Tree of Savior Forum

Feedback: Trading with the Potential System

General Discussion
#1

In light of upcoming changes to potential system in regards to trading I wanted to give a real review of the system.

The potential system does serve an important purpose. Modern MMOs all have some form of way to limit the stock piling of equipment in their games. The reason they all have this system is so items don’t over saturate the market and items keep being made, upgraded, and flow through the markets. That provides multiple ways that wealth inflation stays in check with silver sinks and keeping production and thus the value of equipment affordable. This helps keep good items(relative to their peers) obtainable by new players.

The problems is the current potential system is a bad system in regards to trading. The potential system is what a game analyst or a psychologist would call a punishment system. That means you’re punishing your players every time they interact with the system in a way you don’t want them to. This is the worst system you can put in your game to deal with a major problem like this.

You want to try instead of a punishment system a: Negative reinforcement (taking away a good thing for a period of time). Or better a positive reinforcement which is a reward for the player following the behavior you want.

Example for potential system as a negative reinforcement would be having the potential of a bought item reduce to 0 but regaining it’s potential over time. 1 potential every 5 days for example.

An example of a positive reinforcement system (what you want). Would be something like FFXIV’s disenchant system. Which is setup so after a player has used an item for long enough they can choose to destroy the item to gain a gem they can use to further upgrade new equipment.

In closing. If you’re replacing the potential system please replace it with a positive reinforcement system. Or a negative reinforcement system. So that items production stays high, wealth inflation stays low, and our market stays healthy and items obtainable for new players.

tl;dr

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#2

You should probably add tl;dr to that or some bullet points.

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#3

So sad IMC is very behind modern times in game design.

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#4

Meh.
I kinda like the way it works for upgrades. It’s an improvement from Ragnarok’s grinding system where you’d lose the item should you fail an upgrade. I think the potential reduction in transactions is stupid and I’m glad they’ll change that.

Now, losing potential while upgrading should you fail gives a higher sense of exclusiveness to weapons with very high grinding values which is something important because it helps to put a price on upgraded items. What I really dislike about the current upgrade system is the amount of money you have to spend to upgrade. They should be cheaper and more consistent due to the amount of times you can upgrade an item. A high orange item might cost you 10 times it’s price to upgrade to +10 which is dumb cause you already wasted a LOT to get said item, be it in time spent farming or money to purchase it.

Now the game does have something most MMOs now-a-days don’t which is the ability to trade really rare and dungeon dropped equipment. I’m glad we don’t have those “Unique Soulbound” item drops from dungeon so that you don’t really have to spam dungeons non-stop to get something that’ll be an upgrade for you.

I’m not saying the current system isn’t flawed. In fact item drops and the instance daily limit are tied together since it takes a LONG time to farm something if you’re not extremely lucky with your cubes thus making them extremely expensive in the market and losing potential upon trading is a punishment for trading the item which is bad.

Also only being able to trade 1:1 with talt is extremely annoying and that is one thing they should fix. Something like making Talt an item that can be traded multiple times would help. Obtaining Talt in the current game state is annoying. If we had more ways to get talt other than cubes, say, getting them from daily missions as well as daily quests would allow us to purchase things a bit faster without really changing the market value of things since Talt is directly related to Silver.

Anyways, as OP is giving his opinion I am giving mine. I disagree with OP’s point of view over Potential being a punishment system.

OP also mentioned the Desynthesis system from FFXIV which is not that rewarding. You can’t really Desynthesize rare equipment and it’s completely RNG. Materias are relevant now after a LONG time. Because they’ve finally made good end-game equipments with Materia slots (Even though you can’t Overmeld. Term used to describe when you affix more Materias than the equipment can hold by default).

Materias are coming back because anyone can meld materias which made it easier for people to get into it. Back then only specific crafters could meld specific itens and they needed to be high level crafters depending on the item level. I honestly don’t think FFXIV’s materia system is relevant to OP’s argument.

My point being: The potential system is an insurance that you have to do upgrades on your item. Things that could change and that would be beneficial to the system would be for Item Awakening/Briqueting to not remove potential should the player succeed because that’s about fine-tuning the weapon.

The grinding value is a flat increase and it’s very powerful therefore it should remove potential should it fail and with the changes they’ll make with trading no longer removing potential, it means you will be able to upgrade an item to it’s “full potential” and still be able to sell it or pass it forward.

#5

The only part of the potential system that bothered me was losing potential by trading to others and for weak awakenings/gemming.

Other than that, losing Potential with unsuccessful enhances (and I guess Transcendence?) is fine ^o.o^

#6

I’m using the FFXIV system just as a general example. And not getting into the meat and potatoes of it since it’s a complex system.

And it’s a system you couldn’t apply to ToS without it feeling mismatched for the game. FFXIV has level sync, job system, and armory system that really supports the soul binding mechanic. You’re constantly cycling through gear as you level and soulbinding happens naturally(albeit with less end game applications since they use BoP most of the time). ToS it’s a one way street unless you’re rerolling.

#7

TLDR, TOS is too simplistic and stupid

#8

That’s a bit basin way to put it. If you’re talking about comparing Final Fantasy’s MMOs to ToS?

/sorry ahead of time… I am getting off topic in my own thread I should make a new thead here for this topic. But here is my thought when you compare Final Fantasy MMOs to ToS. They always have a nice job system that lets you switch classes as you want.

I think there was a miss opportunity with all the class diversity to build a system where you kept some of your progress. I feel like rerolling characters on ToS and redoing all your quests again(at bare minimum the +attribute quests), achievements, making new BoP items, etc all over again–I feel like that does get old and it does feel more like a hindrance to the players.

I know I’m staring at R8 classes. And I feel like I need to reroll and redoing all that content over again is a mental hurdle for me. I don’t want to run all the quests again. And I want grinding in a party for my reroll to be faster then redoing quest. But it isn’t. I’m most likely just going to be doing a combination of quests again. Probably all the way to Alemeth. And then I’ll do even more quests I don’t want to repeat as I make my way to the next party grind zone.

tl;dr ToS has a missed opportunity to keep progress between characters.

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#9

I’m not looking forward to quest grinding the same content over either. If I was to redo the way ToS did it. I would do this.

  1. Questing tied to lodge, not character.
  2. Lodge levels as you do quests.
  3. Lodge levels work similar to what it does now which is % Bonus XP. With a curve that slows the higher the lodge level (like it is now).
  4. Benefits from quests like bonus attributes and titles applied to all Lodge members.
  5. Complete freedom to transfer anything between characters with a Token.
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#10

You can do that already can’t you? I mean aside from the very limited Team Storage, even cards which I thought you couldn’t but you actually can and that’s <3.

I’d add that having collections and such giving experience to Team level would be cool too. I like your way of thought, the game really needs to be less Tree of Alts.

I mean the whole multi-character thing worked for Granado Espada, but that’s because classes were character bound and you could play 3 characters at the same time so having the “Family level” as it was called in Granado Espada, with buffs and such was a very interesting concept.

Yeah so that’s what I like about ToS actually. And that’s why, as I said, I like the way Potential works (minus a thing or two which I already discussed in my very long post).

#11

Q: Trading with token
A: Right now you cannot trade all items. Certain Red and Purple drops are bind on pickup. There has been discussion about allowing more trading between characters in your lodge in the our QA news but IMC said they want to keep Red equipment BoP.

https://treeofsavior.com/news/?n=639 that’s the news post about it.

#12

Oh… Some red and purple items. Well I have yet to come across one of those. But I agree with you, if it’s not possible to trade everything between characters, then it should be.

#13

imho, if red item gonna be bop, its better to raise the drop rate by abit

coz we cant trade red anyway, and we still stucked with the deadly RNG…

hrm…

#14

I agree at least for items that aren’t the current or 2nd best item level. Like BoP stepping stone items should be a higher drop chance unless they have unique effects.

I’m thinking of the weeks it is taking me to get a Didel shield that’s just going to be get replaced by another BoP dungeon drop in R8. No one is going to do that when R8 is out. They’ill just buy a non-BoP shield like Aias then sell it back when they get an R8 drop.

#15

too bad IMC wont see this as problem

i can foresee alot of trouble, so…

huehuehue as usual~

#16

Ha. This is first time we’re getting a content patch that expands the level cap. We’ill have to wait and see if they bother to rebalance old bind on pickup gear or not.

I kind of half expect feedback that’s in the middle of a thread like this not to reach them though.

But this is low hanging fruit… It’d take only a few mins to an hour to have a meeting with whoever you need to, make up a list of pre-220 bind of pickup items without unique effect, and then go change a few numbers in the code.

And make everyone happier in the process.

#17

Looks like they are updating the old items. Not so sure about drop rate… But, BoP status are getting removed if tos-neet.tv is accurate.

#18

Would be very very funny if IMC messed up in the process of updating. Also I do think the rank 8 update for us will be further delayed. They are still adjusting a lot of things in kTOS.

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#19

It does look like they used an automation for the update and forgot to have it check if it was quest items.

I certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Running 3 different versions and updating them all separately does sound time consuming. Servers too different from each other? I know we were trying to finish the merge but it never seemed to fully happen.