Suggestion: ingame jewelry balancing

Hello, i am reposting an old support case of mine from 5 years ago as i am not sure that it really ever was considered.

History for support case 313564:

2015-12-03 17:31 You wrote:


Hello, i have been following the introduction of strongboxes and the droprates of limited and unlimited rings for awhile now and im starting to wonder about the balancing of these items compared to other items in the entropia universe.
In the past mindark followed the path of having L items for general consumption and to support the market and a reduced number of unlimited items that were worth working towards in the longrun to avoid constant markup costs.
The amount of these unlimited items usually was capped in relation with the entropia universe population to keep a balance and there were categories which indicated the level of rarity of a specific item (adjusted, improved, modified).
Now recently with the strongbox rings there have been even higher levels of quality/rarity been added (augmented, perfected) but the droprate of rare rings does not seem to be capped like it was for the other items.
We are facing a state were adjusted rings become so cheap and common that the L rings for most active players are just taking up storage space and are not really considered to be worn - the majority of active players seems to be running around with special buffs and even rings which have the highest level of rarity are listed multiple times in auction.
My question on this is that you please ask the balancing team to have an eye on this, as im not sure that the amount of unlimited rare rings which enter the universe is actually capped anymore and we might just end up with everyone using UL equippment and noone needing the L rings which basically destroys a possible extension of the virtual economy towards a virtual jewelry branch that could offer more opportunities to trade for many players.
Please also consider that when perfected rings are dropping in high numbers, that many players quickly will be able of reaching the introduced caps for the respective buff effects - this essentially removes the possibilty of mindark introducing other types of jewelry in the future which could add/stack/improve current jewelry - like bracelets, earrings, necklaces.
I think mindark could improve on the success of strongboxes by introducing a higher variety of jewelry which stacks with oneanother instead of making rare jewelry too common and davalueing it in the long run.
Could you please forward my concerns to the balancing team ?

Kind regards
John
2016-02-24 13:33 Entropia Universe Support:


Hi Black,

Thank you for your support case.

We appreciate the feedback and as you say it is being looked into further to make sure the balancing is proper.

Take care and best of luck.

Kind regards,
Entropia Universe Support
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Thanks for your consideration.

Kind regards
John

personally I suspect the idea of completly unl items was not a great one from the start but it's a fact simply and jewelry does not decay a lot anyway unless you change it often.
The introduction of L items that can go far beyond a so far generally set max tt value could improve the situation a bit but only if that then would be a find that stays rare in relation to player activity, and instead of drops of unl items from that point is what I mean. But well as said not much help in the special case of rings.
I guess it is important from the point of view of the developers to be able to not let drop something of too high $ value but it would be technically possible to simply remove the max tt value attribute from L items, actually if it is there then it could mean you can repair it once up to that value and then the seperate maximum value simply vanishes from the item info screen. A 'max tt' of L items could be set for every specific item and it could be much higher than it's current tt value if you're lucky and loot something good (but not unl anymore). Similar like tier rates it could be a common value or much higher if a rare occurance.
I do see a problem with my own idea when trying to compare L items at auction though then.

Sorry if it feels off topic, was trying to address the more general problem as I think is the case, and maybe it cannot be solved if the incentive to create an illusion of rareness and/or quality stays anyway.

I suggest stop the ring drops from strongboxes and introduce Amulets