Topic

Massive Imagination Sinks

I know that in the future more ways of spending imagination will be added to the game, which is great, and I'm happy to wait for those, but I think as long as things that are added to the game are targeted at average players there will always be those glitchen who end up with stacks and stacks of unused imagination.

Level 60s need to earn a total of 23 million imagination to get there.  If a typical glitch player play a few hours here and there then they probably won't earn that much for years and years of real time.  As a result, everything that is costed within the grasp of a typical player is going to be dirt cheap to a current level 60, and they will buy it all as soon as it appears.

The "hardcore" glitchen may not constitute a large amount of the community, but I think we have our place.  In order to address this issue I think that ultimately there will need to be upgrades or other ways of spending imagination specifically targeted at crazy people who are willing to earn millions a week to pursue foolish goals.  In order to qualify it has to be things that we can spend an unlimited amount on but that no one who doesn't play like crazy will miss.

These don't have to take up a huge amount of developer time to implement.  For example:

Remove the cap on brain capacity and quoin multiplier but make the price of those things increase exponentially as you go above the current cap (quoin multipliers of 200+ were getting way out of hand, but suppose cards went up 5% per multiplier above 100, then we'd need to drop 2 million to get to 125 or almost 9 million to get to 150).

Add a card, again with an expanding cost (though maybe not exponentially since this card confers very little advantage), that increases the number of items you can transmute or the number of things you can cook at once by 1 for those who already have the existing upgrade.  Let people stack that to the moon.

Let people buy up their chance of super harvests at extremely high and exponentially expanding cost.

The trick would be pricing all of these things so that we can never really expect to get our investment back.  Imagine upping your tree super harvest by 1% cost 100,000 imagination and increased by 40% in cost for each extra point.  In order to get that first point back in value you would have to harvest from around 55k trees, which would be around the amount I typically harvest from in a month and a half.  By the time I got to a total of 20% bonus I would have sunk almost 7 million imagination into it - that 10th upgrade would take me about 3 years of play before I got my money's worth out of it (it would be 208 million to get to a 30% chance).

I can see how these kinds of features wouldn't be a top priority, but I some kind of massive imagination nsink will be critical to the long term playability of the game for a small segment of the population.

Posted 6 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • That seems way too expensive.
    Posted 6 months ago by AwesomeCardinal2000 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The point I am hoping to make is that there should be something in the game that is specifically designed to be way too expensive and not at all cost effective.  If there isn't then there will always be people sitting on piles of millions of unusable imagination.
    Posted 6 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • *raises hand* As a member of the very specific subset Hum is discussing, I have to agree with him. I'm love to spend the 14 million imagination I've earned and not spent on the way to 60. With the caveat that I'd need the level cap to be removed ;) I'm happy to grind and grind away into infinity, as long as I can do it effectively. Not being able to donate or craft for iMG would be a huge pain if there were all these lofty goals to work toward.
    Posted 6 months ago by Liza Throttlebottom Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Am I understanding correctly, Liza, that having reached level 60 you cannot gain more iMG?  
    Posted 6 months ago by Red Sauce Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I still can, just not as effectively. I can still earn iMG from my rock, from quoins, from qurazy quoins, from releasing cubimals, from activating broccoli, from quests, from badges etc. 

    Really the only things I CAN'T earn iMG from doing are things that are based on how much iMG I need to get to the next level. IE crafting (Each gameday you can earn 6% of your to-next-level total by making a single item, such as Fruit Tree Beans) and donating (10% of your to next level total).
    Posted 6 months ago by Liza Throttlebottom Subscriber! | Permalink
  • That's kind of annoying.  I find it mildly irritating that we have levels at all after the iMG switch, slightly more irritating that there's a max level, and ridiculously irritating that max level affects what you can do to earn iMG.  

    These things just feel like they have no place in this game.  Except D&D, which I believe created the concept, most PnP RPGs moved away from using levels to gauge advancement years ago.  More and more single player RPGs are dropping the mechanic as well.  

    Oh well.  Just makes me even less motivated to care about levels.  

    But on that note: never-ending, increasingly expensive iMG sinks DO have a place in this game.  Right before the quoin multiplier cap, I recall VS suggesting some of the quoin multipliers were a bit on the ridiculous and suggesting the very exponentially increasing price plan that Humbabella suggests above.  

    That would have been MUCH better than the cap.  
    Posted 6 months ago by Red Sauce Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I agree that hard limits should be replaced by exponentially increasing costs whenever possible. I would even extend this to home street and house size so people could focus on various quirky things to work on and not hit an artificial cap.
    Posted 6 months ago by Janitch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Home street is a lot harder, though, because they need art for the background.  Having someone draw a whole bunch more street with the intention that no one will ever unlock it doesn't seem like a good use of time that could be spent elsewhere.

    Edit: Ooh!  It looks like we might get our wish (probably in about "Two Weeks"): http://www.glitch.com/forum/general/22883/#reply-242635
    Posted 6 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink