Durability, and why It's in DIRE NEED of a rework in Gaming!

Wicked Feedback
1

Okay. Durability in gaming, yes, it’s been there for a long time. We can do better. Moon Studio could change durability as we know it, I know they can! Let’s start from the beginning.

  1. Durability for the sake of durability is not good game design. We should ask the question; How do I make a durability system that players WANT to take advantage of and help improve there game play and player growth?

Now I’m not a game developer, but I have been playing games like, forever. I’ve only ever seen durability done right 1 single time in my life, and I can’t even remember the game, but I remember the durability system, and how awesome it was, I’m not saying ‘Steal this System!’ but I’ll explain how a ‘Fun’ durability system might look in my eyes.

We open on a player who now has low durability, using his Runes and getting hit a lot has lowered his total durability, Instead of using the Repair Rune, or Blacksmith to repair his equipment, we see a smile creep across there face as he thinks about the repair bench in his house he can use to try to upgrade his gear while at the same time repairing it. Ofc, there would be limits, some invisible hard caps on how he can improve this item or items. So, for the sake of this scenario, Let’s say the player has a level 2 repair bench, and at level two, they have a slight chance to slightly improve the item’s non enchantment qualities, for example the lower the durability, the higher chance he might lower the item’s weight, or stamina cost, damage, focus gain on hit, ect. I would say there would be an invisible cap to this, say, each item could only be ‘enhanced’ by a system like this randomly a set number of times, generated when the item is spawned, as a hidden stat. So now, there happy there durability is low, excited for the chance to get a critical success repairing there item! Now we move to a tier 3 repair bench, let’s say this one is an Enchanted repair bench, now you may re-roll an enchantment value on a successful repair attempt. This ofc is an example, I don’t think the game needs to add this to a repair mechanic, but as you can see, you can start to run with the idea of having repairing being a really engaging game play mechanic the player looks forward to using. This follows the ‘All Roads Lead to Rome’ approach of game play design, where the player can gain power even when they are being punished by other mechanics, so for a change like this, you would need to let the player’s durability drop from more things, getting hit, using Runes, attacking with power attacks, ect. Just because repair has only ever been done right in a hand full of games, doesn’t mean that No Rest for the Wicked Can’t be in that handful. Moon studio is fantastic at game play design, I think if you really thought about it for a day or so, you guys could easily break new ground in a durability system!

Thank you for your time! Love the game!

2

Durability is in the game as a death penalty and a gold sink. There are other ways to do that but that’s what they decided on. Your idea seems fine when you only account for durabilty loss on use (gold sink) but not on death (death penalty).

In your example, the idea behind that upgrade system is actually not about the durability but usage of a weapon. A “weapon proficiency” with RNG. You could track that with a different stat that only increases with attacks or kills and is based on damage dealt or exp gained. This runs the risk of making it harder to switch to a new weapon that dropped (the upgrade can’t be too good or too hard to get).

The main problem with tying upgrades/progression to durability is that players will optimize the fun out of any system. Currently durability is mainly tied to death. The highest/fastest durability loss is on death. If you want to roll for a “repair upgrade”, go and fall to death a couple times. This is way less fun than going back to town for repairs every now and then after actually playing the game.

One thing that came to my mind when you talked about reparing as late as possible is maximum durability. Some games reduce the max durability with every repair, to limit the time you can use an item before replacing it. I think this could be somewhat reversed:
Repairing an item yourself (not at an NPC) could add additional durability over the maximum (something I’ve seen in several games), but base the increase on the amount repaired. While this also has a small risk of someone chain-falling of a cliff to prepare for a longer play session, the benefit of that is much smaller and actually fighting monsters is more efficient. To balance the benefit, repairing yourself could use a rarer resource than gold or not be instant…

3

I would make it to where, falling deaths, and self inflicted deaths don’t lower durability.

also having the system only linked to say, 3 attempts or something is not too much of a down side. the improvements to the item would be very minor, say 1 to 2 points at most.

the main problem, paying at most 2 silver to repair is practically nothing at all at lv30. it’s basically free. As it is, I don’t see a reason why durability is currently in the game, players got it nerfed on day one, and I actually really liked it how it was. It forced me to try other items out, and I never would have learned that I loved the wooden sword without how it was on day 1.

4

Self inflicted deaths should carry the penalty aswell.

Currently people are using Death as a teleport.

5

I mean, if someone really wants to die spam for an hour strait just to try and get 1 of 3 critical repairs on an item, I say let them, it’s nothing too big of a deal. it’s mainly a way to incentivize the player to look forward to repairing there equipment instead of dreading it.

6

I agree that the cost of repair was nerfed too much. Death is so cheap, any benefit you can get from it will be abused.
In most games with durability loss on death, it’s not the only death penalty but instead just an additional gold sink. If dieing has a significant downside outside of durability loss, it opens up a lot of design space around durability.

Removing durability loss from falling/drowning won’t help much. You could also just AFK next to a mob to get the same result. We need a different death penalty before anything else can be done to durability.