IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Hidden character key to support unique character content
~sigh~ So true.

I have long thought that the inevitable "publishing" of secret recipes, locations, etc. was a serious problem in all MMOs. After all, game developers invest a great deal of effort coding "discovery systems" only to see them cracked and published in short order. The result is that only a few early (or super diehard) explorers experience these dynamic aspects of gameplay. Despite "Caution - Contains Spoilers" warnings, most players who follow will not want to be "disadvantaged" by researching for themself what can be easily read online. Instead they choose to keep up with their friends' progression, and not get bogged down rediscovering what is already known.

Admittedly not everyone likes to solve puzzles or to put in "extra" game play effort. I am not suggesting any radical changes in gameplay forcing all players into puzzle solving. Employing someone else's discovery should still give you a strong result. However, would it be so bad to give those willing to actually engage in puzzle solving some slight extra advantage or benefit?

I suggest the generation of a unique and hidden random key for each character upon creation. This hidden key is part of that character and is always available to slightly tweak the results of any "discoveries" they make in a consistent and repeatable way (at least for that character).

Thus, Jola's ultimate amps recipe could be slightly different from Olmo's. Any differences would be driven by the effects of their respective hidden keys. The incidence and degree of variation between character discoveries would be totally regulated by the developers. So they could strike whatever balance was desired between delivering unique character experiences and gaming environment consistency.

While a very good idea, this may lead to an impossible to strike balance as some character keys will give an advantage while others may slightly nerf a player. Consider the case of a character requiring more of a very rare material to achieve a similar result to your ultimate amps recipe ... maybe an additional 2 pieces of a specific sup amber ... then that character would be at a disadvantage hard to properly compensate.

If you only have a small set of equivalence classes, it's possible to balance by giving advantages in other recipes, but then it's going to be easy to reverse-engineer by checking the results on a simple basic recipe.
If, however, it's each character key in its own class, statistically half of the server will be mad as hell :)

Plus all oldies who have a stuffed recipe book may feel cheated out of their finds/acquisitions as they now need to tune each recipe to their key.

That wouldnt work well since material statistics would be diffirent for each player. That would mean that one player could make top class armor from easy accesable materials while other one would have to get mats from a spot he/she cant reach.

On the surface a reasonable objection.

While I appreciate the human penchant to insist on absolute fairness, nothing in the universe is "fair". This is strictly a human invention (fallacy really). From the moment of your conception to your final demise, nothing was ever fair.

Why should video games be different? In fact they aren't and never have been. Your rewards and punishments are often determined by random number generators. Stripped to essentials, what is the difference between "winning the roll" to win that uber sword and "winning the roll" and getting a slightly better recipe? None as far as I can see.

Remember, as with all gaming rewards and punishments, it is up to the devs to set the incidence and variability to ensure they have a challenging and enjoyable game.

All that I am proposing really is an initial random roll on character creation that allows your toon to be slightly different from everyone else. Perhaps acquire some very minor advantages and disadvantages that make you unique. So what if some other guy can craft 98% amps with the same effort you expend to craft 97%. Does that really destroy your value as an amp crafter? And even if you think it does, remember you have other advantages that guys lacks. Also, there are tons of applications where the issue of fairness is totally irrelevant, like puzzle solutions.

Regarding complaints from the existing player population, there are always complaints against anything preceived as a "nerf". Again, it is up to the devs not to make changes that anger too many of their customers. One traditional way around this is to make changes of "luv", not nerf. In other words, if you wanted to add small tweaks to recipes based on a random key, make them all beneficial.

Material spots and extraction plans are constant, nothing random about them. Only the Mob materials are affected by random generators.

As for making characters "One of a kind" - the "basic classes" we can choose when starting a character dont have any impact on the character when it's high lvl in all skills. I think that each person should be able to (for example) choose ONE of the 63 skills and have some kind of bonus for it (better profiency in Melee/ranged/magic like 10% efficiency improvement of using a certain weapon/spell, or 10% stat improvement when crafting a certain item. That way each person would choose to become a specialist in one cathegory.

As for puzzles - they could have some random elements like the Occupation's regardless of character creation.

I don't like itm for two reasons:

Despite spoiling experience finding receipes by giving complete ultimate receipes, it's still very important to share insights about receipes. It was an important part of the fun becoming a good crafter for me.

Second, i see some very much unwanted outcome of these changes. To be the bestest crafter u would need to make several alts to ensure best results in the respective crafts. You don't really believe an experienced player who for example wants to start making amps will stick to his main toon if that one gets 96% amps. He'll make an amp crafting alt to do 98%.
Few years later it'll be an requirement for crafters to be average.
New players would be asked to make an item from predefined mats... Depending on the outcome they'll be told to reroll if they really want to continue crafting that item.

the hidden key might work if the game where new on the market but changing the current system to that will not be a very good idea.

I'd rather like to see such stanzas/character traits like the thing from one of the rites that makes items more durable.
There could even be some that have a negative effect combined with two (or more) positive ones as well - bringing a little diversity into the crafting results. (that's what you wanted, right?)

An other thing I thought about was this: reduce the stats depending on the success rate
e.g if you can craft an item for 80% success rate its stats will be reduced to 90%% of the original value ; a 96% amp recipe would become a 86% one but if you reduce the quality a bit to get a 90% success rate it'll be a 92% amp (so a lvl 250 crafter would need occupation items to get a Q250 96% amp) I doubt that this system would be liked very much (it would make some items a lot more valuable though)