In extension to havok. I played a bit of GW2 back in the day and one thing i really enjoyed was the dye system (i am a sucker for cosmetics) but one thing i found awesome was the fact that mobs had a random chance of dropping an unidentified dye which could turn into anything. but at the same time you could craft hues of dyes with cooking of varying rarities and material costs and buy them at cash shop. so this meant that dyes was
A) dropped at low rates by mobs
B) Able to be crafted
C) Able to be purchased for real money.
i think something along those lines could work? like i know its not a classic mmorpg in the whole “boar can drop a twohand greatsword” but it could still be found in chests, titans, whatever. just found in the world. could be crafted by the crafter profession.
to sort it out you could have “rarities” of wearables (i know its subjective how good something looks but from plain metal pants to flaming lava pants of death) and then have A) be all over the spectrum (common to super rare. obviously rare being harder to get) B) have various “max” rarities (so you can make a common random wearable but you can also make a super rare random wearables for waaay harder to get materials) and then C) would be cashshop purchaseable and have a guaranteed chance of a certain wearable rarity.
The problem with this system and with chests would be that you would need a “Collection” system akin to trove (which has done a dang good job of it) and im not sure if that is what the devs plan or they want them to be physical items.
Just that those games also have a “2nd layer” of armor that can only be obtained ingame, Boundless won´t have something like that afaik.
Besides of that:
Those games need that kind of extra revenue because they need to run massive servers that can handle the entire active playerbase. In Boundless a lot (I even dare to say most) of that load will be distributed across rented worlds/servers and those things pay for themselves.
@the devs
If you are already at introducing microtransaction:
How about this?
Most games have 2 layer: 1 that provide stats (meaning the rings here) and one that is cosmetic, in this case the cosmetic as in other games can be obtained in 2 ways:
1 you play the game and get access to the ingame obtainable cosmetics
2 you pay some money and you get access to the payment obtainable cosmtetics
That is kinda assuming a lot, if the loot creates becomes unnecesary to supply the necesary revenue to keep a solid profit I assume that they won’t really become necesary and then we can talk about it.
And this is in no way comparable, there is a HUGE difference between access to cosmetics and resources that actually affect the game.
Vastar cracking me up on a relatively slow Wednesday afternoon. So much salt and bitterness hahahahaha.
Welcome to 2016, Vastar. Age of microtransactions! At least Boundless is nice enough to allow people to obtain wearables via the game and not ONLY from microtransactions.
I agree with @Thorbjorn42gbf, the mystery box isn’t game breaking by any means hahahaha.
If an approach like the Naughty Dog team took with UC4 is taken, that would be ideal. At the same time I reckon paying for wearables is absolutely fine. Name a better way for the team to make money…
I hope their isn’t going to create a have and have nots situation, I think it’s a bit depressing honestly. Whether it affects gameplay or not, it will create jealousy for cosmetics. If you get mystery boxes the odds are you won’t get something great most of the time, so to improve the odds, why not spend a little cash?
I hope that you make such a system more transparent in the future, drop rates, rewards, etc.
One approach where paid RNG rewards work pretty well is Hearthstone. Even if you don’t get the card you want, you can effectively trade in the ones you don’t want for the one(s) you do want. Gives you an out if RNG is particularly bad; and keeps it from being too depressing
On the other hand, you could argue that that’s a pretty poor fit for Boundless. Given that this is going to a largely community-led game, making rare or special cosmetic items be a valued and trade-able commodity seems like a more fitting choice. And with a system that only lets you get things you don’t already have, it’s open to abuse (from people who have everything, they can essentially drop/give away a thing and guarantee getting that thing next), and it doesn’t give you the freedom to retain one copy of something you like and potentially get it again and put it up for sale if you ‘do’ get lucky.
If you can get your panties that much in a bunch over cosmetics i would assume its for the best.
Now that i have countered salt with salt, lets be a bit more serious.
personally im happy its not train simulator.
I honestly think it was quite a clever choice with the wearable system. The way i see it the main promise was the ability to “feel unique within the universe” which I and i assume some others could quickly see that the whole “every wearable does something different” wouldn’t quite fit the theme. So this left three options in my eyes
dont allow customization. which would go against what they said
make a form of “fashion” or “transmogrification” system like WoW. Which would mean they would have to make unique abilities fitting to each type of wearable either making a ton of less useful abilities or making some which are identical. only for them to be transmogged anyways
Just use rings, gems, accessories for the stats and then allow customization with wearables (i assume this is what they are doing? cant find any other confirmation)
so they went with 3 saving them for a ton of work and providing more creative freedom in the ways they want wardrobe items to work. seems fair to me.
Now for the second part of the conversation. i already put my thoughts above
i don’t think having the random boxes be the best idea as solo way to gain them. Simply because if people pay for something they most likely wants to decide. If they were part of a bigger system and just allows for more rare drops i would quite enjoy it.
And then on the side there could be the “cashshop wearables” which are only possible to acquire by paying real cash. the only problem anyone would have with that would be “but then i cant get those skins for free” in which case im honestly just a bit like… so what? I personally dont see it as an argument against it.
The idea of trading skins is fairly interesting. Again if it worked (hypothetically) as it did above then i think it would be neat if you could trade skins that was dropped/crafted. but anything that came from cashshop. either directly or as costume box. should be bind on pickup to avoid real life economy from messing with ingame economy.
