Basic IO recipes can eventually be memorized, meaning that you no longer need a recipe to make them.
However, set IOs are pretty powerful in this game, and should be one-use, IMO.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
The recipes being consumable is vital to keeping the rarity of things. If we all learned a recipe after using it once in COH we'd all be able to produce as much as we had mats for as often as we please completely devaluing the products.
Consider this... know what else traditional MMO's that use the system you describe end up having? Produced items that are worth LESS than the mats needed to make them. In COH the value is mostly in the recipe itself not the mats needed to make it. The finished product is typically the most valuable of all since it incorporates an expended recipe and salvage and the influences costs to produce the enhancement.
Jem - Ill/Rad Controller Lv 50+3 Nic - Mind/Psi Dominator Lv 50+3 Lady Liberation - Invuln/SS Tanker Lv 50+1 Invicitx - Demon/Pain Mastermind Lv 50+1 Celeste - Emp/Arch Defender Lv 50+1 Nightsilver - DB/WP Scrapper Lv 34 Dusk Howl - StJ/Regen Brute Lv 32 Kyriani - Time/Energy Defender Lv 41Psifire - FF/Psi Defender Lv 50
Star Lighter - LB/LA Peacebringer Lv 30
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I think that's partly due to most of those MMOs having you level up crafting skills (so you often get people who powerlevel to the highest levels, and then would rather drop large sums of money to get basic crafting material to level up with than hunt them down in starting areas), which wouldn't ever apply to CoH.|
Originally Posted by Kyriani
Consider this... know what else traditional MMO's that use the system you describe end up having? Produced items that are worth LESS than the mats needed to make them.
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Still though, I guess I see your point. I just think it might be easier to understand if it was called something other than a recipe *shrug*
Consider a recipe like Luck of the Gambler +7.5% Recharge. You can slot it in any defense power and gain 7.5% recharge that applies to all your powers. And you can slot up to 5 of them in a build for 37.5% recharge to everything. That doesn't sound like much, but when you combine it with other sources of global recharge you can get some ridiculous recharge rates going and do things like make very long recharge powers permanent.
If we could memorize that recipe, we could just have one character that stood around making enhancements all day and pass them out to all our characters, and eventually everyone in the game would be completely IOed out because the recipes would have become worthless and anyone could pick them up dirt cheap.
The problem with that is, once you have X% of the population completely IOed and making a mockery of the hardest content in the game, the devs would have to re-balance the game around IOs being readily available to everyone, making it harder.
Why would THAT be a problem, you ask?
Because Free and Premium players are not allowed to use IOs unless they pay for the priviledge.
Being able to memorize recipes would have the end result of the game becoming one where you HAVE to pay in order to even make progress through the game.
That would completely defeat the purpose of the devs adopting the hybrid business model. No one is going to play a game that is insanely difficult because they can't use the thing the game is now balanced around. It's not going to entice people into paying for VIP status or IO access, they would just go play a game where they aren't expected to shell out money just to be able to complete a mission without dying 30 times in it.
It wouldn't kill the game, there would be enough VIP subscribers to keep it afloat, but it wouldn't grow the game either.
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately. |
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What you are missing is that in other games recipes are part of the crafting sub-system. In City they are the loot. In a fantasy MMO you might get a magic sword from an enemy you defeat. In City you will get a recipe instead. No fantasy MMO gives you infinite magic swords. You have to earn them each time. If you can craft them, you have to earn the materials and those are typically hard to come by or only drop from certian enemies.|
Originally Posted by Twilightdusk
Can someone explain to me the logic behind making recipies expendable? In any other MMO with recipes as part of the crafting system, your character just learns them permanently, why does this game make them an expendable part of item creation?
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In City all of our materials drop from basically any enemy. there are low-level, mid-level and high level, and tech or arcane. But that's it. No Farm this specific enemy with .002% chance to drop uber-leet item or uber-special material. You just do anything you want. Kill a random peon from the council and you might get any piece of salvage at all. Or even the most powerful purple recipies. That recipe is the limited resource. The materials are all pretty common. Even the ones called "rare" drop very often.
"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
If recipes weren't expendable, people would be "dupin' rares," and then we'd be "gone to the Americans..." 
"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level." - Quentin Crisp
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken
Think of a recipe as just another kind of component material that drops less frequently than the others required to craft an IO. If the devs had chosen to call it something other than "recipe", there probably wouldn't be this cognitive dissonence with other MMOs where the same term has very different game system implications. The fact that generic IO recipes can eventually be "memorized" further muddies the conceptual conceit, but it is what it is.
NOR-RAD - 50 Rad/Rad/Elec Defender - Nikki Stryker - 50 DM/SR/Weap Scrapper - Iron Marauder - 50 Eng/Eng/Pow Blaster
Lion of Might - 50 SS/Inv/Eng Tanker - Darling Nikkee - 50 (+3) StJ/WP/Eng Brute - Ice Giant Kurg - 36 Ice/Storm Controller
Can someone explain to me the logic behind making recipies expendable? In any other MMO with recipes as part of the crafting system, your character just learns them permanently, why does this game make them an expendable part of item creation?