Combine all garden keys into one key

**hertne** · Apr 27th, 2014, 21:59:33

It would be nice if there was an option to combine all garden keys for a faction into a single key that would work at any statue.

A couple of the benefits of doing this:
> This could be incorporated into a quest to "Prove your devotion to your faction", possibly.

> For sided characters it would increase the number of available inventory spaces by 10.

> For neutral characters, it would increase the number of available inventory spaces by 20.

> Could provide a "special" garden with statues that teleport to other gardens. This could be accessed via the "Shadowlands Recall Beacon" or the statues in RK, for example.

**Doctrony** · Apr 28th, 2014, 01:10:13

I feel the idea as a base starting point has merit, unfortunately due to items such as the Shadowlands Recall Beacon, Garden Teleport Statues and Fixer SL Meep nanos, the actual implementation would be more than just a 'quick fix'.

The point I'm driving at is that if you merged all of the keys into one, how do the aforementioned items/nanos determine which garden you wish to teleport to?

A potential compromise would be combining all of the keys into a single 'toggle item', that you right-click to change which garden key it becomes. Only, then you're faced with an extensive amount of right-click spamming, as well as a potentially large number of items that must be correctly toggled, swapped and replaced as you gain more garden keys, yet haven't collected them all.

Then there's the question of Gardens and Sanctuaries; are the keys merged, separate or a user-defined mixture? How about a right-click item with black/white-list capabilities?

In the realm of perpetual possibility, we're capable of dreaming up a myriad of solutions to potential problems, just see all of the threads claiming to 'fix' multi-boxing if you're looking for examples. However the same principal that is holding those threads and ideas back also applies here: For a solution to be viable, it must solve an existing issue without compromising or creating others, it must be as simple as possible both to implement and to understand and ideally it should make sense and work within the confines of the game and its themes.

This was a bit of a ramble, I know, and I support the idea in theory, but in practice I can see the potential damage outweighing the potential gains. I'm not writing this off yet, though; I just feel there must be a 'better' way.

My 2c.
-Trony-

**Leetlover** · Apr 28th, 2014, 01:19:49

Originally Posted by Doctrony

The point I'm driving at is that if you merged all of the keys into one, how do the aforementioned items/nanos determine which garden you wish to teleport to?

menu on click

**RedWatr** · Apr 28th, 2014, 01:57:15

Originally Posted by leetlover

menu on click

just click thru it, like the letter shirts from vet shop.

I've always loved this idea.

**hertne** · Apr 28th, 2014, 04:40:40

@Doctrony - Some very valid points, but I feel they're pretty easily addressable with my original suggestion. I might not have explained it adequately in my original post.

Lets look at the methods of getting into a garden:

1) Statue in a SL playfield
2) Shadowlands recall beacon
3) Garden teleport statues
4) Fixer SL meep
5) RK Statues

#1 would be easy to handle. If you click the "master" key on a statue, it will take you to the appropriate garden.

#2-#4 can all be lumped together. I recommend instead of making an item that you have to click a million times, or one that has a dropdown menu, that a new "master" garden be made. It would contain a statue to each other garden, much in the same way that current gardens have statues that teleport you to SL locations.

As a use case, here's how I would go from Bor to Inferno:
*I equip the "master key", and use my shadowlands recall beacon.
*It then takes me to the "master garden".
*I find the statue for "Inferno Garden" (or "Inferno Sanctuary) and right click on it.
*I'm teleported to the Inferno Garden. From here, I choose a statue like normal and I'm teleported to the appropriate location in Inferno.

**RedWatr** · Apr 28th, 2014, 07:52:10

I think they should do away with separate keys for sanctuary and garden.

**Leetlover** · Apr 28th, 2014, 11:44:06

Having those jumpstones on rk moved to jobe would be nice too

**Jihnna** · Apr 28th, 2014, 15:14:12

Originally Posted by leetlover

Having those jumpstones on rk moved to jobe would be nice too

I think it's cool that they're on RK, they're just a bit misplaced. Should be in some more "central" areas.(Yeah I mean Borealis/Newland

)

**RedWatr** · Apr 28th, 2014, 15:39:57

Originally Posted by leetlover

Having those jumpstones on rk moved to jobe would be nice too

no, they're right where they should be.

**Gimpynoob** · Apr 28th, 2014, 17:30:08

The devs should remove all of RK, except Bor. This way people wouldn't waste time with unimportant things.

And most of Sl too. What they should do is make it possible to team any toon of any level and allow toons to gain xp even when they are in different playfields. Just put a buff in the item store to make all this possible, and make it give 300% more xp and remove xp caps.

**Jihnna** · Apr 28th, 2014, 18:11:21

Originally Posted by Gimpynoob

The devs should remove all of RK, except Bor. This way people wouldn't waste time with unimportant things.

And most of Sl too. What they should do is make it possible to team any toon of any level and allow toons to gain xp even when they are in different playfields. Just put a buff in the item store to make all this possible, and make it give 300% more xp and remove xp caps.

Best suggestion so far.

**Leetlover** · Apr 28th, 2014, 18:22:59

Originally Posted by Jihnna

I think it's cool that they're on RK, they're just a bit misplaced. Should be in some more "central" areas.(Yeah I mean Borealis/Newland

)

Yeah, at least central place. OA, Bor or Newland and Rome...or Jobe plat. mhm, lazy r us. games = recreation so.

**Doctrony** · Apr 28th, 2014, 22:29:17

Originally Posted by hertne

#2-#4 can all be lumped together. I recommend instead of making an item that you have to click a million times, or one that has a dropdown menu, that a new "master" garden be made. It would contain a statue to each other garden, much in the same way that current gardens have statues that teleport you to SL locations.

That is a potentially workable suggestion for players who have every garden key. My concern is that if you create a separate playfield for housing all of these statues, how do you then prevent players how lack all of the keys from accessing gardens they have yet to unlock?

That is, unless in your original suggestion, you're thinking of this as a questline of sorts that only unlocks once players have completed all of the requisite key quests for a faction? Then you can be sure that each player to complete the quest and gain access to this new playfield is already 'allowed' and so you don't have to place a check on each individual statue.

To get into a bit of a technical discussion about it, I suspect you would have to make four new playfields, two for each faction, Garden and Sanctuary.

The reason I say this, is that if I understand what you're suggesting, players would need to 'trade-in' their current keys for the multi-key, and one of AO's NPC chat limitations is a hardcap of 6-items that can be given to NPCs in a single action. Including Sanctuaries, there are more than 6 gardens per faction. A potential work-around would be to have multiple 'give me your stuff' trade actions with the NPC involved, however I'm not sure how AO would handle giving your items back to you should you cancel the conversation, or disconnect, after giving away your current keys, but before receiving your new one.

Perhaps there is a way it can be done, but right now I can't think of a questline that asks you to give something to an NPC more than once in a row. There may be one; I just can't currently recall one.

Ideas are good.
-Trony-

**hertne** · Apr 29th, 2014, 00:20:19

Originally Posted by Doctrony

That is, unless in your original suggestion, you're thinking of this as a questline of sorts that only unlocks once players have completed all of the requisite key quests for a faction? Then you can be sure that each player to complete the quest and gain access to this new playfield is already 'allowed' and so you don't have to place a check on each individual statue.

That's what I originally had in mind. You have to collect all the keys before you can start the process of getting the "master" key for that faction. This could be split up any way you want, be it only sanctuary keys or regular keys. I would personally suggest all keys for a faction.

Originally Posted by Doctrony

To get into a bit of a technical discussion about it, I suspect you would have to make four new playfields, two for each faction, Garden and Sanctuary.

The reason I say this ... one of AO's NPC chat limitations is a hardcap of 6-items that can be given to NPCs in a single action. Including Sanctuaries, there are more than 6 gardens per faction.

A very good point, I hadn't thought of that. Off the top of my head what comes to mind is to not make it an "item turn in" quest. Instead, make the requirements for the quest something else entirely, to prove your devotion. The reward for the quest line could be an item that allows you to combine the keys in a specific order - we know that combining a very large number of items is possible (see penumbra key quest). Doing this would bring us back down to the two playfields, one per faction.

As a point of note, I would also say that it would be a requirement that you can't receive the quest to get the initial combine item unless you've completed all key quests for your faction. I'm obviously not a dev, but I imagine that this wouldn't be too hard (account flag check), and it would prevent the process from being started (and loosing keys) before you can get the "master key".

Originally Posted by Doctrony

Ideas are good.
-Trony-

Thank you, the points you're bringing up are all great as well.

**Doctrony** · Apr 29th, 2014, 02:57:48

Originally Posted by hertne

I would also say that it would be a requirement that you can't receive the quest to get the initial combine item unless you've completed all key quests for your faction. I'm obviously not a dev, but I imagine that this wouldn't be too hard (account flag check), and it would prevent the process from being started (and loosing keys) before you can get the "master key".

Mildly off-topic; I'm curious as to how 'buying' keys off the item store affects something like this. Having never bought a key myself, I would be interested to know if you can still complete a garden key quest after 'buying' the key. Irrespective of the answer, this would need to be taken into account when verifying if a player is able to accept the quest.

I've done some more thinking, and I feel that to get the best of both worlds, so to speak, the reward from the questline would be the equivalent of a key ring for garden keys.

The closest example I can think of, are the gun racks used for the token gun quests. Collect guns, put them in the gun rack, hand said gun rack into the questgiver. The difference here would be that instead of guns, you'd put garden keys onto a 'key ring', and the key ring would be the meta-key that gets you into this all-in-one garden. To extrapolate on this idea, it would ideally be possible to remove keys from the key ring, so that if for example you use Scheol Sanctuary often (for the port to your reclaim terminal), and Inferno Garden (for pulling Inf mishes) then you could leave those two keys off the key ring, and have the rest on it. That way you not only do you retain the convenience of being able to warp directly to your garden of choice, but you save extensive inventory space by condensing the rest of the keys into a single slot.

Ideally the key ring could be right-clicked (with a confirmation box) to remove all the keys, in case you wished to swap what keys were and were not on the key ring.

As I am unfamiliar with the way items and tradeskilling works in terms of engine code for AO, I can only assume that this would be a relative nightmare to code. My assumption is that each combination of keys on the key ring would have to be a different item, so you're looking at an equation of n^n representing the number of new items that would be required to implement this as I have described, with 'n' being the number of Garden/Sanctuary keys available to a given faction.

Fortunately, the potential for abuse is relatively low with something like this. 'Duping' garden keys would have no gain, as you cannot trade them, or equip more than one. That said, the equip requirements for the key ring would need to be extensively considered. As mentioned above, I'm not familiar with buying garden keys, so I'm not sure if it's possible to buy an Inf key on a level 1.

Food for thought.
-Trony-

**Traderjill** · Apr 29th, 2014, 20:05:00

If this has already been said, excuse me.. I tried reading through all of the posts first and didn't see this form of the suggestion.

1. You don't need to have all of the keys to do the key ring quest. It doesn't matter because the item you're getting isn't going to be a completed key ring but a shell that can be 'filled' with keys.

2. You 'fill' the keyring, in garden order (nasc to inferno, garden before sanctuary) by using the garden/sanct key on the incomplete keyring.

3. Because the garden/sanct keys are being used on the keyring, they do not get destroyed in the process. So Fixers, MP's and items requiring you to have a key equipped are not impacted by the addition of the key ring.

Example of how the keyring filling process works:

Nascence Garden Key + Empty key ring = Key ring stage 1

Ely Garden Key + key ring stage 1= Key ring stage 2

Ely Sanctuary Key + Key ring stage 2 = Key ring stage 3

Scheol Garden Key + Key ring stage 3 = Key ring stage 4

rinse and repeat until...

Inferno Sanctuary key + Key ring stage Y = Completed key ring

The completed key ring becomes the usable item and prior to it being the completed key ring (king ring stage X) it is basically useless.

**Traderjill** · Apr 29th, 2014, 21:03:18

**hertne** · May 1st, 2014, 02:38:07

Thank you Jill, those are some awesome finds. It seems like there's a pretty large audience that would like to see this implemented.

**Brofist** · May 1st, 2014, 07:18:42

Easiest warp solution is just to make 2 more tiny little play fields (one for clan statues, one for omni), that when you use a warp item/nano with the keyring equipped it takes you to a mini garden that warps you to the other gardens. That way you don't have to mess with a drop down menu, or cycling through keys, because lets be honest here, FC is never going to make a drop down menu style thing for it.

**hokutonoken** · May 1st, 2014, 18:50:18

with next patch making prof. ring almost useless ^_=...lets go Lord of the Ring and make the garden key combine with Ring...NO Need inferno booties/penumb glass/adonis back item/Pand's ring/garden statue entry/Jobe apart (heck lets throw in those apartments we all log off in after a long day of playing AO)
.....ONE RING TO RULE OUT MUILTIPLY ITEM WARPING/USAGES

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