Bring the survival back with progressive difficulty

Game Talk The Drawing Board
61

[quote=“Atelerd, post:47, topic:4434”]There is no big problem with spawn, the problem is in respawn.
Right now after looting one city I can just grab a car and move to another one easily, looting infinitely. The same stuff with labs and military objects.

The idea:
Every time when game expands your overmap, there should be these modifers, representing looting and carnage IF at least from two to five days from the last change passes:

  1. -10% of amount of food in the houses and stores. (Up to -60% in houses and -80% in stores)
  2. -15% chance to find something advanced (automatic weapons and non-revolvers) in gun stores (up to -60%)
  3. +5% for military objects of being opened and looted (up to 40%).
  4. +10% to spawn additional zombies near corpses (military, scienticists, etc), up to 90%.
  5. +4% to every building of being burned, particaly or entirely (up to 20%).
  6. +10% for every shop being looted (up to 60%).
  7. +5% for every car to be additionaly damaged after creation (up to 50%).
  8. -10% to find no gas in the pump (up to -70%).
    9)+5% for zombies to become advanced ones (up to 40%).

Starting season: autumn. WINTER WILL BE SOON UPON YOU, SURVIVOR.[/quote]

This is, in my book at least, is actually a terrible abstraction. Not only its not very good realism wise (as said before theres plainly not enough survivors left in the world to loot and plunder the ruins of modern civilization in the relatively short time spawn the game simulates which is at most 2 or 3 years; people just underestimate the amount of excess stuff we have around us in stores and in our homes, securing a lone, smeall supermarket with a small group could possibly feed you for years, if not even decades ).

But more importantly, at the gameplay level its still just a terrible mechanic. Not only do I hate the idea of things getting looted to never been seen again in the face of earth, without no way to possibly find them in a stash somewhere; I also feel that it would encourage a playstile that by no means approaches the one it aims to encourage. Lets enumerate the problems I can see:

1- It encourages start scumming- Because only the first city you visit will be truly “full” you’ll want to always spawn near a big one in order to get a good amount of items, and youll get your big amount of items, even if you wait years before venturing into the city.

2- Time plays no factor- As said before you could wait years to visit your second city and you’ll find the same amount of items that youll have found if you had explored it in the second day.

3- It discourages exploration- Theres simply no reason to explore other cities if all you are going to find are rusty revolvers and old shotguns and most canned items or tools have already disappeared.

4- You cant recover things that get looted- Things that get looted simply disappear from the game, this makes sense for consumables like food and gasoline but not for things like weapons and powertools.

5- You never see those looters- You will never actually find or join an NPC looting gang, and even if you simulated adding NPC gangs into looted areas, youll never see them doing any looting at all.

Really the only way of having things looted in game that would please me is having something akin to Rouge Survivor, where NPCs are actually responsible for the looting and actually killing the ones that enter your looting grounds means keeping all those delicious ruins free for you to loot later

62

Wow, gone for two days and loads of new posts arrived in the meantime! Happy to see so many ideas and thoughts.

There seems to be quite some discussion about the different ways a difficulty progression could be achieved, which are:

[ul][li]Time Based Difficulty - my proposal; Difficulty rises too some degree everywhere over time, though there would still be easier and more difficult zones. The advantage is there is an actual survival factor, as you can’t simply go back to lower level places. It would also give a certain sense of progression (wow, my character survived for 2 years on normal difficulty!).[/li]
[li]Position Based Difficulty - most sandbox games implement this; Difficulty is high on certain places, low on others. Right now cataclysm offers mostly this kind of difficulty, where you choose your challenge yourself. You find it in open world games like Skyrim, Minecraft and Terraria. Its great for offering the player a choice, but also means that survival would be a non-issue, as it is always possible to go to lower difficulty areas. This is when we mostly want a sandbox.[/li]
[li]Level Based Difficulty - see StopSignals proposal in this thread; I quite like this to be honest, though I am not sure if its the best way. The player chooses to go to the next level (Dimension) and stays there. This gives a clear progression, and allows increasing difficulty. Once you feel ready you can go there.[/li][/ul]

While the those can overlap a little I think we should focus the game on one. The question whether Cata should be a Sandbox with actual challenges or about survival (both are valid options, though I prefer the later) plays largely into this.

About the github link:
I very much like these (as you may have guessed)! Awesome to see more progress in that direction, though this is going to involve a good deal of work.

63

I think it should be a mix of the first two, and I’m sure that’s what will end up happening really. Although StopSignal’s Level based difficulty is an awesome idea, (and i’m sure some form of that could appear), it does have the big problem of being able to just grind the earlier level before progressing. Unless the levels were much smaller/less sandbox-y, you’d just be able to grind up until you were powerful enough to waltz through the next level.

Looting: Stuff vanishing into thin air is bad and we all agree - but we’re not talking about stuff you’ve already found disappearing, it’s that unexplored areas (like when you go into an overmap tile you haven’t been into) have a small chance of having a looted building instead of the non-looted one.

This chance would go up over time - but gradually enough that you wouldn’t want to start scum for it (I’m sure this ability will get changed very soon anyway to coincide with other changes) - yes it encourages you to go and stock up quickly, but then you have the danger/lack of skills aspect, so you’d need to balance it - I think that’s a great challenge and lots of fun.

We will get NPCs eventually who go around grabbing stuff, but the actual mechanism of them going, getting loot and taking it back and storing it would be very, very difficult to sort out/code, so this is something to make the world a bit more ‘lived in’ before hand. Remember that some people might have escaped with their stuff (same as looted) or that some of the ‘looted’ buildings could be burnt out.

64

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:61, topic:4434”][quote=“Atelerd, post:47, topic:4434”]There is no big problem with spawn, the problem is in respawn.
Right now after looting one city I can just grab a car and move to another one easily, looting infinitely. The same stuff with labs and military objects.

The idea:
Every time when game expands your overmap, there should be these modifers, representing looting and carnage IF at least from two to five days from the last change passes:

  1. -10% of amount of food in the houses and stores. (Up to -60% in houses and -80% in stores)
  2. -15% chance to find something advanced (automatic weapons and non-revolvers) in gun stores (up to -60%)
  3. +5% for military objects of being opened and looted (up to 40%).
  4. +10% to spawn additional zombies near corpses (military, scienticists, etc), up to 90%.
  5. +4% to every building of being burned, particaly or entirely (up to 20%).
  6. +10% for every shop being looted (up to 60%).
  7. +5% for every car to be additionaly damaged after creation (up to 50%).
  8. -10% to find no gas in the pump (up to -70%).
    9)+5% for zombies to become advanced ones (up to 40%).

Starting season: autumn. WINTER WILL BE SOON UPON YOU, SURVIVOR.[/quote]

This is, in my book at least, is actually a terrible abstraction. Not only its not very good realism wise (as said before theres plainly not enough survivors left in the world to loot and plunder the ruins of modern civilization in the relatively short time spawn the game simulates which is at most 2 or 3 years; people just underestimate the amount of excess stuff we have around us in stores and in our homes, securing a lone, smeall supermarket with a small group could possibly feed you for years, if not even decades ).

But more importantly, at the gameplay level its still just a terrible mechanic. Not only do I hate the idea of things getting looted to never been seen again in the face of earth, without no way to possibly find them in a stash somewhere; I also feel that it would encourage a playstile that by no means approaches the one it aims to encourage. Lets enumerate the problems I can see:

1- It encourages start scumming- Because only the first city you visit will be truly “full” you’ll want to always spawn near a big one in order to get a good amount of items, and youll get your big amount of items, even if you wait years before venturing into the city.

2- Time plays no factor- As said before you could wait years to visit your second city and you’ll find the same amount of items that youll have found if you had explored it in the second day.

3- It discourages exploration- Theres simply no reason to explore other cities if all you are going to find are rusty revolvers and old shotguns and most canned items or tools have already disappeared.

4- You cant recover things that get looted- Things that get looted simply disappear from the game, this makes sense for consumables like food and gasoline but not for things like weapons and powertools.

5- You never see those looters- You will never actually find or join an NPC looting gang, and even if you simulated adding NPC gangs into looted areas, youll never see them doing any looting at all.

Really the only way of having things looted in game that would please me is having something akin to Rouge Survivor, where NPCs are actually responsible for the looting and actually killing the ones that enter your looting grounds means keeping all those delicious ruins free for you to loot later[/quote]

That’s what I think of it. Doesn’t matter if the stuff you’ve already explored doesn’t disappear. Making the stuff you haven’t explored disappear is not the way to do it.

Personally I think that NPCs in working order and everything that GlyphGryph posed is the best way to add progressive difficulty.

65

Maybe you could have an increase per overmap for a new type of building to spawn. Like a boarded up apartment building with traps around the outside and more food supplies on the inside, or a home where a survivor loaded up.

66

Yeah it could certainly be a give or take kinda thing, survivor compounds/buildings could spawn later on (even if deserted/zombie filled at the moment) which could have bigger stocks of stuff. I’m sure when NPC’s get properly sorted this will be easy, but I expect it to take quite a considerable amount of time till they are actually able to go around and steal stuff.

My thoughts are to do a quicker version in the mean time - the end result will be exactly the same (especially with the above) so I don’t get why people are against it? I mean, it’s just that you won’t see them, as you won’t see a lot of the patrols even when NPCs DO get in.

67

Wait, so are you suggesting items appear less based on exploration, or based on time? Because if it’s triggered based on going into unexplored areas, I don’t see how time factors into it at all. Either way, that discourages long-term exploration, though. I mean, suppose a new player realizes that loot is disappearing from cities the longer he waits. So after a few tries, he grinds up all his combat skills early on and manages to collect enough resources on a single character to create a self-sustaining base. At that point, he’s got no incentive to explore, because he knows that it’s a waste of fuel. All this really does is compress the usual issue of people getting bored and restarting into a shorter timeframe.

Now, if there were destroyed buildings and more traps as time went by and you explored, that would be more interesting than focusing on loot. It gives you an incentive to explore and see what kind of interesting places you can find.

68

And how do you now that NPC gangs wont ultimately roam the wasteland in motorbike gangs?

And I dont really see the appeal of things randomly dissapearing with no actual way to stopping it. You said it yourself, cataclysm is a survivalcraft game, and I would consider the ability to actually fight and discourage NPCs entering your looting, or hell even ambushing them as ther return carrying all those backpacks full of loot a very valuable addition to the game.

Despawning items just cant compare, and having a quickfix soluton IMO only makes it less probable for someone to create a proper mechanic because “hey you know it works for now and there are more pressing issues”

69

It didn’t sound like they were proposing that items disappear, but that fewer spawn over time. You say that discourages travel, but there’s really almost 0 reason to travel in the first place. You can usually get everything you need in the first town. Anything you don’t find, you can make. If your goal is sustainable survival, then that can be achieved in about 3 days.

Instead of it being overmap exploration based, it could be a combination of submap/time generation. Submaps are generated as you move around normally, and its when items/monsters are placed. There could be something in the generation based off of the current game time to control that generation. It also sounds feasible for the terrain to be replaced in submap generation, ie: map shows house, during submap generation it turns into a collapsed home, etc.

70

So because there’s very little reason to travel right now, there’s no reason not to add a mechanic that discourages travel even more? I’m not sure I understand your reasoning.

71

The reason to travel should be exploration and more end-game style content, which has yet to be added.

72

If all that stuff is added in at the same time so that the two are balanced against each other that’s one thing, but adding in a quick-fix mechanic to be balanced out against a more difficult task that might be implemented later on sets a bad precedent.

73

I have to agree on Inadequate on this one: I don’t think making stuff disappear by itself or while unexplored is the way to go. It feels really arbitrary and forced, and really penalizes a player for playing nomad style. Don’t get me wrong, the loot is certainly too plenty and the possibility to simply drive a few miles and find the next untouched city to loot is simply undermining the whole rarity thing.

A better alternative would be to make looting in distant cities as dangerous as it is rewarding. If GryphGryphs github thingy gets implemented the player gets a strong incentive to neutralize threats near his home (fungal spires, triffid hearts, zombies) before they become to dangerous. Outside of that safety zone (which the player made himself) the various monsters would thrive and the loot would be therefor dangerous to get, but still untouched, therefor precious. And should the player decide to go living nomad style with those monsters that would mean always living on the edge, but also always getting the newest loot.

74

Is there, somewhere, an overall document stating “THIS is what the game is/shall be”? Is there a final image that is being worked towards? I guess … like… what is the official word on things?

I ask because I see a lot of pull in different directions at times, sometimes all using the same battle-cry.

“This is a roguelike! So it should be difficult!” - “No its a roguelike, so it should be FULL of overpowered loot!” (Which, end up working in opposite directions). “This is a roguelike, it needs to be super complex!” - “It needs to be easy for new players to understand!”; “We need more realism!” - “No it needs moar sci-fi!”

“Don’t add ____, it’ll make the game harder for people that play without cities on!” (Is that a game-play mode that is/should be catered to? To me, in a New England’s Future zombie-apocalypse game, it feels more like a "well if you want to play like that, mod a little and do it - but maybe its a super popular way of playing and should be heavily considered, I dunno’.)

I’m not sure if feature-creep is the right term, but it does feel sometimes, watching the suggestions & Get requests, that a lot of little bits and pieces get stuffed into things and it can feel like, from an outside observer/fan, the game gets pulled into many directions at once.

Plus, and understandably so, a lot of responses are along the lines of “well once NPCs are fixed it’ll all be different”. It can feel like lots of work going in, items stuffed in, things debated … yet when NPCs are more featured the game will change so much a lot of the debates of today will seen silly. lol

As an odd person who has stood in a supermarket in the Northeast of the US and stared out and thought “man, if zombies attack and you could board this place up, you could live in here on all this crap for weeks/months if you don’t care about expiration dates” I get that.

Gameplay wise, though, is there a danger of the game becoming “Supermarket Campsite Simulator” at a certain point?

But more importantly, at the gameplay level its still just a terrible mechanic. Not only do I hate the idea of things getting *looted* to never been seen again in the face of earth, without no way to possibly find them in a stash somewhere; I also feel that it would encourage a playstile that by no means approaches the one it aims to encourage. Lets enumerate the problems I can see:

1- It encourages start scumming- Because only the first city you visit will be truly “full” you’ll want to always spawn near a big one in order to get a good amount of items, and youll get your big amount of items, even if you wait years before venturing into the city.

2- Time plays no factor- As said before you could wait years to visit your second city and you’ll find the same amount of items that youll have found if you had explored it in the second day.

3- It discourages exploration- Theres simply no reason to explore other cities if all you are going to find are rusty revolvers and old shotguns and most canned items or tools have already disappeared.

In all honesty, what encourages exploration right now? In a short time you can clear the starting city and just set yourself up in a building indefinitely. Get lucky with a couple food-filled buildings and you might as well just (Q) and start over. The challenge is gone, and exploring more won’t give you anything you don’t already have unless you REALLY want to make your character a minor deity with all the CBMs and mutations.

4- You cant recover things that get looted- Things that get *looted* simply disappear from the game, this makes sense for consumables like food and gasoline but not for things like weapons and powertools.

Do you need any of that stuff? I think a large point of the “less loot” crowd is that there is just … well … SO MUCH CRAP everywhere (and more added constantly), that you’ll never use it all. Some of which is so crazily overpowered it can instantly throw what difficulty there is in the trash.

I raided a starting town (wouldn’t even call it a city) and filled 6 shopping carts with useful things. Guns and ammo, crafting items, books, 3 filled with food and medication … there is just SO MUCH out there. If HALF of it never even existed I’d not have missed it. … and yes, I can already see people straining and madly typing “THEN TURN DOWN THE NEW LOOT SLIDER” at me. I do, now. Just … well … how should the vanilla game play? Should it just be “stand behind a bush, kill all zombies, then play a ‘The Sims’-style base-building-simulator in your own personal city?”

So again … I guess it just comes down to … “where is this going?” Right now there is a semi-steep hurdle to get over with a new character and then you basically are the sole occupant of a fully stocked metropolis with no purpose.

Are we debating, in these threads lately, real changes and fixes to the game for the long haul … or just band-aids to make the current game more enjoyable to some people while we all wait for BIG changes like NPCs and new gameplay mechanics to get hammered out and ready for testing?

If the true answer is “well this is just a band-aid so I find the game more fun” then maybe all these things should probably just be mods so they don’t clutter up the game code and take time away from big picture stuff.

75

I still don’t understand where people are getting the “make items disappear when you’re not there!” idea from.

The idea is to generate less loot in new areas. *** COMPLETELY MADE UP NUMBERS *** Let’s say every season the amount of items generated decreases by 10%, down to a max of 50% decrease. Now if you loot a gun store that was generated at the start of the game it might have 10 guns in and items it. Now if you explore a new map generated in the fall, it might have only 9 guns and items in it, and so on. As far as I can tell, nobody is arguing that already generated loot has disappeared.

I’m not really a fan of this idea, and would rather have a gradual decrease over a time frame and have it apply to locally generated submaps rather than overmaps. So, if there’s no item decrease for a year, then after that it decreases gradually over time, but at rate roughly equal to 5% a season, or roughly 0.33% a day at default length.

There’s an argument that there won’t be people around to take all that loot because 99% of the population is dead or zombified, but as we’ve already seen, one regular person can easily kill entire towns full of zombies and pick it clean of loot, so why can’t one of those other 1% have done the same thing?

76

This is exactly what I’m proposing. I’m not proposing stuff ‘de-spawns’, just that when you look at the overmap you might go ‘oh, there’s a gunshop!’ but when you get to it, it’s looted/burned out. Now you’ve used up your fuel/fought a lot to get there, and you’re suddenly stuck without whatever you needed. This seems to me to be the very essence of a survivalcraft game.

As far as exploration, this causes you to explore as you now need to find another gun shop. Over time, the amount of buildings you might encounter that are looted would go up, but very gradually. Lets say for the first 4 months of game time 1 out of every 30 buildings was looted when you went to the tile, after 8 months, 2 out of 30 and so on. That’s not going to make you madly rush around and lead to an early game hoarding frenzy, but just gives a lot of flavour and some more challenge (as now the gun AND the pawn shop was looted).

77

This is exactly what I’m proposing. I’m not proposing stuff ‘de-spawns’, just that when you look at the overmap you might go ‘oh, there’s a gunshop!’ but when you get to it, it’s looted/burned out. Now you’ve used up your fuel/fought a lot to get there, and you’re suddenly stuck without whatever you needed. This seems to me to be the very essence of a survivalcraft game.

As far as exploration, this causes you to explore as you now need to find another gun shop. Over time, the amount of buildings you might encounter that are looted would go up, but very gradually. Lets say for the first 4 months of game time 1 out of every 30 buildings was looted when you went to the tile, after 8 months, 2 out of 30 and so on. That’s not going to make you madly rush around and lead to an early game hoarding frenzy, but just gives a lot of flavour and some more challenge (as now the gun AND the pawn shop was looted).[/quote]
Ok, that actually sounds pretty cool. Implemented like that it could work. I based my last post on the idea of overall spawn reduction in the newly discovered areas, but as long as they are visually marked (like you just said) to have been looted (smashed glass, broken windows, perhaps burnt to the ground) and there is this max limit it would be pretty good. Thats going to be difficult to balance however.

The visual markers would be very important, otherwise its just going to appear like some sort of bug, rather then intended behaviour, especially since the NPCs aren’t back in yet.

Great post. I also feel that the game needs a bit more direction (to get more direction in terms of difficulty was the reason I opened this threat). In the end it often seems to boil down to realism vs gameplay, where in my opinion the later should always be considered first and foremost, as its the gameplay that is the actual fun part. The excessive loot problem you mentioned is one instance where gameplay should have triumphed over realism.

78
Gameplay wise, though, is there a danger of the game becoming "Supermarket Campsite Simulator" at a certain point?

As the game stands now, the game play should never devolve into this; but allowing it to happen would actually also bring very interesting game play implications in the future, while a supermarket could sustain you for a very long time, it is prone to get a lot of attention of fellow survivors and gangs, and as it would be just plain impossible to load it all into a utility van, youll be forced to live inside it or near it and constantly defend it (violently or otherwise!) from others. Loaded supermarkets would also be a very valuable asset once we get survivor towns and the options to actually lead survivor groups, and the idea of having gunfights over them sounds just much more interesting to me than the whole oops you traveled hours and spent your last gallon of gasoline to get to this supermarket and find a lone bag of nachos.

In all honesty, what encourages exploration right now? In a short time you can clear the starting city and just set yourself up in a building indefinitely. Get lucky with a couple food-filled buildings and you might as well just (Q) and start over. The challenge is gone, and exploring more won't give you anything you don't already have unless you REALLY want to make your character a minor deity with all the CBMs and mutations.

Technically the arguably strange strange temple does, but other than that nothing. Still adding “features” that discourage exploring is not the way to go if we ever want to change that.

Do you need any of that stuff? I think a large point of the "less loot" crowd is that there is just ... well .. SO MUCH CRAP everywhere (and more added constantly), that you'll never use it all. Some of which is so crazily overpowered it can instantly throw what difficulty there is in the trash.

Ill like to know what is crazily overpowered, yes its true that I haven’t had a real play through in a while now, but there were never crazy op things you could find on day one.

If you mean food, Ill say that meat was never hard to get, if anything it was easier before, as you got bombarded with more rabbits you could ever hope, and that still happens.

If you mean frying pans, ill tell you that they being that rare in the past was frankly ridiculous.

And what stuff do we not need? The power tools? Yeah we kinda need them for killing triffids in the endgame and we need the welders to make vehicles.

If the true answer is "well this is just a band-aid so I find the game more fun" then maybe all these things should probably just be mods so they don't clutter up the game code and take time away from big picture stuff.

This are my thought about this exactly, the game has already a considerable collection of permanent band aids that were just meant to be fixes until the actual mechanics were implemented, and adding more to the list is just not the correct way to go IMO, we are all rouglelike players right? we can wait until things get tackled and implemented in an appropriate way right?

79

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:78, topic:4434”]

Gameplay wise, though, is there a danger of the game becoming “Supermarket Campsite Simulator” at a certain point?


1) Loaded supermarkets would also be a very valuable asset once we get survivor towns and the options to actually lead survivor groups, and the idea of having gunfights over them sounds just much more interesting to me than the whole oops you traveled hours and spent your last gallon of gasoline to get to this supermarket and find a lone bag of nachos.

2) Ill like to know what is crazily overpowered, yes its true that I haven’t had a real play through in a while now, but there were never crazy op things you could find on day one.

3) This are my thought about this exactly, the game has already a considerable collection of permanent band aids that were just meant to be fixes until the actual mechanics were implemented, and adding more to the list is just not the correct way to go IMO, we are all rouglelike players right? we can wait until things get tackled and implemented in an appropriate way right?[/quote]

[Above edited for ease of response]

  1. I think he was talking about it metaphorically, as in, we are sliding towards a game where you’re basically just making a campsite and loading it full of food/supplies. This is pretty much exactly what I DO NOT want out of this game. Currently, we don’t have the mechanics (and god forbid the backlash when they’re implemented) of things actually going and attacking your campsite (unless they follow you), but when they do - fine, great. At the moment though, you’re just carting needless amounts of stuff back to an area to stockpile it.

  2. Loads of the weapons/armour added recently has been really over powered (chainsaw katana?!). Not saying that these don’t have a place, it’s just that they’re pitifully easy to get parts too (as it’s so easy to loot) so without much of a problem you can grab everything necessary to build whatever you want.

  3. You’re assuming that down the line someone is going to suddenly have time for it over the hundred other things that will crop up. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make sure features are properly implemented and balanced well before putting them in (In fact, that should be done a lot more!), but just that taking a less time consuming route would allow us to see the mechanism in action and then assess it for the ‘big project’ which comes later.

80
1) I think he was talking about it metaphorically, as in, we are sliding towards a game where you're basically just making a campsite and loading it full of food/supplies. This is pretty much exactly what I DO NOT want out of this game. Currently, we don't have the mechanics (and god forbid the backlash when they're implemented) of things actually going and attacking your campsite (unless they follow you), but when they do - fine, great. At the moment though, you're just carting needless amounts of stuff back to an area to stockpile it.

True I was just throwing an Idea of why a fully stocked supermarket is not necessarily boring, I dont think the game should actually have them in its current state. And frankly I don’t get why you think that would be terrible once we get NPCs that are able to handle it as you were the one saying the game was a survivor/craft simulator, what is exactly a survival craft simulator then?, but that discussion clearly belongs to another topic.

2) Loads of the weapons/armour added recently has been really over powered (chainsaw katana?!). Not saying that these don't have a place, it's just that they're pitifully easy to get parts too (as it's so easy to loot) so without much of a problem you can grab everything necessary to build whatever you want.

Frankly, at 5 skill, which is what you could get in (what emm 10 days?) if you play with skill rust and don’t find libraries for the most advanced books (libraries are not really that common) there doesnt seem to be any truly OP weapons, well the fire swords are there, but youll need to get lucky with pawnshops or mansions to get your hands on a sword (both buildings are not very common) one level more however really adds a lot of ludicrous and badly balanced items, but skill 6 is already out of scope of the early game and they should actually be discussed in other places.

You're assuming that down the line someone is going to suddenly have time for it over the hundred other things that will crop up. I'm not saying we shouldn't make sure features are properly implemented and balanced well before putting them in (In fact, that should be done a lot more!), but just that taking a less time consuming route would allow us to see the mechanism in action and then assess it for the 'big project' which comes later.

I see we plainly do not share the same development policy, I rather wait 15 years for someone to actually implement real features into a game than receiving half done test things every month (Yep I come from bay 12 :P)