Augmentation: Old Forum Discussion

[Greyfyn]

This is a series of old posts regarding the development of Augmentation. Before the current rendition of Augmentation, players used oils to enhance gear--that's why we have things like fear oil, hatred oil and hope oil still in game. These are Citan's contributions to an old discussion, which might be historically interesting. There are three parts, from different threads.


An Analysis of Augment Brewing Oils 1 year 4 months ago

Citan's comments:

"Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually completely redoing the way augments work right now based on earlier feedback from other players. All the existing augment recipes will be going away. You'll instead be able to make augments by extracting them from other equipment, so you'll be able to get any treasure effect in an augment. (The process is still long and expensive and involves melting down tons of treasure for raw parts, but it will at least be free-form.)

On a related note, I should warn people in the game news screen that they should use their augments now, because any unused augment oils will disappear when the new update hits. (EDIT: hmm maybe I can keep them around for a bit, will have to look into it. Do people have a lot of oils in storage?)"
Last Edit: 1 year 4 months ago by Citan.


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"I'm adding a way to un-augment items with the new system. I was previously against any undo-able crafting because I didn't want the highest-quality items to be passed down among players forever, but I've decided to just attune the item to you when you augment it, and then there's not really much down side to letting you undo it and redo it. (You can still drop or trade it, but nobody else can wield it. And vendors won't buy attuned items.)

I'm also working up an entirely separate additional skill to alter items called Transmutation. It was intended to be a much higher level skill, but I think it will work okay as a skill you unlock in the desert."
Last Edit: 1 year 4 months ago by Citan.


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"You'll keep your existing skill level and the NPCs' favor levels. You'll just have to buy new recipes, of which there are only a few, since it's free-form.

I doubt the new system is too much cheaper to level than the old system, so I don't think you've wasted a lot of money. (You won't have to buy a lot of recipes anymore, but you have to grind up a LOT of magic items to get the materials for new augments.)

EDIT: and any un-used augment oils will disappear. Sorry, just can't keep both systems in place!

Before people go using up their stock of existing oils, though, you might be better off NOT applying the current oils to your really amazing gear. That's because the new recipes will be undo-able, meaning you'll be able to take the augment off the item (at a high expense, but at least it's possible.) Oils applied with the existing system can't be undone, because the necessary info wasn't stored on the item."
Last Edit: 1 year 4 months ago by Citan.


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"No, if you augment an item it's attuned to you forever, so if you don't want it anymore you'd melt it down. That's the whole point of attuning it, to get that stuff out of the economy once you've had fun with it. Otherwise that stuff will slowly become the norm and nobody will be excited to find loot anymore, they'll just use hand-me-down items from their guild forever. Overpowered stuff has to go away eventually!"

[Greyfyn]

This is a series of old posts regarding the development of Augmentation. Before the current rendition of Augmentation, players used oils to enhance gear--that's why we have things like fear oil, hatred oil and hope oil still in game. These are Citan's contributions to an old discussion, which might be historically interesting. There are three parts, from different threads.

November 8 Update 1 year 3 months ago
New augmentation system

Citan's comments:

"Augmentation has had a major do-over. It now lets you add any power as an augmentation; there are no more lists of specific powers to manage. (It is still an intentionally expensive and slow process to level up the augmentation skills, but hopefully it’s a whole lot less confusing and annoying... just slow.)
- You still apply augmentations in the same way: by learning the recipe from Nightshade in Kur Mountains. That part is unchanged and you don’t need to re-buy recipes if you already had them.
- Nightshade sends you to the same four people to learn the augment skills (Syndra, Poe, Malgath, and Gribburn), who still teach you the skills, but they no longer sell huge lists of recipes. All the old recipes are gone, replaced with just a few new ones.
- The new recipes let you create augmentations by ripping them out of magical items. One random power is extracted from the item and the item is destroyed.
- A crystal of the appropriate type is needed (e.g. carnelians for sword, moonstones for lycanthropy, etc.) in order to hold the extracted power.
- The higher the item’s level, the more skill you need to successfully extract an augment. There’s a ten level margin of safety, and after that your chances drop off quickly. (A level N player has a 100% chance of extracting a level N+10 power, but only a 10% chance of extracting a level N+20 power, and a 0% chance of extracting anything higher.) If you fail to extract an augment, the item is lost anyway.
- You also need another special material to create these augments, which you get by breaking down junk magic items. The NPCs have recipes for this as well. You can’t fail to break down an item; it always works
- The amount of resources you get from breaking down an item is based on the number and level of the powers on the item. You also have a chance to get bonus materials if your skill level is significantly higher than the item’s level.
- All of the old-style augmentation oils have ceased to exist in your inventory or vaults. My apologies if you had a bunch stored! It was too much bookkeeping to try to keep them around. (Oils that were already applied to items remain in effect; only the un-applied oils have disappeared.)
- Augmentations were previously called "augmentation oils", and now they are just "augmentations". They are crystalline-esque (since a crystal is used when making them) but they are not technically crystals (for purposes of gifts, vendors, etc.)
- Urzab in Amulna and Sie Antry in Eltibule now buy (and consign) augmentation crystals and ingredients related to augmentations
- If you had skill levels in the old versions of the skills, you retain your level. However, you will need to go and buy the new recipes from the NPCs, since all the old-style recipes have been removed.
- The old alchemy recipes for creating Infusion Oils are not currently in use (and are no longer given out). The items and recipes still exist, though, because these oils will be used for a new kind of crafting in the future.
- When an augment is applied to an item, the item becomes attuned to that player. Only they will be able to wield the item. (Technically, it's attuned to your account, not your character, so any character on the account can wield it.) You can't sell attuned items, but you can still gift them to NPCs or melt them down for scrap.
- Note that Augmentation is not related to the new Transmutation skill. These are two different ways to augment gear. Augmentation is a more difficult (and ultimately more powerful) system that only dedicated crafters will dig deeply into -- other players will buy the crafters' augments. Transmutation is a more personal system that every player will likely take up."

[Greyfyn]

This is a series of old posts regarding the development of Augmentation. Before the current rendition of Augmentation, players used oils to enhance gear--that's why we have things like fear oil, hatred oil and hope oil still in game. These are Citan's contributions to an old discussion, which might be historically interesting. There are three parts, from different threads.


Transmutation feedback 1 year 1 month ago

Citan's comments:

"A note about the "chance to decay" when transmuting -- there's actually a chance to get higher-tier versions as well. It's a double-edged sword. But in any case, the design is just the best I can do with current items. Let me explain why. (This gets very specific... the TL;DR is "it'll be improved eventually".)

When a treasure item is generated, it is given a certain number of "buy-points" for each power slot. Items have an innate number of buy-points, modified by its rarity. For instance, here's a random item's buy-points:

Quality Spring Fairy Shoes
Uncommon: 55-65
Rare: 65-70
Exceptional: 87-92
Epic: 92-97
Legendary: 97-103

For every slot on the item, a number of buy-points are rolled. So an Exceptional item might have 87, 90, and 88 points for each of its respective 3 slots.

The item then goes shopping, randomly of course, spending its points on different enchantments. When it chooses an enchantment, it buys the highest-tier version it can afford for that slot. Those enchantments are then baked into the item and you're given the item.

When it comes time to transmute an enchantment, I don't know how many "buy-points" the item had to begin with. I know how much the enchantment "costs", so I know how much it spent. But it's possible that the game had more points than it cost, and effectively wasted those extra points. If it had 100 buy-points, and one tier of a power cost 85 points and the next cost 105 points, then it'd buy the 85-point one, and the excess buy-points are lost. That happens a lot. In fact most of the time at least a few points are wasted.

So when you transmute a power into a new one, how many buy-points should you have? At first during development I just used the buy-point cost of the old enchantment. But that makes your item weaker over time. If you had a 95-point power and you roll a new power whose maximum tier only costs 90 points, then you'd get that. And if you tried to transmute it again, you'd only have 90 points to spend! So you could never afford to buy the old enchantment you had. You've permanently lost points.

So then I randomly added a handful of points each time, to offset that. But this tended to make the item more powerful over time, for the same reason -- when you can afford slightly better enchantments, your next re-roll will have more points to spend.

Does all that make sense? Anyway... the solution I ended up with has more randomness, so it can go either way: sometimes you get more buy-points, sometimes less. I do see items gradually going up in power. It does happen, but players don't ever seem to comment on that -- maybe they can't tell it's happening. But they definitely feel it when items randomly get weaker.

This isn't really an optimal design. I like that there's risk involved, and I think there should be some additional "cost" to transmuting -- it's a VERY powerful trick. But I'm not really happy with the current down side... it's just the best I could do with the information I have.

Starting in the next update, items will start storing the original buy-points they had for each slot of the item. And eventually, when most items in circulation have their buy-points stored, I'll redo transmutation to always use the original buy-points. I haven't bothered coding that yet, because no existing items could use that system yet, but I'll do that a few months down the road.

That does leave open the question of what other "cost" there should be to transmutation. It's a VERY powerful trick and without the current risk of damaging the item, I do suspect it's too good. Too powerful, basically. But degrading items is probably a little too much of a down side. I'd rather there be a pre-known cost than something random, in this case."
Last Edit: 1 year 1 month ago by Citan.


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"Also, I should mention, phlogiston is in tiers for a very important reason: it prevents rich players from destroying lower-level economies and farming low-level mobs. Let's face it, if newbie gear dropped something that was useful to high level players, you can rest assured they would be grinding that gear (because they could kill newb monsters 100x faster than newbs), buying every used piece of newb gear (because it's cheap, by their income standards), and otherwise depriving actual newbies of the loot they need.

This is just a fact of life because high level players have a LOT more income and power than low-level players.

So this was a very deliberate design decision and not one I'm likely to change -- phlogiston needs to have tiers to prevent abuse. And for similar reasons, there'll never be a way to "upgrade" low-level phlogiston to higher-level, because that just reopens up reasons for level 125s to buy out every piece of gear in the newbie towns. Which sucks for newbies.

There are lots of weird items that low-level players find which are useful to high-level players, and that's intentional: among other things, it gives newbies something to sell. But phlogiston can be obtained from literally every magic item, and phlogiston is useful to literally every player, so that'd get out of hand fast. "
Last Edit: 1 year 1 month ago by Citan.


These are posts from the old forum. They don't require comment.

[cratoh]

"Also, I should mention, phlogiston is in tiers for a very important reason: it prevents rich players from destroying lower-level economies and farming low-level mobs. Let's face it, if newbie gear dropped something that was useful to high level players, you can rest assured they would be grinding that gear (because they could kill newb monsters 100x faster than newbs), buying every used piece of newb gear (because it's cheap, by their income standards), and otherwise depriving actual newbies of the loot they need.

This is just a fact of life because high level players have a LOT more income and power than low-level players.

So this was a very deliberate design decision and not one I'm likely to change -- phlogiston needs to have tiers to prevent abuse. And for similar reasons, there'll never be a way to "upgrade" low-level phlogiston to higher-level, because that just reopens up reasons for level 125s to buy out every piece of gear in the newbie towns. Which sucks for newbies.


I must just mention here that yes, this works well. But it has maybe slipped though the net that it is still well worth high levels buying lowbie gear as you can transmute a piece rather than phlog it and if it is yellow or purple for example there is a very high chance of getting multiple prisms from it.