Aether Forge & Crystal Library [New Glamour Log (stores almost all) & Token System]

[Shougun]

tl;dr- A new system (or two depending on how you look at it) that allows you some control over your received items past and future and can be used for content outside of what is suggested here, simultaneously the tools from that system will be used to create a lower memory cost glamour log which will allow us to have nearly every content set in the game logged into our glamour book (thousands of items saved vs struggling at 200).

Basic that both systems will share:

• Every item that is part of the Aether Forge and Library system can be converted into a core/sort of materia of said content. For example primal weapons from ifrit hard mode would be ifrit aether cores. Items from Brayflox would be Brayflox cores. Can fiddle to the name like aether cores, materia, extra whatever flavor the lore team is going for.
  
• There are multiple ways to add customization (control for SE) to these cores, one of the lowest memory consuming options would be just using NQ / HQ (no/high quality). Such that for example hard mode primal is NQ and extreme is HQ, and this even adds an interesting level of being able to downgrade your cores via a system already in the game. Of course other methods could be separating the left side core from the right into different items, but ideally this sort of thing is kept minimal. Or using HQ/NQ inside the content piece itself, like all weapons from Brayflox are HQ while all other gear is NQ. These distinctions might change depending on area, like Satasha easy mode is just one type of core all together (no reason to be complex there) while Rakshasa (crafting gear) has weapon core, accessory core, and armor core.
  
• These cores may stack.
  
• They may be traded to NPCs in in place of items themselves (some normalization of reward may happen here), but in this way you could convert gear as you get it farming dungeons with your squadron and turn in a stack of 30 Stone Vigil cores (rather than going to the GC member every dungeon run). This means the system is helpful even if you don't care about the two features down below (it saves inventory space). A longer thought may be needed for crafting gear into GC reward though, either a lower reward (to promote creating the actual item rather than items related to it) or not allowing crafted gear to be traded for seals in their core form (if it's not an issue then great, more ease on our life, if it's an issue can lower reward or just prevent crafting gear being pawned off in core format and just maintain the normal way as currently).

Here we're using storage space that's already been allotted for the game, so far we've only really decreased memory transfer (10 different items may be stacked as one stack of 10 now).

Crystal Core Library:

The Core Library (name up for change, I don't care lol) will allow you to collect glamour across most of the game without costing SE loads of memory space. A particular reason this idea was born was because SE in FFXI has a storage system similar to this basic design, which means the concept is something they're familiar with and possibly comfortable achieving (making it more likely a thing that could happen).

For appearance I imagine it being anything from a sleek menu to an actual area like the End of Time in Chrono Trigger, a set piece would be going off a long desire of mine that Hydalen provides us succor and service within her own area (like I'd love an instance housing area with Wildstar inspirations, maybe called the Crystal Hearth/Bosom). So here the "end of time" (Crystal Library/Forge) could be crystal themed (and be nostalgia to some of our earlier crystal cutscenes, and FF themes as a whole).

Edit: Appearance could also something to do with the crystal tower via the Crystal Exarch, now that we've someone to help connect us with the tower and I'm sure some people would love an excuse to work more closely with them lol .

Simply for the mechanic:

• Each area (like dungeon, Brayflox, or crafting group, Rakshasa) in the UI will show the items made available by charging that portion of the library, like a sort of dungeon item guide. It will also tell you the cost to charge that portion of the crystal library (areas can be hidden until unlocked if SE wants to keep them secret).
• You may try on gear from here even if you don't own it.
• Spending your corresponding aether cores will unlock that whole area, which means SE will store 1 variable for an entire zone (do you have Brayflox unlocked? Yes? Okay all of brayflox gear is for you to glamour).
• SE will not worry to increase generic glamour space (the 200 slots we have now), but these unorganized slots can be used for gear that doesn't fit into a grouping (like some armor is just one off).
• Gear that relies on achievements or like concepts that unlock in the calamity salvage for repurchase will be shown here in an achievement section.
• This page isn't for setting up glamour plates, even though it may be helpful, there will be a more powerful search/filter system (like what we have now.. but with more powerful filters).
• IMPORTANT: The core/materia concept (where items from an area stack and become easier to handle) is optional but I believe adds QoL and also adds a feature to other content if used.

For example if the Yellow dungeon had 20 equipment items, 15 of which are easy to get and 5 hard. Now SE can see this and decide okay "I want the player to get 20 NQ Yellow Cores and 10 HQ Yellow Cores". I inflated the price from 1:1 just to show that because its easier to gather any item (it's less specific) that they could increase the cost and still not be as stressful as failing to get that one specific item over and over. The numbers are just for example, not suggesting those be the exact ratios from item per content needed to unlock.

Left over cores can be used in the idea below, trading to GC, and even used in things like relic quests and crafting.

What this does is give players a sort of catalog of content and allow players to get a tease of what they might want to aim for and then give them the objective they need to get it. It also allows them to do so in a less stressful way, meaning rather than trying to get that one jacket and just getting RNG'd (with no hope) you can try for it via RNG and collect items in general to get it later if RNG doesn't let up. It is similar to a system they've implemented in the past and is lower memory than storing each item individually. It also has a side concept benefit I'd like to detail below.



Aether Forge:

The forge is the new sort of control your fate token system and the name is up for change.

However the mechanics are fairly straight forward:

• When you've unlocked a library area you can now spend aether cores of that type to purchase an item specifically.
• The above rule can be modified on circumstance, for example perhaps you could purchase items while it's not unlocked in the library but it costs more (instead of 1 core for 1 item it's 3 cores).
• These tokens may be used for content the dungeon doesn't normally drop, like exchanging them for a special reward, or of course for rare content like the primal mounts (99 cores = mount).

For example, the Purple Primal has 10 weapons and 5 accessories and requires 15 NQ cores and 5 HQ cores to unlock the library. Now that the library is unlocked (meaning you can glamour every item from there), you can spend 1:1 cores to exchange any item you didn't want with one you did want. Meaning you could reliably (farm) gear up from dungeon content for new jobs SE releases, after you charge the library at least. Meanwhile if the area wasn't unlocked yet you might spend 3 cores (exchange three items for one).

This has a side effect that more people might play tanks because they get their own loot pool, which they can use to convert into orbs. That's a huge benefit.

Although that's true for other roles (they just share rolls sometimes) - In essence you can gear up any job with any other job, play tank earn damage dealer gear fairly reliably.



Side stuff:

• As mentioned you can use these cores for other content too, like crafting items or relic progress.
  
• Could even make it so these items have an ilvl associated with them and you may socket them into gear to boost the average ilvl of the gear (one ilvl boosting materia per item). So you might take your Rakshasa ilvl 390 gear and give it some omega cores so that it's now 400, or something like that.
  
• Maybe the next relic could be a quest that's easy to start (very low barrier to entry) but the ilvl of the cores it eats will change how fast it grows (such that casual players can slowly get a strong relic while skilled players challenging harder content could be feeding their relic stuff that causes greater leaps in growth).
  
• These may even be the start of an affix system, something like 5x Bahamut cores craft into a special type of materia that adds mp regen +1 (1 of these unique aether cores per item). There is some balance concerns when you get a bunch of neat (imo) affix like "dragoon dragon fire jump resets after a critical weapon skill", so they may have to be a bit careful but there is benefit in that because these are materia they can move from gear to gear rather than it being stuck to that gear and thus being clearly better than any other gear in it's group.
  
• For consideration of crafters and other reasons I think the cores shouldn't be trade-able on the market BUT their byproducts could be. For example you take 5 Bahamut cores to make mp +1 materia, which can be traded. You can't sell Rakshasa cores on the market board but you can buy Rakshasa gear on the marketboard and convert that.
  
• Library costs and unlocks can be staged/controlled if it needs to be done, for example fresh content might have an elevated cost but decrease over time, similarly the cost to use the forge could follow this. Such that SE has the control of how their content disperses how they feel is best for the game's health (I'm not saying they need to do this, but they can if they're like "yeah that's great for old content but I don't want new content to have that or be as cheap yet").

Besides allowing us to store almost all items in the game into a glamour log (that come in groups, which most do), and allowing us some control over RNG without removing RNG or changing old systems (gear still drops as it drops, the excitement of randomness is still there - but there is a "worse case scenario" that also happens to come with a reward), the two systems would encourage doing a lot of the old content again, give SE a few more tools in other content (relics, crafting), and also could arguably be a nice support to the crafting systems.

I believe crafting would be supported because old crafting groups (wootz armor for example) can be gathered up now for glamour unlocks but also because you'd have to buy a few more pieces than you would otherwise (say if there is 5 nq wootz & 5 hq wootz, you'd need 10 nq + 5 hq cores to unlock the wootz glamour group- this means more market interest to crafters). Keeping in mind if you refuse to buy more you can just store them in the limited slotted system (0/200- but it'll take up those slots, and SE wont be pressured or much interested increasing that now).

If for whatever reason the end game boss is the mother crystal then I believe at that point it could be argued we're so strong we've created our own pocket of aetherial energy. I imagine that's like last expansion to the game sort of deal though, at that point could even leave the game at cliff hanger that we're the next Hydaelen and new heroes will have to come together to stop us lol. I just say that as in there is wiggle room with the whole "this is a room she gave us thing", could be a place she created that we now power ourselves and no longer relies on her (if she dies or becomes a baddy).

"What if we just had the system like /insert MMO here/ that stores each and every piece of gear instead of having to gather many to unlock it, or whatever this is?"
Yeah that'd be cool, I was thinking of a system that requires less memory though. Since they said it's really hard to increase from the 200 they're at, so.. getting the multi-thousand slots that WoW has seems like.. Not going to happen. lol. So yes that'd be cool and I wouldn't be sad about that, but I was trying to suggest something that they're both familiar with, work in essence similarly, and could give us some features out of it too.

"Randomness is good, don't try to remove it"
Wasn't, in fact with this system I encourage them to continue to RNG drop stuff. However there would now be a worst case "if you don't get it in 50 attempts you'll be able to get it anyways".

"I hate tokens, don't make everything a token."
Well the concept of tokens wont be going anywhere (with our without this), but the good news is that I want the system to drop /items/ and if you happen to hate the dropped item then you can make it a token (it's not a token first). Some content may drop a token and an item (primals perhaps for example, where brayflox drops no tokens and only gear), but for the most part I don't want the new face of all rewards to be a token (the face should still be items, that become tokens if you have no use of the item).

"How does this help with memory? What was that FFXI thing?"
In FFXI you could store sets of gear like "silver armor", sort of like our armoire but it was a set of related gear. These ideas help with memory because it utilizes mostly a system we already have (inventory) and when it does go into new memory it's at an accelerated value (instead of the 20 items from Brayflox being stored individually it stores them as 1 single variable, do that multiple times and now instead of looking at 1,000 variables you're looking at ~50 which means sending less info and storing less info).

[Re]tl;dr- you now have two systems in the game one that lets you easily collect items into a few slots (rather than many) and will help you unlock entire dungeons worth of glamour (in the end storing thousands of items in significantly fewer variables), and another system that now adds ability for new content, gearing up on other jobs (not most efficient but still valid now), and worst case scenario control (if you're unlucky getting that one item, now you know there is a safety net).