So, I know there are a whole slew of problems with the rebel economy rework and I want to redo the whole thing. But first I do want to touch base and get some opinions in. So... time for the shitstorm, I guess.
To begin, some of the problems I personally have noted as being a thing. I find it important to begin with listing these up, as we can refer back to them when making decisions on how stuff should work. This is the shit we want to fix in the end.
- Progression is an absolute mess.
- No real system to it, things just unlock at near-random levels made up on a whim when they were being punched in.
- Not much worth crafting beyond level 40, except a few one-offs at level 50.
- Level 30 recipe-wise is somewhat considered mid-game while most crafting rebels start off with 20 levels on character creation already (attributes + starting points).
- Boosts can quickly grant a lot of levels to just jump up in progression, making starting rebels able to go near level 30 roughly 2 hours after character creation.
- The crafting stations are publicly available in the slums, making them no barrier at all to progression. Anyone has access to a metal bench.
- Component cost increases as you go up the levels, but there is no better way to get the base resources to compensate. Making anything at a high level is an absolute grind.
- We should consider making resource income also progress, and locking ‘high level’ things behind more than just cost.
- Breakdown recipes stay the same, giving only the lowest level scrap resources.
- Trash spawners do not really scale with level. They provide a lot for low level players (at least once you have a toolkit to be able to break everything down), but too little for high level players.
- Breakdown results aren’t really balanced with item needs. Usually this means too much plastic, glass and electronics. Wood isn’t gained a lot, but also not used a lot. Cloth can be scarce at a certain point in progression (bags, armor, filters).
- As everything must constantly be crafted from scrap resources, making anything high tier involves lots of clicking and waiting and clicking and waiting.
- Only a few items are worth crafting at level 50, for the rest it is better to not waste your money and buy stuff from BMD’s instead.
- Armor: everyone just goes straight for T2 armor, if not T3
- Guns: the best gun on crafting is weak compared to what you can get from a BMD, and few people bother unless they run solo.
- Medicine as a skill is mostly not required for anything unless you really want to get into drugs. The important stuff is all available at low levels that are easy enough to boost (as intelligence is shared with crafting, chances are this is being boosted already anyway).
- ‘Chip loops’ via smuggling are causing giant amounts of inflation, but with the way BMD’s are set up are 100% required to get anything real.
- None of the good stuff is on crafting, it must be gotten via a BMD
- In the past week alone, 12000+ adhesive were sold via smuggling, creating a net profit of 100k+ chips going into circulation.
- Prices are set based on rebels doing this, making it near impossible for rebels who do not abuse this exploit (or who do not know about it) from getting any real gear.
- Smuggling really is only useful for the chip loops and to dump excess components, because people buy all the good stuff from BMD’s and rarely need any high level from the smuggler.
In case anyone has anything substantial to add to the above list, feel free to post it. But otherwise, I rather not have endless circles of discussions about what really is wrong and what is just a symptom, bla bla bla. We are here to talk solutions.
I have thought about some things I'd like to implement to address the above, but really it comes down to reworking the whole crating, smuggling and trash system from the ground up again. I believe we can make something better now as we got a better idea of what's up - most recipes date back from pre-server launch before the skill system had fully solidified.
- New crafting progression set based on workbenches
- Allow public workbenches to be freely destroyed/taken with RP
- A good part of the cost of some end-game stuff would be from getting the crafting bench. People should WANT to keep them safe.
- Progression per level:
- 0-15: no bench
- 15-25: toolkit
- 25-35: crafting bench
- 35-45: metal bench
- 45-50: machining bench
- ‘Side-benches’
- Ammo bench for all ammo/grenades
- Tinker bench for all electronics
- Medicine to get reinforced progression
- Mixed (all up to refined chemicals)
- Chemistry Bench
- High level crafting (as in level 50) to get more useful stuff that currently can only be acquired from BMD's. Crafting shouldn't be fully subpar to BMD's, it should be equal if you put in the effort (at least for high tier stuff, leaving the very high tier things BMD only).
- Metallurgy
- Metal is used in the vast majority of the recipes, thus making metallurgy core to crafting. It makes sense to also base progression around it, and avoid it taking thousands of clicks to get anything done. Some of our currently most expensive recipes take 300+ bits of scrap metal if crafted from start to finish.
- Rework current metal progression
- Scrap metal
- Wrought Iron
- Steel
- Furnace can do ‘in bulk’ smelting of multiple pieces of metal
- Up to a stack of ingredients at one time
- Coal cost is per entire stack to encourage bulk processing
- Recipes:
- 8 scrap + x coal = 4 wrought iron
- 4 wrought iron + y coal = 2 steel
- Other fields
- Plastic: important up to and including crafting bench, after that there should be a big shift to metal for everything. Potentially shift it away from needing adhesive in favor of chemicals to add some more value to the higher tier plastic - turn it into somewhat of another 'side progression'.
- Wood: to become more important as a source of charcoal, need to maybe make it slightly easier to find
- Cloth: potentially add some ruined clothes to the junk mix to add extra sources of cloth (or even replace all the cardboard giving cloth at the moment)
- Electronics: shifted more to end-game, early game more of a source of chips
- Possibly to also add material tiers in here: ‘scrap electronics’, ‘electrical components’, ‘military-grade electronics’ and add recipes to uptier electronics.
- Potentially include copper wire as an extra ingredient
- Adhesive: see where it makes sense to remove this and either leave it out all-together or substitute it with other things that are less of a pain to get.
- Medicine
- Giving the chemical progression a slight redo as well
- Consider adding better/other sources for alcohol (distillation from food ingredients?).
- Batteries provide enough early-game unrefined chemicals, but late-game might also need a rework
- Disassembly recipes for scrap
- Allow some scrap to be disassembled, returning more/higher grade components, at the cost of needing high tier workbenches and/or high crafting levels
- Perhaps rework the entire trash system to take skill levels into account, providing more value for the higher tier rebels.
- Automatically set smuggling prices based on a handful of ‘base ingredients’ and their crafting recipes.
- We could avoid introducing ‘chip loops’ like this, and potentially restrict them to only high tier crafting/smuggling, longer production chains, or something focused on groups rather than something you do on your own with just a mixer.
- Prices become easier to adjust on the fly, as we'd reduce the potentially 200+ individual price points down to mostly ~10-15 main items and a bunch of items only used in a single crafting recipe (mainly for drugs and some other very niche stuff).