Crepuscule Leather: Remove NODROP.

We're not talking about a "serve up all equipment on easymode" suggestion here. We're not taking business from tradeskillers, but, in fact, probably giving them some. This isn't even really great armor. Three AC dips, three AC holes, and not very high ACs anyway. Ofab is better, and Ofab isn't even NODROP. Crepuscule has to be tradeskilled, and then becomes NODROP when complete. You can't make it on a tradeskill character and then hand it over to a combat character. High QL Crepuscule is either out of reach or a major pain for non-tradeskilling characters. If you're high enough level and well equipped enough to farm the parts, you probably don't even need the armor anyway. The parts are rare to get in a useful QL (I use low level ones to make armor for social because it looks cool).

So, remove the NODROP. Let people make it and sell it. Give us another viable armor alternative to use that we can buy, sell, and trade. Shake things up. Give us variability. Just remove the NODROP tags. This is quick and easy. There's no reason at all not to throw this in.

It seems to me that, the more things we can trade on GMI, the more things people will have to spend their credits on. More activity means more GMI credit sinks (because of taxes) means an increase to the gradual deflation of currency, right?

This, basically. Crep is handy to have and some bits of it are good for twinking low-mid level stuff. Don't see why it has to be limited any more.

I could see it maybe back in the high-population golden age, and when SL was new, and when there wasn't more OP stuff widely available, but yeah. Also, it just looks cool. Gief.

The final build step, when you add the bauble, is 1.5x Psychic & 4.5x CLit.
Not out-of-reach imo, as you'd find it harder to equip the completed item than making the last step.
But I do support the idea of making it YESDROP. I have for eg. Control Crep pants on quite a few chars, some of which are almost identical QLs, so it was a bit of a bug-bear to make another pair just to be worn once instead of grabbing an already built pair off one of my chars.

Yes-Drop is a very nice idea. Some of the pieces are pretty useful, even in these "modern" times. Clear *bump*.

I'm on the fence on this. I think that making too many things 'yesdrop' isn't necessarily a good thing for the game because when you can pass things on people tend to do content less. Think about HHAB's and inferno boots before the nodrop rings came out.

That being said, I wish funcom would create a bind on equip option in the game. Maybe even making the final tradeskill process turn into a 'vacuum sealed Artillery Crepuscule Leather Jacket' (example). That vacuum sealed item can be traded but once its opened out pops a nodrop version of the jacket, making it essentially bind on use/equip.

keep farming lazies ;) It will keep you well entertained while making your twinks ...

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Originally Posted by Traderjill

I'm on the fence on this. I think that making too many things 'yesdrop' isn't necessarily a good thing for the game because when you can pass things on people tend to do content less. Think about HHAB's and inferno boots before the nodrop rings came out.

That being said, I wish funcom would create a bind on equip option in the game. Maybe even making the final tradeskill process turn into a 'vacuum sealed Artillery Crepuscule Leather Jacket' (example). That vacuum sealed item can be traded but once its opened out pops a nodrop version of the jacket, making it essentially bind on use/equip.

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that

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Traderjill

I'm on the fence on this. I think that making too many things 'yesdrop' isn't necessarily a good thing for the game because when you can pass things on people tend to do content less. Think about HHAB's and inferno boots before the nodrop rings came out.

That being said, I wish funcom would create a bind on equip option in the game. Maybe even making the final tradeskill process turn into a 'vacuum sealed Artillery Crepuscule Leather Jacket' (example). That vacuum sealed item can be traded but once its opened out pops a nodrop version of the jacket, making it essentially bind on use/equip.

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Thing is, what content exactly is not having to re-farm crepuscule stuff going to keep people from doing? Crepuscule drops on overworld mobs, not content that groups organize and get together and complete. It's not like it's a dungeon specific drop. We're not talking about the Stygian Desolator here. I wouldn't support making *that* transferable. Crepuscule, though, is pretty clearly something that should be transferable. You don't see "LFT crepuscule farming" in your LFT window, do you?

It has been suggested since '03, numerous times and never implemented. It should be though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by vitriolic-v

Thing is, what content exactly is not having to re-farm crepuscule stuff going to keep people from doing? Crepuscule drops on overworld mobs, not content that groups organize and get together and complete. It's not like it's a dungeon specific drop. We're not talking about the Stygian Desolator here. I wouldn't support making *that* transferable. Crepuscule, though, is pretty clearly something that should be transferable. You don't see "LFT crepuscule farming" in your LFT window, do you?

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No I don't see LFT crepuscule farming in my LFT window. I have gone into pande for the sole purpose of farming high ql baubles and farmed them in other playfields as well for lower ql stuff.

Maybe my real concern is that more and more things are becoming yesdrop and there is a point (I don't know what that is) where that will create an imbalance in the game. Maybe this is one of those 'it's ok' but as someone that is a player and not a game dev I'm unable to make that call.

i always want/wish some of the SL armors would remove it's "no drop" tag and make them useful again.

Yeah, but as a player, and a person with a mind capable of reason, you have to be able to see where some things are complicated population/balance/economy mechanics that are hard to gauge and require specialized knowledge to make the right decisions, while some things are complete nonsense, like Crepuscule being NODROP. You're being overcautious. To get the QL of hides and baubles you need, and the tradeskills you need to assemble the armor, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, while there are armors in the game that are far better and require a lot less effort -- and on top of that, can be bought outright for credit or given as charity. Also, being NODROP means that this content that was designed for the game just doesn't get used, and in what world is that an optimal thing?

Vacuum-sealed is a nice idea to get us at least part of the way to having Crepuscule armor as a decent stepping stone, but, as you can see, it's not like the parts for Crepuscule armor are traded at a wide range of QLs, so it's apparent that nobody is making the stuff right now, and therefore the result would probably be the same: Game content that had fallen into disuse remaining in disuse.

NODROPs and bind on account/bind on equip/bind on pickup in various other games tends to be for gear that is of uncommon to epic quality. The way armor and gear quality works in AO, though, is such that the vast majority of it is, as they'd call it in WoW, gray quality utter vendor trash. If we had meaningful names for rarities in AO, it'd be something like: Utter Crap, Worthless, Vendor Trash, Limited Use Buffing Gear That Neither Does Damage Nor Protects But You Need It, Almost Kinda Cool And Maybe Useable, and Very Epic. That's nowhere near the very granular epicness continuum of, again, say, WoW, where you can fulfill all your class responsibilities decently with green quality gear (the continuum, from crap to epic, is something like gray, white, green, blue, purple, orange), justifying that green quality stuff being bound on pickup.

Crepuscule would, in terms of how the game is played today, be probably considered white quality gear by the players. In terms of rarity in AO, and gear being tradeable or NODROP, there is no consistency or seeming rhyme or reason. (This is as a result of expansions creating more and more OP gear over the years, of course, but the end result is that NODROP tags seem -- and in fact are, since we can't undo the expansions -- arbitrary.) Think about it. Neutrino Flash. NODROP, but drops almost every time, if not every time Notum Habit is killed. Does hella damage, is the best gun a froob soldier can hope for for the first HUNDRED LEVELS, and any end-game character can go into SoM with you in tow and get it for you. It's NODROP, but it's not rare. It might be considered hard to obtain -- crowd control in SoM is a nightmare, especially if you're playing actually level-appropriate characters, rather than the leve 15 soldier who, himself, has no hope of getting through alone, or the level 220 main who isn't even hit by the mobs -- but the way the game works, it isn't hard to obtain at all. Then you have Crepuscule armor. Middling. Not very protective. Much better buffing armor exists that is still more protective. Miy's is probably better, but it's about as rare as the parts for Crepuscule are. Crepuscule is PAID EXPANSION content, but people would probably rather just use Miy's -- froob stuff. On top of that, Crepuscule doesn't just drop. You have to tradeskill it. On top of that, Crepuscule is NODROP and Miy's is tradeable. I think I'm starting to repeat myself here.

Come on, Jill. You've played for a long time. I've seen your posting. Don't pretend you don't know enough about the game to feel comfortable with *this particular* totally-not-radical suggestion. That's a cop out. In fact, if we, the players, even those of us who've been here quite a while (2007 myself, which is a relative newbie compared to some who are still around) don't understand the game well enough to know what would be good for it, what hope in hell does the current dev team have? And isn't Joel "Nusquam" Bylos in charge? Didn't he only just try AO for the first time less than a year ago, something like that?

*** Inb4 forum trolls read referring to WoW's rarity color system, when only using it as a comparison tool for game mechanics, as a suggestion that AO be turned into WoW. Pissoff.

@vitrolic

After reading your rather lengthy response I feel its necessary to clarify a few things to you:

1. "On the fence" means neither for nor against. That's the term I used and yet you are responding to me as if I was against the idea. I'm not against it.

2. As someone that's played games for quite awhile my personal observation is that NODROP flags are typically placed on items by devs for a reason. When it comes to dungeon/instance type loot, it is basically a way of encouraging players to do the content. Crep armor obviously doesn't fit into that category. I do, however, believe that NODROP tags are also placed to create rarity. You and I seem to look at Crep armor differently. I use Crep armor regularly to twink comp lit (control pants) or as cheap weapon skill buffing armor during random levels where I might not want to purchase Ofab or craft AI armor. Additionally, my 220 Engie is in a PvP setup and currently using a Crep chest as part of her endgame setup.

3. Do I know what effects making Crep armor yesdrop would have overall? Not really. What I don't like is you indicating that I'm somehow being overly cautious or pretending to not know when really I'm just admitting 'I DON'T KNOW'. I know it is rare on the forums for someone to admit ignorance but just because I am admitting such a thing doesn't make me dishonest.

4. I don't believe I've ever been one to argue that something should go from nodrop to yesdrop (well maybe that ancient novictum refiner that they turned nodrop on us out the blue one patch.. later reverted). I like nodrop items but then again I also tend to do the content on each of my toons, if I can. I get to pass a lot of stuff on from character to character. I don't feel especially put off by having to make each toon its own crep. Heck, I wasn't put off by having to farm sets of reactiv (before it was yesdrop). A lot of the things they turned from NODROP to YESDROP weren't things that bothered me. So, I guess you can say that the whole 'more things need to be yesdrop' just isn't one of the fights I choose to have with devs.

That being said, no need to really draft a response to me. At this point, this topic is the least of my concerns regarding AO atm. I was just giving some food for thought regarding the whole yesdrop/nodrop thing with the hopes that it might inspire an idea with someone else.

Don't read that as if I thought you were being dishonest. I was saying that you don't give yourself enough credit. It's one thing to be not absolutely 100% sure what all unforeseen consequences of a change might be -- they're called unforeseen for a reason. Nobody is 100% sure how agents in a complex social system are going to adapt to a change. Otherwise, you'd never see inflation, class exclusion in end-game encounters (because they certainly didn't intend to have a bunch of professions considered not worth playing), people doing their best to skip content that was intended to be part of the gameplay experience, and so on. What I'm saying is that the developers have made plenty of these mistakes, and right now we have a pretty fresh crew. What I am saying is don't be afraid to think you might understand the high-level system that is the game just as well as they do, because a lot of it is unpredictable to them, too, and *somebody* around here needs to not be afraid to change things if this game is to survive.

That's the cop-out I'm accusing people of: Being bound up by "but what if" instead of getting things done.

1. I know what "on the fence" means. I just think it's nonsense, for above reasons.

2. I thought I had implicitly already made those observations about rarity, and we talked about people doing the content already. We're on the same page here, only, apparently, two pieces in all of Crepusculedom are actually really useful to you.

3. See above, was important to address this first.

4. You don't see a problem with having to farm your own crep, and that's fine, but I can't help but notice that your name is *trader* jill. You might play the game a lot differently from *soldier* vitriolic-v. (Yes, I know, you can play many professions at once. Imagine a big "for example" woven throughout this entire paragraph. Tradeskilling is a major tradeskill-twinking effort for many characters and it's not exactly cool that such a mediocre armor should be off-limits to non-TSers even though it was designed for their profession.)

You might have a lot of tradeskilling gear collected that you can pass from character to character, or be in an org with a city with a tradeskill machine, or have people around who can lend a hand or buff you, so how you perceive the problem of farming Crepuscule armor might not actually be inclusive enough to take into account how the average player might see it. I'm not even really saying that "more things need to be yesdrop" so much as I am saying "this one particular thing needs to be yesdrop."

Actually, what I meant to get at up there, about rarity coloring and so on, is that all the wrong things are nodrop -- and all the wrong things are yesdrop, too. Right now, all gear rarity and droprates and trading and everything is not in a place where it was designed to be from day one relative to all game content. First we had RK, and only RK, and so, of course, everyone did all end-game content, because every profession had needs and had things they could loot. Then we had SL, and RK content was superseded to a large degree, meaning less impetus to do RK end-game stuff, meaning the rarity/droprates/binding on RK end-game gear were no longer as they were designed to be in relation to the whole game, in spite of nothing about the items themselves -- now how or when or where they drop or what they do -- being changed except for their context in the greater scope of the game.

Comparison:
- Neutrino Flash. Nice energy damage assault rifle with burst. Nodrop. Unattainable to low level characters who are playing the content as it was designed to be played (no high level support, no 220 main with credits, no being carried through by a 220 fixer HoTing you), until such a time as they are of sufficient level that the Neutrino Flash is about ready to replace with the Hellfury or something. Indispensable for a froob soldier, however.
- QL50 Perennium Blaster. Way better than the Neutrino Flash, and not that much harder to equip. Yesdrop. Commonly sold at an affordable price.

This is literally backward. With a lower tradeskill requirement, maybe Perennium weapons could be made NODROP, or have some final "sealing" tradeskill step added to the process that takes no tradeskills but makes it finally NODROP before it can even be equipped as a weapon? In fact, this would create a credsink, since you have to buy one, but can never sell one. Then, we could *still* leave Neutrino Flash exactly as it is, NODROP, for the froob game.

There hasn't been a total rebalancing of this. There is a ton of stuff in the database, though, and it would be a massive effort to figure each and every thing out. That is why everyone's observations are useful here. That is why this bears being discussed. It's not just Crepuscule armor, but Crepuscule armor bears mentioning as something that maybe just should not be nodrop anymore.

If you were to point out that players are going to be biased about what they point out, you'd probably be right. They'd probably want a lot of nodrops removed to make things easier or more easily farmed for sale and so on. I've pointed out that Perennium weapons could be made nodrop. I literally winced as I typed it, because it'll sting a little, but it makes sense. You know what it would do? It would make people start rolling various Nano-Charged [Assault] Rifles at various QLs. It would make people list all their Perennium parts on GMI for sale, the plates, the bolts, etc. Hooray market jumpstart, maybe?

@vitrolic

I completely edited my post because by the time I finished it I realized why I'm not necessarily 'for' changing the YESDROP tag.

So two points.

1. About the whole tradeskilling thing and me being traderjill. Traderjill was created in 2009. I've been using Crep armor since 2004.. before I ever had a tradeskiller and before I even truly knew how to play AO (learned about it from anarchy arcanum). The point that you seemed to try to make that maybe tradeskill based armor might be easier for me (or closer to 2nd nature) isn't correct. My first 5 years of the game were spent without any TS toon at all and AI wasn't out when I first used it (so no tradeskill machine).

2. I think I now understand why I am on the fence/not sure. You stated that Crep is just mediocre armor, mainly because you just see it as something that a leveling toon could us (if they wanted). Me on the other hand, I see it as a powerful twinking resource as that is how I use it (with the one exception of the Art leather jacket on my engie). Being that I see it as a twinking tool, I'm not bothered by the 'one use per toon' nature of the item. I guess I have just gotten used to such things over the years. Alot of twinking items have been made yesdrop (i.e. computing rings, RODT).. I don't see anything wrong with leaving this as it is. But I do understand what someone said above. I did a search on my AOIA and I do have 2 pairs or so of Control Unit pants on several different toons that are all about the same QL. Looks like I've used a lot of Artillery sleeves/jackets and Infantry Jacket/gloves as well. So yeah the change would benefit me.. I just don't know that its necessary.

Overall, I agree that the NODROP/YESDROP flag situation in AO probably could use a complete rehaul. Because if you're wanting Crep to be yesdrop then you might as well add Tier 2 Embryo's, Green/Yellow/Mystical Force Armor, Prowler Armor and Rhinomen Armor to your list. I believe they all fall into the same type of category.

when i'm twinking . i use the database to search for an armor/item i might be able to use....be nice to use some of the "no drops" that apparently not a lot of people came anymore or care for.

but i do notice that Crep armor in the same range as other armor type are harder to wear and gives less benefits....like + melee buff (ie 1 hd edge/ piercing/etc) so i usually opt for finding those other armor then going to the trouble of camping/making hte Crep armor. But Crep armor do make good social armor...people will "inspect" you more and comment on that ? Where you get that armor from? ^_=

Yeah, it is a good looking conversation piece.

So Jill, I do think those items should be in the remove-nodrop category, perhaps with some consideration first, but I do think that something has to take those items' place. Ofab was yesdropped, and in a perfect world, it shouldn't have been, because there is content that should be done to earn it, but Battlestations just weren't running (though this might have made that worse) and its NODROP status was just hindering peoples' progression. Maybe Combined Whatever armor should be sealed/completed with an easy tradeskill as mentioned before so that it is bound to whatever character wants to equip it? It's the top thing, and it does seem it would make people start doing more alien raids.

It seems that nodropifying the right things would stop powerleveling vets from ignoring the content that the rest of us rely upon in order to get our leveling done. This is a pretty big deal, with population where it is, and if you can just gear up into some Combined Whatever you bought on your main and then go solo hecklers or sit being kited for XP until you reach the level at which you can equip it, that means low population hurts the rest of us that much more. At the very least, if that character has to do some kind of content or engage other players in some way in order to have top-end gear, rather than a main just handing it over, things would be better.

Of course, the powerleveling 17th alt vets would disagree...