18 minutes ago, RipClaw said:In my case, that would be to speed up the progress for looting and what the trader is selling. I did a T5 infestation quest in the pine forest this morning and found a Q2 Pump Shotgun but I can already craft a Q5 Auto Shotgun. My lootstage and traderstage is way behind my crafting skills.
How'd you manage that? Crafting is far slower than game progression for me. At least after the first week or so. But I also go up in gamestage very quickly. Crafting definitely doesn't come close to keeping up for me. Loot is okay even with the nerf to looting, though it can take a while to find things at times but I'm fine with that. Quest rewards are too fast. Trader inventory just varies so greatly that I can't even really say if it's too fast or slow. By the time am maxed out on crafting and have a high gamestage, I'm still only seeing Q3-4 items for sale with only a rare Q5. I'm not even sure that I've seen a Q6 yet from the trader. Not that I'd buy those in most cases but I still look. In the early game, the trader inventory is too high, though. It seems like it starts too high and then progresses too slowly so you reach a point where it's even and then instead of being too much it becomes too little.
The biggest problem with trying to balance for game progression is that game progression varies greatly depending on what you do. If you quest constantly, it'll go up far faster than if you almost never quest, for example. Any progression method that isn't tied to game progression (or at least your level) is going to be unbalanced no matter how much they try to balance it. It'll be balanced for some people who play in a way that allows it to be balanced but not for people who play in other ways. If you balance it to align with a player who does 5 quests a day, it'll be way too fast for the player who does 1 quest a week and too slow for the MP group that does 10 quests a day. For the progression types tied to gamestage (or at least your level), those will at least have a chance to be balanced.
Let's say you want to have everything align with your crafting speed. Sounds great. But then you have people who want to craft and those who don't or rarely do so. Not being able to progress well because you're not crafting (learning to craft) at a fast rate isn't balanced. Not to mention that it creates even more problems for MP groups who would all want to read every magazine just to get their progression up for things like looting and questing.
Things like that are just not easy to work around unless every progression method is tied to the same things. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to tie different progression styles to different things in the game to provide variety... just that it is very hard to get a true balance that way. All you can really hope for is "good enough." Still, as far as I'm concerned, these different progression methods don't have to be perfectly balanced anyhow. As long as none are too far off from the others, I don't mind if one way is faster than the others or slower than the others.