📢 Item Level Requirements
The game system design
💫 Core game mechanics
When adopting this step-by-step growth model, the most likely downside would be the boredom from the repeated play pattern. To overcome this, the number and scope of options for the equipment recipe are designed to be determined probabilistically. The combination of options and stats allows players to experience various item combinations. The game is designed for players to clear higher-level stages or take advantageous positions in additional content such as arenas as they become stronger with better items.
🤔 Problem
With various system attempts and insufficient content updates at the beginning of the game launch, there was delay in updating the item wearing level feature (which was on the roadmap from the beginning). We came to realize that the Nine Chronicle’s growth experience may be becoming very different from its initial intended design.
Due to the constantly increasing number of high-spec equipments in the shop, items in the early and mid-term stages failed to form an appropriate market price and faced a steep decline in value. In addition, users who experienced item value depreciation did not continue farming to overcome stages with a higher difficulty in the early and mid-stage stages. With item prices falling quickly and there being no limits to item wearing level, users quickly moved on to purchasing equipment of higher level set at a lower price than the original value. As a result, the volume of early and mid-term items traded is rapidly decreasing.
The transactions highly concentrated around high level equipments lowered chances of NCG earning for new users and slowed their growth tremendously. Also, the top users who should be selling equipment to the new users were not providing enough ****market volatility which was slowing the growth rate of the entire users.
In short: the current system does not work. The initial system designed to provide players with sufficient experience through the production and reinforcement of items that unlocks quickly in the beginning and gets difficult as they go after the World 3, is becoming overly difficult. The value of items gradually declined by the increasing number of top-notch items has made it easy to clear most of the content through the investment of tiny fraction of NCG. Most of the equipments are too low in value, which is why users’ effort to manufacture and upgrade them may feel wasted.
✨ To make experiences in every stages worthwhile
This situation is also a concern for updating the Crystal system to be added later this year. It is an obstacle to determining the various compensation systems linked to additional contents, such as adoption of regular Arena season and World Boss system.
We do not assume that these obstacles will be solved overnight by the item-wearing level limit system alone. However, we expect item wearing level limit system will help the adoption of regular Arena seasons that will provide seasonal goals for users in the future. In addition, it will supplement the World Boss system, which aims to set equipment to prepare for various patterns horizontally as well as the existing vertical stat growth.
Through the update,
- 🛒 Players will be able to enjoy the process of contemplating items that can be produced and purchased at shops and choosing the options of growth through items that can be used.
- 💰 Diversified strategies for each stage will now be available, which is an upgrade from the past where one high-spec solves it all. This will help establish a pattern of reselling well-used equipment at the shop and re-acquiring the funds for the next stage of equipment purchase.
- 💪 As a result, players will have a lower barrier for growth in each stages.
🔮 Item Balancing Design
✔ Items that can be created in current and next stage can be worn.
Initially, to maximize the game experience based on item creation, each item was designed with a very tight wearing level section.
However, under such design, purchase through the shop will be seldom needed. This is why we decided items that are one level higher than those currently available should also be worn.
✔ You are given more various choices for growth between item creating, upgrading, and buying.
The wearing level was set to some extent through grouping and simplification so that the life of each item is not too short.
Of course, players can still get unsatisfactory results or face difficulties getting desired options from production alone. In this case, you can instead consider purchasing items at the shop.
All changes can be previewed before the update at the PreviewNet, which will soon be shared on Discord.
[Behind Story] The remaining traces
Of course, even with the update, the system will not be perfect. In Nine Chronicles, there is an equipment item made with a special recipe called ‘Mimir.’ There is a history of several changes in the production recipe in the first few months from v100023 when ‘Mimisbrunnr’ was first updated. For this reason, various numbers of Mimir items exist in the world of the Nine Chronicles, making it difficult to set special check standards at the moment.
If it was a traditional server-based game, it would have been possible to modify past items or ban the usage of items when changing the production-related system, but at Nine Chronicles, the history built with players cannot be arbitrarily changed by the team. It is systematically impossible.
We have considered various ways to resolve this problem and have concluded as following. We will check the options of the existing ‘Mimisbrunnr’ items and give them the same standard of wearing level as other items as much as possible, but a few items that does not fit in this standard, the general-grade items with the same ID, will be limited of wearing.
We would appreciate it if you could take this part as an event that happened due to completely decentralized nature of the game, the history of which cannot be modified by a central party. As you explore the shop, you might see items with low wearing levels with high specifications.
