Gear and Binding

[OfElectricMen]

This game and its wacky gear binding history. . . Remember when, a few years back, there was a ton of cool new effects showing up on randomly generated loot, but every single piece was Binds to Character on Equip? Yeah, there was cool stuff, but that was a terrible decision.

And now it seems the current fad is Binds To Account on Acquire.

And those are bad ideas.

The ONLY gear that should bind to account is Cannith crafted gear when made with bound shards. I suppose maybe the stuff that is crafted like the ToEE or Slave Lords items. Maybe.

The ONLY gear that should bind to character on acquire is Raid loot.

Everything else should be free for trading or selling.

[systemshaker1941]

Yes please.

Right now the game basically has no functional economy. EVERYTHING is bound in some form or another. We desperately need decent unbound items that can be bought/sold/traded.

[Potatofasf]

I agree... after comeback from a two years break... I'm choked that I can't gear my character on Action House, Pawn Brokers and in-game trade...

I must play the game to get geared... how awful!

[systemshaker1941]

I agree... after comeback from a two years break... I'm choked that I can't gear my character on Action House, Pawn Brokers and in-game trade...

I must play the game to get geared... how awful!

I may have nat-1d my sarcasm check, but I think being able to do a certain amount of gearing from the AH is valuable in any game. Especially a game like DDO which has reincarnations and multiple levels of vet-status(4, 7, and now 15 with iconics). The starting gear is terrible for these(espcially the older iconics such as Bladeforged), so far behind the power-curve as to be virtually useless.

[Potatofasf]

I may have nat-1d my sarcasm check, but I think being able to do a certain amount of gearing from the AH is valuable in any game. Especially a game like DDO which has reincarnations and multiple levels of vet-status(4, 7, and now 15 with iconics). The starting gear is terrible for these(espcially the older iconics such as Bladeforged), so far behind the power-curve as to be virtually useless.

Sorry, I wasn't sarcastic... I'm really frustrated!!!
I have 6 characters as Mule for reincarnation itens and all of them are garbage now. I even can't found better gears on Action House to play the game smoothly and have an enjoyable time. My comeback has been painful and I'm thinking on drop this game at once.

The game is heavily Guild clustered, just few PUGs on Social in-game space. Action House and Pawn brokers are no help. Drop chance on nice itens are ridiculous (I ran Elite at Level Grim and Barret quest till ransack to get the Quiver and.... nothing). Cannith Crafting is awful, because we need to grind farm for COLLECTABLES...

Again, sorry I wasn't being sarcastic... like it seems!

[C-Dog]

The ONLY gear that should bind to character on acquire is Raid loot.

Everything else should be free for trading or selling.

Regardless of "should" from a player's perspective, it'll never happen.

Bound loot encourages players to purchase new content. It's another reason for non-VIP to go VIP, it's another reason for non-VIP to buy DP's. Like it or not, at the end of the day, the game has to make money - no one here is designing and coding and creating all this just out of the kindness of their heart.

[systemshaker1941]

Sorry, I wasn't sarcastic... I'm really frustrated!!!
I have 6 characters as Mule for reincarnation itens and all of them are garbage now. I even can't found better gears on Action House to play the game smoothly and have an enjoyable time. My comeback has been painful and I'm thinking on drop this game at once.

The game is heavily Guild clustered, just few PUGs on Social in-game space. Action House and Pawn brokers are no help. Drop chance on nice itens are ridiculous (I ran Elite at Level Grim and Barret quest till ransack to get the Quiver and.... nothing). Cannith Crafting is awful, because we need to grind farm for COLLECTABLES...

Again, sorry I wasn't being sarcastic... like it seems!

I understand and agree with your pain. It's VERY frustrating, especially given the massive leaps in power the game has seen recently. You can sorta gear off the AH but not really; CCrafting *works* if you already had a stockpile and a maxed crafter(which new or returning players don't). I'm surprised anyone still uses the pawnbrokers at all, so far as I know they were created as a short-term solution to the game not having an auction house MANY updates ago.

And don't even get me STARTED on the drop rates. Let's put it this way: there is a quest I've run easily 50 times, because I liked it; it was fun and flavorful. Over the course of countless lives and alts, and just running it for enjoyment in the MANY years I've been playing the game. I only just now discovered this quest has named items, because that is how low the drop rates are. The chain containing Grim and Barret is a notorious offender, I think I did 150 runs to get 1 item, still haven't gotten several other items I want.

Regardless of "should" from a player's perspective, it'll never happen.

Bound loot encourages players to purchase new content. It's another reason for non-VIP to go VIP, it's another reason for non-VIP to buy DP's. Like it or not, at the end of the day, the game has to make money - no one here is designing and coding and creating all this just out of the kindness of their heart.

There are still ways around this. Adding an "own this pack or be VIP" condition to equip certain items, for example. One might argue that doing this could further encourage people to spend money. "Oh, I want this item! Agh, it's from a pack I don't own. ...ah well, buy the pack." This could be a boon to whales, buy the pack with points, buy the items with shards, run the content they actually want to run instead of grinding endlessly.

But that's just one theory.

[JohnFlory]

Incentives to buy packs are certainly crucial here. It's really sad to see a company go "I take your power level hostage" approach instead of "I create good content people will gladly pay for", that's just the way of it.

Thing is, even without binding there would be no economy, because the AH is so broken. If it were possible to search by certain boni instead of trying to remember two different keywords (prefix and suffix) for whatever you're interested in, missing out on everything named or older in the process, that would make the AH much more viable, leading to more usage and thus more platinum (as well as shard!) being spent through that economy. The shard exchange has such a huge fee that this would net quite a bit of money, actually. Money that feels well spent for those who spend it. And while it could be possible to auction off unique items from new packs, it would a) encourage people to get the packs to farm the stuff or at least b) encourage people to spend shards on that same stuff.

[systemshaker1941]

Incentives to buy packs are certainly crucial here. It's really sad to see a company go "I take your power level hostage" approach instead of "I create good content people will gladly pay for", that's just the way of it.

So a concept a lot of MMOs use is to make the power creep work in such a way that you have to grind through content. In WoW for example(this being pre-burning Crusade, vanilla era) you couldn't simply take on the hardest content with rangen weapons, you needed to grind a series of quests for specific named items, which made you strong enough to grind harder quests, then raids, then harder raids, and so on. The hardest content(at least back when the cap was 60, man I feel old) was only "Accessible" to those who had completed all of the content leading up to it.

This was not a great system for a lot of reasons, but it was definitely a system.

In DDO's case, the pack "being good" is not enough incentive to buy it, since you only get to play it for the first time once, and even if you have to unlock different difficulty levels, no one pack really offers more than a few hours of gameplay unless you also add huge incentive to re-play. So far, SSG's only method of adding re-play incentive is grinding out loot, which in turn requires setting drop rates so low that it takes scores or hundreds of runs to get it all(am currently on my 75th run of slave lords part 1, still no heroic spinneret).

This creates its own self-fullfilling problem; since in order to make people buy new packs, the loot must be more powerful, thus the "I take your power level hostage" approach. The complete lack of lateral advancement in the game - E.G. "the only way to improve is to get stronger" leaves them with no other choice. The devs have effectively painted themselves into a corner, here.

Thing is, even without binding there would be no economy, because the AH is so broken. If it were possible to search by certain boni instead of trying to remember two different keywords (prefix and suffix) for whatever you're interested in, missing out on everything named or older in the process, that would make the AH much more viable, leading to more usage and thus more platinum (as well as shard!) being spent through that economy. The shard exchange has such a huge fee that this would net quite a bit of money, actually. Money that feels well spent for those who spend it. And while it could be possible to auction off unique items from new packs, it would a) encourage people to get the packs to farm the stuff or at least b) encourage people to spend shards on that same stuff.

This is not wrong, though i dare say 90% of rangen loot is garbage anyway. The lack of any sort of clear guidance regarding what is and isn't worth selling makes it even worse. If you're actually searching prefix/suffix, then more likely you should be investing in cannith crafting instead. Relying on the fickle gods of random number generation coupled with some nubs ability to set a reasonable price-point is a recipe for failure. If it can be crafted, its easier to craft it.

A better solution might be to make more crafted ingredients unbound, and let the game focus more on that. We already have 9001 disparit crafting systems in the game, but most of them require you to grind content for BtC/BtA ingredients to get anywhere. ToEE loot for example, might be fun and powerful at level - but is it worth investing 20-30 hours to grind out all the matts? You have to buy the pack to access the altar anyway; why not make everything unbound except the finished item, and create an economy by letting those that want it grind'n'sell.

Right now, the only unbound mats have such high drop rates that you're likely to get all you need while trying to get the hard-to-find bound components. This again cripples the economy.

Then there's the inventory constraints that could be relieved, the list goes on.

[JohnFlory]

In DDO's case, the pack "being good" is not enough incentive to buy it, since you only get to play it for the first time once, and even if you have to unlock different difficulty levels, no one pack really offers more than a few hours of gameplay unless you also add huge incentive to re-play. So far, SSG's only method of adding re-play incentive is grinding out loot, which in turn requires setting drop rates so low that it takes scores or hundreds of runs to get it all(am currently on my 75th run of slave lords part 1, still no heroic spinneret).

This creates its own self-fullfilling problem; since in order to make people buy new packs, the loot must be more powerful, thus the "I take your power level hostage" approach. The complete lack of lateral advancement in the game - E.G. "the only way to improve is to get stronger" leaves them with no other choice. The devs have effectively painted themselves into a corner, here.

MotU is a good expansion. It has one overarching story, it's at an interesting level range, there are no really annoying quests in there, the XP is pretty good (especially when factoring in sagas), the favor is actually amazing. Loot is ****, yet I definitely play it in every single life. Therefore, I encourage people to buy the pack.
RL is a bad expansion. It does have a story, but it's all over the place. The level range is of no interest to me and while the XP is good, it's just not worth the effort. It has annoying opponents and overlapping maps. I play it about 1 out of every 3 lives heroic and hardly ever epic. If the only draw of a pack is its loot, it's a bad pack. In fact, it's so bad that after purchasing it and being utterly disappointed, I stopped playing the game for half a year - and with RL being as bad as it is, I don't have enough trust to purchase Sharn.

This is not wrong, though i dare say 90% of rangen loot is garbage anyway. The lack of any sort of clear guidance regarding what is and isn't worth selling makes it even worse. If you're actually searching prefix/suffix, then more likely you should be investing in cannith crafting instead. Relying on the fickle gods of random number generation coupled with some nubs ability to set a reasonable price-point is a recipe for failure. If it can be crafted, its easier to craft it.

Of course, there is a lot of garbage, but that's just the way of random loot - that's why there is Cannith crafting. However, the vast majority of the player base will still be interested in those decent to good rangen items - if they could find them. I remember how I once found an amazing item with an invisible bonus (Insightful Wis i think), when looking for something completely different. That's not how trading should work.

I remember the economy of Ultima Online, where smart players were able to really make a living just by trading stuff, just by knowing the market, the vendors, etc. It's certainly a facette of the game that DDO is lacking, and the lynchpin is the broken AH.

[Drunkendex]

I agree... after comeback from a two years break... I'm choked that I can't gear my character on Action House, Pawn Brokers and in-game trade...

errr... WHAT?

You're one of those who only equip named items on toon?

There is fair number of lootgen items with nice stats, nothing OP but good enough to solo Elite/reaper at level.

Yes 99% it trash, but if you know what are you looking for you can easily get fully geared from AH.

[Clemeit]

I'm not convinced that the economy is healthy enough to facilitate this change quite yet. It wasn't too long ago that certain dubious actions were performed by many individuals that may or may not have resulted in platinum and Astral Shard... inflation.

Anyways, in a game that lives off of microtransactions such as the sale of adventure packs, allowing players to purchase items from packs they don't themselves own might lessen the incentives of purchasing said packs in the first place. There are reasons other than gear to purchase packs, but I'd claim none so attractive. I suppose they could implement a system by which players would only be able to equip gear that originates from packs that they already own. That doesn't alleviate the first problem, however - at least not short-term.

I want to see a healthy, thriving, active economy just as much as the next person. It adds a certain appeal to a game. I'm just not sure DDO can support that right now.

[systemshaker1941]

I'm not convinced that the economy is healthy enough to facilitate this change quite yet. It wasn't too long ago that certain dubious actions were performed by many individuals that may or may not have resulted in platinum and Astral Shard... inflation.

You are correct that the game is in desperate need of plat/AS sinks to remove extra currency from the economy. Once again, we can use this to take an interesting lesson from WoW: that game has the devs/game masters themselves post high end/rare items to the AH in limited quantites, keeping the money and effectively removing it from the economy. Depending on exactly how much duped AS and plat is out there, this may only take a few months to bring the levels back to healthy.

I want to see a healthy, thriving, active economy just as much as the next person. It adds a certain appeal to a game. I'm just not sure DDO can support that right now.

Really we just need a way to get excess plat/AS out of the system. Every other game on the planet has so-called "money sinks" for that reason. Unfortunately, SSG never thought to implement very effective or scaling ones. To get rid of plat, you've got AH fees(minimal), item repairs(completely negligible), and airships. Except the plat airships also require high guild levels; any guild who can reach a level to buy one can also EASILY put together the 10 mil to buy it("Hey guys, we just hit 150, everyone kick in 50k for the Volant Alcazar!"). There's also guild ameneties(still negligible), and a handful of other small ones. Plat inflation was an issue long before the duping waves hit, so clearly the sinks built into the game have clearly never been sufficient.

Astral Shards are an even bigger problem. While the duping was much less widespread, those that did engage went BIG. There are BILLIONS of "dubious" AS in the economy now, and no easy way to remove them except, maybe, through efficient sinks. Once again, though, the sinks that exist are either terrible or inefficient.

Both are doable, they just require some lateral thinking.