Consumables and the Economy

Anyone who has played any style of turf matches in GW/GW2 has seen the coffin zombie spam. It may instead be vase weeds or pirate barrel zombies or what have you, but it can get obnoxious in those games when you’re defending a point and not only are there 3 Super Commandos or E-Peas to deal with, but also 5+ of these tougher AI as well. At first you have only a few of these but eventually you have so many of even the super rare ones that you can use them virtually at will. The only reason I’m sure I’m not seeing as many of those legendary DJ Uplink bots as I used to is that Rux hasn’t sold any for a while; I have about 200 or so if I recall properly, but over 1000 of the regular uplink bots.

We’ve touched on this before in various threads, but something that I feel that BfN both had a decent idea for, but it didn’t quite work out, are the way it handles consumable AI. The timer system keeps players from spamming the best ones all the time but the lack of variety in summonables is a problem. It does mean that a team that wants to summon a bunch of the better ones has to coordinate to do so or spread them out more evenly which I believe is a good goal, and I’m quire certain this was what the dev team had in mind for this system. Had they given us more variety and more basic options that we could always use, it could have worked very well.

I think the spam of only the really powerful ones needs to be reined in for the next game, but there are various ways to go about this. I have a couple of ideas, some of which I’ve shared before, to put out there and discuss.

Idea One: Coin cost is relative to power. This was the system I had brought up in my many posts for a new game idea. Instead of a timer or random packs, you would spend coins to purchase copies of the consumables you wanted; be them AI zombies/plants, pots/bots, team retries, or self-revives. The cost would be based on power and effectiveness; a basic weed or brown coat must cost 500 coins each, while a coffin zombie or vase weed might cost 5000. Some would be special and require you to unlock them (pirate barrel zombie or primal heal flower as examples), others would always be available as long as you could afford it. For example, if you had 5k coins to spend here you could get a single coffin zombie or 10 brown coats using the above costs. Of course, the costs would have to be tweaked so they’re balanced, but you get the general idea.

There would be a plethora of options here, so you could set up favorites to make it easier to place the ones you like the most more quickly, but you can always place one you have at least 1 copy of, the idea of favorites is to make it easier to quickly summon them while in a battle. This isn’t a 100% cure of the spamming if people wanted to spend a lot of coins here but it does mean that there is at least some attempt to balance it out by strength=cost and you could buy the stuff you wanted and had unlocked. It also means that coins would always be useful, which is something that I felt BfN really got wrong.

Idea Two: Point system. In this system, you would still start with some things you could always use, like browncoats and weeds, and some you’d have to unlock. It would also keep self-revives and team retries in the store for purchase for coins, separate from the AI consumables.

When you join any game with this system you start with 0 points and never drop below this value so you can always summon a 0 point AI; for example, browncoats or peashooter pots would be 0 point summonable items, so you could always summon them. Summoning more powerful pots, bots, and mobile AI would spend those points down to 0. 1 point things would be conehead zombies and lightning reeds, 2 point things could be screen door zombies and laser beans, 3 point things could be DJ Uplinks and vase weeds.  If you lacked the points, you couldn’t summon things until your points had increased enough to do so. The points may need some fine tuning so coneheads and bucketheads aren’t the same tier, but the basic idea should be fine.

Your points would automatically increase over time, maybe there would be an indicator on your HUD that showed the current value and with a visible clock or graph that showed you at a glance where your summon ability was currently at. This is like this for 2 reasons; 1 so you can’t jump in a match and immediately summon the best stuff, and 2 to give all players an even playing field; you wouldn’t be able to alter this system with coins or leveling up. You may likely have more options of what you can summon via unlocking things through gameplay, but the point system would keep players on an even playing field as far as power of their summons. There would be a cap, but not sure if it should be 3, as that’s the highest value from above, or higher. It can’t be too high as we don’t want the return of coffin spam! You do not lose points from being vanquished, and in fact, your point timer would always be increasing even while waiting for a revive or to respawn.

This would play out much like the timer in BfN, but with more flexibility and you would have a few options that would always be available for use as both attacker and defender. You can set favorites here as well so they are always the easiest to access as long as you have enough points to do so.

Idea Three: Crafting. This is something that other online shooters like Warframe and Destiny 2 do and would be another reason to play in the free roam regions over the long term; to earn crafting ingredients. For those that don’t enjoy PvE as much or want a mix, part of the rewards from matches could also be crafting materials and Rux may have some for sale and/or an exchange/converting system. Another possibility is using coins to buy the resources you need but lack directly while crafting.

There would be generic crafting items for each side; I’m thinking sun for plants and bones for zombies as the basic material they all need so would also be the most common and cheapest material, while other items would be varying levels of rarity and the more powerful the summonable item is, the more raw materials and rare materials you will need. In addition to that, the themed summons like wild west or Zgyptian stuff, would require specific items from those free roam regions.

Obviously, the system would need balancing for how much stuff costs, how the resources are balanced to each other, how much you get from matches and playing in the free roam zones, and so on. The system needs to encourage people to play and craft the things they want, not feel too restrictive forcing people to play the game in ways they don’t want to play. The goal here is to make the more powerful summons rarer by making them both more expensive and require rarer materials. You would also have a favorite system here, so you have fast access to your preferred consumables.

To craft you’d simply go to the crafting station (Zomboss Lab and Crazy Dave’s greenhouse) in the appropriate base in your personal neighborhood or the public battlefield and through a simple menu system, craft any consumable you have the resources for. You would also be able to trade resources at these crafting stations with varying exchange rates. Crafting multiples of any of the consumables you have the resources for would be simple and fast, we don’t want this to be onerous. It has to have an interface easy to use for both Mouse+Keyboard and controller. You can convert coins into resources at these stations as well, but going beyond the basic graves/sun would cost quite a lot.

For some examples, although actual costs would be adjusted as needed; A basic Weed would cost 5 sun; a coffin zombie would cost 30 bones, 5 graves, and 1 Pop-Smart; a heal flower would cost 5 sun; as a Zgyptian themed plant, a bloomerang pot would cost 10 sun and 2 cat statues; a piano zombie (wild west) would cost 20 bones, 3 graves, and 1 bottle of Dr. Zomboss’s brainz tonic.

Converting coins to the basic sun/bone resource would be fairly cheap; 100 coins each or so, I’m guessing. You can make team retries and self-revives as either side and they would be 5 bones/sun each, the same as the most basic consumable AI so you can easily make a bunch of them with only a few matches in, while keeping the more powerful ones more expensive and rarer.

Objectives. My objectives here with all 3 systems are as follows:

• To reduce veterans (like myself) from spamming the best consumables all the time.
• To give greater value and therefore cost to the more powerful consumables.
• To encourage a wider variety in consumable types we see in games.
• To avoid having thousands of retries and self-revives as well as AI we don’t need or use that much-with all 3 systems you purchase or make what you feel you need and can afford.
• To have an in game economy that encourages play without feeling onerous or demanding.
• To make coins always useful (although not as much in the point system as the other 2).

These are not the only systems that could work, but are my take on what could replace the sticker packs of GW/GW2 and the timer in BfN, as the first two games are flooded with the best stuff all the time in many matches and the randomness can be frustrating (if also fun at times, opening packs does have a thrill involved with it), while BfN’s lack of options make the timer feel downright oppressive at times. I’d like to try to get a system that is fair for veterans and new players alike, isn’t annoying or tedious, and encourages people to play different modes and styles of game play, but not force it as that tends to backfire.