Item upgrade system vote

Howdy,

I am currently facing a bit of a dilemma with designing the core aspect of how the item upgrade system will work, and I think your feedback here will help me take a decision.

The general idea:

In the new item upgrade system, it is no longer possible to upgrade the level of an item, but it is possible to add any enchantment to elite items - as long as you have the corresponding elite enchanted book.

In EliteMobs, the more enchantments and potion effects an item has, the higher the quality of the item.

The higher the quality of the item, the more enchanted books and the more expensive it becomes to upgrade, and the less likely it will be to succeed in upgrading (there will be some fun mechanics associated to potentially failing upgrades, including surprise boss fights).

The question:

In the original design of the enchantment system I had planned, there was also an item called an elite enchantment ticket. These tickets would be required to upgrade items, and the higher the quality of the item the more tickets would be required to try to upgrade said item.

Please note that enchantment books and elite enchantment tickets will be the only unbound items in EliteMobs. They are intentionally designed to promote trade and cooperation among players.

To try to condense this into a digestible format, let's talk about the advantages and disadvantages of such a system.

The advantages:

+ it can be used as a limiting resource for people who find a really good farm for, say, sharpness and are just trying to max sharpness out, forcing them to farm more than just one spot for goods

+ it can be a great generic reward to give out for things like quests and arenas

+ it can even be tied to various systems in your servers as a general reward for EliteMobs that would always be appreciated to some degree

+ it can promote trade and cooperation among players

The disadvantages:

- it makes the enchantment system considerably more complex, quite possibly too complex for a lot of people to bother with it (or understand it in the case of younger and foreign audiences)

- it might make enchanting items too time consuming / expensive to be worth it if not carefully balanced

- enchanting items already has a scaling price (total amount of enchantments ^ 3) for enchanting items which guarantees that spamming enchantment attempts will not be economically viable, partially making this a redundant system (although elite coins aren't "rare", you would just need a lot of them)

- it will require a very careful consideration of where we drop these, and will force me to rebalance all the loot tables for nearly every piece of content ever released to make sure there is an appropriate amount of loot in it

- since not every server has every single last piece of dungeon content, and since there are still levels which are not covered by official content released by us, there will be some significant level gaps where there will be no adequate way of handing these tickets out

For those still confused as to how this works, think about how vanilla Minecraft handles enchanting items. In Minecraft, you have the enchantment book (in our case the elite enchantment book, approximately) and lapis lazuli powering the enchanting table (in our case the elite enchantment tickets).

Ultimately the question is if the added complexity of having to explain how the lapis lazuli equivalent in EliteMobs is worth having in the system, or if it's so superficial and potentially hard to explain that it would be best to skip out on it.

Note: I am posting this as a poll, and I will seriously take the result of the poll into account, but it will just be a part of what I consider for the end result! I will also carefully take anything you reply with into account, and I will be talking to the usual suspects that help me work on EliteMobs to get some feedback from them.

Obviously we will also be playtesting the end result, and may adjust things based on the outcome.

Right now I am exactly 50/50 split on implementing the tickets, so your feedback and insights would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, the update is being worked on very smoothly, you might be able to see the first versions of this as early as next week!

- MagmaGuy