"I dunno, a game sans-entropy would get pretty boring..."

Translation:

"I dunno, a game without-uniformity would get pretty boring…"

I highly doubt that!

A couple more thoughts on item scarcity with regards to "hoarding" and crafting:

I think it would be more difficult than people expect for a single guild to "hoard" unique items, since when a player dies there would be a ~90% chance that the item would get destroyed in the blast and returned to the "item pool"

Therefore it wouldn't matter if the player had five guildmates standing by to recover the dropped items because 9 times out of 10 the item would go back to whatever bot or rare mission spawned it in the first place, for the next random lucky player to find.

I think crafted items should definitely be somewhat better than regular items (what incentive is there to craft, otherwise?) but crafted items can never be truly scarce, since the source of ore in the universe is replenishable. Therefore given enough time and resources a player could craft an infinite number of gauss mkIIIs. So if joe player the crafter gets destroyed with his gauss mkIII on board all he has to do to get a new one is mine some ore then go back to his station and craft another one.

If there were only 100 alien death rays allowed in the game, however, these would be truly scarce and the only way to get one would be to kill a player who had one, and then find the mission or bot that caused the drop, or if you're very lucky you might be able to loot it directly from the player.

Phaserlight, what incentive is there to mine, or to have a job in real life for that matter? Someone has to make the items we keep blowing to bits. I agree that, eventually, crafting should allow characters to make better items; however, remember that the plan is to have PCs and NPCs be interchangable. So, then it simply boils down to your definition of "regular".

I disagree in principle with having artificially limited supplies of an item (unrealistic); however, I cannot argue that it would not add some interesting depth and aspects to the game. IF this were something that might be tried, I would suggest starting with a truely superior mining beam (so as to not affect PvP fighting immediately) that Hive Queens drop (10% chance, 50 in universe). The story could be that the Hive stumbled across a small stash of them and has had an incredibly difficult time reproducing them due to their unique and complex construction. This would hopefully lead to miners hiring fighters to blast queens and other miners until they got a beam or two.

aw, snap!

It seems as though the survival rate of dropped crates could be lowered somewhat... right now it's pretty easy to get your hands on high level dropped eq, even as a newb.

So cool we have this now... I think it will have a very large effect on the nature of gameplay. It's so much fun to try and collect a full set of high powered eq as a low level newbie.

Yeah. At the moment, newbies can go and just collect the Law Neuts that Strike Force bots drop when they issue on the side of the station. That, and you get so many Neuts and Phase blasters when botting, there's barely any point in buying your own gear.

I think the drop rate is a bit off. Maybe if it was reduced so that 10% of the time you got a drop it would be a better deal.

Or... instead of dropping a whole weapon the bot/player dropped a damaged weapon component of which you had to collect ten or so of the same type in order to reconstruct the weapon. This could be tied in with a crafting system in that the higher your crafting skill was, the fewer components you would need to craft the whole... like LostCommander suggested once upon a time.

[stamp of approval] @ Phaserlight.

Well good deal this got implemented. I agree that the drop rate is a bit off for bots. I think keep the player drop rate high, but reduce the bot drop rate to something more like 10% like Sarahanne said?

Anyway, Yay for suggestions being implemented!

This is an awesome feature but yea, the bot drop rate should be waaaaay less like 10% of the time so if you are a newb and you kill a bot and it happens to drop something you are more like "Jackpot!!" instead of "meh, been there done that"

Also the partial item idea to build a final component is even cooler!

And what would be even cooler?!

if there was like a 1% chance that whatever you fought (or maybe specific things in specific places) dropped rare bonus items for example.....Olden days blue ions! Those who never seen the blue ions do not scoff because of the lousy nature of todays ions! The blue ion is an epic space weapon used in the old galaxy by the great ones in streaming duels of pwn combined with rocket II intensity.

I know the rare items bit is a part of this thread already. I just wanted to bring up the idea of getting olden days blue ions again.

I just want to also say that dropping thr bot drop rate sounds like a good idea. In like 10 minutes last night I had a heavy battery and all the flechettes I could carry, and now I'm returning from every mission and hocking gear that I would have to gain 2 or 3 more levels to purchase.

It removes the "specialness" of it a bit.