Qi to levels to belt
Making two types of items, some tradable, and some non-tradable.
-Non-Tradable items: Regular items that are currently in shop.
-Tradable items: The new type of items that I’ll call Rare Items.
What is a Rare Item? Items you can only buy for a limited amount of time from shop, afterwards only from the market, from other players.
So the shop would be made of two sections
1) Regular items for new players, always available to buy for everyone. (Can only sell back to shop)
2) Rare monthly items that are going to be replaced with new rare items every month.
The current problem is that the staff can’t make items that fast. Because 3D items are too hard to make and not many people are skilled in that area, and there aren’t enough colors to constantly make new joint colors and gradients. That’s why we need Static Body Textures
What is a static body texture? It is the same as a regular body texture, but it comes with the artwork and you cannot replace the artwork.
Replace (custom body textures), with (static body textures). Before you freak out, there can still be ways to get your artwork on your tori.
Step 1) Administrators warn players to back up the artwork that they have stored only on their items. Then remove all body and joint textures from circulation and replace with the amount of TC they are worth.
Step 2) afterwards there can be four ways new body textures are put into circulation
1. Texture set made by Art Squad (staff position)
2. Texture set made by community artist who won best texture of the month event.
3. Texture set made by community artists who pay a ridiculous price for their set to be unique items transferred to their account. (If approved by staff)
4. Texture set made by community artists who pay a reasonable price for their set to be sold in shop. (If approved by staff)
Notes: Head textures can be the only custom textures that stay the way they are, to ease the community into the new system. And I think all sets should be 512, but prices should vary depending on art itself. It just makes Toribash look better.
How does all this help? 1. New player's items won't be affected by the market. 2. Putting new items in the shop constantly, is going to be taking more TC out of circulation
Limited time Items: (items that go away after time)
-No QI limited time item: Somebody with less than 10k QI could buy a pure force that will last 1 month, and then deletes itself.
-Cheap, limited time items: Anyone can buy a 512x512 head texture for %50 of the price, but it lasts only 1 month.
-Cheaper, limited time items: Anyone can buy a 512x512 head texture, for %10 of the price, but it only lasts 2 days.
Reserve currency: We do have something similar called ST, but that's not good enough.
For example we can have ToriCredits and ToriGolds.
TC: Earned by playing, can use to buy from shop or from market (the way it currently is)
TG: Bought or got from boosters, can only use to buy from shop.
We should be able to buy TG with TC or USD. But we shouldn't be able to buy TC with USD or TG.
How does this help?
This way any bought TG must be converted into Items before being put into circulation
This way there will be a lot of items and not enough TC, therefore the market price will stay low and there will still be a reason to buy credits from shop (TG)
-Pay TC for QI
I know the biggest money makers are usually the more experienced players, and we all know how hard it gets to rank up when you're a 10th dan+. So you should sell Qi to them. But with current system, Qi will be either too cheap for high belt players, or too expensive for beginners. That's why the experience system needs to change a bit. It should work a bit more like Call of Duty's, count by levels and change rank (belt) every few levels.
For example:
Qi to levels to belt
How does this help?
Because that way there's enough improvement to keep the player interested, and you're also extending the time it takes to jump rank. And you want that because if you're selling QI for TC, there should be a lot more ranks. And the top players will spend all their TC that's just lying around, on QI.
Quick suggestion related to Qi: the game should make leveling up a lot more exciting. Show it on the screen and tell the player that they leveled up. Or better yet, make a bot say it on the server chat so everybody sees that they leveled up.
First of all, non-tradeable items were launched and tried several times, and that didn't go well since noone wanted to get stuck with items that they wouldn't be able to resell later.
Then, when you're talking about rare items, you mention "regular items for new players (...)", which aren't rare at all, they fall under the non-tradeable section.
Having in mind the idea that marketing is one of the best things this community has (since despite the complaints it's been working good for way more than a decade), killing the free market sounds really harmful for the community and lots of players would leave.
Later, "monthly" items as you said, are pretty difficult to be pulled off constantly; here's where your static body textures idea comes, which sounds... like a bad idea:
- Noone wants their textures removed, and then being sold to them for more money.
- Even if they were, who will decide which textures are going to be sold at the shop?
Remember that there're a lot of texture sets, even incomplete texture sets that are being used and/or owned by lots of players. Are you ready to browse 20+ pages of texture sets before finding the one you "possibly like", instead using the one you love and which is unique?
- I will talk for myself in this sentence and say that I doubt that my set and their 3 recolors would be chosen, but hell I would love to keep them without paying any cent, because I already own them.
- There are rare and expensive sets in lower quality than 512x, would you ignore them too?
- Lots of marketeers have been investing for a while in textures, and even make money out of that. That would leave them out of the loop.
- Noone wants to have the same texture as others, the freedom to have a unique set is one of the most valuable things in tb. That suggestion will favor people with lots of tc only, which are a small portion of the playerbase, who would be able to pay for uniqueness (+ 12 good artists/year considering the texture of the month thing).
-The other two items, I highly doubt people would buy that, even less if combined with your previous itemized art idea.
How are you suposed to convert TG -> TC if you can't sell stuff you bought from the shop (conflicts with your previous suggestion).
Imho it will add more problems (creating a whole new currency which isn't that easy to do, keep their prices up2date, watch out for bugs, etc) than the ones it will potentially solve (TC in circulation).