This aspect won’t be covered in Chapter 3, but it’s a great topic for discussion.
Many MMORPGs have weapon degradation systems, with varying degrees of annoyance to the player. Weapon degradation reduces the effectiveness of the weapon (sometimes even breaking it), forcing the player to expend some resources to repair it.
One of the most powerful Alchemica sinks we can introduce to the game would be a recurring sink like weapon repairs. Even burning a relatively smol amount of Alchemica per repair would add up to big gains over many years of gameplay.
For an implementation in the Gotchiverse, we would not want to break weapons completely, but their effectiveness (damage, armor, etc.) would go down over time if they are not repaired.
Notably, because weapons are ERC1155s, we cannot accurately pinpoint which weapon has been used. It would need to be tied to the Gotchi ID.
For example, LickSlayer Gotchi slays some licks with Haanzo Katana. Over a 3 month period, the effectiveness of the blade goes from 100% to 80%, but only for LickSlayer Gotchi. If the blade is transferred to another Gotchi, it would begin again at 100%. But if transferred back to LickSlayer, it would revert back to 80%.
So what do you think gotchigang? Should we introduce weapon degradation into our weapons system?
100% yes to this. If we opt for slow degrading of items effectiveness I would vote to make it lose stats in chunks rather than slowly and linearly.
Ie once it hits 80% durability it loses 10% effectiveness. Then again at 60% it loses 20% in total.
I’m a bit the obsessive type who loves his gear always fully repaired. If there’s a linear decay from 99 and down I think I might lose my mind!
Though I believe the best practice would be more of a break and near break mechanic. Items wouldn’t break in the sense that you lose them just that they become unusable until repaired.
What about at 25% durability they lose 50% effectiveness and at 0% they lose 100%? The cost for a fully broken item to repair ought to be significantly higher as well.
I see this difficult to implement.
Possible problems:
I use a weapon/tool, I lost 20% of effectiveness → I sell it → I rebuy it 3 month later = I still need to repair it? It doesn’t feel natural
I sell a gotchi that lost 20% effectiveness of the long bow. Somebody buys it and equips a long bow and he has 80% effectiveness before using it? We would need to keep track and display ALL the percentages of use of each item in the gotchi listings or the gotchi page, which I don’t see it to scale over the time.
Maybe a cooldown time is the solution? You can reduce the cooling time by burning some alchemica.
What about installations? Wouldn’t that be easier to track as they can’t be moved between parcels? An installation could lose effectiveness or even revert to a lower level if not maintained
First of all, I love to see this topic. It would be another great sink for Alchemica as pointed out. However, as many pointed out, there are challenges. I am going to add some additional questions and challenges that we may face.
How weapon degrade mechanism works?
Purely linear decay based on time may not be reasonable. IRL, weapons require maintenance even not used. However, the cost of maintenance would be much less than repair.But it is the simplest
Degraded proportional to damage inflicted? That’s reasonable, but more involved in capturing the data. Should we make it even more complicated such as incorporate damage absorbed by armor?
Listing in baazaar and transferring are indeed tricky.
I think we can make it a rule that weapons must be fully repaired before they can be listed in baazaar
For transferring a non-100% weapon, since we cannot really stop the transferring, it is really challenging, if not impossible, to implement.
** If we cannot address this challenge, the whole mechanism may not be possible.
I like the concept of degradation, but am not sure we can track this properly. And even if we could, it seems like it would be a lot of on-chain data to store.
For instance, if i sell a 50% used Katana, the buyer gets it at 100%. But if i later buy a new Katana (not necessarily the same one i sold), is the new one at 50% or 100%? How would we know if it’s the same Katana I sold/bought since all Katanas use the same item number and aren’t unique?
This is a fantastic idea, so long as it’s framed positively for the player and we embrace the oddity of tying degradation to gotchis and not wearables. It should never feel like a pointless chore; ideally there should be some meaningful choice involved.
For example, what if it was framed as maintenance + getting to know your weapon (or whatever) inside and out? You sink in alchemica and time playing (represented by some achievement like “X # of lickquidators killed”), and not only keep it shaped up but also improve some aspect of its use for the gotchi. It can be a small benefit, like a fraction of a point of damage or armor, but still feel really good, I think. And it incentivizes holding NFTs as they are used by particular gotchis, in addition to making each gotchi more of an individual.
I agree @actaeon this sounds like a more feasible way to introduce this idea and completely avoid having to track individual wearables and worry about bazaar value. Treat it as a Gotchi Wearable “Spirit Link” instead of weapon degradation specific to that item.
i.e. the more a gotchi uses a weapon, the more the spirit link between the gotchi and that weapon is strained as it takes energy to maintain a strong spirit link for extended durations. We can introduce two ways to re-invigorate the “Spirit Link”:
Spend alchemica at the “Spirit Forge” to revitalise the link,
Time spent with the weapon unequipped very slowly revitalises the link.
I would recommend that “Spirit Link” only decreases for an equipped wearable while your gotchi is in the gotchiverse. Would not be super happy to have a wearable equipped, not be in the reaalm for a couple months, go to play and have 20% weapon effectiveness.
However, for the slow revitalisation of spirit link when not using the item, I would suggest this is time based independent of the gotchiverse. Or for simplicity, don’t revitalise the link at all with time and the only way to improve it is with alchemica.
Would the same problems exist for installation decay? It makes more gameplay/lore sense that these would need to be maintained overtime. It seems silly that a day 1 installation never needs to be touched ever again.
Yeah installation decay is another game mechanic that could be introduced. We were wary of bringing it up because it directly impacts ROI of Installations, but if there is an appetite to introduce it, it would definitely help reduce inflation.
That could be very interesting. So a Wearable that has been used for a long time by a specific Gotchi could perform slightly better over time with 100% charge, compared to a freshly-equipped new weapon also at 100% charge.
What comes to mind is a concept of “fatigue”:
if I use a certain weapon/technique (IRL) my muscels will get weary, effectiveness drops: time (or “potions”) are required to replenish energy, of course paid for with Alchemica.
Organically tied to that would be a concept of “dexterity”: having performed a specific action/handling many times, effectiveness rises.
actually I kinda like this idea, but is this still tied a specific weapon to a specific gotchi ? Or the weapon just have a params called “spirit power” and it is tied to that weapon only ?
I agree with this. I think it’d be a lot more user frenly if alchemica functioned as an accelerator rather than as a requirement. Otherwise the game might lean a little too hard on the pay to win side.
Yes, this would be similar to the concept of mana that many games use, except we could use it for inflicting damage.
Stronger weapons use more mana/attack power per attack. Mana/Attack Power could be replenished over time (new stat, perhaps?) or refilled by chugging mana pots.
This also addresses another issue, which is Lvl 1 floor gotchis wielding Godlike weapons. They may be able to get one hit out, but it would take a while to replenish the AP for the second hit.
Ofc this is separate from a weapon repair system and wouldn’t replace it, but if the goal is making gameplay fun while also introducing more necessity for sinking alchemica, this could be a good way.
No only tied to the Aavegotchi. Every gotchi would have a unique Spirit Link paramater for each wearable. E.g. If you give a portal mage axe to a gotchi that has never used it before, that gotchi will have full axe strength to start with but then slowly get less effective with it as he tires from using it. You could then give that axe to another gotchi (or sell on bazaar) who will have a completely different parameter for Spirit Link again with that same axe.
Basically, every gotchi stores a Spirit Link parameter for each wearable that the gotchiverse game adjusts as they use specific items.
Hard no, unless there is also an upgrade system, then hard yes.
If you can reset it by swapping to another gotchi, it’s useless and will be defeated by swapping items around. This is just busywork.
The only way that this becomes viable, is if you are also leveling weapons up, because it follows that if it resets when you transfer it from gotchi to gotchi, that you would be willing to pay to repair it.
