Kaelik wrote:If you're fine with players never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever crafting items, then sure.
But if they can buy items with the same resources they can spend to fucking roll on random charts, they are going to cast divination to find the one that already has the qualities they want instead of wasting their fucking resources making a bunch of useless pieces of shit.
So... while you're giving us these reports from the Bizarro World in which you apparently live, how are the sportsball teams doing? Are the Golden State Warriors ever going to make the playoffs on Bizarro World?
You know that even though people can buy exactly the magic cards that they want, that people still buy random packs, right? You know, literally exactly the thing you say would never happen. Or how in like fucking every game that exists that has both a crafting system and an auction house, people both craft things and also buy things on the auction house. Again, literally exactly the thing you simply cannot imagine people doing "ever."
They do it. All the time. Because unlike you, the rest of us
do not live on Bizarro Earth, but instead live on regular Earth. And on regular Earth, acceptable pricing for a chance to get a thing vs. a certainty to get the same thing is something which is done every minute of every hour of every day, and has been being done for literally thousands of years.
Kaelik wrote:It's just a math equation. If buying gets you what you want but costs you five times as much, but you have only a 1/10th chance of getting what you want, then buying is better and only gamblers make items.
If buying costs 100 times as much, and you have a 1/100 chance of getting what you want, then you just make items, unless you are so risk adverse that you value certainty twice as much as money, you never buy anything.
Wow. You even acknowledge that some people are "gamblers" and some people are "risk averse" and
still you hold to your completely insane claim that no universe could support black box crafting and open box purchases. You've already admitted that different people have different utility functions for the tradeoffs between chance and certainty. That
alone means that your thesis is wrong. Since different people have different utility functions, no matter what you set the cost ratios there will be some people who choose one option and some who choose another. Like
fucking obviously. And there will tautologically be some place you can set the slider where both systems would be used "enough" to fit whatever design goals you have.
Tannhäuser wrote:So, does magic item acquisition resemble Pokemon more than WoW under this proposed system?
I'm not sure we're at the point of a proposed system at this point. But it kinda sounds like we're talking about one of those alchemy minigames from a Nippon Ichi game.
Obviously there's a huge tradeoff in how much "cool stuff" you can get into the charts versus how long it takes to generate these things. In this world of mobile phones and webpages with dumb superhero generators and shit, I would think that you could thread that needle by making it a computer program that spits out all the crazy bullshit and has whatever vanishingly tiny chances of giving you
really anomalous results you want. If you phrase artifice skill successes and special recipe items as "you may replace one of the slots on the final object with XXX" then you wouldn't even have to have a difficult menu to navigate to get things started.
-Username17