Author Topic: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues  (Read 10911 times)

Offline Sir Mathias

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Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« on: June 27, 2013, 11:31:32 pm »
First off forgive me if I do something egregious as this is my first post. I had an idea earlier that I think could add variety to ship choices without the lengthy process of balancing, and make Muse some good money to boot.

Everyone talks about wanting more ships, and the standard response seems to be that its too complicated to balance them. But what if Muse introduced new, purchasable, ships that had EXACTLY the same stats and gun arrangement, but with a different shape and look? I'm not talking colors or logos I'm talking brand new ship designs - at least cosmetically. The only thing that might change, slightly, is the distance between components which I'm sure the most excellent parkour-engineers could make use of but for most people would represent no change. This, in my mind anyway, solves the problem of throwing off game balance by introducing new stuff. And I understand (and very much appreciate) Muse's desire to prevent GOIO from becoming a pay-to-win game, but I think this should avoid that problem as well. As far as the gameplay is concerned, its the same old ship. The idea being that to mix things up players will buy something that handles like a pyramidion, uses the same meta as a pyramidion, has the same strengths and weaknesses as a pyramidion, but looks outlandish and novel.

I think if people will spend $5 buying a new wardrobe piece that has no bearing on gameplay, they will gladly spend ten or twenty or even more (depending on how rare you want these things to be) on something that every player they go up against will remember.

Thoughts? Can it work? Is it possible to make a ship that looks different in an appreciable way but doesn't vary from existing ship strengths and weaknesses?

Offline Squidslinger Gilder

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #1 on: June 28, 2013, 04:01:56 am »
If the component placement was a huge improvement over stock then you would be looking at a pay 2 win setup. Not a huge one but pro teams would quickly change over to ships which are just a tiny bit better in some way. So they would still have to be balanced so it wouldn't be better or worse than the stock ship it is based on.

The idea isn't bad tho. Certainly tickles me a little. But it does remind me of games like Rise to Flight or others where you buy airplanes to play in the game. Aside from never getting my joystick/pad to work right, I just wasn't fond of the concept of buying the planes to make the game more complete. It isn't a bad idea if you are paying for the cost of dev as it goes. Its just, if it gets out of hand, you'll find more dev time spent on creating things like this and less on the rest of the game. That is what is happening with SWTOR atm. They are spending more time developing items for people to buy in game than they are adding more content and good content at that.

Offline Shinkurex

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #2 on: June 28, 2013, 08:00:41 am »
Just to geek out here, but I want this:



I would pay double for this..... seriously though, what Gilder says is correct, even just a little bit of deviation, could be the turning point in whether or not a ship becomes OP.... Now if only I had more money to throw at Muse to make this airship happen, or maybe I could persuade LordFunPants to work on it (I hope he likes Bacon ^.^)

Offline Imagine

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #3 on: June 28, 2013, 10:52:05 am »
So.... basically LoL skins?

Offline Captain Smollett

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #4 on: June 28, 2013, 11:26:59 am »
From what I hear Muse has been working on skins for months now since they will be used heavily in adventure mode.  I may have understood it incorrectly but at some point I believe the concept was that every faction might have a "Pyramidion, Galleon, Junker, etc..." class ship however each factions ship would look drastically different. 

If they finish up the AM skins early I'm sure they'd be more than happy to sell them to us.

Offline Captain Phil

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #5 on: July 03, 2013, 12:47:28 pm »
Muse did say that a lot of things from adventure mode will be brought over to skirmish, so you can probably expect a skin for each ship from each faction at some point. What I want is to be able to color the ship, add banners, paint fancy names on the side, and all that fun customization. But, we all can dream, can't we?

Offline Pickle

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #6 on: July 03, 2013, 02:49:36 pm »
Opposite handed versions of the Pyra and Squid would be an interesting option.  No real advantage, but the element of surprise when facing them.

Offline Wazulu

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #7 on: July 03, 2013, 06:26:01 pm »
Just to geek out here, but I want this:





Hmm, I think I saw this as an example of what a boss ship would look like. What's even more fun to speculate about is with that much armour plating how in heck does it remain airborne :)

Offline Piemanlives

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #8 on: July 03, 2013, 08:04:31 pm »
If I remember correctly this is one of the older ship concepts they had a while back, kind of like the large howitzer. I kind of wanted this in game.

Offline Montis

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Re: Generating money, more ships, and no balance issues
« Reply #9 on: July 04, 2013, 05:41:35 pm »
Honestly, I think the ships should have some sort furniture customization where there is set places for the furniture but you could change what the furniture is in that position, along with new colours and decals they could also do an armour system similar to Halo where parts of your ship are changeable with other things. This would be enough for me to be happy with new content in terms of ships, I don't want a new ship every other month, the ones we got now are good enough.