0007616: Upgrade and Upgrade Stones - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0007616	Valley 1	Suggestion - Balancing Issues		May 7, 2012 11:00 am	Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm

Reporter	MaxwellDemonic	Assigned To	Chris_McElligottPark
Status	closed	Resolution	fixed
Product Version	1.010

Summary	0007616: Upgrade and Upgrade Stones
Description	So, I've noticed that upgrade stones have become somewhat trivial. 10 upgrades isn't nearly as big of a deal as it used to be. With the advent of bosses dropping upgrade stones, they are really prevalent. Now the shop offers them for super cheap as well. My proposal is to increase the upgrade cap on characters by 2 per continent completed. As a balance to this, increase the base cost of upgrades per continent. The end results would be higher caps, but it would involve more work to get the upgrade stones required. This also gives incentive to die less in future continents.
Tags	No tags attached.

Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

khadgar May 7, 2012 12:41 pm reporter ~0023695	I think upgrade stones should be changed, but I don't think this is the way. The original stated intent of upgrades was to provide a way for characters that live longer to be slightly more powerful than new characters, so that you had an incentive to not do things like abandon character for a quick return to town. However, with how upgrade stones have always worked, the bonuses for upgrading (at least health) were always enormous. Having 200-250 health is nothing compared to having 750 health after a few upgrades in the current system. So, the point is that upgrades have become more important than intended. So, to balance that out, they made acquiring upgrade stones easier. First with bosses dropping them, and then with the store selling them. Now the acquisition of upgrade stones is trivial, because their importance might be termed critical to successful gameplay. Perhaps some compromise should be reached, in terms of upgrading a character. Maybe when you upgrade a character, the next one's cost increases by 10x, but then over time (measured by monsters killed, real game time, missions completed, or something) the cost drops back down, eventually to the default again. So, you could boost a character extremely fast and blow through upgrade stones, or you could take your time and not use as many. PROS: allows upgrade stones to be spent at a higher rate for a higher return, discourages throwing away characters when you have an excess of upgrade stones. CONS: might encourages just sitting around waiting for the cost to decrease Upgrade stones could have their effect diminished, to the point where it didn't feel like a player NEEDED to be upgraded to effectively explore and adventure. PROS: Matches the ease of getting stones with the importance of using them. CONS: Would make existing characters weaker.

Bluddy May 7, 2012 1:21 pm reporter ~0023698	Insightful comments and suggestion khadgar, as always. The question of upgrade stones ties in to the concept of permadeath. I'm still not clear on why it's in the game ie. what it contributes. It's there as a feature, but it's not clear what it's doing other than distancing the player from his avatar. It would make more sense to me that the player should be able to take any one of the settlers and adventure with them, and that dying would just mean that they're incapacitated for a while and the player needs to switch to another character. Anyway, the suggestion I have that's more relevant to the existing mechanics is that upgrades happen slowly over time as the character adventures and does heroic things ie. XP. This would mean there's a real sense of loss when your character dies, and that those characters that stuck around for a long time and did great things would slowly become really powerful. You'd have to tie this to difficulty so that when a character is created it's tied to a certain difficulty and gets proportional rewards. Otherwise you'd cheese developing characters by lowering the difficulty level. At the same time, I think there is a place for upgrade stones as a way to give boosts to characters when you needed them. These boosts could be temporary buffs, but my preferred idea is to have upgrade stones take from one stat and give to another (at a loss). In this way you can customize the default characters you get from different ages, but the only way to really grow those characters is to do lots of things with them.

tigersfan May 7, 2012 1:49 pm reporter ~0023700	We aren't done changing the upgrade stones. I don't want to discuss yet how they are being changed, as that's not yet certain, but we did discuss that some today. However, I potentially like the idea of them being more effective as continents progress. I don't think this idea will work precisely as written, as there are just too many potential problems, but the idea in general I think should be discussed.

Chris_McElligottPark Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm administrator ~0027958	No more upgrade stones, so moot now! :)

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
May 7, 2012 11:00 am	MaxwellDemonic	New Issue
May 7, 2012 12:09 pm	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
May 7, 2012 12:09 pm	tigersfan	Status	new => considering
May 7, 2012 12:41 pm	khadgar	Note Added: 0023695
May 7, 2012 1:21 pm	Bluddy	Note Added: 0023698
May 7, 2012 1:42 pm	Penumbra	Relationship added	related to 0007544
May 7, 2012 1:43 pm	Penumbra	Relationship added	related to 0007563
May 7, 2012 1:49 pm	tigersfan	Note Added: 0023700
Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0027958
Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Status	considering => closed
Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	=> Chris_McElligottPark
Aug 24, 2012 7:31 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Resolution	open => fixed