Inventions and Recipes and Salvage …
… so not my bag, baby.
So we went through the tutorial with Rita and Runt last night. And then we hopped over to the convenient Wentworths …
… and …
… and …
… I felt like I needed a freaking college course to find what I wanted. The very worst aspects of the insane “We’re not going to call a Science SO for Accuracy an ‘Accuracy SO’ but a ‘Boron Accelerator Module SO’ system have been brought over and magnified a hundredfold the Invention system. Eleventy-zillion little bits of Invention Salvage (not to be confused with, but convertable to, Base Salvage), which can be put up for bid (maybe, and you can perhaps find the price of what it’s going for if you spend fifteen minutes rooting through the Wentworths interface) or, maybe, sold to contacts. I think.
And if you want to do something with this, then maybe you’ve found a recipe for a device of some sort. Or maybe you bought one at Wentworths, or something like that (if you are fabulously wealthy — the recipe for Dragon Wings is going for 6-25 million influence). And perhaps you have the salvage you need. And maybe, just maybe, you have the influence (influence?) you need.
At which point you can build something that’s pretty cool. But the whole process is sort of like balancing your checkbook, in spades.
Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The rest of us will shun it like the freaking plague. My prediction is that the Unis and Wentworths will be, within a few weeks, only slightly more populated than the Arenas.
What I want, if we’re going to have something like this, is to be able to walk into the Wentworths, dump what I have in front of the man, have him say, “Oh, you can exchange this for this, this, or this,” and be done with it. Anything more than that is …
… well, hell, tell me how this resembles any comic book you’ve ever heard of?
Yeesh.
<small>And, yes, I realize that if I really applied myself, and really tried it out, I could learn how to do all of this like a second nature. But I don’t want to, and don’t see why I should. As far as I can tell, the only real advantage to the game is that it slows down people going through content while they dick around with salvage and recipes and inventions.</small>
<small>And, yes, I realize I don’t actually have to do it. And I may very well end up just turning off the freaking “You got Salvage” and “Salvage is Full” messages and completely ignore it for the rest of my stay on CoX. Yeesh.</small>
No… those who like that sort of thing will head to WoW, where it’s done better, the interface is better, and building magical stuff out of arcane bits is actually part of the mainstream part of the genre.
I mean, not even the magical types in the comics sit around making potions, for pete’s sake.
Not even the magical types in the comics sit around at a department store haggling for magical-item parts, you mean?
I doubt the shopping malls will be quite as empty as the Arenas, but that’s because nobody uses the arenas and I know some people will dig on this.
Well there’s evidently *somebody* out there in the PVP community, based on the forums. That said …
The Invention system needs (for me to enjoy it, to frame it properly) to be either (a) much simpler, or (b) offering more bang for the buck.
Under (a), I offered a suggestion above. Salvage just goes into some magical, unlimited pool (Ack! Inventory control! Ack! What everyone in D&D drops from the rules first!) that you don’t have to manage. You periodically go to some contact , maybe at one of the stores, and say, “Hey, what can I make out of this?” And it tells you and you choose what you want to build and, woot, cool stuff! Maybe some strategic planning — “You can build this, or save it up to build that.” But it should be as relatively simple as the power selection system.
Of course, I get that right now — I just hand all my salvage over to Margie and let her play with it. 🙂
Under (b), give me a freaking costume piece or a glowy item or something to go with these things. If I go through all this work, I don’t just want yet another type of Enh — I want a widget!
Oh, and let me say that the costume recipes going for eight figures of influence is just ridiculous. (Granted, that’s early bidding, but …) Not only does this make no sense from a narrative or RP perspective, it’s prohibitively expensive for, well, a costume piece. Feh.
I wholeheartedly agree. If I wanted inventory management, I’d play WOW or any of the myriad fantasy games out there.
To truly make this worth it – Group storage for SGs. If I could just dump everything into a general storage bin and then play with it when I had some down time I might actually use it – just as I did with the base salvage. But it’s too complicated for casual use.
I also foresee a jump in influence peddling on ebay.
You can get SG storage, I believe — but it’s got the same screwy limits as the other base salvage stuff.
Frankly, I find the whole Base Salvage/Storage/Building thing needlessly complicated. Especially since much of it was PVP Base Raids (see above).
My take on it? Based on SG size (factoring in number of heroes, level, and activity), certain stuff is or isn’t available. You get it, you build it, it’s there. I don’t recall the JLA or the Avengers ever getting back to their HQ and emptying out their collective pockets of all the salvage they’d gotten in order to build a new wing.
Add in, if you want, some vet rewards and some badge accomplishments and you’re golden. Oh, and no rent; if the group shrinks in size, the stuff no longer available goes away.
IMO, so Far, so suck. I cant figure out heads or tails of what I could and SHOULD make. And I didn’t pay attention in college the First time. I aint doing it now. Bleh x infinity.
Now the Statesman’s TF is another matter entirely. BIG thumbs up. but thats such a small aspect of this issue that it in no way offsets the suckiness of IO’s.
IMO, so Far, so suck. I cant figure out heads or tails of what I could and SHOULD make. And I didn’t pay attention in college the First time. I aint doing it now. Bleh x infinity.
Now the Statesman’s TF is another matter entirely. BIG thumbs up. but thats such a small aspect of this issue that it in no way offsets the suckiness of IO’s.
I did a bit more playing around with this last night.
Allow me to say that any in-game process that requires frequent reference to out-of-game materials to make sense of it is poorly implemented. (Heck, the whole Powers thing is sketchy, given the vagueness of the descriptions and the usual need to look at all sorts of online guides, but you could conceivably make use of it without any outside reference. Not so for the Inventions, even with the info-packed obstrusive tool tips.)
I note that if you put a bid on salvage at Wentworths, you have to deposit the money for the bid (it vanishes from your tray).
I also note that, if you put something up for bid at Wentworths, you cannot see if it was sold, or get the money for it, without going back to Wentworths.
I have no idea if you have to go back to Wentworths to actually see if you won something in bid (and pick it up). I suspect so.
Imagine if eBay only worked at “eBay stores.” Yeah.
Then there’s the inventory management. You can carry some stuff in your “pockets.” You can save some stuff in the new Vault stores (also accessible via Pocket D, oddly enough — so when will we get “real” stores there, too?). You can build equipment at your base to store stuff.
As far as I can tell, though, if you want that stuff you’ve stored, you have to go and retrieve it.
So not only do you have to track what you want, for what recipes, for what figured out effect, but you have to remember what you’ve bid on (and check for it), and remember where you stashed the stuff that was spilling out of your pockets.
*sigh*
Oh, and those fancy inventions you build? Only sellable at Wentworths, too. Even if an IO looks like a beefed up TO, no contacts or stores will touch them.
I really wish I’d been in the meeting where this was all decided. With a bat.
I spent 2 hours trying to get it all sorted out in my head. During that time someone was crowing that they just bought a Wings Recipe for 25 Million.
At that point I stopped, flew to an area away from Wentworths and logged.
Maybe when people come to their senses I’ll go back and look again but wow……
Casual players have no real hope if making sets or getting the new costume parts at this point and to me that seems very sad.
From a Genre standpoint, when has Batman run down to Walmart and dropped 25 million for a new cape? Supes and a few others borrow things from Star Labs from time to time and they even whip up a cool widget if they need to. While I think the Inventions system is at least interesting, I think the whole AH and player economy was ill-conceived and poorly executed.
Amen, brother.