If you stick with the system of "high star equipment is weak and poor at shallow depths", then keeping payouts relatively equal isn't so bad -- your incentive to play lower is that you have better equipment.

The real question is a little different:

With new players wanting to play shallow, because they have shallow gear, what incentive is there for people with high-end equipment to play shallower?

So what if your crown/heat award was modified by your equipment tier? Have tier three equipment? Get three times as much payout. Running in tier three? Your equipment is at full strength, but you don't have the newbies with you Payout is three times normal. Running in tier one? Your equipment is pathetically weak, but you're running with newbies, getting lots of crowns/heat for the increased challenge. Payout is 6 times normal.

> Games need endgame content that is different from the beginning content.

Why?

If you regard a ship battle as the basic game content of YPP, then that -- a good ship v. ship battle -- will keep you going for years.

(Sadly, YPP was too dependent on a good pillaging crew. I got lucky on two of my early ones -- ARR, and later Fandango -- but after Fandango crumbled, I didn't find good green ocean ones, and eventually just gave up and went back to blue. Soloing over there doesn't give good ship battles. Flotillas, Atlantis, etc, are all dependent on having lots of good people. Small stuff? Minimum is really a cutter and a backup officer/navigator if you DC or have real life.)

If a dungeon run is enjoyable, then it is enjoyable. It's not like we have scripts and story lines, where once you've done a script or story line, it's done -- you've got a never ending set of dungeons. Twisty maze of little passages, all different.

So why do you need new content for the end game, if the base game is enjoyable? If the base game is not enjoyable, what would make it enjoyable?

Does Chess, or Go, need advanced content?

> Because doing always the same thing gets boring.

But if the endgame content doesn't keep expanding, then you'll get bored.

> > Games need endgame content that is different from the beginning content.
> Why?

Question still stands. The need for new content, and different content to avoid boredom, doesn't mean that the content must irrevocably change to this second set and never go back to the first set.

You mention the need for easy levels, as well as challenging levels. Fine. That doesn't mean that "endgame" and "new game" are different, just that you need easy, medium, and hard.

YPP has red routes, and Midnight has Ruby. End-game and new-game are still pretty much the same there. Red just means "Harder than the game thinks you can handle". Normal might mean you're expected to win 70% of the time; as you win, the difficulty goes up slowly. Hard means the game expects you to lose; as you win, the difficulty goes up quickly. Either way, it goes up until you lose.

What's "Hard" supposed to be here, different from "easy"? Given that 1-star equipment outperforms 2-star equipment in tier 1, isn't "harder" the same as "Play shallower, it's harder"?

Most people's response to "Play shallower" isn't "It's too hard", it's "It's too cheap".

By "end-game", do you really mean "Make me rich"?

> Does it? I have played tier 1 with 4* equip and killed everything in 1 or 2 hits. Boring. Similar thing with tier 2. Went recipe hunting.

Have you done this recently? I've confirmed, and reported (both F2 and in the forums here) that 2-star equipment does less than one-star equipment in the 1-7 zone since the recent patch. Roughly, 10 heat 2 star and 1 heat 1-star are about the same (granted, that's a loose approximation, and it does vary by weapon.) Haven't (yet) tried the other tiers (although I'm making three star stuff now).

> Most of the development of a game should be directed to whatever the players will be doing for most of their time.

Yep. You still haven't explained why that can't be the main game. All you've done is explain why it can't be rescue camp:

> New players aren't familiar with the game, have few sets of equipment, and generally have few in game contacts as to get a good party. So you have none of those 3 things I mentioned.

So rescue camp, and the sparrow dungeon in rescue camp, are different than the rest of the world.

Why can't you have a boss battle balanced for either 1-star equipment at full, or tier-2/3 equipment weakened by being in the shallow area?

> Bossfights. They are supposed to be challenging fights that require preparation, cooperation, and skill.

You and I have different ideas of Boss fights. Heck, I haven't yet seen a fight like that in SK. All I've seen is hordes of monsters all spawning at once to surround you.

I've seen MOB fights.
I have not seen a BOSS fight.

Are boss fights only below emberlight? Or are you and I thinking of different things and calling them the same thing?

To me: A boss fight is a fight against one unit that is very powerful, intended to be an equal or better match for you, that you have to wear down slowly, using primarily defensive tactics, and looking for an opening to exploit the Boss's weakness. And maybe the boss has a lot of wimps around for distractions. Mario Vs. Browser Junior (Super Mario Galaxy). "Monster X" (Cave Story/Dokotsu).

They are NOT rapid twitch combat.
They are slow, cautious, and "look and observe what's happening" fights.

Yes, I'm spending a lot of time with Tier 2 stuff.
Yes, I'm checking to see if Tier 2 stuff behaves as expected in Tier 1 (apparently, it doesn't, but that actually opens up new possibilities and challenges).

I suspect that the majority of players will be in Tier 2 zone at any time. Just because the cost to get out of Tier 2 and into Tier 3 is so high.

Yes, long players will spend most of their time with tier 3 equipment.
Most players won't be long players.
I suspect most play-time will be spent with Tier 2 equipment, especially if Tier 3 is really going to be raid content with hard to get equipment, and tier 3 gear in tier 2 content is penalized.

Now, why do you want to say "Tier 2 gear should not be seen in tier 1 content"? What is wrong with saying "Levels 4-7 are significantly harder than levels 1-3; you're expected to have warmed up 1-star or better, and know how the game works before you go here"? Or are you saying that the equivalent -- 2 star (tier 2) equipment is not sufficient for levels 14-17? (Threat indicator red to solid purple, so apparently 2 star gear isn't supposed to get me down to Emberlight.)

If you can say "4-7 are harder than 1-3", then you can say "Your weakened tier 2/3 stuff will be a challenge and you can play with the tier 1 people in the just as challenging, if not more so, hard boss fights".

Again, we're back to the question:
Do you want a hard fight, or do you want to be rich?

Do you want "End-game pays super duper riches, so I'm $$$"? Or do you want "Hard, challenging fight"?

===
>>What's "Hard" supposed to be here, different from "easy"?
>Hard and easy refer to how well you have to play to not die.
In a hard dungeon, enemies might take away 1/2 of your health in a hit, while in an easy dungeon that amount may be 1/8. Etc. Pretty simple.

... Except ... I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.

We have people pointing out that if you can circle and shoot, then all armor has the same value -- zero -- because you can avoid being hit.

Even if you do get hit, yes, the nastier monsters do bigger chunks of bars, but you have more bars.

And now we're at a flaw in the vitapod system. Going from 1 to 7, I might go from 7 health to 12. Going from 20 to 30, I might go from 12 to 40. Or I might go from 5-7 to 25-27.

Something that takes 1/4th of my start -- 2 bars -- will only take 1/6th at the end.

Something that takes 1/4th of my start -- 3 bars -- will take 1/13th at the end.

And if I'm in tier 1 gear down with friends? That 3 bars will be 5 because my armor is weaker, so it's going from 100% to 1/5th. So if you really want "harder" as in "Monsters take longer to kill and hurt more when I'm hit", get out your proto sword and shield. There's your "hard" game.

For a monster to be equally nasty at the end, it has to be horrifically overstrong at the start. In this case, "hard" meaning "more damage if you are hit" is really a flaw in the vitapod system.

> In a hard dungeon, enemies might take away 1/2 of your health in a hit,

But with the current system, at depth N, there is no way to tell what your HP will be. The rate at which vitapods are dispensed doesn't seem to follow any noticeable, dependable invariant, so you really can't tell if the person has level appropriate HP, or 4 levels ago HP; there's the whole issue of "the bigger the party, the less HP most people will have", and "you just joined? Gaa, you're horribly weak until the next vitapod -- which might be three more levels".

Are you guys gonna keep at it or am I going to have to turn this thread around and take you both home? Really, creating more work for Poseidon to moderate the forums... *sighs*

THAT COMIC IS MADE OF WIN.

I love XKCD.

Seriously, that is my life at times.