got me thinking beyond basic changes to current mechanics, onto potential major changes to how things work. Just riffing here, but I think oort shards could be stored as a currency alongside coin, provided there are some additional changes to support the system. So here are my big points:
Quantity: The game requires so many. Between storage space and inventory space, with regards to how quickly portals burn through shards, some players need to create processes/schedules for delivering fuel from A to B. This side of things should not be a grind.
Crafting: No change. We craft oort stones into shards, snag that sweet xp, then the shards are added to the total quantity when we retrieve them.
Trading: We can no longer sell them in shop stands, but maybe we could offer them in questies and/or set shop stands to accept them as currency, which could be even better. We could hand trade them too, with no limit on amount rather than only 4 stacks.
Fueling: I think there would still need to be a time cap for the sake of the servers, but with this system the cap can be the same amount of time for any size portal. Presently, 1x2âs are easy because a stack lasts a month. Bigger portals blast through 900 shards much quicker and require so much more fueling. They canât add slots for more shards to fuel the large ones, or weâd be able to keep smalls open that much longer. With this system, we could simply add the max shard limit on each portal and keep them open for the flat month or 5 weeks or whatever. No running back and forth- as long as you have enough shards you can just hit all your portals and refresh the timer.
Public fueling (popular idea): Imagine we do get an update that allows us to fuel anyoneâs portals. Now imagine how much more people would do it if we had every shard to our name in our inventory without taking up space.
New kind of portal/warp: As briefly mentioned and commonly known, the devs/servers donât love having a ton of open portals and would have preferred players mostly using warps. Well, that isnât going to happen. Warps are inconvenient as we need to carry them, they can only be placed outside of beacons, and they disappear. Maybe there could be something in the middle, like a pay-per-use portal that we drop a few shards into to open for an hour. These could be used for regen farms or any place people go periodically for a short time. Wins across the board- the servers lighten up, portal/farm owners save shards and fueling time, and gatherers need not worry about closed portals.
Random extra thought on closed portals: It would be cool if auto-doors next to portals could be set to stay open while the portal is open, then close when it closes. Closed portals look ugly and sad.
So anyway, in this period before Monumental starts stripping the code down and recreating things, what else could use a major overhaul, as opposed to little tweaks?
In general im not for this, Iâm not gonna be to agressive with my response though, because ideas are important when thinking about improvements even the ones we donât like
A couple of thoughts,
If you are trying to solo an entire hub, itâs understandable for it to be a grind imho. The storage chests allow so many, so you can store excess shards nearby.
If itâs a currency, we shouldnât get xp, we donât get xp from crysominter (unless im mistaken), we shouldnât get xp from that either.
Larger portals reach farther already in the current setup. It would be just as reasonable to just add a second slot to a 8portal conduit sized portal, and a third to a 16conduit portal if we are talking âbig changesâ.
Alternatively we could just list location tokens in shop stands, and you can use the santium warp conduit from wherever⌠Iâd argue that is what xp farms should be now, but the convenience is portals because they require no effort for me just a user, so they are more popular
Would have edited this post but it locked me out too quickâŚ
I meant this to increase the portal slots so standard shards could fuel a portal for a min of 2 weeks regardless of size. Which If my calculations are correct, means second slot at 5 portal conduit, third slot at 14 conduit, and a fourth slot at 24 portal conduit.
no, 100times no. anything that isnât a ânew player shopâ will just use portal shards as currency, making coin useless, locking new players out of âthe good stuffâ since they wonât have a way to get shards until they get to higher level worlds and/or join a huntâŚ
ok, I promise iâm done I really donât mind the public fueling options, and I admit that is harder to implement without it being a currency, but I feel that is the âbig changeâ that would be put in place should they just add slots to larger portals⌠(either way the whole portal fueling system gets rewritten, but this way currency system doesnât get rewritten in addition to portal system).
Im against this for the sake of Exos more than anything. Exo spawns, 40 open portals for an hour to the Exo just sounds like a nightmare on a number of levels. In addition, adding yet more overall portals even for a short period of time would probably create even more lag than we already have.
Stop making huge portals pretty much solves the issue. While Iâm sure that isnât popular opinion, I have 2 âsemi-largeâ portals from my Sov to TNT and Dragon Hubs, but I only use those so people can reach my shops easier. I donât deem them necessary though. Having ran DK Mall for a good while, fueling the VERY large portals there were quite painful, but even those portals I question how much use they actually got. I think a good bit of them were mostly for visibility and doubt they were used a whole lot.
These sadly are a grind by choice again because why does anyone (with the exception of major hubs) need 5, 10, 50+ portals? The most common reason I get is because they can⌠or for convenience. But, obviously it isnât too convenient with all the complaints of portal cost.
In total I counted my portals I have 8 not including my sov. If I counted my newest Sov I have 12. 4 that last 7 days, all the rest last 5 weeks+ as they are local. I never have Oort issues and I havenât been on a hunt in about 3 weeks ish.
I love your ideas though and while I may not totally agree with them, I welcome any ideas⌠the game needs more ideas.
I like your ideas. Micromanaging inventory space isnât fun.This would also help to keep track of how much oort I have left if it was in a currency wallet instead of scattered around storage chests.
I donât think this would be a bad idea to have Oort a currency, but I wouldnât want it to be used in the way coins are.
I donât think itâs a lack of oort personally and just increasing fuel size/capacity in a portal is fine. But overhauling the whole economic system is probably not that smart as the economy is fairly decent minus the lack of players.
As a test, I put out some request baskets for Rough Oort and Oort Shards and they filled up pretty much instantly once they price was shown on BUTT. To me this shows there is no lack of Oort and I know there isnât a lack of coins as I can generate about a million or so every few days if I really push myself.
All that said, Oort being âstoredâ like currency is not a bad idea, but using it as a form of currency is not a good idea. Granted, it is used as a form of currency as it is. I had someone trade me Oort shards for items and items for Oort shards via hand trades.
Iâve played other games that had currency wallets for currencies that could not be used as a method of trade. Guild Wars 2 has a ton of different currencies in their wallet and most of them are account bound. They are for trading with particular NPCs or particular types of content.
Iâve also played games that had wallets for storing items in a bank. It was used as a way of managing inventory and keeping track of items when there were a large number of heavily used in-game items. A lot of the time, only a certain amount could be kept in the wallet, and the rest had to be stored in some other form of storage. About enough would go in the wallet to let you go about normal activities without running back and forth to storage, and any extra had to be placed into chests/lockers/bank. Iâd be happy with something like that as well.
So long as Oort could not in any way be used for purchases, outside of the natural buying oort from a shop stand or selling it for coin, Iâd be on-board with it for sure.
Considering just how vital it is for a key feature in the game? Yeah, it would make sense to have it stored as such.
If it is at all able to be used for purchases outside of the aforementioned, I agree itâd end up being the âbig currencyâ akin to keys/earbuds in Team Fortress 2 trading, compared to, say, the Refined Metal in the game, which would be Coin in this game;
Nobody uses metal to buy unusual hats, and likely very few would use coin for purchases, if Oort was a higher currency.
I was thinking about this and the scenario I see is this:
I have a lot of Oort and can sell it at 400coin per.
I want to buy a ton of gleam for a million coin using my Oort.
I sell my Oort for 400coin per to gain a million coins
I buy the gleam for million coin
In essence, I just used my Oort for purchasing Gleam. Now I know that it isnât a direct trade, but in that scenario âtechnicallyâ Oort is the currency.
If there were no coins in the game Iâm fairly sure that Oort would be used as currency.
Second scenario without coins in the game:
I need to buy an item
I use whatever is the most wanted material as a trade for said item. (bitter beans, lucents, oort).
Hadnât looked at this since the day after I posted and saw the comments were basically just nitpicking the specifics of the little side ideas I added⌠âWhy did I think this time would be different from every other random idea thread?â But Iâm glad to see some discussion developed
They donât need to be USED as currency. I slapped that on as an extra possibility. The basis of the idea is only about them being stored as a quantity. You can disagree with my personal sentiment on shards being a grind or the specifics of implementation and utility, but donât base your opinion of the idea on minor details that can change.
Iâll approach âideasâ posts differently in the future⌠Core idea in the main post then Iâll spoiler tag additional details to make it clear that theyâre separate thoughts. AnywayâŚ
False equivalent. It wonât be a currency and itâll have the same craft times it does now. Minting is instant, like timber, which gives 0 xp. Your idea on extra slots for bigger portals is legit though dude. Works just like spark gennies. That should definitely be part of the larger discussion on improving portals.
They wouldnât work on exos. That idea is for them to act like portal blocks, which have to be plotted and connected to another. Only difference is that they arenât designed to stay open indefinitely so they just cost the hourly rate of shards- another arbitrary detail that can change⌠and itâs an idea that hinges on two other ideas becoming real so it doesnât really warrant a strawman argument.
I really donât mind the public fueling options, and I admit that is harder to implement without it being a currency, but I feel that is the âbig changeâ that would be put in place should they just add slots to larger portals⌠(either way the whole portal fueling system gets rewritten, but this way currency system doesnât get rewritten in addition to portal system).
