Zsigmas big suggestion thread
So I have played for some time now and I have gotten to the point where I have most of my 5* gear and I am beginning to look for uvs and stuff like that. I have pretty much tried everything in the game except shadow lairs and blast network. I even did vanaduke with 2 players recently.
I have come across several things, which I feel could be changed/improved.
The main game:
New content:
I have heard a lot of talk from older spiral knights players that they were annoyed due to the lack of new content and there has even been an auction or two with people quitting because they were dissatisfied with no new “real” content. The reason I put real in citation marks is that shadow lairs were added, but lets be honest here: Shadow lairs are not as much new content as it make itself out to be, mostly they are a reskin of the boss levels with a few added mechanics as well as a few armor sets.
I understand that such new content is very time consuming and OOO probably are busy with other projects (dr who mmo anyone?), therefore a good way to add new content would be to increase the replayability of each level.
One way to do this I think would be to add kind of quests which would require minimal effort from OOO, for example (random generated?) quests like: kill 5 wolvers in XX gate and get 200 cr (sounds boring I know, but you get the idea). If the reward was worth it (or almost worth it) I would be happy to do such quests instead of just doing fsc (vanaduke) over and over again.
Balance:
Unbind cost: I understand that energy sinks are the main source of income for OOO, but I think they have gone a bit overboard with the unbind for 5* (and maybe 4*). This was afaik introduced to limit the influx of high level items due to crafting. I remember reading a thread that the unbind cost would be about the crafting cost of the item, to quote: ”Over the next month, we plan to implement a new store that will allow players to "unbind" items. There will be a fee for doing so, roughly equal to the cumulative cost of crafting that item. ” (from this thread ). Starting from a with a 2* item (eg wolver) and to a 5* item the total crafting cost will be (for a vog cub, not including recipe costs and using ce for every craft (nb!: stupid :))):
Crafting ce: 50+200+400+800=1450 ce
Crafting cr: 400+1000+2500+5000=9900 cr
Mat cost(estimate): 600+1400+2700+5000=9700 cr
mat+crafting in ce: 19700/68= about 300 ce
Total cost: 1740 ce
Now take into account that a vog cub is one of the more expensive items to make due to the price of green shards and you see a big gap to that 4k ce unbind cost that is NOWHERE roughly equal to the cmulative cost. Even with recipes its not even within 1k ce range. Same goes for 4* and 3* items and this is the reason the jump in price on eg ah from a 3* (15k cr) to a 4*(200k cr). I understand that its desirable to keep people from getting tier 3 gear easy, and therefore I think the unbind cost should remain over the crafting price of the item, but it should be lowered to maybe 2700 ce for a 5* item (which would still be above the crafting + recipe cost!)
Interface:
Loadout edit/rename:
I really think there is a great need for this. Everytime you upgrade your gear you have to equip it and name it again. This is a minor thing, but could as well be implemented. The renaming is suggested in this thread :
NPC talk in combat:
Another minor thing, here I am thinking specifically about charred court where it often happens that while you try to attack a zombie you accidentially talk to the sprite and is killed. I would suggest that you either should not be able to talk to npcs in combat or the player should be invunable when talking.
Lockdown:
I recently tried lockdown and liked it a lot. However many lockdown games are a bit frustrating because of several broken elements:
Trinkets, UVs and espcially heart pendants: Especially used on strikers the extra hp is so huge that it can win games alone. In my opinion should this be fixed to scale like for example +hp from armors and likewise with trinkets and UVs, so a tier 1 asi vh would maybe just be an asi med. In t3 everything would be fully up to scale ofc.
Alternatively lockdown could be split into two modes, one with ”everything goes” and one where UVs and trinkets were disabled.
Tier seperation: Another thing which makes lockdown games less enjoyable is how you are assigned to the different tier. For example will a tier 1 guy with a 2* sword end up in tier 2 lockdown. Of course i cannot be in tier 1 lockdown, however he will be oneshot by everyone in tier 2 and if teams otherwise are balanced lead his team to a certain loss (in 99.999% of all cases).
Instead I think it should be like PvE where you have to have at least armor, weapon etc. of the tier before you gain access. This way the ”pros” who want to show off can still equip their proto gear, but ”noobs” cannot gain access before they have some gear. Of course that could leave one unable to play tier 2 lockdown for a short while (if you upgraded your only weapon/armor to 4*), but the benefits are way greater than this drawback.
Balance: The way lockdown is made means that one or two good players can win against a whole team of mediocre players. This makes almost every game onesided since its unlikely that the ”good” players are evenly distributed. To balance things out I think players should be assigned to different teams after some stat (dmg/game, caps/game, rank points or best: win%), this way lockdown would be more fun to play for everyone.
Heh, that was all, I am sorry it ended in a giant wall of text, I can split it up into multiple threads if you guys want. I will update the post if I get some brilliant new ideas :)
TL;DR:
Main game:
Make new content, even if it is only small things like bounty quests.
Reduce the unbind cost (a lot! :)
Make it possible to rename/edit loadouts
Lockdown:
Reduce trinket/UV influence
Make players unlock lockdown tiers with gear to avoid slaughter
Balance lockdown after player skill and not randomness.
I know I might not be the best or clearest writer, but I felt like I had to give some good arguments.
Any feedback much appreciated, if you want me to edit the post.
edit: small spelling mistakes
Unbind costs are as expensive as they are to limit the ability for players to buy their way into endgame content - I see no reason to reduce the costs for unbinding, especially as it would likely affect the recipe market.