Item Degradation

[lethak]

Maintenance cost:

 

Each planetary construct has a "maintenance cost" in resources or money. The bigger the construct, the bigger the cost per day.

You have to fill in a container with it. If the container is empty, the construct starts to degrade and disappear overtime.

Since the world is big, I would hope for a small maintenance cost.

[croxis]

This post is more me thinking out loud than taking any specific position.

 

I think about this in terms of player time. In 1 hour of play how many minutes does the player need to spend just to maintain their status quo vs how many minutes they have to better their situation. Item decay goes into the maintain status part and its so hard to balance. Too much and the player feels like they are treading water. Too little then why bother spending the dev time coding the mechanic at all.

 

In a game like Eve it isn't hard to replace a lost ship and loadout. Duals build system gets interesting because our ships have the potential to be very custom and personal -- so battles might need to have high survivability for both sides (unless it is easy for players to duplicate their designs). If high survivability is a thing then the economy is going to need additional sinks to help the money flow -- such as higher consumable rates and item decay.

 

IIRC item decay came about as a mechanic in the old RPGs as an additional punishment for death and damage. The problem is that there are a number of penalties to death -- one of them is time. I feel that the time penalty in a sandbox mmo is much harsher per minute lost than in a themepark or sp game, because other players will be advancing their agendas as the poor dead chap respawns at the nearest re-spawn point. This is on top of probably losing all the stuff the player had with them.

 

I'm just meh about item decay as an idea. "Oh you managed to survive all those encounters? Lets reward you by making your stuff break!"