FortuneLeoVX on Jun 24, 2022 wrote:

Post 2 in my series "Revival of Pirate101" which aims to do exactly that. Now based on how KI deals with things, I highly doubt that my suggestions will be taken into actual thoughtful consideration, but a pirate can dream, and dreams I have a lot of. Now in an earlier post, I spoke about reviving Pirate101 by giving it a more enjoyable endgame (for reasons discussed previously) and I listed a few ways in which that can be done. Today I want to introduce a new concept, once again I am unsure whether this has been already suggested, and if it has, I reiterate. What I want to discuss is the introduction of "Growth type gear". Now, some of my fellow pirates might be asking "What in Davy Jones's locker is that?". Well, it's just as the name implies, gear that can increase in stats. Now this is where some of you may be going "But Dante, that there is a horrible idea. It would destroy the balance of the game!" and you know what, you may be right. But still, I'm going to try to set ground rules for it to be viable and explain why it's worth giving a thought anyway. Firstly, let's talk about how such items could be acquired and how they could be "upgraded". Weapon acquisition can be from the crown shop (I know you like money after all that's the end goal of most companies) or from the usual boss drop. Now we move on to the matter of upgrading. There are a few ways I've thought this could be done, I'll start with the simplest. Weapons can have a certain "mob meter" which requires you to defeat a certain number or sequence of mobs to upgrade their stats. The second method is a bit more complex and involves the addition of the crafting option before it can be brought to fruition. Each 'growth gear' will have the pirate get certain crafting items required to upgrade it to the next level. Said items can be acquired just like they would for any other craftable item, such as collecting in skyways or acquisition from mob drops. In fact, crafting the growth type gear to begin with can be one of the methods of acquisition. Let's move on to how the items will 'grow'. I propose a sort of leveling system, with a cap on every item to maintain some semblance of balance. The items should start off as below average, maybe among the worst hunks of gear possible, and through grinding can be upgraded to one of the highest tier gears available. If by even slightly, having the option for grinding for stronger gear is some really good incentive for even opening up the game (especially for PVP hungry pirates). Keeping game balance is a very complex issue and I will leave it to the experts to decide how each level should be dealt with in order to maintain it. Now that that's out of the way let's talk a bit more in-depth about the possible problems the introduction of such gear could bring and ways to solve them. The first problem that comes to mind might be the redundancy of PVP gear, which will discourage people from using PVP items. Now how to solve it? Pvp gear is already pretty bad (not accounting for past but current gear) sorry to say. But this can easily be fixed by having one of the requirements to own a growth type item be that you be a certain rank in PVP. The next problem would probably be the issue of normal players being left behind by 'sweats'. To be fair, this is how games should be. When people invest time and money into the game, they should be able to see a good return on their investment (the current state literally has people who've been playing for 1 or 2 years and players who've been here since inception indistinguishable from each other apart from older gear). Plus, the growth gear should be made so that it is not overly above normal gear, so 'sweats' will only have a somewhat acceptable advantage over 'normies' in PVP. This might even encourage us 'normies' to 'sweat' and grind more. Another problem might be how short-lived such an addition might have. Solving this could be as easy as having the levels exponentially harder to attain. Much like the 'team helper' badge, the final levels should be made somewhat erroneously hard to acquire. All in all, as always my ideas are not very far thought out, and my attempts at making them 'viable' are shaky at best, but this is why I post them. Perhaps pirates with broader minds can take this and make it into something more viable. However, I still think the idea is really cool, and if anything might inspire new concepts to improve the quality of Pirate101's endgame. Till the next post. -Dante your friendly neighbourhood Death musketeer