re-evaluating recurring costs

[OverthinkingThis]

------

The Problem

------

 

One of the primary reasons I have a hard time staying interested in Avorion is the late game costs. They are by no means unmanageable but the simple fact that I lose a large (I like playing big ships) amount of money at set intervals never lets me relax. It's that same sense of forced efficiency that makes people play to their first win of the day or use up all of their bonus experience in MMO's, except significantly worse because it's fighting to not lose something as opposed to fighting to gain a bonus. Any time not making money feels wasted.

 

------

The idea

------

 

Boiled down, the easiest thing to do is to reverse the trend. Stop making the player *lose* money. Don't get me wrong, maintenance costs are necessary to prevent afk progress among other things, but there is a way to introduce maintenence costs without putting a constant countdown over a player's head.

 

Income garnishing.

 

What I mean by this is to introduce a modifier to money earned. For example, say this modifier is 10%, that means that a player would only earn 90% of the listed amount of money for any income source, where the 10% would thematically be going to maintenance costs.

 

Going one step further if you keep the current interval cost of ship/crew/stations, you can dynamically alter this modifier depending on if they hit this cost or not. If they don't you increase the garnish modifier until they do hit the cost threshold and if they do hit it you can decrease the modifier.

 

Here's an example scenario:

 

Player A has a cost of 1000 and a garnish modifier of 5%.

He makes 100, which puts 5 towards cost.

5<1000 so his modifier goes up. Let's say to 15%.

He makes 10000 next interval so 1500 goes towards costs.

1500>1000 so his modifier goes down.

 

Naturally you would need a maximum garnish modifier to prevent people from being completely locked out of profit but you could make it decently high (80% or so) and significantly punish people who don't keep up with their costs. By the same token you can also use this to significantly reward people who build efficient, cost-effective ships by giving them a much higher rate of income(<5% garnish).

 

This system still incentivizes a player to stay in the game and earn consistent income to keep or improve their current modifier but doesn't put the pressure of "how long will my current money last?" on the player every time they log in. Not to mention it also spreads sudden cost increases over a longer period of time rather than instantaneously. A major ship upgrade will just increase the garnish modifier over a few months as opposed to forcing you to pay several times more money immediately.