Item Empowerment and Making Wishes

Or How to Reward Players for Time Spent Playing

Here is the new system I propose. First, Experience becomes a resource that is tracked on your Riches tab. Collecting Experience begins from day one. You don't need to be 70 to start collecting Artifacts, so you shouldn't have to be 70 to start collecting Experience. A simple mock up is here:You can see at the bottom the Experience resource is neatly added to the bottom. The currency tab has already been reworked with new currencies added over the last 3 modules, so I don't believe this is a major technical hurdle. Next to the Experience count is the "Use" button, exactly identical to the Black Ice resource.When a player hits the Use button, another interface is brought up:The Item Empowerment screen, again identical in function to the existing Black Ice Empowerment. The screen lists your available Experience points you can allocate, and lists all your equipped Artifacts and Artifact Equipment. If something is already at maximum rank, the equipment will be listed, but you will be unable to add more experience.Now all you do is simply use the slider (or 100% to allocate it all) to decide how much experience you wish to add to the Artifact. If enough experience is added to enable the Artifact to "Rank Up", after the experience is allocated, the 100% button turns to the "Rank Up!" button, and you cannot allocate more experience until the Artifact is refined to the next level. Pressing the "Rank Up!" button brings up the traditional refining interface for this.Now what's the ROI that justifies the change?First, it allows players to focus on just playing the game, while still feeling like they have control over advancing their Artifacts and Artifact Equipment. Since nearly everything in this game gives experience, players can chose how they want to play and still make progress.Secondly, the current experience boosters become more relevant to post-70 play, meaning more players have more reasons to purchase these from the Zen shop. If you want to rank up an Artifact more quickly, you might purchase a large or huge experience booster to double the rate at which you receive experience to help speed up the process.Third, it turns content that might otherwise be viewed as boring or repetitive into opportunities to earn more experience for your artifacts. Doing existing Campaign dailies even after you finished the Campaign could potentially become a lucrative way to earn experience for your artifacts, as well as running dungeon or skirmish content with friends or new players, even though you don't need any of the drops. However, the experience earned will go a long way towards improving your existing equipment.Fourth, it's not something that 3rd party farmers and bots can produce and sell back to players. The experience you earned is earned via your own play. There's no way for farmers to monetize this, which takes away from Cryptic, as well as generally leads to less happy experience (via attempts to exploit) for players.And Fifth, it's more satisfying to know that your power level is directly related to how much you continue to play. And as new Artifacts and Artifact Equipment is released, it's not as stressful to start to replace other gear by simply playing the game...and it also gives you an incentive to keep playing and building and experience pool in anticipation of new equipment.I even think it's reasonable to make this experience pool account-wide to help (and encourage) people to grow their alts, and not make starting a second, third or tenth character seem like such a mountain to climbPlease keep in mind I'm not advocating changing anything about the current Refinement system. Using equipment, stones and enchants is still a valid path to ranking up your Artifacts or Artifact Equipment. If you feel like you'd rather farm stones, or purchases stacks off the AH, that's totally cool. But multiple paths to advancement to help supplement is never a bad thing.