Hi.

Implants are important purchases, and make a complete difference in your character's ability to perform. However, they're not exactly easy to acquire for a new player.. which puts them in this weird cycle of being too gimped to do much, more than likely losing interest in the game and moving on. I've been looking over implant related things lately, and I did some data gathering/crunching. Unless there's something unforeseen, these are mostly quality of life changes. I'm not looking to make the game easier at all, but pointless difficulties are something AO has to address.

Few assumptions I had:

1) The buyer was the most frugal shopper imaginable, only looking at clusters that met the minimum requirements necessary for the implant they were building (86% of QL for Shiny, 84% of QL for Bright, 82% of QL for Faded).

2) A full set of implants was being made/bought, and every single cluster spot was being used (this is never true in practice, but for the sake of the argument.. meh).

Data here: http://i.imgur.com/OmWDadf.png

There are some variables just because of the rounding I have written into the formulas, but the trends you're seeing are correct. Just the exact values may be off by a 100 credits or something small.

The majority of the total cost of creating an implant set is eaten up in the empty implants, assuming you bought them from the store. I took the trend of store-bought implants and extrapolated it out past QL125 to get what the game considers the vendor value for those. As QL goes up, it starts to reach about 61% and caps there. So that leaves roughly 40% of the total implant cost to the clusters.

As expected, Shiny clusters are by far the biggest expenditure out of the three. 75% of the total cost of an implant's clusters is in the Shiny cluster.

I think a few (hopefully) simple steps could be taken to make this a more obtainable for newer/lower income players.

1) Make Implant Disassembly a part of the NPE. You could pre-cursor the Doctor's implant quests with finding an implant with stuff in it and stripping it.

2) Add an Implant Disassembly terminal. Implants up to the store-bought QL125 can be stripped at this for a small fee, but anything higher than that would require a tradeskiller.

3) Make the Implant requirements a little less mysterious. I wouldn't want to mess or tweak anything with this because twinking is so fickle, but that being said I really don't know the calcs that go into this.. I have a general feel for what needs to be added to what in order for it to spit out the requirement I want, but maybe someone could enlighten me on why a given cluster makes an implant go a certain way. I couldn't find anything out there.

4) Shift even more of the cost (I'm thinking like 70% of the total cost) of the implant process to the basic implants and away from Clusters. Combining this with (hopefully) more common Implant Disassembly could make creating implants more affordable for new players.

5) Adjust Cluster prices to be in line with the bonuses that they give. 50% for Shiny, 30% for Bright, 20% for Faded.

6) Cluster shopping is awful. Maybe we could get a better selection of Clusters in the stores as well, so you don't have to massively over pay for a certain implant. Maybe, every 5 QL's in the basic store, every 10 in the advanced, and every 20 in the superior.

My proposed breakdown would look like this: http://i.imgur.com/wSXQfZr.png

I realize that all of this is probably nothing earth-shattering. I've recently been leveling an alt and being a Shade for so long made me forget the entire implant system and how confusing it can be at the lower levels.

TLDR: Make implant cleaning easy and accessible up to a point, shift cost burden (somewhat) off of clusters and on to the implants. Change cluster prices to be in line with the bonuses that they give. Make cluster shopping better.


Thoughts?