Development Cycle Archive

oops! I started typing my msg up before Feazer posted his (not claiming that my idea is original, just would have referenced his post as well if I had seen it!). So that's GMTA, great minds think alike (unless you are the board name of the guy I was just talking to in game about this idea! lol).

Iree

Idea for a New Money Sink and player time saver.

G.A.R.T.Pass technology. (Galaxy Area Rapid Transit, another way the Empire is benifiting it's citizens)

• Go to any Starport terminal, and you can click on the added option to buy a G.A.R.T. pass.


• The GARTPass costs 20k, and gets you the pass in your datapad, nothing else. The pass is good for 1 (one) week, after which it expires. (note: slicers can slice their pass to get up to a 50% duration increase).


• Click on GARTPass, select [Program] from the passes radial menu.
  
  1. Brings up a new UI
  
  
  2. Player selects the Point of Origin from the map/pulldown. Clicks OK.
  
  
  3. Player then selects the destination from the map/pulldown. Clicks OK.
  
  
  4. Game goes in, figures out shortest number of hops from PoO to Dest, and the base cost if those were done the normal faction.. Unless a starport is selected as the starting or ending city, travel will be through the most expensive (read, the hub cities) cities on planets.. Example: Travel from player city on Rori to Player city on Talus:
     RoriPC-> Restuss -> Theed -> Coronet -> Whatever city is most expensive on Talus -> TalusPC.
  
  
  5. Game then adds a 'convienence fee'. Say 50%? Maybe instead of allowing them to raise the duration, allow slicers to lower their convienence fees.
  
  
  6. Pass asks them to verify by entering a 4 digit number, and deducts the charge from the player's account.
  
  
  7. Player can either double click on the travel droid or type /usegartpass once the shuttle has arrived.
  
  


• The purchase price is non-refundable, pre arranged travel dates non-negotiable (If you want to change the GARTPasses settings to a different destination, you have to throw away your current route and get no money back).


• The GARTPass takes you straight to your destination, no waiting at intervening starports. (You are switching shuttles of course, but because you paid a premium the ship schedules they found for you mesh into a seemless trip to your destination).

Pros:
Less agonizing by the players over missing the second boat, er shuttle...
Sinks a little more money out of the economy.
Lowers the amount of cross server traffic for people crossing the galaxy.
Cons:
Faster Galactic travel, lowers immersiveness and possibly improves monetary rewards for some activities due to speed of travel.
You would have to keep a record of all player cities available from any server, assuming they are not now.

Yah I know the idea isn't new, but I recently saw a NPC "holding and drinking a drink" so the memory came back to me. Here are some screens that show that the animations are already in the game (for those who didn't know).

Holding "glass"-
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=50754

Making a toast-
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=50756

Down the hatch-
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=50758

I think it would great if we could have a certain kind of glass to craft that players could hold finally. Wouldn't have to be any of the current items but maybe something new that is equiptable.

A benefit would be another source of income for Chefs could have a small number of glasses, few different styles, and a few different colors to sell to players.

"New" Emotes then could come into play like /toast (check image above) that could give players more RP options during parties/wedding/celebrations.

Maybe even tie something into it so that the cup would need to be refilled (renewable resource)?

If not a "fillable" glass, then maybe allow some of the current drinks to be equipted? Tie in some of the emotes to the charges (if use use /drink while holding the cup you'll use a charge?) to give the chefs steady buyers? The other idea may give chefs a surge of sells, but since the item doesn't go away then sells would drop off after a while.

Granted, it needs more polishing but I just a thought I wanted to dig back up and dust off.

Feazer, Shadow, I second your ideas... and didn't try to steal them. been working on this since page 3.

Really... it's just an all around good idea for something like this... I've seen several references to this kind of thing in the past, I just fleshed it out a little more.

Cool, Tripp! it's great that so many of us have posted on this, as several diff people all arriving at the same conclusion that something like this would be great, can only help push this sort of idea forward. Plus, the more people to help flesh it out, the better! I'm glad you aren't peeved about my post, just, whatever betters the game! Esp with this issue, I'd love something like this.

Iree

Please fix commandos.

One facet that all of the past weeks' crafting experimentation discussion was getting away from is that the only goods being bought on the servers are master produced goods. It seems to me that upon entering a crafting class there should be a few components that a master and a lucky novice produce at the SAME level.

If a master had an advantage at producing say "butter knives" it certainly wouldn't come in the ability of said knife to spread butter. Assuming heavily decorated knives cut the same as a well-crafted plain-looking knife so, arguably master knives would be produced quicker, and his quality would be more consistent (the in-game result would be less critical failures to produce the same high-level knife over and over). There's always the apprentice with real talent that could, by chance, produce the most heavenly of knives on his first try because he's got the gift. So, what am I babbling about?

Why not give a novice a chance at producing a very high quality good, perhaps as good as a "since-beta" master? Make critical failures MUCH MUCH MUCH more common as a newbie, but a person with time and resources should be able to roll the dice over and over again until they get a schematic that competes with a master schematic. In this new system I'm suggesting, most noob crafters do not have the piles of good resources laid up to out-sell the master crafters. Certainly there is a problem with crafters that can dabble and make their own goods, but I think we achieve one of the original goals of making master crafters more consistent through the reduction of critical failures.

This opens certain markets to low-level crafters with the creation of niche markets for the guy who has a stock-piled a couple hundred K of something and got lucky with a schematic one night. To prevent dabbler-abuse you could tie the number of items in a schematic to crafter level so that Master Crafters still create the products in bulk. Regardless of number of schematics produced, all of them are going to require resources that are finite. Hence, Joe-bob's butter knife of spreading is going to be around for a while and then no more will be made unless Joe-bob spends a large amount of time "rolling the dice" to get another amazing success. If a novice schematic could only produce 100 or 10 of these uber knives all of sudden the value to the crafter increases a lot, and therefore the price now competes with the master crafter's.

To tie this to the butter knife, you may have seen the multitude of late night info-mercials for Wonder-uber-super knives. Is the market already flooded with wonderful 200$ kitchen knives that will last until your grandkids need to give them away? Yes. Are their fewer and fewer ads from small start-ups selling knives that may, for a time, work as well as a 200$ knife? No. The path to selling a knife in a buyers' market is in specialization in the vertical market of people who need one knife to do it all and don't care if it's name brand or has matching steak knives. (of course throwing in 6 junk steak knives will sway some buyers) They guy hawking it on late night television is the newbie crafter, the company with 200$ knives in 5 different chains of kitchen stores is the Master Crafter. The customer shopping at the kitchen store is a Master Chef shopping at well-stocked vendor, while the customer purchasing from the infomercial is the one buying from the noob spamming the starport who carries much of his stock in his backpack. Allowing a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) new crafters will craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers for the master increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree. This change also attempts combats the resource mining/hoarding of critical resources that haven't come up very often.

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kalmank wrote:

Hey all,

I have an idea for a new dungeon: The Spice Mines of Kessel. This is a "long-term" dungeon, which means you can possibly stay a few days in it. Here's the story:

Jabba the Hutt needs more raw spice, now that Imperial troops are seizing random shipments during the Crackdown. So now, Hutt mobs are "kidnapping" players randomly on Tatooine, and hiring bounty hunters to kidnap those with low or negative Jabba Faction points, and bringing them to work in the spice mines. When you are DB-ed by specific mobs, instead of cloning, you are brought to the lowest level of the spice mines.

All ofthe player'sinventory and clothing are gone, stored in a lockbox which he can access if he manages to "escape." He is equipped with a prisoner's uniform. There are three ways to escape. The first is to pay off the level supervisor with a large sum of credits. This will bring you back to the closest starport to where you were kidnapped.

The second method is to work your way up to the top level of the mine. Each level has a quota of spice to mine before you can move on. Spice is mined like sampling resources. Also, you can get more spice to move things up by doing missions for fellow prisoners (NPCs) or supervisors. Once you get to the top level, You can bribe (with spice) your way into the Lockbox storage, which acts like a temporary bank, where you can retreive as much of your belongings as you'd like (in case you want to leave room in your inventory for the loot you've gotten in the mines), and run past the guards to a shuttle. This method does take a while, maybe a few days for a casual player, but you end up with the most amount of raw spice.

The third method is to get smuggled out. The only way to get to Kessel is to be kidnapped - but Smugglers with the Underworld and Spices trees can travel there from Tatooine spaceports. They are free to walk around, but they cannot actually mine the spice. There are missions they can do to get spice and loot, and they can also buy spice from prisoner players. Their best function is the ability to smuggle players (by grouping with them)to the surface of Kessel where the lockbox and shuttle are, usually in exchange for spice and/or credits.

New spices will be introduced that are mined. One idea I have is Glitterstim, from the novels. What it does is double the amount of whatever doctor and chef buffs you have when you take the spice, for 30 min (the downer is for 10 min you'll have no buffs at all). The raw spice that is mined cannot be taken as is - smugglers use them in crafting eatable spice. Something as good as this will encourage smugglers to come to Kessel.

More ideas arefor Bio-Engineers to get themselves kidnapped to get dna samples from underground creatures in the mines. Maybeanyone who is grouped with a smuggler can fly to Kessel (with their inventory and weapons), to try to take over the spice mining facility by killing certain npcs, and while they control it, they get a flow of raw spice into their inventory.

Lastly, since the planet Kessel's atmosphere is mostly unbreathable away from the mines (this is from the novels), very little of the planet's surface would need to be created, and the focus would be the mine itself. Also, since the Kessel system has a black hole in it, the sky could look really cool.

Ok, that's it for now. What do you all think?

-Isildur

Intrepid

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OMG, What an awsome idea!!!!! I think i'd purposely tried to get DB'd jsut to go through it!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE TH, bring this up! This has to be one of the best ideas for a dungeon I think I've seen for a long time! it get EVERYONE involved!!! (Thinking Guild rescues, Player bounties (hiring a BH to send someone to the spice mines )Way to go Isildur!

Why thank you, Vegas. I have other ideas, but let's see how this one flies with the devs. For player bounties, here's what I envision. The game randomly picks names of those who have low or negative Jabba faction, perhaps even the lower you have, the greater chance your name gets picked. These are posted on the BH terminals, just like Jedi. The player will get a TEF, and will most undoubtedly be caught unawares. And THAT is the beauty of it - people want the game to be more Star Warsy - no one in the Star Wars universe who crosses Jabba the Hutt can expect to go unscathed. So you can be placing a harvester or playing music in a cantina, but he will track you down.

Now of course, when a player is DBed in this manner, he will wake up in the mines. No item decay or anything (inventory in lockbox), and of course, the BH will get a nice reward. Perhaps something better than money, like some kind of special Jabba loot. This way everybody wins. Well, maybe except Lady Valarian. But then she could hire BH's to kill people with low Valarian fac......nah, one Star Warsy step at a time.

Always,

Isildur

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billybudd wrote:

I've noticed a detail that really should be added to create a more realistic experience.

Wookies should have dingleberries handing from their harry arses. I mean come on, that much hair is bound to catch a few stink nuggets from time to time.

Well, thanks for considering my suggestion.

Play on....

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/sign

Greatness.