New Group Hunting Idea

Cooper

Okay, so I haven't really thrown one of my crazy "I thought of this while showering/driving home from work" ideas out in a long time.

I've noticed people have been wanting harder bashing with more focus on bashing as a group with bigger rewards, and not just honours mobs that require you to get X dragons and all hit gut at the same time.

So I've never played WoW past level 30, but the crazy idea revolves around sort of 'instances' like they have. Basically only you and your party can enter the bashing area at the same time. You'd go somewhere that everyone can go - like Delos or something. And greet some magical creature that can conjure fake dungeons. That give you exp when you complete them.

After you're in, you're in sort of a 'ready up' room where you prepare to start. Then you just move forward in the rooms while hordes of monsters attack you. They would attack you smartly, though. They'd do lots of afflictions and the mobs would auto know what you had. So they'd chain together aeon/kalmia/web/etc. and focus on specific targets.

For difficulty, the monsters would scale with how many artefacts the group had, total levels, might, etc. So if a group of artied dragons went in, the monsters they would face would instant kill a level 80 group of people etc.

Experience wise, it would work out to be 2-3 times the experience you would have gotten bashing solo for the time you spent in the 'instance'. So if you get 10% per 30 minutes at the level you are, you'd get 20-30% in the same time in the instance (assuming you completed it successfully). Gold would be the same rate. After you finish, the illusion corpses or whatever could be converted to real essence you could raise shrines/defile with.

Here's another cool part. Each city/house/order would get to design an instance. The area, denizens in it, the general attacks, etc. (Okay obviously this would be subject to a lot of admin approval, but the idea is that the admins don't have to spend 5000 hours on this, some of it would be done by players so it's a bit easier. And cooler.)

Anyway, the real point is to just increase interaction between players while hunting - giving you incentive to group up and bash together, make strategies for completing instances, etc.

Antidas

This sounds pretty cool, but while I admittedly know very little about coding, it seems like it would be absurdly hard to create.

Silas

We have these already. They're called 'cities'.

Blujixapug

I don't like the idea of instances. I appreciate the theory behind it, but it seems too sterile, separating people into their own individual one-time-only areas.

I do like the idea of group bashing that requires well-organised strategy to beat tough mobs, not merely recruiting more dragons. I also like the idea of scaling mobs to the levels of players, so dragons face a real challenge. I posted some ideas re: strategic boss fights in a previous thread on this subject.

I hate the idea of players designing these things themselves. Super no. If you want to design stuff you can go be a mortal builder. Design by committee takes forever and results in mediocre results, and generally boils down to 90% of the work being done by one person, with endless concessions for no reason other than so that everyone else's crappy little ideas are included and they don't feel they were left out (even though they should have been (that sounds pretty harsh and I should probably sugarcoat it (but I won't ))).

Sarapis

@Cooper Appreciate the suggestion, but @blujixapug has the right idea here. Completely unworkable. Getting even gods to finish an area is hard. Getting players to do it is almost impossible. Beyond that, your fourth paragraph seems to indicate you're not even sure what you're suggesting. "They would attack you smartly, though." Define smartly. Good luck!

Eld

Sarapis said:

@Cooper Appreciate the suggestion, but @blujixapug has the right idea here. Completely unworkable. Getting even gods to finish an area is hard. Getting players to do it is almost impossible. Beyond that, your fourth paragraph seems to indicate you're not even sure what you're suggesting. "They would attack you smartly, though." Define smartly. Good luck!

Anything that makes you say "That smarts!", obviously. Keep up, man.

Sarapis

I'm not trying to give Cooper a hard time also, to be up front. It's just that what he proposed is, on the spectrum between "fix a bug" and "make Achaea graphical", more towards the latter than the former.

Penwize

You know, come to think of it, this sort of thing might not be quite as unrealistic as it sounds.  Instance generation code already exists in Achaea, in the form of deep sea diving.  Strong mobs do exist, and I know scaling mobs exists because of the Eleusian halloween event with the skeletons.  I'm not sure how lengthy and flexible mob AI can be, but given that amnesia pets will attack you as normal rather than with amnesia if you already have amnesia, I imagine they're capable of at least rudimentary decisions based on player afflictions.  Combining all of that, I actually think it's fairly plausible to put together a pretty solid instanced PvE experience here.  It'd be a right fair chunk of work to actually flesh out and design, but given the tech I've seen in Achaea so far I'm not sure it's as implausible as it sounds.

@Sarapis: As for getting areas finished, when's the next mortal builder program application round? I was gone during the last call for applications.   I'd probably pitch in there if it meant getting more bashing grounds faster!  Hah.

Tesha

It might be possible (most things are with creative coding, I would bet) but is the coder time best spent on instance-style bashing? It would be fun at first, and a select few people might enjoy it a lot over time, but it would detract from time spent working on multiclass, weaponry changes, new areas, new talisman sets, ship things, classleads, events (both massive and mini), etc.

The idea of an instanced bashing zone is attractive only at first. Even in MMORPGs, dungeons are awesome at first, and they get really stale after a few runs. This sounds like a huge investment of time for something that most people would presumably find just as tedious as normal bashing in a matter of months (oh, time to split up again, okay, grab that spear and throw it like the last 8 times you've done it, alright, stop sipping health so he stops healing, okay done). Fresh content would require a large amount of work over time.

It sounds like a better idea would be to focus on smaller, overarching improvements to bashing that would hopefully have a better ratio of coder time required to lasting enjoyment beyond the initial "oo shiny" feeling. Things like expanding on feelings villages, including reactions (on entry, not selkie-esque seizure inducers), random "uber" npcs similar to UW's "uber" deathknights, even something like patrolling factional guards (like Theran guards that would call for help) are just a few brief ideas.

Nim

Also more places for people to bash without essentially being horrific mass murderers. So many of the apparently good bashing spots involve killing relatively innocent people that, although they might be (at worst) of ambiguous moral standards, certainly don't deserve to be butchered.

Antonius

@Nim: Not exactly sure what your complaint is. Are you saying you don't have a problem committing mass murder if they're recognisably evil and therefore deserving of it?

Sylvance

Antonius said:

@Nim: Not exactly sure what your complaint is. Are you saying you don't have a problem committing mass murder if they're recognisably evil and therefore deserving of it?

I read it more as a "Killing some things makes RP sense for certain well-thought-out characters... whereas killing other things makes very little RP sense for most well-thought-out characters."

ETA: An example being that killing an aggro Creville lunatic, who has savaged you just because you committed the sin of entering the room he's in will, generally speaking, make more sense than killing a dwarven shopkeeper. Again, I stress that I understand that there are exceptions to all of these rules.

Sena

Antonius said:

@Nim: Not exactly sure what your complaint is. Are you saying you don't have a problem committing mass murder if they're recognisably evil and therefore deserving of it?

More high level animals, undead, or non-sentient things to bash would help a lot. Anything where indiscriminate slaughter is easy to justify.

Cooper

Sarapis said:

@Cooper Appreciate the suggestion, but @blujixapug has the right idea here. Completely unworkable. Getting even gods to finish an area is hard. Getting players to do it is almost impossible. Beyond that, your fourth paragraph seems to indicate you're not even sure what you're suggesting. "They would attack you smartly, though." Define smartly. Good luck!

@SarapisI defined smartly in the next sentence after that.

"They'd do lots of afflictions and the mobs would auto know what you had. So they'd chain together aeon/kalmia/web/etc. and focus on specific targets."

It wouldn't be as much work as you think, though. The areas would be small, you could use existing denizens for all of it, and like Penwize said, the base for most of it is already in the game.

As far as spending time on things only a "few" people would use - look at ships. 10 years of planning and working and reworking for something that barely anyone even used at first. And guess what? You can put new talisman sets, events and they would all be new areas!

Rangor

If villages are bashed often, they could grow stronger, hire guards (like Thera), hire mages, demons, villagers could equip themselves with armour and weapons (making them big and mean), ask player cities for help if it continues...

Would be interesting, say you're farming Tsol'aa village regularly. After 3 hoursof being spawn cleared their rangers call in BEARS to help them defeat you. You bring in a dragon friend to take out the bears and you get dryad enchantresses from Eleusis moving in. Bring in all of Mhaldor to clear the new village (that's now a super awesome bashing grounds) and the tsol'aa hire Eleusis(or any other city) to defend them. (Tsol'aa village would now be no-xp loss for eleusians.) 

(This could scale up within a single day, or over a longer period like a week.)

Every hour the villagers are alive (or a couple notable denizens) it scales back down. Once the village is "defended" it will be a few days before it can be scaled back up.

Eleusis would get gold and xp for defending the village. Bashers would get gold and xp for bashing the village. It's turned into a high-end bashing ground with pvp conflict escalating into political drama.

Naturally the end scenario is that Ashtan spawn farms every village and every city that tries to defend them. (right?)

Don't mess with the normal bashing grounds though. This would be for the villages.

edit: Oh, to involve noncoms some quests/abilities/gold donations/brainstooorm could be designed for an "active" village that lets people help them boost their defences.

Silas

Rangor's idea is closer to what I'd want to see. Definitely not instanced, and something to encourage and improve player city relations with denizen villages. This has always been something I've wanted to see in Achaea.

Santar

Rangor said:

Would be interesting, say you're farming Tsol'aa village regularly. After 3 hours of being spawn cleared their rangers call in BEARS to help them defeat you. You bring in a dragon friend to take out the bears and you get dryad enchantresses from Eleusis moving in. Bring in all of Mhaldor to clear the new village (that's now a super awesome bashing grounds) and the tsol'aa hire Eleusis(or any other city) to defend them. (Tsol'aa village would now be no-xp loss for eleusians.) 

Athrax

Some of the best ideas I've seen lately have been in the most random threads.  Flower crits, tea party combat... and now the bear cavalry.  I feel like I need to go make a Golden Dais thread asap.

Rangor

Eleusis' guards already ride bears.

Balkin

But Tsol'aa Village rangers all ready smack you around with their bears.... o.o

Zythaar

Anything that promotes group work is cool in my view. They don't need to be instanced, though. As Penwize stated much of the technology is -in- the game. Instead of private instances, I'd like to see public zones. Some of you might know a "public quest" from some MMOs, and I'd like to see something like this. For example...at such and such time, X spawns with his army of minions in Y area that opens at the same time, and each City's team enters from different points and has to navigate the "maze" or whatever to defeat the end boss that adds some buff to the participants or the city for a certain time. The paths overlap, so the different player teams can interact and either team up (in one bigger party) or feud over who will get to continue. Team size would have to be limited to 2 cities of course.

 

Anyway, basically rather than private instances i'd like to see public events.

Cooper

The point of the instance is so other people can't interrupt you, like everyone knows they would. 'Oh that group of 5 people from Targossas is attempting to clear that dungeon that is extra hard for extra reward? Let's go gank them with a group of 10 people, it'll sure be fun for all of us'

It's for the people who don't care so much about PvP but still want a challenge instead of just holding down kill target.

Nellaundra

I've been gone from the forums for ages, but I'd love something like this.  Right now, I've been trying to bash to dragon (and get someone up to 80 at least while I'm at it) but I consistently hit areas at the wrong time or some asshole dragon just marches in and starts slaughtering things faster than I can kill them.  Right now, it's near impossible for me to gain any progress (or gold) simply because I'm apparently in the wrong timezone or something and the things that -do- give gold and stuff would be against Nellaundra's virtues IC to fight.  So I'm relegated to farming an area that's -meant- for level 50s or so because no one bloody hits it but I only get a single percent after like three hours of clearing it repeatedly.  I don't use timers for areas because I'm not an asshole, so I just keep having to cycle and hope that I get lucky.  And if someone else is already in there, I leave them the area because again, I am not that big an asshole.

Point is, I want more instances to go in that aren't deepsea diving because that would slaughter the hell out of me.  Bashing is already the single most tedious task in the game aside from falcon training, and it's almost always singleplayer unless someone decides to come gank you.  I've asked people to please leave the mobs be while I was trying to fight them and all I've gotten in reply was "lol".

There is an issue.  And it's bloody horrible.  I shouldn't have to literally have a timer for when I go and kill crap.

Cathy

Nellaundra said:

 I shouldn't have to literally have a timer for when I go and kill crap.

I found timers a great help, you should try it!

Nim

@Cathy's on the list.

Cathy

Nim said:

@Cathy's on the list.

Christmas card list?

Kresslack

They did instances in Old Republic and it was really bland imo. It'd be like being to bash Blackrock or any oallied village without anyone being able to stop you. Even if a neutral area like Azdun, the idea of making any area 'off limits' to interruption is counter-productive towards encouraging more frequent group interaction.