I haven't talked much about items, for one cause it's still quite out there in the future and another cause we've been busy with other things in the mean time, but figured it's been so long since I've posted I may as well so my followers don't get worried. :D

I have mostly just been busy trying to help on things with the game that I can and other parts some waiting around and moving pieces here and there, I even managed to learn some editing myself recently just so I could get that done to save the project some temporary liquid funding so it could be used elsewhere but dang was that workload tedious. Though I hope it'll pay off once you guys see the end result. ^^

Either way, items!

I think this post will also cover parts of what we have planned for zing in-game, but do keep in mind that everything I'm about to say isn't set in stone and a lot if not everything may change in the future.

One thing that's been important to keep in mind with the project and item generation is to prevent "gambling" as we've seen in modern web2 games where most of the monetization is based on players purchasing "lootboxes" and it enabling younger people to get into gambling habits. I believe Europe has even banned some of these mechanics but needless to say you can't completely avoid it from games as people can often find ways to gamble on certain things but we have of course put a lot of thought into it to not encourage it in any way. One large factor that comes into play here is that when players purchase these lootboxes, that money of course directly goes to the game and even though players may be able to find out what the odds of getting rare cards or items are, they don't often show it to you directly at the screen to discourage you from buying which is quite bad mannered.

You may think that I should be comparing lootboxes to starter packs rather than item generation but the main difference there is that starter packs and their content can be resold on the market, there may, for instance, be accounts that eventually just purchase a healer license, a healer and a starter character to directly get into the game, or just lease them eventually which means they can practically avoid the whole having to buy packs and "roll the dice" on what stats their creatures will have. So not only can players choose to skip that part completely but even if they purchase something it may still have resell value compared to lootboxes in web2 games, some of which even become obsolete every season (Google FIFA lootboxes, you may find quite a few articles on the controversy and moneygrab).

So the next part is about item generation in the game, here we also wanted to make sure that it doesn't incentivize gambling and we believe that the best way forward to achieve that will be to make a lot of "currencies" in game not tradable. While this may sound controversial for a web3 game let me get into the reasons as to why we think this'll be better for the health of the ecosystem.

Let's say there's these items or currencies you need in the game to craft items, let's call them shards, shards may drop off of holo-creatures when defeated in battle or you may find some sprinkled here and there when harvesting gathering materials and most items you want to craft will require shards and some zing. If these shards are tradable it'll create an ecosystem where farmers will thrive, all you'd need to do would be to create an account, pay for a healer license and lease a healer and creature then figure out a way to bot grind defeat creatures to garner shards in order to sell them on the marketplace to people who don't want to bother gathering them to create items - which also incentivizes gambling since they'll just purchase shards to create hundreds of items per day in order to try get the best one there is, etc. While this may be good for the project short-term (to sell a lot of healer licenses), it's not going to go well for the player economy long-term if there's farms with thousands of accounts selling shards at any price and making item generation cost close to nothing and having best in slot items become common.

Now that's not to say that there won't be checks and overview on the bot activity that may crush these accounts before they go wild, but we believe that making these in-game currencies/materials not tradable is a better solution.

If these materials aren't tradable, how is this going to work, you may wonder. Before you start thinking that we're going to force every account and healer to level up their own professions to the max, we have a different solution in place for that. It'll work like this.

You basically have to agree with other players either through socializing in the community or discord or later in-game to craft certain items, let's say you know a forger that has the plans for a certain helmet you want to be crafted for your healer, he has spent a lot of materials, zing, and other resources to get his forging up to that skill level to learn the plans for that helmet and he's deciding to use his day on crafting your helmet so naturally he'd also want a fee for his work and you end up being the one overbidding everyone else that day. You would simply through a trade window or in-game mail system send him all the materials needed to prove that you have them, and the forger, without ever getting access or control over your materials (to prevent ingame scams and tomfoolery) would be able to use them through the mail or trade window to craft your helmet which you then would instantly get back without him having any control over the crafted result either. If you don't also include the fee the crafter requested he could simply decline the trade or send the mail back. This removes any abuse from both parties but most importantly makes it work without the need to make the materials tradable. For the "trade" or "mail" system to work, a crafted item has to be the result, thus you can't just mail or trade away materials with a fee which makes them nontradable.

This means it would force people to play the game, defeat creatures, gather materials, etc to craft items. There may of course also be people who prefer to level up their own professions so they can craft their own items, there may even be craftable items that incentivize that so there's a reason for you to want to level up your professions rather than always having others craft them for you but there will also be limitations on how many unique professions a healer can have which means that eventually you're going to need to look for other crafters either way. If you choose forging, for instance, you won't be able to also learn gem-cutting or botany or engineering, etc.

Now this doesn't completely prevent bots either, but it makes it a lot more open and creates community awareness which may make it easier to report suspicious activities if noted which makes it easier for our devs and other workers to look into the right place to squash it among other activities and detection tools we'll work on implementing against bot farms.

To give you some concrete examples of the day-to-day of a player and crafter, let's say you just defeated a level 30 creature and it dropped 45 shards, you now have 800 shards and can craft that amulet you really wanted for your Light Healer, your profession is, however, botany so all you can do is craft elixirs, potions, and other buffs, not actual amulets. You look in the chat for a forger and there are plenty of crafters looking for work cause they'll get a fee for having spent the time/crafting cooldown on crafting your amulet for you. You look for one that specializes in amulets in the hopes it'll grant you a higher rarity amulet and you both agree to a 200 zing fee. You send the crafter all the necessary items in the mail, 800 shards, 10 melted iron bars, 2 melted gold bars, 20 zing to craft (gets burned) and 200 zing for the fee. A minute later you get a notification that your craft is finished so you open up your mail again and there's your blue rarity amulet waiting for you to equip it, increasing your healing stats and boosting your mana generation. Meanwhile, the crafter receives his 200 zing and won't be able to craft another item until tomorrow because he's so tired from having crafted this one.

Lastly, there will of course be some randomization with items as mentioned above, you'll never really know what you're going to get in terms of rarity and exact stats. You can't completely remove that attribute from games like these cause else it'll just be a straightforward grind to x amount of shards and x amount of zing to get the best items you want for your healers. Limiting this to only materials you can obtain yourself or going to the marketplace to purchase already crafted items will hopefully remove a lot of the gambling aspect from the game to not incentivize people to spend a lot of money on getting the best gear but instead spend time and being consistent at it.

Professions will have skill levels both in terms of levels and how high you can go to learn certain items to craft for specific level restrictions and also different "talents" in professions where you can focus on certain things to become more efficient at crafting them. This gives you a specialization that makes you stand out from other similar professions when offering your crafting services to players who haven't bothered to level up professions or just haven't gotten to that level yet or are currently on cooldown but have enough materials to want another go at crafting a certain item they need for pvp or pve.

Items will have weighted randomness to them, so when crafting a certain amulet it could range from uncommon to rare to epic to legendary or even holo rarity, and specialization and other factors would help with making the super rare ones occur a bit more often. Items will however also have certain attributes that are rare, for instance, if your healer specializes in mana generation to heal creatures more often in and out of battles instead of focusing on big heals in-game, he would want that holo rarity amulet with a lot of mana generation but may get unlucky and only get healing power attribute for instance. On top of some attributes being replaced by others, there's also going to be range in the item stats, my holo amulet may not be the same as your holo amulet even if the plans of the forger to craft it are the same. Even though both our amulets are of holo rarity due to their stats being super high, yours just happened to be slightly higher thus potentially giving you an edge in combat, and those 5 extra health points it managed to heal that one round deciding on who lost and won an important pvp battle.

Items will also have different soulbound odds here and there so that not everything can be bought or sold on the marketplace but I think we're already got quite far in this post so I'll leave that for another time. Just wanted to give those eager for more info an overview on how items will work in the game and that we've put quite some thought on that as well even though we're not really there yet.

Let me know your thoughts!

I'll try posting more often from here on out, even though I've been saying that for the past couple years. xD

Images were created with Midjourney for this post alone.