Decay

[Raven0238]

Assuming there will be crafters in the game needing to make a lively hood, how do you think decay should be implemented in STO, or do you think it has no place here?? How much decay if any? Yea /discuss

[llamabread]

Yes, decay is a necessary way to take items out of the game, and force players to continue to acquire new items, giving crafters a role in the game world. If there is a player driven economy, then decay is a must.

[Glavius]

Crater classes make sense, over time things do stop functioning. Decay should be a 2 stage event... (for ease of use I'm going to use the term durability). Personally I'd brake crater into multiple classes Engineer (your basic on ship repair class, again I'm assuming multiple players on a ship), Specialist (explained later), and some Fabrication class.

a new item would have 100/100 durability - over time it'd fall to 0/100 durability and go offline but be repairable (hopefully through some kind of engineering skill) and it would lose from its maximum. So it'd repair to 75/75 durability and so an and so forth. This way items when bought do last a long time but over time they will require replacement.

The Specialist should work a bit like an enchanter in WoW - take an item and modify it for better output (be it damage or whatever).

The Fabrication class would literally build new items there skill level would determine the quality of the item built. You could even make any of these classes more diverse by (example) having players allocate skills into building better phasers (they'd produce a different class of phaser than someone with just a generalized fabrication skill).

Truthfully there's so much you could do as a crafter class in ST:O that you can go so many directions.

[PhantomPhoton]

Personally I hate item decay. Now bringing up the example of SWG for the 8042nd time :p ...
They made "repair" kits, however everytime you repaired an item it lost a significant chunk of maximum durability, on the neighborhood of 1/5 or more if I remember correctly. This system was just too harsh.
Now one of the problems is they had some stupidly powerful uber-loot that made such things a necessity toward the end.
What I envision is a game where items may get beat up and damaged from rough use, and phasers and tri-corders will need to be recharged every so often, but outright decay fir common use isn't necessary for pretty much all of your every day items. A big part of maintaining this will be a very dymanic crafting system so that there will never be a best for everything, stuff will have to be tweaked, modded and hacked by engineers to suit the task at hand. No uber-loot that gives a definite advantage to one player in game mechanics over another... just like in Guildwars. Items used in rough ways like getting glanced in combat or in ways other than their original design... taking apart a power cell from one device and jerry rigging it to another should be the only time when things loose durability.

In the end it will likely matter a lot more based on how the economy is set up. We really don't know right now.