Adder1234 wrote:The more I think about it the more ideas I have for ball games now. Pretty sure that Aurora is going to be hosting the hearthling equivalent of the olympics at this rate.
To be honest we are kind of planning it indeed xD
jorb wrote:Reason being that, A) Things which fit the lore and theme perfectly should arguably be ingame items possible to craft, and B) That some aspect of the store hats was some intended comic relief, though I have been trying to make them perhaps a notch less silly than bicycle helmets and beer hats.
I completely agree with the reasoning. However, this is prettier in theory than in reality, unfortunately, due to relatively unbalanced item statistics. Especially when considering armor, you end up with no more options than dragon helmets and maybe the cheaper alternative of winged helmets (towards the end of the game), leaving a wide array of would-be-cool helmet options behind: bronze, thane's, druid's, steel, etc...
For example, winged helmet baseline stats (q10) are literally better than steel helmet's baseline (q10) stats, even though it uses a less refined and easier to acquire metal set and... feathers, which are not exactly challenging to obtain. This makes the steel helmet completely useless.
I understand it is not easy to balance items in a game this big and perhaps even balancing wouldn't be enough as new "metas" would arise. So maybe adding some kind of advantage/disadvantage to each helmet (things like the implementation of "damage types") would be a nice option.
Besides all that, however, what I wanted to say was far more simple: an easy and good solution, if you ask me, is to allow *any* head item to be worn as a cosmetic hat. Let people choose if they want safari hats, druid helmets, fox hats or silly crab cones on their heads. It's a harmless change, adds variety and finally gives some cool purpose (even if only visual for now) to the nice helmets and hats in the game.
Edit: Heck, you could even make it so that this is a "Subscriber" benefit - the ability to equip any in-game hat as a cosmetic hat.
Real item hats would be dropped on KO, of course