Objects - followup

For reasons unrelated to the previous post, I ended up doing a lot of object work in the last couple of days. I discovered that the linkages between rarity, and the bind/artifact/rare flags were not just overly complex, but in some cases really inappropriate. It took several hours and multiple tries to work out all the details, and we now have a much better rating system for flags and rarity.

The general summary is that binding is much weaker, artifact and rare are stronger, you get an extra artifact per rack, and rarity is being deprecated.

Rarity I was the most surprised about; there were literally thousands of objects with rarity on the game. I wrote a function to remove it from everything that didn't strictly need it; this cut the number down to under a thousand. It's still a useful mechanic to have on certain special items, but having it on this many of them really doesn't seem appropriate. Rarity will also be a major issue with a larger player base, and we need to use a new mechanic for a lot of these things.

Weakening the bind flag caused issues with a lot of equipment that was built to take advantage of binding. A good chunk of it was in newbie areas, where I myself used it to get fairly powerful equipment to low levels. On the other hand, a lot of the other binding objects were problem objects that needed to be adjusted anyway. We've had a problem with bind flag overuse for a while now, and this helps address that.

The addition of another artifact flag is a major change, but it comes with a caveat: one artifact flag has to be bound, while the other must be unbound. A similar restriction is in place for rare flagged items.

This seems to be a really interesting idea. The bound objects are slightly more powerful but cannot be sold; the unbound objects can be sold and will serve to keep the equipment market functional. The fact that builders must build both bound and unbound equipment should help with equipment diversity and address some of the concerns that players have about "everything becoming bound".

All in all, I've been getting a lot of positive feedback on it. I know it's inconvenient for builders to update things (I make a point of it to personally take my share of pain from the older areas), but so far the consensus seems to be that it's worth it.