How do we make gold useful?

[Archon_Wing]

Hmm, Diablo 2 is one of the few games where nobody seems to value money that much. That's not realistic at all. :D But I was wondering, what could be done to make players actualy care about gold? ;)

The only idea I have is to make the chance of gambling elite items higher. (Not necesarily unique, but you get the idea) But there must be a more compelling reason.

(Anya charges you a fee for the portal to Pindleskin) ;) About time she thought of that.

[FoxBat]

Very simple.

1) Make items sell for crap. 1/8th should do. :D

2) Useful elite stuff regularly shoppable.

3) Raise chance on unique or set gamble.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Once again, the answer is to make things wear out. If a person's uber gear lasts forever, they have little reason to buy new and little need for gold. If the gear wears out and must be replaced, then the gold is necessary to make up for what isn't dropped.

Of course, the whole thing needs to be balanced. So Buzzard would need to hire a consultant that could do simple arithmetic ;)

--Pete

[Brista]

This one is potentially quite interesting

You have two directions gold travels in: gold in and gold out

Gold in: well, you could reduce drops, sell value and the effect of gold find. Increasing them is probably a bad idea. In LoD gold find specialists are getting over 100K on their best drops which seems plenty big enough

Gold out: more expensive stuff to spend your money on, higher upkeep costs: Pete's idea about faster durability decrease, expensive merc resurrection. Is it technically possible for a cube recipe to use gold?

I doubt 1.10 will change much in this regard

I do think that mods could do interesting things with gold. In fact, I'll plug Foxbat's Seven Lances, gold really is quite rewarding to collect there and the game is better as a result

He did this by changing gambling so that it resembles pre-LoD gambling. You have a decent chance of gambling uniques and set items if you're patient and rich. He also nerfed some of the more commonly sold junk items. It is a little less easy to become rich by selling off throwing daggers and white sceptres. Lastly he altered the balance of items so that a really good rare will probably surpass a unique, making gambling more fun. 7L has a number of enthusiastic shoppers too. Lastly there tends to be a correlation between item quality and difficulty so that you often see elite stuff in hell and exceptional stuff in nightmare although lower grade stuff still appears

More generally, other changes that would make gold a more central part of the play experience might include

- really good blues. If blues were the best items then anyone could acquire them given enough patience. This is perhaps excessive, one wouldn't want to ruin magic find in favour of gold find, the game is best if both are worthwhile. Still in the current game there are a few quite specific things that are worth shopping and everything else is junk. Now the code exists to prevent useless low level affixes spawning at higher levels. It would be so nice if the maxlvl or whatever it's called were used more often

- class-specific items more available in the shops, full range of skills available in the later game. For example, that +3 oak sage, +3 fury, +3 werewolf hat you have set your heart on might be available but it would need patient shopping to do so. There are a few technical issues around this one

- really expensive merc resurrection. I would love to see mercs costing a million gold to resurrect. People couldn't care less if they lose them these days. I think merc positioning is a key part of playing the game well and it's a shame to see people just not bother


It would be possible to mod the game so that money was a perpetual worry. In fact certain builds in 1.08 approached this as items were incredibly expensive to repair - mainly the ones with charges

Now if everything was really really expensive I guess you would get something like the Ironman experience

Of course there are significant balance issues - sorcs, summoners might go for long periods without ever seeing a repair bill so you might want to alter the way durability works so that casting degrades items too

[Wiz]

Provide more things to spend your money on. For example, make some quest rewards purchasable. Item personalization could be purchasable without any change to game balance. For a high enough price, let folks buy imbues( assuming 1.10 makes rare items desirable again). Purchase a socketing from Larzuk. All of those can and are being obtained by creating additional characters, so it is not a huge game balance change. It might significantly improve the trading economy, however.

[TaMeOlta]

I like to create private games once-in -a - while , scatter my gold all across town , then strip my character down and run thru all those wonderful piles of gold whilst giggling like a mad man ..... is this a 'bad' thing ? :huh:


I actually need gold for merc resurrection .... a lot , so gold is mainly used for that , repairs , and for other people who seem to run short of merc resssurection money .



EDIT: me spell bad

[Bob]

How about a savings scheme with atma?
10,000,000 gold - book of skill
5,000,000 gold - elixir
15,000,000 gold - scroll of resist

cube recipies:
50,000 gold - one chipped gem
magic equipment + 500,000 gold - rare eqipment of the same base type
non-magic normal equipment + 1,000,000 gold - make to exceptional version
non-magical exceptional equipment + 2,000,000 gold - make to elite version (wait, can you carry that much?)
any piece of non-magic equipmeant + 250,000 gold - magical equip

NPC's
4x cost items for the ability to pick what base and affixes they have,
higher repair costs for things with mods (i.e. not for the skills, they cost enough already)


I don't agree with increased merc res cost

scroll price proportional to Clvl



change gold values above for more appropriate ones if you can think of them, these were more just 'pick-a-number-out-of-a-hat' kind of numbers.



-Bob

[Obi2Kenobi]

But then everyone would need to have 20 to all skils they might even use, virtually infinite amount of stat points, and max resists base in Hell, just to be able to compete, of course. :o

[Occhidiangela]

And with Gold Find additions to items, the gold amounts you suggest will become trivial to acquire.

Gold is actually quite useful.

1. Repairs
2. Buying Blue items of particular quality for socketing, use, or cubing
3. Merc Resurrecting.
4. Gambling.

If there was to be any change, IMO the place to change Gold's role would be in Gambling.

Make Rare's the game's Best items again. If we do that, as it was in original Diablo II, then Gambling becomes a method for trying to get excellent rares, as does MFing loads of monsters to jack up the drop rate.

That would also make dupe deletion easier. Doing a comparison every few days of all rare War Pikes, for example, and s pitting out those with identical stats would be pretty easy to do from a data search and management perspective. If the results show obvious duping, erase them all from the servers. That would put a totally different spin on the item market at ebat in terms of how perishable a super item is. :) Legit MF traders, whose reputations could be verified, would still possible make some dough. By keeping track of who they traded stuff to, they could even help blizz track down dupers if someone bought one and then duped it for further profit taking.

When certain well know rares are discovered to be duped, then the ALL of them get deleted, since the original finder and or the person who traded for it before the first dupe are guilty, as accomplices, of contributing to the dupe.

Fan outrage? Bah. Caveat Emptor, the Real law of the Economy!

[Kevin]

I'm not sure you followed Pete's suggestion to the conclusion. It isn't just that things lose durability faster it is that they completely wear out and become unusable after time. This is something that I don't mind either. You would need to tweak drop rates and gambling chances to help with replacement of equipment, but I like the idea.

Implementation is simple. Everytime you repair something it loses some of the max durability. Eventually it will no longer work. I see a problem with melee vs caster balance her. Bows would need durability again, and you get rid of arrows (the repair cost includes that arrow costs). Weapons and shields would need to have a chance to lose durability when spells are casts as well. Of course you would think that the melee guys being up front would have a better chance to get items and gold to pay for the higher costs they may incur. Gold sharing in parties would have to be removed too I would think. The fairness of different classes is the biggest issue with items disappearing since stand back types would have equipment that would last longer. I have ethereal stuff on my sorcs all the time and don't worry about it. I would think you would need to greatly increase the stack size on throwing weapons too (heck I think that needs to be done now).

Heck you could even thrown shrines back in (very rare shrines) that add durability back or give you a free repair too.

But as was said it may not be a big issue if replacing the items is doable through the use of money via gambling/normal buying/cubing etc.

[kandrathe]

Beyond many of the other great suggestions;

The artificial 35,000 limit is ridiculous. Blizzard's algorithm for determining items value just blows big time. Some items are under valued, and some are over valued. IMHO, it is wrong to have valuation mostly based on spells and + to skills. A +2 sorceress skills helm should not be equal to a +2 Energy Shield helm, both at 35000. Especially since they charge way more for some blue items (again based mostly on + skills and spell levels). It is strange to me that they mucked this up as bad as they did, as they obviously had great plans for a D2 economy.

Another idea is that you could assess a training fee of 1000 * the skill level for each skill in the tree.

[-Tempus-]

to some people gold isnt worth anything, to others its worth a lot. just talk to anyone that uses goldfind chars. you can get ~1000% greed in d2c and ~3700% greed in lod.

the best game i've seen that used cash well was Lineage.

if you recall when lod first came out gold was worth a lot more then it is now. thats because the max sale price was only 25k in hell games. the cost to repair items was much higher. the party sharing of gold on sold items made it very hard to save gold unless you sold cash items out of a party.

right now gold is only used to gamble for items, buy items to craft with or to shop with. other then that not many people care about gold unless they need some for repair or get a merc back.

one of the problems with is some classes never have any repair cost while those that melee seem to always need it.

some things i'd like to see done is change the odds to gamble uniqs/sets. have rares have much better stats then they now do. old d2c rares use to rock and that was the point of mf, to get that next killer rare item.

i'd also like to able to gamble on jewels or charms.

the last thing i'd like to see added are gold tokens. maybe you can buy one for a mill gold but then you could cube them into larger ones like you can with jewels. it takes 81 chip to = 1 p gem now so maybe a token could be worth 81 mill gold. then using one of those you could gamble on jewel or charms or something. or maybe using one of those you could have a higher % chance for an elite you gamble for. they could also be used to craft items

[ldw]

Make gold tradable for experience points 1:1
Make that trade subject to exp nerf at high levels. 50k gold would buy you 10k exp at lvl 98
So this way of 'leveling' would only work for low to mid level characters
- low character couldn't hold much gold but they dont need much exp to level
- mid character could hold a bit more .. especially from lvl 31 up but they need quite a bit of exp to level then

This would be perfectly balanced.. if you're 95% to the next level and worrying about dying or just *must* have that extra skill point *now* ... just pick up a few plates and get yourself trained with Kashya/Fara/Natalya (although she disappears later hrmmm, Ormus is a wacko, so is Alkor and Asheara has a snake fetish ) / Tyrael (some divine pointers regarding tactics :lol: ) / Qual-khek (sp?)

If you think it would be overpowered it wont. It takes time to haul orbs/plates/scepters in and sell them. Time that could be spent leveling the 'normal' way. This would be just a way to get rid of excess gold and for untwinked/SP characters it would make an alternative for when going gets tough with monsters.
Hell one could even sell/trade gold to others on Bnet. Especially < lvl 30 as they have quite limited stash space and cannot haul in vast amounts.

Of course .. I can just practically smell a gold dupe cheat coming up on Bnet closed if this went ahead ...

[Count Duckula]

All this does, hon, is continue the laziness. Why go out to the Cow Level and risk getting killed? Simply join dead cow games, pick up everything, sell it, and get experience. Might stop leechers in cow games or "insert-your-favorite-area-to-do-over-for-experience-here" games, but not much else.

The economy of Battle.net needs a rebuild. Maybe that's why 1.10 is taking so friggin long.

[Kasreyn]

With the max sell cap, there are tons of items you can find in mere hell outer plains that hit the cap. Trust me, it takes my high level barb a LOT longer to make a certain amount of XP than it does to make an equal amount of gold.

Besides, the other nasty thing about this idea is that it is not based on your skill selections, thus you could create ANY cockamamie skill distribution you wanted and still get it to high levels. Why? Because you wouldn't have to slug it out with the nasties. Skill builds have been devised the way they have because they allow you to defeat the monsters to gain the XP. If you no longer have to defeat the monsters...

kinda changes things a bit much for me to stomach. ;-)

-Kasreyn

[ldw]

Fine make it 1:5 per xp or 1:10 whatever makes it not too much. It is no different than xp leeching at the moment. *If* they fixed that then this could be abused.

... and I did mention that you could nerf this 'pseudo-exp' the same way as exp is for high levels.
How much of a nerfage it would be one could tune if the usual 1/5 at 95+ cannot be stomached :)

And what is wrong with buying exp (however nerfed if you insist) as a supplement to killing for exp? One could in fact liken it to a 'merchant' class from other games. We already have ugh .. gambling.. however dubious a concept in terms of pure monster-for-item and monster-for-exp ideaology.

Pah defeat the monsters! :) a lvl 1 blaze + mastery could do that and some junky 30 f/r boots! ok maybe not for fire immune :)

In any case the point was this would be of *supplemental* value. Something to get that poor old baba over the hurdle to one or 2 more levels so he can equip something decent maybe to let him be revitalised so he *can* kill monsters again with some effect... and iof course it would make gold useful on yet another way.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Buying skills or XP or anything else that's capped doesn't solve the problem. It just makes gold worthwhile a little bit longer. Eventually, all your skills get to be 20, your character is 99 and the gold still rolls in.

To make gold worth anything and to have a real economy requires that there be a constant demand on the gold, not just a demand while some skills or levels are still to be had. Besides, the way the game is "balanced" right now, you level faster than is necessary to keep making progress. Buying XP would just make that situation worse.

--Pete

[CelticHound]

What I'd want to add is a cube recipe that rerolls one of the stats on am item and, if improved, sets it to that. The recipe would also use an amount of gold proportional to the item value. (as well as an antidote, a stamina and a thawing potion - because they ought to be valuable!)

Let's say I've found a Sacred Targe for my Paladin. It has a defense of 130 and a modifier of +36% to resists. It's nice but I wish I'd found a better one. I use The Recipe. It randomly picks between defense and resists, and comes up resists. It rerolls the resists and gets a 42. I now have a 42% resist shield with a def of 130.

I try the recipe again. This time it rerolls the def to 145. Better and better.

I try yet again. Reroll def to 136. Since it isn't an improvement the shield is unchanged. I'm still out the gold and potions, though.

I can keep going until I have a "perfect" shield, but the odds of improving it go down as it gets better.

If the Targe were magical, then the prefix and/or suffix would also be possibilities for improvement.

A six affix rare could take a long time to perfect.

Maybe for an additional amount it could be possible to upgrade and affix to the next higher level, e.g. Shimmering to Rainbow.

I think this would help get rid of the gap between the haves and have nots.

-- CH

[ldw]

Erm hmm .. isn't this what these supposed 'tempered' item recipes are supposedly supposed to do in 1.10? :D

[CorwinBrute]

I love the idea of buying sockets and personalizations. I'm less fond of buying skill points and the like.

For repair costs, they are completely jacked currently. Some things such as enhanced durability and skills make the repair costs skyrockets, which is not good (I have a superior Wyrmhide socketed with 3 jewels and an Um rune which costs something along the lines of 18k per durability point, and don't get me started on Fury claws with skills). A good way to fix this would be to rebalance the repair costs all over the board, and then increase all of them by a decent, but not ridiculous, amount.

The best way to improve the value of gold is of course, as was said, gambling.

1) Make gambled items list the exact type, ie have for examples "Diamond Bow" listed and very expensive, instead of "Short Battle Bow" which has a very low chance to evolve.
2) Scale the price for all gambled items with Clvl, including amulets and rings.
3) Make it possible to gamble jewels and charms.
4) Make the gambling screen spawn on several tabs (weapons, armors, misc)

Crafting recipes using large amounts of gold would also be nice, of course.