Pics without cencorship is followed.
Great!
Beside of new game contents, there are at least three aspects I'm focus on,
first is various of 'currency', I'm not quite fond of trading everything with money, I regard it as a simplified substitution when other systems are not finished, and a rich game content should provide alternatives for players to achieve some certain goals or set different ways for unique things like the 4 forum quests, which needs not less testing to do balancing. So, except for money buying, barter, doing favor & using favor, gaining reputation & using reputation, looting all can be good ways to enrich game interests. That's why I always give you suggestion on mist combat loots, cause' many things, including girls, they come from the mist right? Since nearly everything can be bought through money, guild reputation, faction fame, npc attitude(not in use) are less necessary while playing.
second is to simplify operations, this game already own some, the 'silent rule'. But it nearly skips every event, which is also not what we want to see, and it may be replaced with a 'simple report' like what you do in quest description. And in my mod, if not necessary for detailed information, I won't show new events in end-day section, but sepera simple descriptions into dialogs、infos and maybe even letting it affect menus.
third is to optimize the game experience, 4 wearings like bull ring, I added a wearing slot and 4 rings, which will definitely make it easier and more convenient for your playing, working differently in and out of hard mode. More similar contents subject to change, these part should be designed carefully, not to ruin game experience.
Disagreements exist between us, so what will you do if conflicts happens? For example, mist combat loots, and maybe further team battle(if I can succeed to handle the russian code).
Regarding disagreements, the way it's worked so far is that qwerty and I (and any other active developers) debate whatever point, trying to reach consensus, and then either find something we both accept or one of us defers to the other. Usually in cases where we can't agree, I defer to qwerty. On a few occasions, we've taken the approach of having it both ways, depending on game difficulty setting.
Your three aspects are:
#1 an economics overhaul including new resource types (loot, favors) and new uses for existing resources (bartering items, trading reputation) and new systems for acquiring/managing/using the new resource types (loot acquisition, loot inventory, loot uses, favor acquisition, favor status, favor uses)
#2 UI changes
#3 other new features that affect gameplay including new inventory slots and new items that apply modifiers when worn
For each of them, I need more information, but at a high level, while I like the concept of existing variables (like reputation) having more uses, and favors are an interesting idea I would like to explore further, I am concerned about introducing a loot mechanic.
As we have it now, everything you need can be acquired from shops. If I understand your idea correctly, that would still be true with a loot system: you would be able to buy everything you could loot from shops. Effectively, then, loot is just another form of money in a more restricted form with some randomization. What is the benefit of adding so much complexity? Mists combat is already rewarding - you get a trophy slave, which can be trained or converted into sparks.
Loot needs to have a purpose, so you would need to introduce new game systems for using it, or change existing game systems to require it, for example the modified potion recipes you suggested earlier. For potions, we would need to communicate to players all of the new recipes, so we would need to modify all of Mystra's dialogue, and we would need to modify the brewing system to consume these extra ingredients, and we would need to add all of these extra ingredients to various shops (new shops?) for players to be able to buy them without combat, etc. This is a lot of significant changes and a lot of work. I am not convinced so far that the end result would be a better game.
In other games that have loot systems, there is usually an exclusive aspect, in the sense that looting is the only way to obtain certain items, which are valuable for progression. This usually combines with an exploration system, needing to go to different places to obtain different loot, and the gameplay involves managing limited inventory space, crafting, barter/sale interfaces for trading items for other items or for money, and a "gacha" aspect, with randomization of "drops" and low-probability "rare" items encouraging players to repeat the same activity many times in hopes of obtaining a certain desired item. This is exploiting the human psychology of gambling addiction to keep players engaged. In multiplayer games, rare loot systems often pair with systems for trading between players (auctions, etc.) and introduce cooperation/competition aspects (guilds/teams/parties, farming, kill stealing, raids, bragging rights for having the best X or being first to reach milestone Y, etc.).
In JONT, we want to keep players engaged in the training loop. A loot system would be a major undertaking and I am not seeing a compelling benefit. Instead I am seeing a lot of revision of existing systems to add complexity that in the end doesn't really change anything. Of course, I might be missing something. Do you see it differently?
