Ripard Teg gets existencial in this one, good read
Jester’s Trek: Possession is 9/10ths of Your Soul
I’m pretty sure I first encountered the expression “soulbound” in RIFT. I had no idea what it meant. The game sure wasn’t interested in telling me what it meant, either. Instead it just warned me that if I picked that item up, it would be soulbound. It sounded slightly scary to me at the time, if I recall correctly. 
Later, I started encountering “bound” items in Global Agenda and in due course I discovered what the expression means.
And it’s dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. Dumb as a box of rocks.
I don’t praise EVE enough — mostly I assume you guys are smart enough to figure out that if I’m not blasting something, I must like it at least a little — but this is some of the true genius in EVE’s game design. There’s not really any such thing as possession in EVE. If any of us saw the dialog box to the left, we’d laugh. It makes me smile just looking at it because this concept is so foreign to the EVE universe.
There’s three things going on here. First, it takes a really smart game to let you do really stupid things. Want to fit meta 1 guns to a Vindicator? Go for it. Officer rocket launchers on your Kestrel? By all means. Get into a cap fight in a Chimera with Carrier II skill? You bet. Hull tank a Tengu? Fine by me. Select all the mods in your hangar and click “Fit to Active Ship”? You can do that. Fit the Powergrid Subroutine Maximizer rig to a ship for any reason whatsoever? Absolutely.
Something I’m running into in GW2 that I find amusing is that it’s trying to have a vibrant economy with a player-driven marketplace, but as long as the game insists on having soulbound items and leveled items, it’s never going to get there. Oh sure, there’s stuff for sale there, even useful stuff. It’s mostly good for filling in your gear pieces with sorta-OK items because the game insists on randomly giving you fourteen items of one type and zero of the one you need. But the good stuff is invariably level-limited, soulbound or both, which means at the end of the day you’re probably not going to find something on the market that’s better than the random drops.
Only if a character picks up a good item and resolves not to use it and puts it on the market immediately will you get a crack at it… and even then you’ll only be able to use it if your level stacks up.
This is another genius of EVE, copied straight from the real world: we’re all using the same gear. It’s just that some characters are better at it than others. GW2 really really really should have gone with this sort of model. Let us all use the same great swords and axes and rifles, with some models having advantages in one direction and some having advantages in the other. And then set the damage and the scale of those advantages to character level. A master swordsman can take the very same wooden practice sword a novice uses… but is much more effective with it.
And conversely, if the novice picks up a pair of nunchakus or a scimitar while untrained (insufficient level), dumb (and fun) things happen. Level 1 novice picks up a level 1 sword, fine. 1-10 points of damage plus other bonuses. Level 1 novice picks up a level 40 scimitar, not so good. 1-3 points of damage. Make it clear (with bright red text or something) that the novice is being badly penalized for reaching beyond their training. But if they insist on flying a hull-tanked Tengu or a Vindicator with meta 1 guns, let them. And if they want to spend every piece of silver they have to buy it, let them do that too.
It’s one of those few places where GW2 made a dumb design choice. EVE made the smart one.
The second and related place is this whole “soulbound” business, though. There really should be no room in a game with an open marketplace for soulbound items. Let players buy and sell what they want. If you want to make a few (and I do mean a few) items lock to characters because they were won in particularly nasty PvE challenges, PvP tournaments, or whatever, fine. But as this percentage of items gets over a few percent of your total items, you’re just limiting your in-game marketplace and limiting by two or three the number of careers that players can have in your game. Let there be a guy out there buying and selling vast quantities of high-end items and making a profit. Let him stand in front of the Trading Post agent all day and all night if he wants to. If he’s creating content for your players, why not?
I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I realized that most NPC merchants in GW2 sell run-of-the-mill crap and you have to go to the Trading Post to get the good stuff from other players. And I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I realized that only a small fraction of items in the game are actually available there, and only a small fraction of those are actually useful things a player might buy. This is a place where the game can definitely stand to grow and develop in the future if the developers choose it.
Third item? Upgrades. Another very smart bit of game design in EVE is that ships are infinitely customizable, all of the customization can be removed, and only a small fraction of that customization is destroyed when doing so. When you realize hull-tanking your Tengu or fitting meta 1 guns to your Vindicator is a daft idea, you can strip the ship to bare metal and try again.
GW2 has upgrades too, but once you fit them, as far as I can tell all but the richest characters are locked into them. This is also as dumb as a box of rocks. I can’t even express how dumb this is. Granted, we’re dealing with “magic” here, but removing a gemstone from the hilt of a sword is a trivial exercise. Military officers in the late Renaissance and early modern age would be asked to surrender their swords as a token of the surrender of their command. But more often than not, the victor had a somewhat baser purpose in mind: it was a simple matter to pry the gold filigree, gems, and seed pearls off a vanquished gentleman’s sword if you had it in hand…
In a similar way, if you find an upgrade superior to the one fitted to a particular piece of equipment, you should be able to pop off the old upgrade and put in the new. This has the bonus of giving novice crafters in the game a ready-made stock of low-level upgrade items to work their craft with as they reach the mid-level ones. Again, there might be a simple way to remove these upgrades that I’m just missing and it’s a relatively minor issue compared to the other two.
Sometimes you play a game and you don’t appreciate the good, correct choices the game developer made early in the process until you’re presented with the alternative choices they could have made. Let’s all sit down and offer a brief note of thanks that our EVE strategic cruisers aren’t soulbound, shall we?
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Ok
Cough, Implants, Cough
/thread??
He said items that were soulbound that made no sense like upgraded swords and the like. Implants are implanted into your brain . . . I don't think that is as easy to "pry" out as a gemstone in the hilt of a sword.
The gem removal and soulbound items were two different topics.
The way I see it, from a storyline POV, if we have the technology to put a chip into a live person's brain in less than five seconds, why don't we have the technology to remove the chip from a dead person's brain?
I think reprocessing corpses for implants is a fun idea.
Give corpses some use other than necro jokes…
He did say in the article that all upgrades are removable, even if some are destroyed in the process. What point are you trying to make?
you can still remove an implant
TL;DR: Ripard Teg tried to escape EVE, looked beyond the horizon, found only wasteland, now is back. Everyone run!
Bound stuff is needed in other MMOs because you dont actually lose stuff. Thats why other games will always be 'Casual' .
Immagin CoD 3 that when you die you lose 5k exp points. You will have one slow as game where everyone camps around a corner.
When your game is basically a dressed up gear grind, souldbound items is the only way to go. If the best gear is for sale on the market, there's no point to working towards being the best. For the market to work, gear must be secondary, a means to an end, it cannot be the sole focus of advancing your character.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQfzwFloVqA
^^
Somewhat funny that bound stuff in other games are needed, and why it's not needed in EVE.
"Mudflation" Ripard, look it up, and think for a moment why bound items are not needed in EVE.
what the hell is gw2
Guild Wars 2.
Who the hell is that??!
Stupid question to the fuckwads out there, but why am I being negrep'd for educating someone? EN24 really went to shit in the last month or so didn't it? And by that I mean beyond the usual levels of Full Retard.
…What?
In all seriousness, though, you are trying to shove a sandbox economic system into a themepark and chastising the GW2 devs for not doing it themselves?
Let me run down some issues that I am rather perplexed you did not see yourself:
1. Market saturation.
GW2, and all themeparks in general, have persistent gear. You don't lose your stuff when you die. That means the only way that a piece of armor or a sword in GW2 can be 'destroyed' is if a player willingly destroys it when it is in his inventory. Every single non-soulbound piece of gear can be used and sold afterwords with no detriment to the user. That is what you were going for, right?
The issue with this is that, because equipment never vanishes from circulation, you simply have thousands of people using the same gear and then trying to sell it afterword on the market.
This leaves you after a very short while with 100% supply and no demand. Consider if EVE worked with the same rules regarding loss of equipment, alright? Rifters are produced and sold by players, but don't get destroyed after you lose them. They simply respawn with your pod. What do you think the market will look like for rifters? Think that there will be a big 'yay free market' bonanza for them?
Same priniciple applies. One of the ONLY things keeping a themepark economy going is that most of the good gear players want is BOE. That's bind on pickup, I'll save you the trouble of figuring it out.
That means that once a player uses it, it is out of circulation. In all intents and purposes, it is now 'destroyed' with regard to the open market. Themepark economies still run into the issue of only having to buy something once, but in a system where the name of the game is to put players on a gear treadmill, that doesn't matter much in the long run.
In fact, one of the biggest criticisms that a lot of crafters in GW2 have about the economy is that MORE stuff isn't BOE, so they could actually craft things that would sell. Go look at the crafted gear on the market. 100% sell orders.
2. Artificial level caps vs Actual level caps.
You want there to be a sword that is level 1, then another type of sword that is level 10, and anyone under level 10 will use poorly. And I'm assuming another type of sword at level 20, that any sub-20 will suck at if they use it.
How is this any different from simply having a level 1, 10, and 20 sword that only levels 1, 10, and 20 to use it?
You could make the argument that "Oh, how good it is will scale to your level", but then you have just defeated the purpose of a themepark progression system. Again, you are trying to shove a sandbox-centric system into a themepark, and it simply doesn't work.
3. Upgrades are one of the few things that crafters can actually produce that are in demand.
Same as BOE gear, the fact that you have to destroy your current upgrade to use a new one in the same piece of gear is what is driving the upgrade markets in every mmo that uses that sort of system. If you want to put the same upgrade you have in your sword into a lower quality sword, because you just bought a shiny new one? You have to buy another from a crafter.
Reusable upgrades would simply saturate the market and then your supply/demand for that sort of item is fucked.
Is the fact that you can't simply take out a gen from a sword without breaking it retarded? Of course it is. But themeparks need retarded systems in place to have any semblance of a 'player driven market' to exist.
The stuff you suggest would work if GW2 was EVE. It isn't. Stuff isn't lost when you die and need to be replaced, gear isn't infinitely customizable, and gear isn't universally produced by the players with a fundamental part of the game being a free market.
They are two different types of games. EVE is an entirely different animal than any other mmo on the market. This means that EVE's game mechanics are more or less incompatible with them.
I really need to stop reading this blog…
I never bother reading Jesters Trek, it has become off topic and whiny articles.
If you say you read eve forums then….
Eve online is the greatest mmo out there, i've played a lot of mmo's as im sure all you have, and i've never experienced such freedom as a player. CCP is incredibly dedicated to their game and constantly improve it thus im assured my money in subs is a good investment. The fact that the game world can be controlled or effected by players or player entities is always refreshing and unique. The level of control a player has in eve is unmatched anywhere else. And ultimately the game is only getting better as time goes on….. i as a sci fi player need go nowhere else
Keep up the good work CCP.
i think you missed the mark with this article.
soulbound items are used in MMOs where equipment is not destroyed. When equipment is never destroyed, only repaired, you have an issue where crafters/farmers over saturate the market. It is an inevitable problem with a system that doesnt have a sink. The end result is the top of the line gear, with somewhat decent drop rates, devalue quickly. soulbound items do not have this issue, well they do… just not as quickly as they otherwise would. This buys time until new content/crafts are brought in with an expansion.
Obviously EvE does not have this problem, so there are no soulbound items.
What's the name of this site again, GW2news?
Oh, evenews!!
I'm at the wrong site!
uhm i found an online WH !!!! that leads to this site?