Wow, I thought crystals as well Godfather suggested them too. Interesting...
I suppose we could go down that route. I'll think about it

I like the crystal idea the more I think about it

CK you need to focus also on a crafting skill for item upgrades.

Depending on your skill level will determine what level you can craft at and what items can be made with those materials.

You can have individual players be able to make the really hard to get items and have the merchants if we cant find a player to make us a "god like" item be able to make them also but only to Excellent status. Basically 2 tiers.

The skills cant be easy to max out like they are now. So it takes some time to build up different skills unlike how it is now.

Maybe have different types of crystals out there. You want crystals to be different so they add different stats to item along with your "skill".

I say make up a "futuristic" word and don't use crystals. Crystals, gems ect ect are used in other games that are based in olden days. Words are made everyday so why not be unique? lol

Anyways..so as items get upgraded there can be stars or circles or whatever you choose to show the level of the upgrade to item...maybe even have a glow effect around items. ( like with the K suite would be cool if it glowed a nice bright orange at full upgrade)...something along those lines.

There also has to be diffrent levels of crystals that can be found....common thru extremely rare crystals ( if you go that route and use crystals) that can be dropped buy a boss character only. ( Boss Characters are a whole different issue i have right now lol so i wont bring it up here) But thats who can drop them and you would need a "crystal" and maybe points or credits to do the upgrade....( you also need to figure out to if they would be bound or not)

welp time to get back to work. Ill message ya later CK about boss characters and guild stuff.

REMEMBER THESE ARE IDEAS ONLY!!!! lol

Crystaurum?

Just an additional thought about the "crystals" or whatever they will be called. Sdiddy mentioned having different levels of crystal "common through extremely rare" or some such, I'm not sure if this is where he was going with that, but could it be that the rarer the "crystal" is the more powerful it is? That way you could technically have X amount of "crystals" by the same name, but they could all give different bonuses.