Equipment Insurance - A Way to Fight Active Leeching/Gold Farming

[Tydeus]

I posted this in the Strategus economy thread but I feel I should post it here as well.

Everyone hates when you get stuck with high level peasants on your team. While you're using your best and likely most expensive gear, they're using a torch and three plain cavalry shields with no other equipment. So I propose having a sort of "insurance" on your gear where, when it breaks, the insurance would pay for a portion of the upkeep cost.

Here's how I see it working:
1. Every tic of xp/gold that someone got, they would also get a tic of insurance gold.
     (This is necessary as each tic increases the chance of something breaking)
2. Insurance gold would be something like a static 40/50 gold per tic and would not be increased by a multiplier.
     (If it were affected by a multiplier there would be almost no reason to have upkeep to begin with)
3. Insurance affects everyone equally and the player doesn't have to pay a fee for this service, think of it as the faction you're fighting for is paying a portion of your upkeep cost.

Example 1) If my Bec de Corbin breaks after 4 tics of gold and xp, the normal cost would be 475 gold, insurance covering 50 gold per tic would amount to 200 gold, so you would end up paying 275 gold total, instead of 475.

Example 2) If both my Cased Greaves and my Bec break, 213 and 475 repair cost, after 5 tics you would have 250 insurance gold. This would pay off the greaves and pay the remaining 37 gold toward the next item that broke, which would be the bec. So you would end up paying a total of 438 gold for that round.

What this does specifically, is it completely removes the benefit of running around naked not trying to help your team win and only caring about making gold. Instead players would gain close to the same amount of gold naked, that they would in 15-20K worth of gear.

With this, to maintain close to the same income on average that people who actively participate in rounds with their best(or close to) gear currently have, gold per tic would need to be scaled back slightly to about 30 or 40 per tic from the current 50.

This would greatly affect strategus and keep people from being able to farm gold by running around naked as they currently do. Yes they could still run around naked with only one weapon, but there would be no advantage to it. Currently the best way to make the absolute most gold possible, is to play naked. With my system, this would change to actively participating with medium quality gear, not to be confused with medium weight, as this isn't the case at all.

[Xol!]

This is actually a really brilliant idea.  This might also help combat deflation when strat comes out.

[Elerion]

As long as the "full benefit" armor cost point is set at a reasonably low figure, so as to not disfavor those that have low weight loadouts, it sounds fine.

[Kafein]

I already stated I'm all for this in another thread.

[Tydeus]

A low weight melee loadout should still be at least 20K upkeep because of your weapon. Most weapons take at least half of that 20K.

Studded leather coat at 2500, Nordic Conical Helmet 1000, Rus Cav Boots at 400, Mail mittens at 1400, 5300 in armor, 7900 strongbow, 2x arrows 300, Spiked Mace 3000. 11200 for weapons so a total of 16500 gold for a very cheap archer loadout.

Unlike gold, when you don't have to repair anything, you don't gain anything so at a 1x 50gold per tic is going to do more for you than 50g insurance, over time. 50gold insurance would probably sustain somewhere around 16-18K upkeep. This should affect any realistic build just as much as the next. No serious build has a character running around with zero armor on.

The people that actually gain the most from insurance are the people who have all of their slots full. If you're breaking things every round, you'd getting the maximum use out of insurance.

[Elerion]

Additionally, it would be nice if true peasants, that is players below level ~20, were compensated so they gain gold at the old rate. New players need gold.

[Kafein]

Additionally, it would be nice if true peasants, that is players below level ~20, were compensated so they gain gold at the old rate. New players need gold.

Well, I hate to admit but I agree. We lost the sense of frustration and pride linked with equipment gathering since January anyway.

Also, Skip the fun should give at the very least 25k. There are no decent builds you can immediately play with 10k gold. Yeah dagger maniac but that doesn't count.

[Thomek]

So now we can have tin-cans running around, whether or not they help the team get a multiplier?

I'm sorry, but leechers exist on both teams in the long run. If you can't afford keeping your favourite armor on at all times, you are just not a good enough player, and should adjust the cost of your gear. Skyrayfox was cruising for days on his plated charger recently, but he was also making his team win consistently, and it's a given that he either had a near-constant x5 or he would loose his cash very fast.. Even if it were a million.

Anyway.. this idea would soften up the game a bit, and if I know the devs right, they are all for trolling and a hardcore perhaps unfair game experience!

[Tydeus]

(1)So now we can have tin-cans running around, whether or not they help the team get a multiplier?

(2)I'm sorry, but leechers exist on both teams in the long run. (3)If you can't afford keeping your favourite armor on at all times, you are just not a good enough player, and should adjust the cost of your gear. Skyrayfox was cruising for days on his plated charger recently, but he was also making his team win consistently, and it's a given that he either had a near-constant x5 or he would loose his cash very fast.. Even if it were a million.

(4)Anyway.. this idea would soften up the game a bit, and if I know the devs right, they are all for trolling and a hardcore perhaps unfair game experience!

Pretty amusing post, sadly the entire thing from start to finish doesn't apply in this thread. Allow me to shred your post apart, sentence by sentence.

(1)This is exactly why I suggested that if implemented, we would need to lower the average gold gained so that effective upkeep in the game wasn't changed at all. It would be rather easy to do as well. We know that 50g tics per round amount to being able to sustain about 25000 gold worth of equipment on average, as shown by WaltF4 in this post: http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,8400.0.html
This means that were a player able to keep his insurance gold on the rounds nothing breaks, it would sustain 25000 gold worth of equipment, by itself. That isn't how it would work though, the gold doesn't carry over. I'd estimate about 18000 gold sustainability with equipment cost equally split between 6 items because of this.

If the gold per tic were lowered to about 30g then using the formula from the link above:
average equipment cost = 30 gold * (average multiplier)/0.002 = 30000

Adding the 30000 gold + 18000 gold from insurance puts us 2000 gold under the 50000 gold sustainability with the current system.

(2) So you're saying that because they should be equally split between both teams(I'd argue this isn't actually the case due to skewered balance often putting 20 players againt 30 and in worse case scenarios, twice as many players on one team.) that leeching isn't a problem? Okay, so you support leeching, cool, what about your intentions to play Strategus then? Do you realize that much of the problems for balancing strategus come from "gold farming"? This one change could essentially remove that problem altogether as it would make gold farming significantly harder.

(3) Myself, personally? I'm just about the only person I've ever seen that has been able to sustain having their plate armor on 100% of the time, since I started using plate about two to three months ago. I have somewhere around an average multiplier of 2.5. Now, with the market, I could sustain using my plate armor at a 1x multiplier for ever. I can assure you, I am not nearly as biased as you're making me out to be. This change wouldn't really affect me at all aside from fewer headaches caused by leechers and gold farmers.

(4) It would soften it up for beginners a bit, sure. Aside from that it could go both ways. Depending on the new value of gold per tic, it could make the average sustainability lower.

Really, your first sentence gets me the most. I address this specifically in my original post, I wish you had read it thoroughly.

[Byrdi]

Don't get me wrong I dislike leechers, but this is not the way (if any) to deal with them.
Tbh this is just another way to make equipment more afordable and along with it more desireble , I think it is clear for eveyone to see that if this was implementated the "border" for equipment cost would be moved, so you could have even more expensive gear on. Some of us are against this. I have a feeling this will be the new 2h vs polearm discussion (low vs high upkeep), where its all just about personal preferences.

[Tears of Destiny]

Don't get me wrong I dislike leechers, but this is not the way (if any) to deal with them.
Tbh this is just another way to make equipment more afordable and along with it more desireble , I think it is clear for eveyone to see that if this was implementated the "border" for equipment cost would be moved, so you could have even more expensive gear on. Some of us are against this. I have a feeling this will be the new 2h vs polearm discussion (low vs high upkeep), where its all just about personal preferences.

I don't understand, this allows a slightly less amount for sustaining your armour (30 + 18 as opposed to 50), and it would make saving up for new items a little more hard at first...

How will this make equipment more affordable?

[Digglez]

insurance is for real world, not video games.

Insurance ruins the cost of pvp in EVE & PotBS.

If your team is a bunch of naked leechers, guess what...you have plenty of options, which include NOT wearing your best armor.

[Tydeus]

Don't get me wrong I dislike leechers, but this is not the way (if any) to deal with them.
Tbh this is just another way to make equipment more afordable and along with it more desireble , I think it is clear for eveyone to see that if this was implementated the "border" for equipment cost would be moved, so you could have even more expensive gear on. Some of us are against this. I have a feeling this will be the new 2h vs polearm discussion (low vs high upkeep), where its all just about personal preferences.

insurance is for real world, not video games.

Insurance ruins the cost of pvp in EVE & PotBS.

If your team is a bunch of naked leechers, guess what...you have plenty of options, which include NOT wearing your best armor.

I wish people would read everything in its entirety. You can easily implement this without a change to item sustainability. Currently with an average 2.0 multiplier for an entire gen a person would break even if they used 50,000 gold in equipment for the entire gen. With my sustem it would be roughly the same, if anything, it would be slightly less.

Insurance is just the word I put on it, it's not really insurance at all, it's more or less just a buffer. Using zero items, you would actually make more gold with the current system than you would with my proposed system. I'm not seeing how you guys are objecting to my system at all, to be honest.

[Panoply]

Elerion raises a good point about actual peasants. While you're taking away the advantage of a low cost loadout for high level players, you're also making it much more difficult for peasants to accumulate the gold to buy new gear, compared to the current system. Perhaps if the gold put toward insurance started low, and increases with level?

[San]

This sounds like a pretty good idea. Even though 50 gold breaks even for a person around 25k worth of equipment, I would be more than satisfied with even half that (50 gold is still nice =) ). Even 25 gold of this insurance and a little less gold per tick would encourage wearing some gear at least, as well as increasing your multiplier by actively helping out your team.


The thing about peasants, wouldn't the insurance cover their small expenses with their weapons and armor more efficiently as time goes on, aiding them in eventually building up their inventory?