86 replies to this topic

[rowbeth]

In medicine this is where you give a patient a pill for an actual medical problem. It causes side effects, you give them another pill to deal with the side effects, it causes more side effects, you end up giving a patent 10 different pills to treat one problem, and they come into hospital sick as a dog. They don't need more treatment, they need less. They need someone to look back, and stop all the medicines and try again to treat the original medical problem in a different way that does not cause unwanted side effects.

 

Actually (and the analogy might be better than I'd like it to be) this is old age. There are no perfect medicines, but the consequences of not treating the original ailment are too drastic to contemplate, so your doctors end up juggling a cocktail of drugs to try to keep things as good as possible.

 

 

The irony of having too many frags, so people stop breaking down items (needing frag hunters) for a feature that was created to get rid of excess items is too delicious. The side effects are taking over the patient. Time to withdraw treatment and take a look at the big picture and see what happens.

 

This irony has been there for as long as composing has been live (well, maybe a couple of weeks less). Composing got introduced to do something with the large quantity of useless legendary, crystal and SE items sitting in backpacks (and I'd beg to differ - commons and rares didn't enter into that discussion). And as soon as composing starts we get pressure for lots more legendary events to re-create the excess of useless items.

 

As was pointed out in the original (pre-launch) composing thread, composing was always going to be about creating a need to create excess supplies to feed the new ways of using up excess supplies.

[Belaric]

@ rowbeth Don't necessarily agree on the analogy front... composing is not as complex nor as inevitable as aging. It is a problem that needs to be carefully treated though. If done well it might even improve quality of life! LOL! Unless you are referring to the game itself getting old and dying...

 

Good point though about the need to create excess always being there from the outset.

 

On people being sad we take stuff away... yes they would be, just as children scream when you take away their candy - which responsible adults do as they don't want their kid fat, toothless and diabetic. (To continue with medical metaphors apparently)

 

These frags are a huge pile of candy we cannot possibly eat at one sitting. We can't eat them all, but want them to be reduced. Taking some away seems reasonable, but we'll scream if that happens. Our parents don't want us to scream. Should they appease us by exchanging the massive amount of candy for a new candy- powered toy to distract us? If we like the toy we'll scream for more candy to keep the toy working. The parents can't win.

 

The problem is letting us slowly use up all the frags may harm the game as frag hunting etc. is killed off until the frags are gone. And crystal and legendary events may not be of much interest either. But the solution to excess frags (whichever form it would take) may also harm the game.

 

The candy powered toy being a frag exchange mechanism of some sort for those lost in my candy coated metaphor.

 

If an exchange is done let it be a one off. If nothing else a new permanent mechanism would be a new rod for the developers backs, a new reason for more frags to be needed in game. More globals, problem solved. Sigh. I think I just stopped caring. Where's my fiddle?

 

I had cake for breakfast this morning. Sugar high.

Edited by Belaric, 09 March 2014 - 17:17.

[Undjuvion]

everyone is in for a big suprise anyway, you get anything half decent quickly and before you know it everything decent is maxxed and you are just grinding through composing with no new skills or need to even level fast

[rowbeth]

@ rowbeth Don't necessarily agree on the analogy front... composing is not as complex nor as inevitable as aging. It is a problem that needs to be carefully treated though. If done well it might even improve quality of life! LOL! Unless you are referring to the game itself getting old and dying...

 

Yes I was thinking of the game getting old (not just composing) - wasn't going as far as dying though. Having started to build up the doctor's drug cocktail in my mid-50s, I'd like to think there is still quite a bit of living beyond that.

[dobroeutro]

I think the composing formula is fine as it is. We get a bonus for every 10 levels achieved & I think that is enough. Just my 2. Have at it... 

Edited by dobroeutro, 12 March 2014 - 12:03.

[Leos3000]

Another possibility to speed things up a little would be to leave the XP formula alone but:

Make the time required to complete a potion always be 1 hr. And the gold cost to create always be 5000 gold.


If this was done people could efficiently speed up their composing leveling, it would just be at a much higher frag cost and should therefore sink frags much faster.

[DomCorvis]

what about the ability to pay into instant finish for composing...instead of having to hold insane amounts of gold(19 million for the highest potion ive made so far) why not allow us to simply make "payments". say i have a potion that takes 4,000,000 gold to instant finish and i steal 400,000 gold from someone, I could then put that 400,000 gold towards reducing the time by 10%....wouldnt hurt the game any(besides possibly taking away juicy gold targets for other PvP'rs like myself)