RE: How does IBT bring value to Steemit?
I left a couple of other short comments on other peoples reply threads.
Please don't take any of theses suggestions too hard I find overall IBT to be enjoyable to play and they are just what I don't like from my perspective.
I'm not a fan of the shop items the way they were this iteration of IBT. I felt like if you randomly drew the helmet you had an unfair advantage for the rest of the game including the boss round. It was almost impossible to not win a round on the first try with the helmet.
So either their can't be an extremely overpowered item or it needs to reset every round. I kind of like the idea of it resetting every round. That would also give everyone 6 chances to draw the helmet or similar overpowered items.
I also think if you had to send money to wizard zap every round for items then we could raise more funds to power up the bot. I think the fee for items could go up to something like 0.05 STEEM every round. I know you are probably trying to keep it low to be fair to people with small wallets but between wizardzap upvotes, and upvotes for playing each round and for winning on the first attack it should still be profitable for those players. Maybe there is some additional way we can compensate people.
The other thing I feel doesn't quite play right are when you steal and draw a negative item. In most games if you steal a crappy item you don't have to use it. You could sell it or throw it away. But you probably have negative items because you want to add an element of risk to stealing which I like. I would suggest that if you choose to steal there is a chance that you get caught or activate a trap and automatically lose a life or some other consequence.
Although probably too complicated right now having some sort of inventory of items that could be accumulated and carried over to future rounds would be pretty cool too.
Some great points here, I'm gonna take key points from everyone's comments and create an improvement list summary post in a couple days:)
Wow! your really getting me thinking, so.... if every item you collected stacked and stayed in your inventory, might improve play? so like you can only get a few each round (like currently, a luckydip, a pickpocket and a gobbo pocket), but you never lose any. I could try to have it display when you type !l3 ... So if you do pickpocket and get a bad one, you can make up for it by doing more pickpockets next round...or buying an additional lucky dip each round?
It may be technically difficult to achieve, I need to investigate..Alternatively we could make it possible to sell a negative item back to @wizardzap, if people favor making a little to power up our bot. I'm not really keen to raise the price for @wizardzap as I don't want preclude really new Steemit users from playing. As @Steemseph mentioned, imagine if IBT was so fun people joined Steemit just to play, and from there learned about the greater Steemit world as well. hehe
..hmnn I could also make gobbos dropped item positive, i mean you did defeat him :)
The stacked items is interesting but I think you would have to be careful that the combined bonuses didn't become so large as to almost make the attack roll irrelevant. I was thinking more like an inventory that could be activated when needed.
Ok... so more like items are consumable, you collect as you go along, keep them in your bag and can use once when you want type deal?
Yeah, but maybe there is a limit to how many you can hold like 3 or something. Otherwise everyone will just save all their good items for the boss round. There is pros and cons to everything. But it is just an idea.
My main concern was people drawing a single item on the first round that then gives them an edge over everyone else for the entire game though. So I would say priority on game balancing but if somehow we can swing having an item inventory that would be super cool.
..I'm thinking you can luckydip every round if you want (at low transfer cost). But you can only keep one luckydip item (so whatever you get replaces your current). In this sense if you don't mind leveling up wizardzap, not happy with your item can keep trying. I'll also remove the helm +4 is too high. I'm also thinking as you level-up your chances of gaining a better luckydip item increases a bit. As you said pro's cons to any approach, but this might work..
I might remove the negative items from gobbo and just make them +1's or something minor...Still thinking though :)
That sounds more balanced for sure. Some of the Gobbo items could actually be more powerful because they don't carry over to the next round.