12-24-2004, 07:36 AM
Hmmm. How about gambling? I liked it, conceptually, in Diablo II. Didn't work, but I think we can fix that.
The positive of DIIC gambling was that it made money valuable again. Definitely a step up from D1 where I regularly tossed 5000 gold piles on the ground and let them get cleared away with the game. Of course, the downside was that players quickly found an exploit: gambling rings for SoJs. With DIIC's high unique/set rates, the economy exploded with them and we all know what happened there. We certainly don't want the same thing to happen in WoW, just with Staves of Jordan instead.
LoD beta introduced circlets and their enormous pool of desirable affixes, which led to predictable results - mass gambling on circlets, often for greater sell value than price. Blizzard then introduced price scaling to counter that. It didn't change the fact that only circlets (and occasionally amulets and rings) were gambled, just slowed it down. Mostly, it was flawed in two ways. Firstly, no one gambled on anything that wasn't a circlet, ring or amulet. Secondly, it was a surplus money sink - people gambled, but they gambled with money that they really had no other use for anyway.
Both of these flaws, I think, stemmed from a single cause, which was the large number of worthless items in D2. I was once asked by a new player a long time ago as to why rolling for technology wasn't usually a good strategy in Axis and Allies. After all, if you get a good roll you can hit Heavy Bombers, or Industrial Tech. It's not about Heavy Bombers or Industrial Tech, I said. The reason you don't roll for technology is Super Subs. For those unfamiliar with the game, rolling for technology is a moderately expensive tactic with a low chance of success. If you don't get a success, the wasted cash is likely to lose you the game. But the fact that you can succeed at technology and still get one that will basically have no effect on the game is what makes it such a bad move. It makes you want to spend your money on other things.
You can't lose the game in D2, but the ratio was much different. Instead of a two-to-one ratio of relatively useless to relatively useful, there were forests of Garnet Clubs of the Jackal and the like, a massive ratio favouring uselessness. That gambling still occurred was because there was really nothing else to spend the money on. If D2 had contained some other profitable way of using cash, gambling would have fallen by the wayside. Of course, this ratio was needed because if gambling useful items was easy, every player would be lavishly equipped in no time, also passing useful stuff down to lower-level characters. And since magic finding was a better way to get the same result, no one really pursued gambling, just flushing cash at the gamble screen whenever they got some extra.
The challenge: with all the other useful ways to use money, we need to provide a compelling incentive to gamble, but without letting gambling flood the market with items and obliterate the economy that way.
One thing in our favour is that WoW has no magic finding; no quick item runs. All the "bosses" that you can run drop bind-on-pickup blues reliably and nothing else. Green drops are not frequent and can't be improved by doing anything specific.
Another bonus: there is no junk in WoW. Everything has a use, and this is by design. If every suffix could appear on every item, useless items could be created - i.e. "of the Owl" on plate - but they don't. In fact, useless conjunctions like that have been specifically weeded out by Blizzard. Already, there are powerful incentives to gamble, since you're guaranteed something at least somewhat useful and it's a way to get more green+ drops, which you can't do any other way. Naturally, blue and even purple drops have to pop up from time to time, though very infrequently.
Of course, we have to make this mostly a high-level sink, so we scale the quality of the drops to the level of the gambling character. We don't, however, scale the cost, setting it at something like 100g or more. This prevents high level characters from shipping gold to lower-level characters and abusing gambling that way - if you can spend 100g on a 60 character to get level 60 quality items, why spend 100g on a lower level character for lower level items? High-level characters need to be interested in the items, so all of the high-level instance-only stuff should be available at a vanishingly tiny percentage, even smaller than the post-patch chance of gambling uniques in LoD. The potential has to be there, however, or high-level characters will lose interest.
To avoid the problem of some item types being over-gambled while others are under-gambled, we remove the option to choose what specific type of item you're gambling. This also keeps players from finding an exploitable item type to repeatedly gamble. Instead, players gamble from a category. Armour is gambled from "Plate", "Mail", "Leather", and so forth, which again, ensures that what's turned up is useful. Weapons are either warrior class or caster class, which means that occasionally types will turn up that you can't use (maces for mages, bows for paladins) but that most of the time you'll get something that you can use.
Finally, the part that we could only do in WoW: each and every gambled item binds on pickup. This protects the economy by ensuring that all the decent-to-good quality items turned up through gambling can't enter it except by being turned into a handful of gold pieces. You can't twink anyone with it or auction it. The Auction House therefore remains useful as the odds of gambling any one particular item are very small - AH is still the best way to get what you want. For higher-level characters, though, gambling has the thrill of the lottery and the promise of the big win that keeps people spending on gambles of all kinds in real life, as well. Those obsessed with maximizing their characters will pour all their money into gambling, which will essentially just make money disappear. Yes, some lucky few will score one of the high-level instance-only things, but you'll still need more than one to go playing in the super-high instances and gambling won't provide that for more than a tiny subset of the lucky few.
To summarize, what I'm suggesting is a gambling system with the following features:
- High cost, not scaled to the level of the gambler.
- High item quality, scaled to the level of the gambler. Small chance of blues and purples.
- Exceedingly small, but present, chance of gambling a very high powered item.
- No direct item selection, only selection from a broad category of items.
- Every item binds to the gambler once it is gambled.
Comments?
The positive of DIIC gambling was that it made money valuable again. Definitely a step up from D1 where I regularly tossed 5000 gold piles on the ground and let them get cleared away with the game. Of course, the downside was that players quickly found an exploit: gambling rings for SoJs. With DIIC's high unique/set rates, the economy exploded with them and we all know what happened there. We certainly don't want the same thing to happen in WoW, just with Staves of Jordan instead.
LoD beta introduced circlets and their enormous pool of desirable affixes, which led to predictable results - mass gambling on circlets, often for greater sell value than price. Blizzard then introduced price scaling to counter that. It didn't change the fact that only circlets (and occasionally amulets and rings) were gambled, just slowed it down. Mostly, it was flawed in two ways. Firstly, no one gambled on anything that wasn't a circlet, ring or amulet. Secondly, it was a surplus money sink - people gambled, but they gambled with money that they really had no other use for anyway.
Both of these flaws, I think, stemmed from a single cause, which was the large number of worthless items in D2. I was once asked by a new player a long time ago as to why rolling for technology wasn't usually a good strategy in Axis and Allies. After all, if you get a good roll you can hit Heavy Bombers, or Industrial Tech. It's not about Heavy Bombers or Industrial Tech, I said. The reason you don't roll for technology is Super Subs. For those unfamiliar with the game, rolling for technology is a moderately expensive tactic with a low chance of success. If you don't get a success, the wasted cash is likely to lose you the game. But the fact that you can succeed at technology and still get one that will basically have no effect on the game is what makes it such a bad move. It makes you want to spend your money on other things.
You can't lose the game in D2, but the ratio was much different. Instead of a two-to-one ratio of relatively useless to relatively useful, there were forests of Garnet Clubs of the Jackal and the like, a massive ratio favouring uselessness. That gambling still occurred was because there was really nothing else to spend the money on. If D2 had contained some other profitable way of using cash, gambling would have fallen by the wayside. Of course, this ratio was needed because if gambling useful items was easy, every player would be lavishly equipped in no time, also passing useful stuff down to lower-level characters. And since magic finding was a better way to get the same result, no one really pursued gambling, just flushing cash at the gamble screen whenever they got some extra.
The challenge: with all the other useful ways to use money, we need to provide a compelling incentive to gamble, but without letting gambling flood the market with items and obliterate the economy that way.
One thing in our favour is that WoW has no magic finding; no quick item runs. All the "bosses" that you can run drop bind-on-pickup blues reliably and nothing else. Green drops are not frequent and can't be improved by doing anything specific.
Another bonus: there is no junk in WoW. Everything has a use, and this is by design. If every suffix could appear on every item, useless items could be created - i.e. "of the Owl" on plate - but they don't. In fact, useless conjunctions like that have been specifically weeded out by Blizzard. Already, there are powerful incentives to gamble, since you're guaranteed something at least somewhat useful and it's a way to get more green+ drops, which you can't do any other way. Naturally, blue and even purple drops have to pop up from time to time, though very infrequently.
Of course, we have to make this mostly a high-level sink, so we scale the quality of the drops to the level of the gambling character. We don't, however, scale the cost, setting it at something like 100g or more. This prevents high level characters from shipping gold to lower-level characters and abusing gambling that way - if you can spend 100g on a 60 character to get level 60 quality items, why spend 100g on a lower level character for lower level items? High-level characters need to be interested in the items, so all of the high-level instance-only stuff should be available at a vanishingly tiny percentage, even smaller than the post-patch chance of gambling uniques in LoD. The potential has to be there, however, or high-level characters will lose interest.
To avoid the problem of some item types being over-gambled while others are under-gambled, we remove the option to choose what specific type of item you're gambling. This also keeps players from finding an exploitable item type to repeatedly gamble. Instead, players gamble from a category. Armour is gambled from "Plate", "Mail", "Leather", and so forth, which again, ensures that what's turned up is useful. Weapons are either warrior class or caster class, which means that occasionally types will turn up that you can't use (maces for mages, bows for paladins) but that most of the time you'll get something that you can use.
Finally, the part that we could only do in WoW: each and every gambled item binds on pickup. This protects the economy by ensuring that all the decent-to-good quality items turned up through gambling can't enter it except by being turned into a handful of gold pieces. You can't twink anyone with it or auction it. The Auction House therefore remains useful as the odds of gambling any one particular item are very small - AH is still the best way to get what you want. For higher-level characters, though, gambling has the thrill of the lottery and the promise of the big win that keeps people spending on gambles of all kinds in real life, as well. Those obsessed with maximizing their characters will pour all their money into gambling, which will essentially just make money disappear. Yes, some lucky few will score one of the high-level instance-only things, but you'll still need more than one to go playing in the super-high instances and gambling won't provide that for more than a tiny subset of the lucky few.
To summarize, what I'm suggesting is a gambling system with the following features:
- High cost, not scaled to the level of the gambler.
- High item quality, scaled to the level of the gambler. Small chance of blues and purples.
- Exceedingly small, but present, chance of gambling a very high powered item.
- No direct item selection, only selection from a broad category of items.
- Every item binds to the gambler once it is gambled.
Comments?