience when you're not willing to experience anything. Reducing every piece in the game to how it must benefit you without being bothersome.
Of course if you find the same gray item for the 20197th time its not gonna be interesting or funny anymore but is that a reason for it never to have existed in the first place?
And those of you who think mobs should only drop usable items consider this...
Let's devide it between usable items by yourself i.e. equipment, and usable items as crafting components.
If items were usable, does that mean you WOULD actually use them? Sure lets say every 10th Brigand drops a leather tunic...for the first one you'd be like yay loot and put it on (if it provides an upgrade for you...another variable I'm going to adress), but what do you do with the 3rd, the 7th and the 654th tunic? If it was sellable you'd want to take it wouldn't you, actually degrading it youself to vendor trash...sure it could be used but do you need more than one or two? And if it wasnt sellable you'd probably complain that it wasn't because for some reason it just doesn't sit right with us leaving loot behind now does it? ;D
In this scenario there are a lot of variables that need to be thought through because it will impact the game...
If usable items drop will they be useful enough for us to ACTUALLY use. And if they are you gotta think about the droprate....if the game has a system like UO used to have or like Darkfall for example items expire when their durability is through which puts more emphasis on the characters stats and skills than the armor, which makes it more viable for equipment to be more readily availble as drops. If it has a system like WOW, Rift and what have you where items dont expire, there's no need to have more than one of the same item, which renders all multiples of an item obsolete except for possible coinage if sale is possible...making it in effect the same as you have with grays.
Also if the game also has crafting which almost every game does, having readily available equipment from loot will either inflate crafting..OR if the crafted items are for one or more reasons better than dropped items, render the drops worthless...can't have your pie and eat it too :P
In WOW for example they got vendor junk and white weapons which are basically crap too because noone ever uses them except for back when you still needed to skill up your weapon proficiencies...so that game has both, vendor crap and usable items noone ever uses making them vendor trash as well, so is that a viable item in your opinion then? One you could use but never do?
Now on to crafting materials...almost the same applies here....if mobs did only drop currency and crafting components you'd have to look at the drop rates and compare them with the required amounts for crafting.
If the droprates are high/common you'd have to require many items to make a crafted item or crafting would be useless at least in regards to an economy/trading-perspective...because if you had too many crafting components from simply killing stuff in the course of normal gameplay everyone would craft their own stuff greatly reducing trade oportunities.
If the droprates are low the crafted items would need to be more powerful to make up for the hassle of being able to make them i.e. buy/farm all the components, further decreasing the value of any possible readily available equipment drops.
So what it all comes down to is this....
If there are no grays at all loot would be 2 dimensional and boring for lack of variety and a loss of fluff and rpg elements.
If instead grays would be replaced by equipment drops, the drops would either have to kinda suck to not screw over crafters, making the drops tho usable effectively worthless and vendor junk as well, or it would have to be a system where crafting doesnt make too big of a difference but then items would have to break to keep demand existant.
If grays would be replaced by crafting components crafting would either be marginalised if the loot drops are too many compared to the crafting requirements hurting crafting as a way to impact the economy or if you also needed a lot of items to make one you'd have to farm forever or buy it which also requires farming for money then people would complain that they need to constantly kill stuff to craft when crafting is supposed to be a mostly non-combat proficiency. And this option kind of also includes the loss of fluff and rpg elements if not to such a degree as completely removing loot other than currency.
I'm sure I've explained a few of the things a bit poorly and they don't exactly represent the jumble of thoughts in my head but maybe you get the idea xD
The main point would be that stuff has way more consequences you'd have to think about than just to remove something, the end. Because it rarely leaves other things uneffected.
And last but not least...for those of you who argued that nobody in their right mind (vendors) would buy all that crap you pick up...I pose the question why not? Maybe all the broken weapons and armor scraps go into making the things the vendor makes and offers to you? Maybe the potions vendor gladly buys all your broken weapons because he knows the blacksmith vendor will gladly take them off his hands and reimburse him? Sure thats all just an idea...but it makes more sense to me than just to say there couldnt possibly be any reason for a vendor to buy your crap.
Hm wow wall of text...well anyways...those are my thoughts on the topic...have fun taking them apart and shooting them down at your leisure. I'm off to play IWBTG again where I don't have to worry about oh so bothersome gray drops :P
I like selling greys. Makes the world I am playing in feel more real. What I dont like is greys that are worth almost nothing unless its a funny item. Like a broken I win button. IMO greys should look and feel they came from what you have killed. Dont give me a butchers axe off a Wolf I just killed. Second they should have a good sell amount for your level.
no, that tradition came from Nethack/Moria/Angband type games.
Diablo just made a nicer looking icon replacing / for flail or , for amulet or ] for armour when that D you fireballed to death splashed the dungeon floor with a jumble of what lookes like censored swear words.
Diablo hardly adds anything new to gaming, graphics merely made it popular with a wider, less literate audience, just like movies based on books, or dubbing over subtitles.
-- Vet of: UO, Pre-AI AO, EQ, DAoC, Shadowbane, Pre-CU SWG, EQ2, RO, Crossgate, Neocron, StoneAge, JY Online, JY Online 2, Seal Online, Asgard Online, Mabinogi, Dragonraja, Lineage, Guild Wars, WoW US, WoW China, WoW Taiwan, EVE Online, LOTRO, Dark and Light, FFXI, FFXIV, Age of Conan, Atlantica Online, STO, and many more...
-- Still have an account on: WoW: Cata(US)(2 months+).
-- waiting for them to make: Zork(game), Wizardry Compiled(novel), Dune(novel), G1 Transformers(cartoon).
I guess I am sold on the idea of having a companion to go sell my stuff. I was actually picky about what I bothered to loot, but knowing I can unload with a few minutes to spare is pretty cool to me. Yes, it isn't very EPIC to go sell stuff and waiting for your companion to do it won't be all that EPIC either, but better them than me. They can help me clear some much needed bag space and still not feel bad about picking up every piece of crap as it drops or actually deciding... the boots sell for more than the hat so I will grab the boots. LOL
one suggestion i've had over many years since UO and was successfully but limited-ly introduced by WoW is the concept of breaking down loot into components (ala WoW's Enchanting prof.) but make it widescale. using WoW as a medium, all loot is at least white quality, and all loot can be broken down to simpler components, or even materials, which could then be used for crafting. which would allow sellers to still sell it to NPCs for a price if they want, or be broken down into stackable parts and sold for even less to NPC, or sold/traded to crafters perhaps for higher than NPC price. FFXIV has the loot and player market part down, although the console-friendly UI bogged down the entire system to unplayable, same goes for SWG, albeit bogged down due to over-intricacy of resource collecting. WoW's Enchant is the closest playable system in this sense, and really IMHO should be the basis for crafting/loot in a good MMO.
-- Vet of: UO, Pre-AI AO, EQ, DAoC, Shadowbane, Pre-CU SWG, EQ2, RO, Crossgate, Neocron, StoneAge, JY Online, JY Online 2, Seal Online, Asgard Online, Mabinogi, Dragonraja, Lineage, Guild Wars, WoW US, WoW China, WoW Taiwan, EVE Online, LOTRO, Dark and Light, FFXI, FFXIV, Age of Conan, Atlantica Online, STO, and many more...
-- Still have an account on: WoW: Cata(US)(2 months+).
-- waiting for them to make: Zork(game), Wizardry Compiled(novel), Dune(novel), G1 Transformers(cartoon).
one suggestion i've had over many years since UO and was successfully but limited-ly introduced by WoW is the concept of breaking down loot into components (ala WoW's Enchanting prof.) but make it widescale. using WoW as a medium, all loot is at least white quality, and all loot can be broken down to simpler components, or even materials, which could then be used for crafting. which would allow sellers to still sell it to NPCs for a price if they want, or be broken down into stackable parts and sold for even less to NPC, or sold/traded to crafters perhaps for higher than NPC price. FFXIV has the loot and player market part down, although the console-friendly UI bogged down the entire system to unplayable, same goes for SWG, albeit bogged down due to over-intricacy of resource collecting. WoW's Enchant is the closest playable system in this sense, and really IMHO should be the basis for crafting/loot in a good MMO.
This.
I think with all the "grey" equipment collected you should have a choice to sell it to a vendor intact, disassemble and get the raw materials, which in some "Junk" items might be worth than the item itself in the player economy, and sell or trade it to a crafter, or use it to craft new items.
Comments
Pretty soon these games will just play themselves. No reason to log on or even purchase the discs/DL.
I like looting crap, even if it's worthless. Some of the stuff I loot makes me laugh. One of my characters has been carrying around a Polished Skull for 2 months because it looks cool in the inventory.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
If it wasn't for games implementing auto-looting, I wouldn't bother grabbing greys at all. Since the advent of auto-looting, I grab everything since these games make earning gold such a chore, I'll work with anything that makes the process a bit faster, escpecially since I do not want to waste my precious game time doing boring crap like farming resources or crafting.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
I think the way BW sees it as greys are mostly just cash, mobs will mostly like have a few hundred creds (short for credits, kinda) a storm trooper kneepad and a gun (kneepad is VT and the gun is sellable if albeit for little coinage)
They stated they didn't want you returning back to town just to sell stuff because thats an uneccessary annoyance. So they went with this idea instead.
Personally i'm okay with the companions selling greys, granted you could just cut them out and give you the money instead but then how did the items get sold when you never visted the vendor? am i to believe that every mob in the galaxy has republic creds on them regardless of what it is? In a world stand point i'm okay with VT dropping, the biggest thing i hated was being forced to return to town in the middle of a grind (not that they said there would be one in this game) *covers that base before it sticks*.
Anyway, the way they descirbe this issue they prefer VT to just be a way to get money. I posted a while back the various reasons they wanted you to go back to town and selling greys wasn't one of them.
Always new ways of trying things, glad they are at least trying to change things up a bit by allowing you to sell greys through your companions thus keeping in tune with the world and make sense.
They could expand upon this if they wanted to, or allow you to use those greys if they wanted to. But for now this is a good solution to the problem of people having to return to a merchant to sell. Last thing you want to hear is your healer saying i need a 15 min break to sell to a merchant 3 zones away (this did happen in EQ 1 to me once)
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Heh, this reminds me of what I just said the other day in that backpack space thread:
But actually, I might have changed my mind a little after reading Gobla's post:
I think that is a better justification than what many other people have said. If you carry around a thing for a while until you've got a whole stack of 50 of them, it feels like you've earned a lot of money when you sell them. Getting the actual cash value at the time that the kill was made would be too small an amount... it would feel like nothing. Even 50 times nothing is nothing. Because the grey item has an icon and takes up space, it's easier to think of it as a reward compared to having 12 gp drop into your wallet (which already has 20,000 gp) with each kill. Even though it has no use beyond being translated to currency, it feels like a thing. Cash does not.
I kind of like game systems that have a little bit more "realism" in them.....
Needing to do support stuff in order to maintain your adventuring has always been something I liked (for the Developer it's also important to slow down the rate at which player burn through content)....
Traveling between points on the map, getting your gear fixed, getting healed, selling loot and trading out equipment from storage.....are all stuff that makes sense to me, because they are part of what an actual character going out adventuring in a fantasy/sci-fi universe would really need to do.
I'd be pretty put off if every time I killed a giant womp-rat, 5 credits magicaly materialized in my bank acount... how would that make sense? On the other hand, I get pretty put off when a giant rat drops a +5 suit of chainmail... that doesn't make much sense either. YMMV
But without the grays, what would motivate you to stop in town as often as you did? Diablo has this same problem. I burnt more Town Portal spells to unload my spoils then to stock up on ammo or potions. Yet in Torchlight, I used my pet's inventory and kept sending him back topside so I could keep exploring. This removed my need to go back to town at all except on the harder difficulty levels and when the story demanded it. However, a side effect of this was that "I wonder what's on the next floor?" eventually turned into "WHERE'S THE F***ING BOTTOM!?"
If you don't have a change in scenery the game wears you out.
2 words for you: Time sink.
I think it all began back in Everquest, the undisputed King of time sinks. Although it does provide for some additional coin to be made along your travels and adventures, I think it was originally designed to eventually fill up your bags, forcing you to stop grinding so you could go to town and sell off all the junk. If you remember EQ prior to all the rapid travel options it has now, anyone that was not a caster class that could bind wherever they wanted, would face a good 20 minute downtime just to go sell and get back to the camp spot.
Although tragic that the practice has survived all these years, at least todays MMO's are far easier to travel around in than the early days of EQ were.
A quote they stated why they did this the way they did. Granted i will say they could do something with these greys that would be great, but if they aren't. I'm all up for a way to reduce the need to return to town every 10 mins as my bags fill up. Anyway heres the quote:
You are right, players need a reason to return to social hubs from time to time.
Here are some reasons why 'selling grays' is not that reason in The Old Republic:
- Players have no incentive to interact with other players when selling grays. You're just forcing them to return to a hub. There are better reasons (e.g. trainers, turning in quests, etc.) that reward the player for doing the same thing, which creates a much more positive attitude to begin with.
- It's something you have to do with high frequency and creates implicit dependencies, that we then have to balance. In TOR, whenever you go into combat, you usually fight a substantially larger number of foes than in other MMOs. As a result, your inventory fills up quicker. We obviously can adjust drop rates down to change that, but that also means that if we address drop rates for any other reason, we implicitly change the frequency at which you have to return to town.
- Frankly - nobody has ever told me "Man, I went to town to sell grays, it was soooo awesome!"
To address your concerns, here's a small list of reasons for you to return to a social hub in TOR, and as a bonus, how we view each reason from a player perspective:
Various vendors. Positive: I get to buy stuff.
Crafting benches. Positive: I get to make stuff.
Banking access. Positive: I don't pay bills there?
Trainers. Positive: I get to learn new stuff.
Quests / Follow-up quests. Positive: I get rewards.
Meeting friends (much easier at a known location than randomly in a snowstorm on Hoth). Positive: I meet friends.
Spaceport access. Neutral.
Medcenters. Neutral, arguably negative (I failed).
Speeder Transportation Service. Neutral.
Your inventory still fills up with items, so it's not like you never have to return to town. Probably Neutral: since I get a lot of credits for the non gray stuff.
Lastly, adding a feature to the game ('companions sell grays') and then balancing it in a way that it becomes undesirable to the player by the meas of penalties ('can't use companion for a long time') would be bad design. When you create a feature for a game, it is either strong, stands on it own and has been designed to account for potential issues, or you don't do it. You don't add it and then try to balance it out with something negative.
Ultimately, it's not like this is a super ground breaking feature. It's just different from what other MMOs do and I can see how that is out of the comfort zone for some. That's fine - every once in a while someone needs to question these kinds of conventions, or we'd still be stuck with 'lose half a level' XP death penalties as the genre standard.
You can find it here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=264912&highlight=greys&page=8
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Useless items should not be worth anything. They are useless.
One mans trash is another mans treasure.
And in case thats to complicated, just because somethings useless to you doesnt mean its useless to other people.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
This.
I don't see any reason to have something useless in a game, except in one odd case.
Animals. Obviously, animals SHOULDn't have little bear and spider "wallets", so it makes sense that loot come to you in the form of "monstrous claw" or something. What's odd is many games, despite having those sort of things in-game, ALSO have bears with wallets and spiders carrying a chain breastplate!
So I don't get it.
You really dont remember seeing anyone loot in all 6 movies? I rember Luke and Han killing some storm troopers and looting their armor to sneak around the Death Star in episode 4. I seem to remember other scenes where someone would pick up a blaster dropped by Storm Troopers too.
I have stopped playing most of these type of games because of this stuff! You get half way through some quest, only to have to go to the shop, so that you can make more room for the quest items, yeah right!!!
Actually it began in Ultima Online. The books on the bookshelves... heavy and many many trips to get that first katana and plate armor!
Also, remember that greedy game makers rent item space for real money!
Been there since long before diablo, of course they weren't gray, but they were still vendor junk.
Lost my mind, now trying to lose yours...
The items in question literally have no use, cannot be used by anyone for anything except to sell to an npc vendor for some money.
How about getting rid of the idea that a character, no matter how physically degenrate can carry around 5 backpacks full of crap in the first place?
Who can carry around 112 swords and still fight bad guys?
Two "fixes" to this issue. Make all the "greys" reduceable to craftable components so there is value to them outside of vendoring trash... DAOC did this with some success via salvage.
Get rid fo the practice alltogether by putting encumbrance back into the game. You kill a baddie, you take whatss useful, pocket his bank notes, and leave the rest to rot or to be picked up by whoever has the time, inclination, and skills to garbage pick the battlefields and make something useful otu of the scrap.
If games gave you enough money to begin with, players wouldn't have to sell junk. Give me a break.
All the perviously mentioned things aside like delayed pseudo-instantgratification i.e. gathering a stack of crap earning the money seemingly all at once when you sell, other psychological reasons that may be ment to get you "addicted" like super markets employ as well, the reason animals shouldnt carry cash, theres other reasons as well.
You gotta decide for yourself if they make sense to you or not but they certainly do to me.
First of all you have to decide what you want and then think it all the way through with all the consequences such a system would have.
Those of you who ask grays to be removed, give this a thought...
If mobs didnt have any grays and their monetary value was just added to the normal gold/currency drop that would mean that there wouldnt be any loot ever except for rare drops.
Does it make sense for a mob, humanoids especially who are packed with gear never to have any loot available? Does it make sense in any way? I don't think so. If someone murdered me on the street I'd have all sorts of crap in my pockets :P Sure usually people wouldnt take most of it but then again thats more the "fault" of our society/lifestyle than anything else. Pretty sure a few centuries ago people took almost anything they could get their hands on be it for trade for something else, to have a backup or whatever reason.
"Realism" aside, Onlinegames are supposed to be RPGs and gray items also give the opportunity to add some fluff items to different mobs, to give them a bit of personality. Maybe just worth a quick smile or a small laugh when you first encounter it...maybe you even decide to keep it around for its funny name or looks (icon). Those may be irrelevant reasons for some or maybe even most people but imo mmos/mmorpgs have strayed enough from the old rpgs/pen&paper without us crying for removal or all non-essential items, texts and fluff in general etc. you can't expect to have a great experience when you're not willing to experience anything. Reducing every piece in the game to how it must benefit you without being bothersome.
Of course if you find the same gray item for the 20197th time its not gonna be interesting or funny anymore but is that a reason for it never to have existed in the first place?
And those of you who think mobs should only drop usable items consider this...
Let's devide it between usable items by yourself i.e. equipment, and usable items as crafting components.
If items were usable, does that mean you WOULD actually use them? Sure lets say every 10th Brigand drops a leather tunic...for the first one you'd be like yay loot and put it on (if it provides an upgrade for you...another variable I'm going to adress), but what do you do with the 3rd, the 7th and the 654th tunic? If it was sellable you'd want to take it wouldn't you, actually degrading it youself to vendor trash...sure it could be used but do you need more than one or two? And if it wasnt sellable you'd probably complain that it wasn't because for some reason it just doesn't sit right with us leaving loot behind now does it? ;D
In this scenario there are a lot of variables that need to be thought through because it will impact the game...
If usable items drop will they be useful enough for us to ACTUALLY use. And if they are you gotta think about the droprate....if the game has a system like UO used to have or like Darkfall for example items expire when their durability is through which puts more emphasis on the characters stats and skills than the armor, which makes it more viable for equipment to be more readily availble as drops. If it has a system like WOW, Rift and what have you where items dont expire, there's no need to have more than one of the same item, which renders all multiples of an item obsolete except for possible coinage if sale is possible...making it in effect the same as you have with grays.
Also if the game also has crafting which almost every game does, having readily available equipment from loot will either inflate crafting..OR if the crafted items are for one or more reasons better than dropped items, render the drops worthless...can't have your pie and eat it too :P
In WOW for example they got vendor junk and white weapons which are basically crap too because noone ever uses them except for back when you still needed to skill up your weapon proficiencies...so that game has both, vendor crap and usable items noone ever uses making them vendor trash as well, so is that a viable item in your opinion then? One you could use but never do?
Now on to crafting materials...almost the same applies here....if mobs did only drop currency and crafting components you'd have to look at the drop rates and compare them with the required amounts for crafting.
If the droprates are high/common you'd have to require many items to make a crafted item or crafting would be useless at least in regards to an economy/trading-perspective...because if you had too many crafting components from simply killing stuff in the course of normal gameplay everyone would craft their own stuff greatly reducing trade oportunities.
If the droprates are low the crafted items would need to be more powerful to make up for the hassle of being able to make them i.e. buy/farm all the components, further decreasing the value of any possible readily available equipment drops.
So what it all comes down to is this....
If there are no grays at all loot would be 2 dimensional and boring for lack of variety and a loss of fluff and rpg elements.
If instead grays would be replaced by equipment drops, the drops would either have to kinda suck to not screw over crafters, making the drops tho usable effectively worthless and vendor junk as well, or it would have to be a system where crafting doesnt make too big of a difference but then items would have to break to keep demand existant.
If grays would be replaced by crafting components crafting would either be marginalised if the loot drops are too many compared to the crafting requirements hurting crafting as a way to impact the economy or if you also needed a lot of items to make one you'd have to farm forever or buy it which also requires farming for money then people would complain that they need to constantly kill stuff to craft when crafting is supposed to be a mostly non-combat proficiency. And this option kind of also includes the loss of fluff and rpg elements if not to such a degree as completely removing loot other than currency.
I'm sure I've explained a few of the things a bit poorly and they don't exactly represent the jumble of thoughts in my head but maybe you get the idea xD
The main point would be that stuff has way more consequences you'd have to think about than just to remove something, the end. Because it rarely leaves other things uneffected.
And last but not least...for those of you who argued that nobody in their right mind (vendors) would buy all that crap you pick up...I pose the question why not? Maybe all the broken weapons and armor scraps go into making the things the vendor makes and offers to you? Maybe the potions vendor gladly buys all your broken weapons because he knows the blacksmith vendor will gladly take them off his hands and reimburse him? Sure thats all just an idea...but it makes more sense to me than just to say there couldnt possibly be any reason for a vendor to buy your crap.
Hm wow wall of text...well anyways...those are my thoughts on the topic...have fun taking them apart and shooting them down at your leisure. I'm off to play IWBTG again where I don't have to worry about oh so bothersome gray drops :P
Cheers, CK
I like selling greys. Makes the world I am playing in feel more real. What I dont like is greys that are worth almost nothing unless its a funny item. Like a broken I win button. IMO greys should look and feel they came from what you have killed. Dont give me a butchers axe off a Wolf I just killed. Second they should have a good sell amount for your level.
no, that tradition came from Nethack/Moria/Angband type games.
Diablo just made a nicer looking icon replacing / for flail or , for amulet or ] for armour when that D you fireballed to death splashed the dungeon floor with a jumble of what lookes like censored swear words.
Diablo hardly adds anything new to gaming, graphics merely made it popular with a wider, less literate audience, just like movies based on books, or dubbing over subtitles.
-- Vet of: UO, Pre-AI AO, EQ, DAoC, Shadowbane, Pre-CU SWG, EQ2, RO, Crossgate, Neocron, StoneAge, JY Online, JY Online 2, Seal Online, Asgard Online, Mabinogi, Dragonraja, Lineage, Guild Wars, WoW US, WoW China, WoW Taiwan, EVE Online, LOTRO, Dark and Light, FFXI, FFXIV, Age of Conan, Atlantica Online, STO, and many more...
-- Still have an account on: WoW: Cata(US)(2 months+).
-- waiting for them to make:
Zork(game), Wizardry Compiled(novel), Dune(novel), G1 Transformers(cartoon).
I guess I am sold on the idea of having a companion to go sell my stuff. I was actually picky about what I bothered to loot, but knowing I can unload with a few minutes to spare is pretty cool to me. Yes, it isn't very EPIC to go sell stuff and waiting for your companion to do it won't be all that EPIC either, but better them than me. They can help me clear some much needed bag space and still not feel bad about picking up every piece of crap as it drops or actually deciding... the boots sell for more than the hat so I will grab the boots. LOL
read and agree with most of it.
one suggestion i've had over many years since UO and was successfully but limited-ly introduced by WoW is the concept of breaking down loot into components (ala WoW's Enchanting prof.) but make it widescale. using WoW as a medium, all loot is at least white quality, and all loot can be broken down to simpler components, or even materials, which could then be used for crafting. which would allow sellers to still sell it to NPCs for a price if they want, or be broken down into stackable parts and sold for even less to NPC, or sold/traded to crafters perhaps for higher than NPC price. FFXIV has the loot and player market part down, although the console-friendly UI bogged down the entire system to unplayable, same goes for SWG, albeit bogged down due to over-intricacy of resource collecting. WoW's Enchant is the closest playable system in this sense, and really IMHO should be the basis for crafting/loot in a good MMO.
-- Vet of: UO, Pre-AI AO, EQ, DAoC, Shadowbane, Pre-CU SWG, EQ2, RO, Crossgate, Neocron, StoneAge, JY Online, JY Online 2, Seal Online, Asgard Online, Mabinogi, Dragonraja, Lineage, Guild Wars, WoW US, WoW China, WoW Taiwan, EVE Online, LOTRO, Dark and Light, FFXI, FFXIV, Age of Conan, Atlantica Online, STO, and many more...
-- Still have an account on: WoW: Cata(US)(2 months+).
-- waiting for them to make:
Zork(game), Wizardry Compiled(novel), Dune(novel), G1 Transformers(cartoon).
This.
I think with all the "grey" equipment collected you should have a choice to sell it to a vendor intact, disassemble and get the raw materials, which in some "Junk" items might be worth than the item itself in the player economy, and sell or trade it to a crafter, or use it to craft new items.