Okay, just to clarify, this suggestion is based off of the many ideas I have seen bounced around by the GLB community, and also to suggest an alternative that addresses the concerns expressed by people about the new equipment. These ideas are not all originally mine, but I’ve compiled as many of the logical suggestions I could find into this comprehensive idea for new equipment. Again, questions and comments are encouraged. If you think something doesn’t work, don’t just post “-1 this idea suks ballz”, because that is pointless. Be constructive.
A summary of the ideas and issues addressed with this suggestion include:
-New items are just as good as old ones (in fact, potentially the same)
-Players don’t have to choose between “advanced” items and basic items
-People can keep and use old equipment at no penalty
-Shopping tokens are more worthwhile
-Players can actually customize their new equipment and tailor it to their objective (no more +2% deflect pass chance for you kicker unless you want it)
-Items with “sockets”
-Spending bonus tokens on anything but +1 SP is actually practical
-Upgrading equipment now occurs at levels 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, etc. (however doesn’t penalize players with older equipment)
-You can actually choose you color of your equipment (not a big deal, but people have actually been concerned with this)
_____________________________________________________________________________
EQUIPMENT AND BONUSES
One of the major issues with the equipment upgrade to GLB is the lack of comparison between new items and old ones. In this suggestion, they are exactly comparable. Older items though, because they are already bought are less flexible than if you created the item from scratch and tailored it to your player.
How do I get new equipment?
There is no “new/advanced” equipment. You’d buy equipment in the exact same way as you would before. Simply choose the piece and color you want. However, you don’t apply any bonus when you buy. So that basic black shirt with +1 strength (in days of yore) is now just a basic black shirt.
Wait, so equipment doesn’t add to attributes anymore? Wow, what’s the point of this thread?
No, equipment still adds to attributes, but you have to apply bonuses to the equipment via the store.
Where do the bonuses come from then?
Well, this is where the store comes back in. You purchase upgrades from the store rather than having random equipment appear. See the “Store” section for more on buying upgrades.
Okay, so how exactly are upgrades applied to items then?
Items would have an allowance of points (or “capacity”), and each upgrade takes a certain amount of points to put into an item. This is pretty much the “socket” idea.
How much upgrade “capacity” would items have then?
An item’s capacity is determined solely by the player’s level. An item just bought would have a capacity of 2. Every 4 levels, this capacity increases by 1. So...
Level 1: 2
Level 4: 3
Level 8: 4
Level 12: 5, etc.
The capacity of upgrades would cost as follows:
1 Capacity
- +1% to xxx (i.e. pass quality, avoid fake, break tackle, swat ball, etc.)
2 Capacity
- +1 to any attribute
3 Capacity
- +1 to any SA
What kind of items would you create by level then? This sounds too powerful and/or confusing…
Some sample items from this template that you could create based on level:
Level 1
1. +1 speed
2. +2% pass quality
3. +1% swat ball; +1% intercept chance
Level 4
1. +1 agility; +1% break tackle
2. +1 Pocket Passer SA
3. +3% pass distance
Level 16
- +3 throwing
- +1 speed; +1 Juke SA; +1% break tackle
- +1 Swat Ball SA; +1 Closing Speed SA
As you can see, you could upgrade your new equipment to be just like the old ones if you really wanted to. However, you are provided with a little bit more flexibility on what you want to do with items.
So a level 28 could have +3 Pump Fake SA in one piece, so he could potentially have +12 Pump Fake SA!?!?!
No. There would be limits to how much you could stack one item:
% abilities: Only up to +5%, meaning you could have +20% total potentially (this is conservative, as only Bort knows the code and whether or not this needs a limit).
Attributes: No limit
Special Abilities: Only +1 to a given SA per piece (for example, the third level 16 equipment above could never have more Swat Ball or Closing Speed SA, but could have any others)
Where does money factor into this?
Well, your equipment capacity doesn’t just increase itself when you level up. You gotta pay for that. So when you first buy your black shirt, you need to increase the capacity to be able to apply upgrades. Increasing the capacity would cost the same as upgrading the old equipment – but since you can do this every 4 levels, it would be scaled to be the same amount as before:
Capacity 0 to 1: $150
Capacity 1 to 2: $350
Capacity 2 to 3: $800
Capacity 3 to 4: $1700; and so on
*Note $500 to fully upgrade level 1, $2500 to fully upgrade level 8 – same costs as before)
EDIT IDEA
Someone suggested that you be able to increase the amount of sockets that your equipment has via bonus tokens. For example, you could spend 6 BT to add an additional "capacity" to the equipment. Then you could spend 8 BT to add another, then 10 and so on. Pretty good idea because it allows another use of bonus tokens that is also progressive use, so it wouldn't really get out of hand.
____________________________________________________________________________
SHOPPING and TOKENS
There are really two separate ideas that have bounced around GLB about how to handle this, so I’ll present both options and let people discuss which would be better. The first option would have a random store similar to the one now, except that random upgrades would appear and the person would purchase them to slot into items. The second option, which I personally like MUCH better, would have people adding any bonuses they want to the items.
Option 1
This option would have a store similar to the one that already exists, except that instead of items, you purchase upgrades. You could increase the store size by spending Shopping Tokens in an exponential fashion (i.e. 1 ST increases store size by one, 2 ST increases by another one, 3 ST increases by another one, etc.). This would maintain the random element to the store and allow people to eventually find what they are looking for. However, I would suggest that the store refreshes its wares every night at rollover so people don’t have to waste ST to get new upgrades and it also encourages people to check every day lest they miss what they are looking for. You’d also have the appearance of “rare” upgrades such as +1.5 speed, +2 to SA (allowing breakage of the limit set above), etc. I’m not going to go much further with this idea, because I feel that option 2 is far superior from a player’s standpoint.
Option 2
The option I actually prefer is to allow people to upgrade their equipment by simply choosing what they want rather than having to refresh a store over and over again. It would basically be the old way of doing things, but you’d be able to add SA bonuses and those % chance bonuses to your equipment in addition to attributes. However, the new twist would be that to purchase upgrades, you have to spend ST. For each capacity the item you are purchasing takes, you need to spend 1 ST. For example, to get +1 speed on your item, you have to spend 2 ST. To get +1 Shutdown Coverage SA, you’d have to spend 3 ST. This would force people to have shopping tokens to upgrade equipment, but not at such a ridiculous rate that it is pointless (you would technically need only 4 shopping tokens every 4 levels to upgrade equipment). As it is now, you have to refresh the store 5-6 times at least before you find anything remotely useful.
By letting players choose what they want, you avoid the pitfall of having players just wasting away their ST because they can’t get anything useful in the store. Despite what you may think Bort, refreshing the store seems to be frustrating players much more than it excites them. Plus, if you want to have a LB with 4 points in the Return Specialist SA, then you do it. You don’t have to refresh the store a billion times to hope that you get different pieces (head, body, hands, and feet) with Return Specialist on it. This allows GLB agents to build players as they want and test out funky builds if they want. More control in the agent’s hands on how their players are built is a good thing.
And, you could still have a random store with this option in the same fashion as before (since I know this is close to your heart Bort). However, the items that could be found in the store need to be less random and useless as they are now. They would be level appropriate in that all their “slots” would already be filled (i.e. a level 13 CB wouldn’t get +2% to not fumble; he would see an item like +1 agility, +1 speed, +1% chance to intercept pass). The random store could/would allow people to take a chance that they would find something useful without having to spend money and extra ST to do it themselves. The store could also have the chance to have items like +1 speed, +2 Closing Speed SA – something you couldn’t make yourself.
____________________________________________________________________________
Bonus tokens
I think the consensus around the GLB community on spending 10 bonus tokens to upgrade +1 is simply ludicrous, given that you can only get 16 tokens per season (somebody actually did the math on this, and to upgrade 4 pieces of equipment +4 would take 400 days…10 seasons. Ugh, seriously?). So what would be a useful alternative for bonus tokens in relation to equipment?
One idea that I saw somewhere coincided perfectly with this overall suggestion: you allow players to spend bonus tokens to rearrange the bonuses on their equipment. Basically, when you are adding bonuses to equipment, they are socketed in and can’t be removed (in my current suggestion). So if a person decides they don’t like their equipment, or want to try something else, they’d have to sell the equipment, buy something new and increase the capacity again wasting money and then again wasting ST to put upgrades on. However, our trusty bonus tokens would allow a player to remove all the bonuses from an already improved piece of equipment, and give them a refund of the ST spent. This way, bonus tokens can be used to save a player valuable money and shopping time (or training to get ST). This would actually be useful, especially for higher level players where it would cost ludicrous amounts of money and ST to start over on a piece of equipment. Though this is subject to debate, it could be:
0 bonus tokens to refund for players level 1-7
1 bonus token to refund for players level 8-15
2 bonus tokens to refund for players level 16-23
3 bonus tokens to refund for players level 24-31; and so on
*Note that until a player hits level 8, they can rearrange the upgrades they bought at level 1/4 for free to allow newbies to correct for mistakes early on, and also to let people try some things with low level players before they become a serious player. However, to avoid exploitation of this, you could only allow one equipment “refund” per day or something like that.
There are other things that bonus tokens could be spent on (as I think the +1 SP is driving people up walls), but that’s another topic and not for this thread.
SUMMARY
As you can see, this suggestion would allow GLBers to more fully customize their players the way that they want, and remove the frustration involved with refreshing the store only to find useless crap that doesn’t compare to the “old” equipment. In fact, under this suggestion, people could still retain their old equipment and if they decide they want to change it, they can spend bonus tokens to reorganize the bonuses rather than having to re-purchase something new.
I’m also looking out for the future here. I mean, if you eventually add more SA’s to the game or different % bonuses (such as: +10% bonus to 4th quarter play when losing…hint hint), then you don’t need to go back and create more items with these abilities and you won’t have people complaining that their level 44 will never be able to have the new stuff as good because they could seamlessly transition by throwing a few bonus tokens around. It would be MUCH easier to implement new attributes, SA’s, or other bonuses this way because people can choose when and how they upgrade their equipment.
I understand that this is an overhaul of the way things are, but I tried my best to compile the most logical suggestions with the most rampant concerns into one singular idea that could possibly work. Again, be constructive!
And I’m spent.
*Note: Increasing shop space using tokens - credit to Anarcho
A summary of the ideas and issues addressed with this suggestion include:
-New items are just as good as old ones (in fact, potentially the same)
-Players don’t have to choose between “advanced” items and basic items
-People can keep and use old equipment at no penalty
-Shopping tokens are more worthwhile
-Players can actually customize their new equipment and tailor it to their objective (no more +2% deflect pass chance for you kicker unless you want it)
-Items with “sockets”
-Spending bonus tokens on anything but +1 SP is actually practical
-Upgrading equipment now occurs at levels 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, etc. (however doesn’t penalize players with older equipment)
-You can actually choose you color of your equipment (not a big deal, but people have actually been concerned with this)
_____________________________________________________________________________
EQUIPMENT AND BONUSES
One of the major issues with the equipment upgrade to GLB is the lack of comparison between new items and old ones. In this suggestion, they are exactly comparable. Older items though, because they are already bought are less flexible than if you created the item from scratch and tailored it to your player.
How do I get new equipment?
There is no “new/advanced” equipment. You’d buy equipment in the exact same way as you would before. Simply choose the piece and color you want. However, you don’t apply any bonus when you buy. So that basic black shirt with +1 strength (in days of yore) is now just a basic black shirt.
Wait, so equipment doesn’t add to attributes anymore? Wow, what’s the point of this thread?
No, equipment still adds to attributes, but you have to apply bonuses to the equipment via the store.
Where do the bonuses come from then?
Well, this is where the store comes back in. You purchase upgrades from the store rather than having random equipment appear. See the “Store” section for more on buying upgrades.
Okay, so how exactly are upgrades applied to items then?
Items would have an allowance of points (or “capacity”), and each upgrade takes a certain amount of points to put into an item. This is pretty much the “socket” idea.
How much upgrade “capacity” would items have then?
An item’s capacity is determined solely by the player’s level. An item just bought would have a capacity of 2. Every 4 levels, this capacity increases by 1. So...
Level 1: 2
Level 4: 3
Level 8: 4
Level 12: 5, etc.
The capacity of upgrades would cost as follows:
1 Capacity
- +1% to xxx (i.e. pass quality, avoid fake, break tackle, swat ball, etc.)
2 Capacity
- +1 to any attribute
3 Capacity
- +1 to any SA
What kind of items would you create by level then? This sounds too powerful and/or confusing…
Some sample items from this template that you could create based on level:
Level 1
1. +1 speed
2. +2% pass quality
3. +1% swat ball; +1% intercept chance
Level 4
1. +1 agility; +1% break tackle
2. +1 Pocket Passer SA
3. +3% pass distance
Level 16
- +3 throwing
- +1 speed; +1 Juke SA; +1% break tackle
- +1 Swat Ball SA; +1 Closing Speed SA
As you can see, you could upgrade your new equipment to be just like the old ones if you really wanted to. However, you are provided with a little bit more flexibility on what you want to do with items.
So a level 28 could have +3 Pump Fake SA in one piece, so he could potentially have +12 Pump Fake SA!?!?!
No. There would be limits to how much you could stack one item:
% abilities: Only up to +5%, meaning you could have +20% total potentially (this is conservative, as only Bort knows the code and whether or not this needs a limit).
Attributes: No limit
Special Abilities: Only +1 to a given SA per piece (for example, the third level 16 equipment above could never have more Swat Ball or Closing Speed SA, but could have any others)
Where does money factor into this?
Well, your equipment capacity doesn’t just increase itself when you level up. You gotta pay for that. So when you first buy your black shirt, you need to increase the capacity to be able to apply upgrades. Increasing the capacity would cost the same as upgrading the old equipment – but since you can do this every 4 levels, it would be scaled to be the same amount as before:
Capacity 0 to 1: $150
Capacity 1 to 2: $350
Capacity 2 to 3: $800
Capacity 3 to 4: $1700; and so on
*Note $500 to fully upgrade level 1, $2500 to fully upgrade level 8 – same costs as before)
EDIT IDEA
Someone suggested that you be able to increase the amount of sockets that your equipment has via bonus tokens. For example, you could spend 6 BT to add an additional "capacity" to the equipment. Then you could spend 8 BT to add another, then 10 and so on. Pretty good idea because it allows another use of bonus tokens that is also progressive use, so it wouldn't really get out of hand.
____________________________________________________________________________
SHOPPING and TOKENS
There are really two separate ideas that have bounced around GLB about how to handle this, so I’ll present both options and let people discuss which would be better. The first option would have a random store similar to the one now, except that random upgrades would appear and the person would purchase them to slot into items. The second option, which I personally like MUCH better, would have people adding any bonuses they want to the items.
Option 1
This option would have a store similar to the one that already exists, except that instead of items, you purchase upgrades. You could increase the store size by spending Shopping Tokens in an exponential fashion (i.e. 1 ST increases store size by one, 2 ST increases by another one, 3 ST increases by another one, etc.). This would maintain the random element to the store and allow people to eventually find what they are looking for. However, I would suggest that the store refreshes its wares every night at rollover so people don’t have to waste ST to get new upgrades and it also encourages people to check every day lest they miss what they are looking for. You’d also have the appearance of “rare” upgrades such as +1.5 speed, +2 to SA (allowing breakage of the limit set above), etc. I’m not going to go much further with this idea, because I feel that option 2 is far superior from a player’s standpoint.
Option 2
The option I actually prefer is to allow people to upgrade their equipment by simply choosing what they want rather than having to refresh a store over and over again. It would basically be the old way of doing things, but you’d be able to add SA bonuses and those % chance bonuses to your equipment in addition to attributes. However, the new twist would be that to purchase upgrades, you have to spend ST. For each capacity the item you are purchasing takes, you need to spend 1 ST. For example, to get +1 speed on your item, you have to spend 2 ST. To get +1 Shutdown Coverage SA, you’d have to spend 3 ST. This would force people to have shopping tokens to upgrade equipment, but not at such a ridiculous rate that it is pointless (you would technically need only 4 shopping tokens every 4 levels to upgrade equipment). As it is now, you have to refresh the store 5-6 times at least before you find anything remotely useful.
By letting players choose what they want, you avoid the pitfall of having players just wasting away their ST because they can’t get anything useful in the store. Despite what you may think Bort, refreshing the store seems to be frustrating players much more than it excites them. Plus, if you want to have a LB with 4 points in the Return Specialist SA, then you do it. You don’t have to refresh the store a billion times to hope that you get different pieces (head, body, hands, and feet) with Return Specialist on it. This allows GLB agents to build players as they want and test out funky builds if they want. More control in the agent’s hands on how their players are built is a good thing.
And, you could still have a random store with this option in the same fashion as before (since I know this is close to your heart Bort). However, the items that could be found in the store need to be less random and useless as they are now. They would be level appropriate in that all their “slots” would already be filled (i.e. a level 13 CB wouldn’t get +2% to not fumble; he would see an item like +1 agility, +1 speed, +1% chance to intercept pass). The random store could/would allow people to take a chance that they would find something useful without having to spend money and extra ST to do it themselves. The store could also have the chance to have items like +1 speed, +2 Closing Speed SA – something you couldn’t make yourself.
____________________________________________________________________________
Bonus tokens
I think the consensus around the GLB community on spending 10 bonus tokens to upgrade +1 is simply ludicrous, given that you can only get 16 tokens per season (somebody actually did the math on this, and to upgrade 4 pieces of equipment +4 would take 400 days…10 seasons. Ugh, seriously?). So what would be a useful alternative for bonus tokens in relation to equipment?
One idea that I saw somewhere coincided perfectly with this overall suggestion: you allow players to spend bonus tokens to rearrange the bonuses on their equipment. Basically, when you are adding bonuses to equipment, they are socketed in and can’t be removed (in my current suggestion). So if a person decides they don’t like their equipment, or want to try something else, they’d have to sell the equipment, buy something new and increase the capacity again wasting money and then again wasting ST to put upgrades on. However, our trusty bonus tokens would allow a player to remove all the bonuses from an already improved piece of equipment, and give them a refund of the ST spent. This way, bonus tokens can be used to save a player valuable money and shopping time (or training to get ST). This would actually be useful, especially for higher level players where it would cost ludicrous amounts of money and ST to start over on a piece of equipment. Though this is subject to debate, it could be:
0 bonus tokens to refund for players level 1-7
1 bonus token to refund for players level 8-15
2 bonus tokens to refund for players level 16-23
3 bonus tokens to refund for players level 24-31; and so on
*Note that until a player hits level 8, they can rearrange the upgrades they bought at level 1/4 for free to allow newbies to correct for mistakes early on, and also to let people try some things with low level players before they become a serious player. However, to avoid exploitation of this, you could only allow one equipment “refund” per day or something like that.
There are other things that bonus tokens could be spent on (as I think the +1 SP is driving people up walls), but that’s another topic and not for this thread.
SUMMARY
As you can see, this suggestion would allow GLBers to more fully customize their players the way that they want, and remove the frustration involved with refreshing the store only to find useless crap that doesn’t compare to the “old” equipment. In fact, under this suggestion, people could still retain their old equipment and if they decide they want to change it, they can spend bonus tokens to reorganize the bonuses rather than having to re-purchase something new.
I’m also looking out for the future here. I mean, if you eventually add more SA’s to the game or different % bonuses (such as: +10% bonus to 4th quarter play when losing…hint hint), then you don’t need to go back and create more items with these abilities and you won’t have people complaining that their level 44 will never be able to have the new stuff as good because they could seamlessly transition by throwing a few bonus tokens around. It would be MUCH easier to implement new attributes, SA’s, or other bonuses this way because people can choose when and how they upgrade their equipment.
I understand that this is an overhaul of the way things are, but I tried my best to compile the most logical suggestions with the most rampant concerns into one singular idea that could possibly work. Again, be constructive!
And I’m spent.
*Note: Increasing shop space using tokens - credit to Anarcho
Last edited Sep 23, 2008 00:59:05
