Pete,Dec 22 2004, 03:02 PM Wrote:In a one dimensional game like WoW (kill mobs to get better gear and become more powerful to kill bigger mobs) the only important rewards tend to unbalance the overall game play.[right][snapback]63350[/snapback][/right]
Not necessarily. Exponential costs to better one's character strength quickly become ridiculous or impossible to obtain. Yet players still go for it.
In Lineage 1, it was not uncommon that players would spend a year on making enough money just to increase their average weapon damage from 30 to 31. 31-32 took 3-5x as long as that, and yet players still went for it. Why? They had nothing else to spend their money on that affected their character's strength. Not only that, people tended to believe the new weapon did more damage than it actually did.
Giving high-level players options to improve their high level gear with exponential costs, will only solve one part of the problem though. We still have the problem of high level players buying low level gear for their new characters and friends and inflating the price.
Due to the massive amount of gold available to the high level players, the only thing that will keep the low level items' price from inflating is statically linking gold to the items through vendors. The nice transferable stuff would have to become buyable from vendors at a set rate, reasonable for the new players with no help from high level players. Either this or get rid of trade completely and make it all bind-on-pickup, but I think that's the worse option.
Less QQ more Pew Pew