[Gameplay] Team Interaction

Interesting idea, but what I can see happening here is a team pooling their resources into a single player who then goes out and gets godly gear, and then that player goes and beats the other team to a pulp (with his or her team mates of course. Not insinuating any of the demigods are strong enough to weather a group of demigods even with said godly gear, but it could decisively shift the course of a battle if you had say a fully kitted out demigod within 5 minutes of play).

One way to sort of balance it is to only allow it once your team reaches a certain war rank, or imposing limits on what you can trade (eg, giving a team mate a potion or something). That's the only way I can see it at least. That or you limit the amount of gold you can give a player on a gold/time basis.

Resource trading really brings more downsides than upsides - especially in a situation where resource income is already shared or has a shared component, which is the case with Gold Mines. Being able to give gold to other players would effective multiply the number of actual goldmines you control for one player.

Eg.: Team 1, consisting of 5 Demigods, has 1 goldmine. That goldmine provides each player with 1000 per timeunit. But when all players give their gold to one player, suddenly that player has an income of 5000 per timeunit, despite not having had to go out and capture more goldmines. It makes gifting gold the only valid strategy.

I know this isn't exactly what you're getting at, but you can double right click on an item (not a consumable, but a weapon/armor) and it will drop it on the ground.

Really???  You learn something new every day lol XD  So that means item-feeding is present after all, if a bit inconvenient.

in my opinion this yould cause major imbalance. one thin what should be poossible would be selling items you bought to other players for the ammount you would get from stores for it. that would not give the chance to power a teammate up into the sky. at the moment he coulb buy "godly" items, he would still need a lot of gold. at the moment he could buy all of the items, he already is highlvl and that means the enemys are highlvl as well and they can focus him. some stuns and nukes and he will be gone as well.

Giving one player 5000gold per timeunit isn't necessarily more effective than 5 players 1000gold per timeunit, if there's 4 flags he needs to control. All of the big maps are balanced so that one uber-Demigod couldn't win the game.

However, the power of endgame items is so great that even one Demigod with a full set can seriously damage a Citadel - which is the thing that wins the game. It'd take one player on his own very long to get there. 5 players pooling gold however would get to that point game breakingly fast.

I don't think so. If they are underpowered in 4/5 of the game, they're not going to be earning much gold. Additionally, a Demigod with a full set of endgame items = most of the towers have already gone down and his team is supporting him. This would not be the case.

This was the major problem I was looking at, but to play Dev's Advocate for a moment:

1.  Is one well-kitted and 4 unkitted Demigods really more powerful than 5 low kit Demigods? 

2.  What's to stop a coordinated team from item-feeding in the current build, per Rackjabbit? 

3.  What's to stop an item-fed player from selling all of his loot to buy citadel upgrades all at once and win the game in five minutes?

As I see it, the only reason this hasn't happened is that we have artificially-timed war ranks in this build, which will be removed, and the lack of generally coordinated play, which won't last. 

The trade/feed system is slightly less convenient, now, but it still exists.

Should it? 

Well, to adress those points:

1. That's of course not 100% unargueably determined - but I think yes, endgame items are powerful enough to effective counter a high number of un-itemed demigods.

2. Well, nothing - however, they'll only be able to feed low-cost items, since it takes time to build up to the quite high costs of the individual endgame items. So you won't be able to feed-outfit a single Demigod right from the start. It'd take quite a long period of buildup, during which time the other team will have an advantage.

3. The fact that selling items does not refund full buy price. Too much gold is wasted to give any advantage when trying this.

So I don't think a trade/feed system does exist right now, nor should it.

To my knowledge, there is at the very least no item buyback (re: #3) - if you make money back when dropping an item, I completely didn't notice that.

The only real advantage I see here over item dropping, is if you can suddenly afford an awesome piece, and decide for any reason to drop a piece you already had so that you can wear this new one - someone else who only put their $ into Citadel upgrades now has an item (this is assuming someone else can pick up an item you drop, which I have yet to try). 

Sure others could deliberately item-feed based on this assumption, but as it stands time is important, and a lot of clumsy time spent away from battle figuring items may not be worth it to some of us (I know you weren't suggesting this would be the case; just a thought I had :)).

Anyway - good points all around - regardless of the outcome, I'm curious what exactly their final implementation will be so that we know the rules and can incorporate them into our play sooner rather than later. Without doubt, items are important.

I would like to at least see the implementation to drop consumables, as well... that would be helpful in some situations, I feel.

Best-