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Salvage: the concept is simple really, I think we all get the basics but let's take that a step further. Salvage in MWO should give you a chance to acquire parts of mechs but only mechs you killed, or assisted in killing.Sort of a keep what you kill kinda deal, you could even go one more step and make it so that destroyed parts of a mech never drop(which would make cores quite hard to come by) Weapon systems of salvaged mechs would always be ruined or broken down into salvagable parts as well. For example, a salvaged gauss rifle might only give you the rifling or the electromagnets, or some kind of charge pack for where it stores it's charge. Or LRMs would be broken down to tubes/casing/targeting system as an example.
Now you're probably wondering why parts and why so many?
Because that enables crafting. You see salvage wouldn't work in MWO as it has in previous games because salvaging a whole mech would create all sorts of problems both economic and practical especially once you consider mechbay space. But breaking things down into parts allows for collection/building and balancing out the crafting process against simply buying something from the shop. This also gives people something else to do besides farm c-bills.In my opinion MWO desperately needs more content....loot is just one avenue to explore.
So let's talk about how crafting would work. We'd be looking at probably buying a blueprint of somesort to begin with to layout the framework for a mech/weapon and also so we know what parts and how many we need to build it. Then it'd be a matter of salvaging parts from the battlefield till you have what you need. So if you want to build a Atlas, you need to go kill atlas users till you get a full set of atlas parts, but wait what about variants? Well, parts would ome based on the variant you killed. So kill an Atlas D get atlas D parts, kill an atlas S get atlas S parts. This means it'd be harder to build IS mechs than Clan ones because clan omnimechs can use ANY pods for their parts. Course this also means commonly used mechs will be rather easily crafted but since they're commonly used....most people probably have them anyway and I doubt that'd be a problem. Everything up to champion mechs should be craftable via salvaging hero mechs i feel are not something that should be buildable via salvage as they're akin to 'Uniques'.
There's some wiggle room to play with crafting to create slight variations of weapons or introduce some of the weapons that were left out or experimental (for example heavy lasers,Light gauss, light AC/2,AC/5 or long tom to name a few) as weapons that are craftable from parts of other weapons but not buyable in the shop. To reflect the fact these weapons though available weren't widely available. Weapons being so common and easily affordable the route of making some crafting exclusive weapons is a appealling way to go since parts are likely to be shared between weapons, obviously a lrm 5 isn't going to have different parts from a lrm20 and likewise perhaps some of the same components could be used for other missile systems (Like Mrm's)
But I'm sure someone thought "But what's to stop people from grouping and farming their pals to craft things?" Well simple answer is only allow salvaging in matches where tier ranking applies and not in private matches. This means CW wouldn't allow for salvage, but rather quick play matches would forcing people to play properly if they want their loot.
This also opens up contests/lootbag events to give out parts/blueprints for desirable mechs instead of the currently mostly useless array of items in event loot and more importantly creates a legitimate possibility of a trade market when some items are only available in limited quantities or are hard to come by trade becomes popular and trade is usually beneficial to games. However the current state of the game requires some reworking of the chat system before we can get into a trade market. I'd rather we had some form of person to person trade rather than an AH simply because Auction houses tend to get exploited.
Now I know I didn't think of everything and there's probably some flaw somewhere I didn't think of but I feel like this system could work and really help flesh out MWO a bit.
Edited by Dekallis, 24 March 2016 - 09:11 AM.
