Mermalion's
Gift points and Gift wrappers suggestions

Questions:
How we will give gifts to other players?
How we are supposed to make private drop parties again?
How to do voluntary help to players in peril by consumable items?


Coming from Mermalion's January Big Bang questions

Overview:
Giving gifts and provide small voluntary help to other peoples is necessary part of social life (even virtual one). Also doing small private dropping parties, even anonymous, was great fun and can enjoy my life a lot. I am feeling really bad without those abilities. The problem is, that even all my accounts have nice questpoints status, the players in need are usually poor adventurers that cannot accept more than like bronze dagger (joke).

There are suggestions to remove trading cap for "more experienced" accounts. However, such account will be valuable target of hackers and stolen account could be easily misused by RWTers. So if we want to give expensive gifts again, the rights for this should be only temporary, obtained on random basis and it probably should give more rights to more experienced players.

Suggestion:
There are two ideas that used together can solve whole thing pretty good. But even each single of them will be very good to have.

"Gift points"
There are similar suggestions using term "gift tokens", but I think that "points" is better name for this kind of use. The idea is to have special "gift points" player can get randomly during playing. These "gift points" will be displayed in trading screen and player will be able to add them to trade as special "commodity". Each point will have negative value, for example -5K. For example if I want to give gift in value of 30k I will need to add 6 gift points to get back to balance.

Gift points can be obtained as rewards from quests and achievments, some minigames, tournaments, challenges, treasure trails, random events and eventually as monster drop of high lvl slayer monsters or monsters you need master quests to access. The average rate player can get such points is subject of discussion but I think that if value of one point be -5K, then gaining like 20 points per day in average for well experienced player will be suitable and if player be doing something wealth oriented (treasure trails or slaying high lvl monsters) I see not any problem with getting more gift points from such activities.

"Gift wrappers"
Special gift boxes of different quality player can use to give gifts to other players and to make small drop parties with them. Each box can hold one item (GE set is count as one item for this purpose) or stock of stakable items up to GE value given by quality of box. From poor quality paper boxes able to hold things up to 10K of value up to gilded and/or jewelled exquisite wrap boxes able to hold millions worth items. Empty wrappers are untradeable. Gift box has zero value regardless of its content (so be sure to not die with it!). Gift giver can put item in (wrap it). Wrapped box can be dropped (it has zero value so it will be visible on ground), bartered to other player or unwrapped to get item hidden inside out. Box will be destroyed upon unwrapping. Wrapped boxes cannot been banked (point of discussion bellow). "Gift wrappers" can be obtained from random events, challenges, treasure trails and monster drops. "Drop rate" will depend on box quality. More exquisite wrappers will be really rare and only the most experienced players will have chance to obtain them.

The reason why i am not allowing banking of wrapped items is technical. Each wrapped item is unique. As far as I know, actual structure of bank record is unable to hold such variety of items without deep remake. Also all wrapped boxes of the same quality looks exactly the same and no one can find what is inside until unwrapping. This will make maintaining of more wrapped boxes a bit difficult even for original gift giver. I even thought about limiting gift boxes to just only one at time (like clues) but in such case I will lost ability to make private drop parties. But if I disallow banking then it is easily possible to "save" items in inventory to database as wrapped item with special atribute telling this item is wrapped and eventually also to what wrapper (but it is not necessary - wrappers might degrade to lower quailty if you put too worse item to it). Because inventory has just 28 slots and wrappers be unstackable, the price of saving these items will be max 28 bytes for new atributes per player record and I think it is applicable.


Last update: 07.01.2008