I think it's a good idea. We need more systems.
I'll go through what I think:
- "Makes it possible to wear people down if they aren't looking after their equipment, which might be interesting (the pace of this will be gradual though, you won't be able to destroy someone's items in a few hours)."
- I think this is a good idea. It's like credit leak when you're inactive. But this potentially allows a better chance for weaker players to defeat a strong inactive player.
- "Opens the door for skills that can improve/worsen the rate of damage taken."
- This would be perfect, because we need more skills. You could enchant your weapon to inflict more durability damage in attacks, or enchant your armor to take less.
- Side note, this made me think of a current skill Honour though. Ultimately that skill isn't useful. I think it should also stop experience being lost when you attack and lose as well. Which is very valuable for Monster Farm pushing, or attempting to win against higher players.
- A skill to negate durability damage when you lose to NPC's only could be one as well.
- "Whenever you are involved in an attack, the items you have equipped will take a small amount of damage." --
- "Decided that all should take damage, something like 10 points of damage, 20 if you lose. Means we can have skills that increase/reduce it, whereas if it just took 1 point, we couldn't do that."
- I think certain pieces of equipment should degrade faster or slower. That way you aren't just repairing every piece when you do need to repair. This would leave equipment and total character stats in a constant variance, which would be very interesting. Something like -- Very High: Weapon. High: Torso, Off-hand. Medium: Head, Leg, Feet. Low: Hidden, Utility, Neck.
- I agree with the content or type of fight having a multiplier to the durability damage. Losing in any form except a defend could be highest. PvP attacks and winning high, because it is one on one. This also gives a cost to attacking and stealing credits/exp from players, thereby lowering overall credit gain. Raid medium, as you wouldn't be the sole target. Being attacked by a player and losing, medium. Being attacked by a player and winning, low. NPC should probably be low, it's typically thousands+ of attacks.
- "How to decide how durable existing items are... probably just based on quality, but would be nice to add as a thing you could configure when making an item."
- I personally think it should be based on level and it's quality. Higher level should a**ume better material. Higher quality should a**ume better enchantments or blacksmith/creator, whatever. As such, quality seems to have a heavier impact on the possible stats of equipment, so it could be a heavier reduction in the durability damage you take. With level of the equipment reducing by less, and combining the 2 different factors. Take Observer for example. It's 150 but white. It still reduces more than a set of 100 because it is a higher level set, however its is immensely weaker than a 150 set of blue quality. So you could potentially have say, a 130 set of the highest quality equalize and reduce by the same amount, if not more, since it is fortified better.
- "Need to decide how many attacks this will equate to before 0% durability of a typical item. Some stupidly overpowered items could be very flimsy and high-maintenance, but normal stuff should be good for a decent number of attacks. We can tune this as we go though, we don't need to get it right first time."
- I think that's a really good idea. Items that are a cut above the rest could degrade faster, I like that. Making it more expensive to maintain or balance is a unique way to add one form of balance.
- "You can repair this with Credits, probably on a Repair Items page unless someone has a fancier idea."
- This is also a good chance to have a point sink as well. Either by repairing with points, or temporary upgrades in the shop to reduce durability damage by a % for a duration, or negate it.
- This is a good chance to introduce a 'town' page or map, one NPC there being a blacksmith for repairs. Which can be used to be built upon with more NPC and areas. One idea I have right now is an inn & NPC for holiday mode. Instead of just going into holiday mode, you would enter the town and have an interaction with the NPC to set up your holiday mode. Giving the game more... feeling and interaction with the environment. I actually have a lot of ideas now that I'm talking about that, but I'll leave it there in case you don't like or go with it.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edited by Symphony @ Mon Nov 16 0:38:19 EST 2020
I'll just merge it.
Quote from Jrady
I think that the rarity should actually cause the durability to be higher, because though people may like it now, what happens when everyone's credits run out and we're all stuck doing 5k attacks a day just to keep the items in good shape?
Which brings me to npc attacking should not cost more to repair than you're getting from the attack. This would be a very minute amount and probably take a lot of calculations to figure out especially if the damage is random.
I think though my best idea would be to repurpose the whole stars on the items that increase the stats now to actually be the durability, feature except items start at 5 stars and the lower the amount of stars an item has the more it costs to repair. So say it loses one star then it costs 500k to repair the second star lost would cost 1.5mil to repair and so on. So the cost would be reversed but it starts at 5 star.
Also I think for this whole system to work I think something you said before(CK) about having all the items have a bigger chunk of stats compared to a person's actual stats might be good as well.
Not really sure how to state the next idea but somehow I think that for partial degradation if you catch it soon enough the repair cost should be free just to encourage people to stay more active and repair sooner.
Like I said before I think that the higher rarity items should NOT degrade faster but slower, but the idea there would be that though the cost overall compared to the lower rarity items would be higher not just direct correlation, but the ratio to level, but would take more hits to degrade. I mean think about it a strong set of armor should be a strong set of armor right?
Hey, just a quick progress update:
- Item damage is accrued during attacks on all equipped items.
- For winner, random 0-1 dice roll (for now).
- For loser, random 0-2 dice roll (for now).
- Raiding will have impact too, but haven't implemented yet. Not too hard though.
- Item tooltips show the damage status, max durability
- We have a Marketplace/Repair Items page which lists your damaged items.
- I haven't finished making it look a bit shinier, but the page is "done".
We have some things to agree on, from pricing (I think substantial damage should cost a lot more, not just linear increase, to create a strategy of keeping your items relatively well maintained), to the typical amount of damage an item should be able to take before it crosses each of the 10 damage thresholds (0, 10, 20, ..., 90, 100% damage is when the item gets debuffed), etc.
Open to all ideas, I just think, let's get something released and figure it out as we go 
I think I'm going to tint the item rows based on the damage rating, to highlight the bad ones. Item images need a dark background, columns need widths set properly, and the damage should be a progress bar (well, it already is, but I haven't styled it yet...).
Invisible War ][
Edited 2 time(s). Last edited by Cyberkilla @ Mon Mar 8 16:23:02 EST 2021
I like this idea. I'm a fan of any new uses for Credits, even if means me having to put my hand in my pocket!
My only thought is that I don't think it should cost more if you recharge it less often. Obviously it should cost more on a linear scale so repairing 2% is twice the cost of 1% but I don't think it should cost more past that. If someone isn't repairing their armour regularly, they're already suffering the debuff in their gear. There's no need to increase the cost further. Also, you could look at perhaps a skill that reduces the cost of repairing? Only a small amount, perhaps a 10% reduction for a maxed out skill with each level up to 10 giving 1%?
Quote from Mightyafro
I like this idea. I'm a fan of any new uses for Credits, even if means me having to put my hand in my pocket!
My only thought is that I don't think it should cost more if you recharge it less often. Obviously it should cost more on a linear scale so repairing 2% is twice the cost of 1% but I don't think it should cost more past that. If someone isn't repairing their armour regularly, they're already suffering the debuff in their gear. There's no need to increase the cost further. Also, you could look at perhaps a skill that reduces the cost of repairing? Only a small amount, perhaps a 10% reduction for a maxed out skill with each level up to 10 giving 1%?
Skills and upgrades to impact price and damage rate sound good to me. Could have a negative skill buff that makes the target's armour damage accrue more substantially.
We can put the pricing of repairs to a vote, and I'm happy with whatever the general consensus is. For me, it's like the saying, "a st*tch in time saves nine".
If you have a knife and you keep it honed, apply oil to it, that's cheap maintenance. If you expose it to salt water and leave it to rust, you're going to have to take it to the grindstone and hope it isn't covered in pockmarks by the end of it.
To throw a curveball into this, there was also an idea to tune weapons to basically apply extra buffs to them that decay over time. Whether that's a separate system entirely, or is incompatible with this repair feature, I don't know
I also had ideas about weapon skill, where your use of a weapon gives you a "weapon mastery" that results in extra buffs whenever you use that type of weapon (e.g. low tech, rifle, explosive). Just more things to think about. Too many ideas 
Invisible War ][
Edited 1 time(s). Last edited by Cyberkilla @ Mon Mar 8 17:46:42 EST 2021