Smuggler Archive
Thread: Risk vs Reward: Spice, Buffs, and Food
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ReelAblo
Thu Jul 29, 2004 11:48 pm
#14
i juat use both, some **edit** wants to duel?
dancer buff now 2200 mind
musician buff
brandy 1
brandy 2
Iawo
Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:57 am
#15
I love all of those ideas... heh. I myself was wondering why you just couldn't take another 'spice' to negate the downer, but make the downer time add up for when you finally do come down. That would be the time to go sit in a cantina or starport slicing, just don't throw up on the customers. 
Seriously though... with foods and buffs as they are now, spices are nothing but emergency stims.
Golrok
Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:49 am
#16
I totally agree with "up to 3 spices". You can combine them anyway you want but 3 only. But oh god the downers from the various combinations should be scary. They should have you hallucinating tuskens or kraytsthat arent there when you spice that hard.
I saw on a vendor a food (kudos to chefs again) called smugglers delight- reduces downer time. overpriced of course.
Message Edited by Golrok on 07-30-2004 10:51 AM
BaronPwent
Fri Jul 30, 2004 8:20 pm
#17
You should definitely be able to down more than 1 spice at a time. At the very least you should have seperate timers for each type of spice instead of one all encumpassing spice timer. With taking more than 1 spice at a time, I think there should be a logritmic type curve to how the bonuses stack. For example: take 1 pixie full effect, down a 2nd pixie and you only get half the bonus, down a 3rd and you only get 25% of the bonus. Conversely, the downer effect should have an exponential curve. For example: If your on a downer already and a 2nd downer kicks in it has an increased penalty of say 150%. A 3rd downer kicks in and it stacks 175% penalty on top of what your already incurring.
The stacking downer effect probably seems pretty extreme and would certainly require some relaxing of the ludicriously debilitating effect of the current spice downer.
This brings me right around to the subject of spice experimentation. Why can we not make spice with better stat boosts or weaker downsides? I fail to believe that every single hit of muon is exactly the same potency.
But back to the idea at hand. The concept of an overdose chance is interesting, butreally seems like it could turn out to be too much of a downside to spices. The downer on spices is already enough to limit there use to nearly nonexistant. Spices would have to give some serious advantage to risk the chance (no matter how small a chance) of going instant incap.
Bottomline - spices need some serious revamping to make them actually viable and in demand.
FrankLee
Fri Jul 30, 2004 8:50 pm
#18
-Spices with 'side effects' (lowered mind but boosted str during the 'upper' phase) should have little or no downtime. If it's a straight trade or even a proportional improvement, there shouldn't be a long downtime.
-Spice durations need to be competetive with buffs. Yes, you can do them yourself, so they can't be 3 hours, but you can do food yourself too. I'm thinking an uptime of 20-60 minutes is acceptable. It'd certainly increase the purchases of smuggler's delight food.
-Downtime needs to be rethought. A 5 minute shuttle wait is annoying, a 3 minute pukefest is moreso. Something better than near-incapacitation needs to be done. Either let us 'chain' drugs to offset downer effects, or change the duration/magnitude of thme.
-Consider 'mandatory drug moods'. Lock a player into 'relaxed' while dropping sedative h4b. Lock them into nervous when they've tipped a muon gold.
-Show people using drugs. Even a simple medic animation with a spatial line '%TT burns a brick of grey gabaki and relaxes' would be great, but it would easily add to the atmosphere.
-Make some variability. Spices always struck me as a late craftable addition that was terribly coded, and nobody gave a **edit** to go back and fix it. People want to compete for good drugs, let them.
-Spice up spices a bit. Give us some new functions. All our spices are stat-related. Give us spices that make us preternaturally alert, zippy dodgers, berserk warriors. A spice that did +50 berserk would be hillarious. Nobody uses that skill on purpose anyway. Give us a spice that lets us be un-incappable for 45 seconds, but whose downer is mandatory incap. Or something. Give us a drug that lets people feign death for 60 seconds. Sure, we don't need it, but we could sell it.
-Addiction/tolerance: Instead of (or in addition to) downer effects, you could institute an addiction cycle. You only get 'downer' effects when you're not high, so you stay high instead. After a while, the bonus wears down. You can either suffer through a full downer phase (detoxification) or keep pushing, till the drug does nothing for you. I know call_out routines are client-server intensive, but they could be intelligently stacked to communicate all drug effects at once, and they'd only need to ping every minute or so; the to-the-second accuracy could slide.
-Spice durations need to be competetive with buffs. Yes, you can do them yourself, so they can't be 3 hours, but you can do food yourself too. I'm thinking an uptime of 20-60 minutes is acceptable. It'd certainly increase the purchases of smuggler's delight food.
-Downtime needs to be rethought. A 5 minute shuttle wait is annoying, a 3 minute pukefest is moreso. Something better than near-incapacitation needs to be done. Either let us 'chain' drugs to offset downer effects, or change the duration/magnitude of thme.
-Consider 'mandatory drug moods'. Lock a player into 'relaxed' while dropping sedative h4b. Lock them into nervous when they've tipped a muon gold.
-Show people using drugs. Even a simple medic animation with a spatial line '%TT burns a brick of grey gabaki and relaxes' would be great, but it would easily add to the atmosphere.
-Make some variability. Spices always struck me as a late craftable addition that was terribly coded, and nobody gave a **edit** to go back and fix it. People want to compete for good drugs, let them.
-Spice up spices a bit. Give us some new functions. All our spices are stat-related. Give us spices that make us preternaturally alert, zippy dodgers, berserk warriors. A spice that did +50 berserk would be hillarious. Nobody uses that skill on purpose anyway. Give us a spice that lets us be un-incappable for 45 seconds, but whose downer is mandatory incap. Or something. Give us a drug that lets people feign death for 60 seconds. Sure, we don't need it, but we could sell it.
-Addiction/tolerance: Instead of (or in addition to) downer effects, you could institute an addiction cycle. You only get 'downer' effects when you're not high, so you stay high instead. After a while, the bonus wears down. You can either suffer through a full downer phase (detoxification) or keep pushing, till the drug does nothing for you. I know call_out routines are client-server intensive, but they could be intelligently stacked to communicate all drug effects at once, and they'd only need to ping every minute or so; the to-the-second accuracy could slide.
Gaarotharr
Sat Jul 31, 2004 12:25 am
#19
or have the spice downer based on your strength like you i.e a wookie brawler would be able to take more spice than a medic mon cal but the wookie would have a bad downer because he took more spice. i also like the hallucination thing for a downer. i could just picture a dude tripped out on muon and gunjet shooting at tye-dye bull rancors lol that would be hilarious. but i agree foods and buffs make the spice obselete.there needs to be a way to either chain them or have better stats. and why does alcohol make your sharper. If anything it should boost your strength so you cant feel pain or are less suceptible to incapp.
Sengis
Sat Jul 31, 2004 5:09 pm
#20
The game engine seems powerful, to perhaps create for the individual halucinatory effects, so a blue tint, to eerything, massive lense flares, fisheye, lensing, loads of scope to make Drug usage recreational from a rp and gamplay point of view. Doing mind enhancing drugs, increase the genuine effect of a ind healers, buff, or some such. There should be a negative cost at ALL times when using spices, so strength loses, coordination, so quickness delay, mind strength adn so forth, this would allow for useful balances. I do eat a lot of smugglers delight buut its in short supply, I think the smuggler delight should be makeable by smugglers and should be soemsort of drug apparatus, enableing efficent filtered measured dosages. Thus improving the drug usage, and giving us semthing else to sell. Aklso I wan to be a able to roll another fat one in game. I crafted untold amounts of gabaki, and i wanna see smoking. I smoke, I know its not pc, but its a game, on a pc and id like to smoke. Peopl can have no smoking cantinas if they so wish, hell could enact legislation which brings me to another idea. I think all planets, should have elctions similar to bestine, but every player residing ont he planet can vote, and it may bring spurious laws into force, should turnout be low, or if the devs are feeling naughty. So i can imagine, no Speeder nbikes within 200m of NPCS Cities being enforced for 30 days if peopel dont vote against, it, or an area being a smuggler free zone, with harsh anti drugs laws, other more relaxed. Anyways, thats just a few of my thoughts.
KefkaQ
Sun Aug 01, 2004 12:35 am
#21
....I would so love this from an RP point of view, in addition to not being so dependent (heh!) on buffs and brandy
FrankLee
Sun Aug 01, 2004 8:32 pm
#22
Yeah, exactly. As well as 'forced mood' drug effects, you could have hallucinatory ones too.
How about, you drop some sedative h4b. Your mood goes to relaxed. Everyone elses mood goes to 'nervous' (for you) or 'peppy' or whatever. I _believe_ that the message string that comes across to our client is just the string with the mood affector; I've been on voice with a person asking 'what's puckish mean' because they saw 'I say something puckishly' but I saw 'impishly'. This leads me to believe the server sends message-mood type signals.
So, I take some muon, I speed up, everyone else slows down. I take some pixie, I get belligerent, everyone else appears weak and nervous to me. I take some gabaki, suddenly everyone's shifty to me.
Another idea, how about wounding instead of downtimes. I take some booster blue, which pumps up my action stats, but when it's over I'm burned out and I take 50 wounds in action/quickness/stamina? Rework for addiction/tolerance as you see fit. Less wounds, more wounds, whatever.
The visual-effect idea sounds great. Everything in the thread sounds great.
How about, you drop some sedative h4b. Your mood goes to relaxed. Everyone elses mood goes to 'nervous' (for you) or 'peppy' or whatever. I _believe_ that the message string that comes across to our client is just the string with the mood affector; I've been on voice with a person asking 'what's puckish mean' because they saw 'I say something puckishly' but I saw 'impishly'. This leads me to believe the server sends message-mood type signals.
So, I take some muon, I speed up, everyone else slows down. I take some pixie, I get belligerent, everyone else appears weak and nervous to me. I take some gabaki, suddenly everyone's shifty to me.
Another idea, how about wounding instead of downtimes. I take some booster blue, which pumps up my action stats, but when it's over I'm burned out and I take 50 wounds in action/quickness/stamina? Rework for addiction/tolerance as you see fit. Less wounds, more wounds, whatever.
The visual-effect idea sounds great. Everything in the thread sounds great.
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