A quick but important thought about being able to stock these new objects in shops:
Generally, I'm against it, although I'm less against vouchers than I am crystals. The entire point of caches is to gather crystals, and the point of crystals is to be a constant resource to upkeep Cosmpiercers. If you don't have the crystals to cover your Cosmpiercer, you lose it. This is fair. However, if people aren't incentivized to participate in caches because they can just go buy them from someone else who has, or they just have a massive stockpile from slow days, then there's going to eventually be a point where people stop bothering with caches because less new blood is showing up to get in on the gathering/dying process. Reducing the cloning cost was a great step to making this less likely to happen, but I still think that letting people store crystals would be a mistake.
Letting them sell vouchers is questionable but probably less harmful for the system, although considering I already have so many and nothing to use them on (yet), I think there might be some looming issue for the abundance of vouchers later down the line. We'll see how it plays out with whatever skills wind up being the meta.
The more powers get unlocked the more valuable vouchers will be. I really don't foresee an overabundance, especially after some of the more pvp-centric powers will be available.
What about being able to convert vouchers to crystals, and crystals to vouchers? Since some of the unlocks take way longer than the vouchers' decay timer, you wind up in this weird lurch where you have crystals/vouchers but nothing to use them on until something gets unlocked which may not even be what you want.
I forgot I was going to call myself Ike while in chargen, so now I'm Zarrach.
You already convert crystals into vouchers when you turn them in. 5 = 1 voucher. Being able to convert vouchers back into crystals is not a good idea, because then you'd really have far too many crystals than you'd ever need, which would yet again lead into the cache stagnation issue described above.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not against selling crystals, vouchers, items to people. That could all create/facilitate RP and conflict. What I'm against is being able to store them in shops indefinitely. If people absolutely want to sell them through shops rather than the 'black market', then I'd strongly advise them just being immune to the nondecay thing that normally applies to items in shops.
To highlight an issue we've run into, when the 1000-crystal bank gets capped, you can no longer generate new vouchers. We kicked around ideas for maybe spending crystals on something else, but really I think we'd just need the ability to turn in crystals over the limit and still receive vouchers, without actually raising our crystal count.
There's an issue with relinquishing control of a CP that relates to caches because it could mean largely bypassing caches to get power consumables.
Vouchers come from two sources: CP captures and crystal turnins. 5x vouchers per CP capture per person present is probably going to be more efficient than cache fighting, so any consideration for implementing a means to relinquish control of a CP should be made in light of this fact. Engineer wormholes could exacerbate the problem.
Example: bring five people to take 3x low rank CPs, earn a total of 25 vouchers. Relinquish control. From there, either recapture when able for more vouchers, or stop capturing new ones to skirt the crystal upkeep.
Without any limitations, this could lead to production of vouchers without doing caches without having to pay increased upkeep. I think relinquishing control of CPs would be a good feature, but it's got to have some kinds of limitations.
There was some other WILDERNESS TRIANGULATE feedback in here so I thought I'd throw in one more thing:
- When you discover raw materials after a triangulate, make it correspond to refineries supported in ECONOMY STATUS. It's a huge pain to haul otherwise.
Comments
Generally, I'm against it, although I'm less against vouchers than I am crystals. The entire point of caches is to gather crystals, and the point of crystals is to be a constant resource to upkeep Cosmpiercers. If you don't have the crystals to cover your Cosmpiercer, you lose it. This is fair. However, if people aren't incentivized to participate in caches because they can just go buy them from someone else who has, or they just have a massive stockpile from slow days, then there's going to eventually be a point where people stop bothering with caches because less new blood is showing up to get in on the gathering/dying process. Reducing the cloning cost was a great step to making this less likely to happen, but I still think that letting people store crystals would be a mistake.
Letting them sell vouchers is questionable but probably less harmful for the system, although considering I already have so many and nothing to use them on (yet), I think there might be some looming issue for the abundance of vouchers later down the line. We'll see how it plays out with whatever skills wind up being the meta.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not against selling crystals, vouchers, items to people. That could all create/facilitate RP and conflict. What I'm against is being able to store them in shops indefinitely. If people absolutely want to sell them through shops rather than the 'black market', then I'd strongly advise them just being immune to the nondecay thing that normally applies to items in shops.