Crystals having value beyond the current

Rylek

It was recently brought up how once a faction has max crystal storage, there's a flaw in the system. Not much to use the crystals on. And perhaps, you can't even get vouchers? Not sure about that one. So, what to do? Suggestions time!

-Convert the station quests from random economy items (Which I think has failed, I'm not sure anyone does these currently) to crystals. This would give a place to vent crystals after a faction's holding limits for them is reached. And get rid of all those damn random shops >.>
-Create a new npc that wants the crsytals for...reasons! Understanding that they're hard to come by, the npc lets people who turn in enough crystals borrow one of their wonderfully powerful items! Unique CrysTek equipment that boosts all sorts of useful things. Think artifacts, you borrow them for 24-48 hours, and then they are returned to the npc. Have system either be fairly expensive (100+) and they give you a list to pick from, or maybe a little cheaper (50+) and it's random each time. Or some mix of the two.
-CrysTek for guards! Power up factional guards using crystals. Because.


Please spew further thoughts, suggestions and feedback in a delightfully civil and respectful manner!

Soza

Here's my gander at the crystals, Open to any other ideas aswell!

1.)Remove vouchers.
2.)Make creating a cosmpiercer item cost crystals
3.)Remove the ability to have multiples of one cosmpiercer item in your inventory, You can still have a cosmpiercer heal, a cosmpiercer bodyheal etc. Just only one of each.
4.)Increase the duration of these cosmpiercer items by a little bit, increase the amount to create one by a lot.
5.)Increase the charges/balance the usage of the cosmpiercer items as necessary.
6.)Allow recharge of cosmpiercer items for a lower crystal cost than that of buying one, so there really is no point in stockpiling cosmpiercer items if you can only hold one on you and its cheaper to just recharge it.

Also give factional influence to scatterhome members who turn in crystals as currently no one does cosmpiercers and our influence just decays if we don't do faction quests.

Cubey

I'd be very careful about introducing extra value to crystals. Consider the following:

1. If any extra utility for crystals is more useful than powering cosmpiercers (and everything Rylek suggests counts as more useful), players will focus exactly on that utility and totally ignore powering cosmpiercers. We'd be effectively trashing the cosmpiercer powers system and replacing it with something else - the only exception is factions that are already capped out on crystals, but they open a new can of worms:

2. Any system that rewards being capped out on crystals will also comparatively punish factions that aren't or can't be capped out on crystals. This means less active factions suffer, and also incentivizes capturing less cosmpiercers than you can maintain just to stock up on the crystals. I'm pretty sure that's not what the devs intended.

My solution: allow crystals to be stored even if you're at cap, it doesn't increase the stock above cap but still gives you vouchers. Let storing crystals give faction influence too - being from CA it's not an issue for me but I already assumed they do for the others and it was just an oversight that they didn't. But that's all I'd implement on the changes front. Other than that, don't fix what isn't broken, maybe focus on balancing powers and adding new ones if any turns out to be particularly useless or broken.

Rylek

Faction influence for turning in crystals is probably just a good idea in general.

Soza

Rylek said:

Faction influence for turning in crystals is probably just a good idea in general.

SH is the only faction that uses factional influece iirc which is why Im asking.

Deltrion

Add another tier to the CAC beyond report slivers, with small either PvP or non-pvp endgame benefits, that cost crystals.  The current CAC bonuses are not too exciting for a max lvl player, imo, and though that might be the point, it's usually max lvl players doing them.

I do like the guards having some interaction with crystals though.