Build Fragility and the Respec System

The only improvement I can see being needed for the respec system is to improve the UI to be much more akin to how Mids' operates.

Any suggestion that includes getting more enhancements out of your build is going to get a pretty big "no" from me simply because enhancement destruction is one of the only substantive influence sinks in the game any more. If any system makes it easier for players to pull enhancements out of characters is going to upset the already facked up economic situation we're in.

Now, to address Billz's question as to why it's not being done in huge quantities even though it's possible now, the answer is pretty simple: price. Respecs are expensive. You get 3 respecs that you can run a trial for, a few more you can get for free as a veteran, but, if you've used up all of those, you have to start spending money to buy respecs to pull them out. There is a reasonably high demand for them, somewhere in the 100 mill inf on blueside last I checked, so the return would need to be substantially higher than that to make the effort worth the cost. If you could get more enhancements out of a build in a single respec, then you would be increasing the return of each respec, making the use of them all the more common. The price for respecs would go up, but it wouldn't go up as much proportionately, increasing the profit margin by a substantial margin.

I haven't read all of this thread since I am all burnt out from reading the whol BoTZ nerf thread, but what they need to do is:

A - assign proper merit values to each IO based on how useful they actually are, not what group they are in.
B - change respecs to give that number of merits when you sell an IO.
C - give global storage at 10 per character slot, so people can store more IO's than before, but only to a certain limit. And while they are at it global salvage and inf too.

If a crappy IO that nobody wants is only worth 5 merits then no amount of bronze roll farming is going to get you great rewards, but those who actually need to respec out of the useful IO's will still get good value.

The whole idea of "All of pool X is equally valable" which the merit system is based on was a bad idea all along, and is even worse now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

By the way I'm also against the 'bind on use' type mechanic, which is why I can see the 10 IO limit remaining.

With constant new drops added, there has to be a mechanic that removes drops from free circulation.

Just as you need inf sinks you need item sinks.

The two ways to do this, are basically 'bind on use' (or the worst case bind on pickup), or putting a significant wall into removing and reusing them.

I didn't post this yesterday, as I am interested in others opinions on the topic, and didn't want to skew that thread with my own.

The BotZ thread made me think about the IO / Respec situation. Our current respecification system was designed to change power picks and slot distribution. And the fact that we get a refund for SOs that are being deleted in the respec indicates that it was solely designed that way (I don't believe that people with fully HOed toons were on their radar then – anyway if I am wrong with solely I'm probably right with largely).

The introduction of IOs changed the game and made it much more complex. And every time new IOs are introduced to the game the level of complexity is raised, too. People who use IOs very often try to optimize their builds. Changing even only one IO in such an environment easily has the potential of causing massive collateral damage in terms of time and effort to optimize the build within the new game specifications. Sarrate already pointed this out and gave an example.

I think the same reasons that initiated the creation of the respec system are still valid and good enough to justify an alteration of this system to reflect on the changes that were made in the game. Before we come to the question how we want to improve the system, we should take a look at what we think needs to change and try to define the problem.

A character in CoX (currently) has 67 enhancements slots at level 50 he can distribute among his powers. Additionally there are 24 power picks from primary, secondary, pool and ancillary powers that come with one enhancement slot. And three more from Brawl, Sprint and Rest. So in total we have up to 94 enhancements we can slot into our build in many different combinations (not including special cases here, like Prestige Sprints or Kheldian inherents). At max we can slot six enhancements in one power. To get benefits from IO sets we need to slot at least two enhancements of the same kind. And IOs are typed enhancements that can only be slotted in specific powers. To optimize a build (actually optimizing a build is in part subjective) you define what you think you need in certain values (often it's simply „as much as possible“), check for the IO sets that provide the needed bonus and how many IOs from this set you have to slot in order to get the bonus and compare the result with the powers you have available (this includes using powers as mules or switching one power to another because of better IO options). In essence it means that in the worst case you'll need nine respecs to optimize a given build after any change that was made to IOs, no matter if something was increased, decreased, added or taken away (if we go into depths we might find that the worst case is only seven or eight respecs – some IOs will always be reusable).

At this point we need to make our first design decision. Obviously there's only a problem for players who try to optimize their builds. Players who use IOs only sparingly or not at all are not affected. So is it worth to invest resources to change the respec system (resources are limited – investing in a change here means something else will be postponed)? To answer this we need to consider several factors. Probably most important is the question how many players are affected by the problem. I can only make an educated guess here. IOs are available for some time now and overall it's easy enough to get a good build with a reasonable invest of influence and merits. If it's still not the majority of the player base it's probably a large part at least. Far less important but still worth considering is the fact, that the „Optimizers“ are usually very active in voicing their opinions in various forums which is some kind of PR and has some potential to hurt or help the game.

Another important question is about possible side effects of a change. It's obvious that any solution will involve having more freedom to move around IOs during a respec. If we go for an open system which allows to trade IOs they might end up in the market increasing the supply. Or they might be traded to other characters thus reducing the demand. If we go for a closed system, for example by binding IOs to a character when slotted we will reduce the supply and increase the demand besides alienating the player base by introducing a system that is more restrictive than what we have now. I don't really see a possible hybrid system here, just different approaches within an open or closed system.

I think we can discard the closed system idea immediately. Binding IOs to a character has the potential to vastly increase the cost for a build and the market demand. After a few minor changes you would end up easily with three times the number of IOs bound to your character than you have now. IOs you can't sell to finance the IOs you need to buy to make the adjustments you need to optimize your build. And if you don't create a new system to carry or store all the uneeded IOs there would be no choice but to delete most of them. So when you come up with a new idea how to use your old IOs you have to buy them anew. Binding IOs to the account would be better, but not much. There are more arguments against a closed system, but I think most important is that the players wouldn't accept it. I would even go so far as to compare the probable impact of such a change to GDN and ED. Definitely nothing we need or want.

An open system is what we have now. Currently it is limited to be able to move ten enhancements per respec. I'd say this is at the lower spectrum of possible approaches. There are other approaches and we already heard some examples. We could increase the enhancement storage on our characters to double or triple the current capacity. We could change the enhancement storage to work like a PEZ dispenser – it could hold all our enhancements but only ten of them would be accessible through the enhancement tray and all ten slots in the enhancement tray would stay occupied as long as there are ten or more enhancements in our storage. We could convert IOs to merits during the respec but aside from the problem that some enhancements are not available though merits it would be a system that could be easily exploited. Ben Arizona showed an example how it could be done. Arkanaville made the suggestion (in the other thread) to break down any IOs not slotted or saved in the enhancement tray into the salvage needed to create them and refund the influence needed to create them. She didn't suggest to include the IO recipe (for obvious reasons, I'd say). Aside from the problem of limited salvage storage capacity this would be almost the same what we have now. Such a change wouldn't be worth the effort to make the change, imho, because it doesn't adress the problem outlined above.

I'd like to suggest a more radical approach. We could make all slotted enhancements „click to move“. What are the side effects? It's safe to assume, that players wouldn't delete any enhancement if they could unslot and sell it with ease. To be able to sell TOs, DOs and SOs would remove one influence sink from the game thus increasing the amount of influence available. I don't know the numbers when you take all existing characters into account. But I believe it's trivial when compared to what you can earn by playing the game at high levels. And I think the high level range is what matters in this discussion. The low and mid level range characters are less likely to have full IO builds and haven't as many enhancement slots available so they need fewer respecs to change a full build. I agree that this game needs influence sinks for a number of good reasons. But common enhancements stopped working in that way a long time ago.

This leads us to IOs and how they help to remove influence from the game. You cannot sell them to NPCs so you can't use them to generate new influence. Destroying them will not remove influence from the game directly, no matter what their trade value is. However, you can trade them to other players via the market system thus removing 10% of the trade value for each trade. The influence sink in a given time frame is equal to 10% of the average trade value multiplied with the trade volume in that frame. If IOs are no longer deleted we'll see an increase in supply or a proportional decrease in demand, this seems to be certain. But it will not affect all market segments equally. Enhancements with trade values of 20M and above won't be affected at all (at least not in a way with noticeable impact), enhancements in the 10-20M range won't be affected much. Because at these prices players currently use respecs to salvage those IOs. The only change we would see is in the low price segment. Still it's probably a sizeable amount of influence that's removed from the game this way. But the reduction in effectiveness as an influence sink (no matter how severe it would be) and the undesirable effect on the markt it could have, can be weighted against the possible (if not probable) positive aspects of such a change.
(There are some side effects from IO recipes and the cost of creating them that I didn't cover here.)

Considering that all other presented solutions and even the current respec system have the same impact on the market in slightly varying degrees, leads me to the conclusion that my seemingly radical approach has the most potential of improving the game. Because it gives great flexibility and choice to the players and offers new approaches in other areas like PvP builds for example. The Influence Sink problem needs to be addressed in another way. Miladys Knight gave some good examples in his post above.

All this is only my opinion, of course. But maybe you'll share it.

Keep the 10 enhancement slots, give players the option to turn the other enhancements back into recipes. Crafting cost and salvavge cost as punishment?

Just throwing things out there.

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Originally Posted by UberGuy I'd like to see the respec screens redone though. There has to be an easier way. I hate having to add two slots, hit next, add two slots, hit next, and so on. It drives me nuts.

I feel your pain

There's no place in this discussion for people who think the current system is fine, is there?

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All I really want out of the interface itself is to not flood my trays with temp powers. The respec interface is a bit annoying but sorting out the trays is like sifting through a disaster area.

What about having one's available slots in Wentworths/the Black Market show up under one's enhancement tray while respecing?

Of course, this means you may have to respec two or three times if you're completely rebuilding, but it's better than what we currently have and I can't imagine it's very exploitable.

I would make it so that when the values on a set change, IOs in that set can be dragged and dropped out of the current power slot and into the reserve bar, independant of the respec process. Players should only be allowed to do this once for each individual IO in the changed set. Leave the respec process itself exactly the same (although the suggestion to make it more like Mids is a good one).

A quick and dirty way to do this, by the way, would be to strip all characters of the changed set and have it be retrievable from the Vault Reserve. If they want to put the IOs back in, that's their option.

I am definitely a smidge irritated with the thought of tearing down so many builds in game for the whole BotZ thing- but I am dreading do the respec just because of the amount of time it takes to do it. I wish there were a way to go in to your build as if you were lvl 50 (or whatever lvl you do your respec), and just move certain enhancements or powers around. In my opinion, doing a respec takes up entirely too much time. Who knows- maybe I am slow while doing a respec, but (as a few other responses in this thread have indicated) I am not alone in this regard.