We had our creative juices flowing.....discussion of ideas!
Feb 10, 2021 17:07:09 GMT -5
Sturm, bigtoes, and 2 more like this
Post by tysin on Feb 10, 2021 17:07:09 GMT -5
Problem Statement:
For a core part of the server's community, they have caught up on many/all of the custom quest lines and content and have been farming the same raid zones/arena for several months. These zones are now starting to no longer hold any desirable rewards, so they have - semi retired / tried other games / gone to other servers.
Proposal:
We love your custom content, but realise it can take a significant amount of time and effort to not only design, but also code and test that same content. It's what makes the server great, but it's a huge commitment/imposition on you and we devour it fairly quickly. So, we'd like to propose a new time sink, that would give us something fun to do that would take a while to exhaust but at the same time buy some time to implement your next fun and crazy ideas.
Assumptions:
If an existing zone could be re-used it would make it "faster" to implement than new expansions or zones, as much as we are keen to see it.
There's a level of copy and paste about implementing some new items, like recipes (assuming they are very similiar).
We believe everyone - especially coming out of COVID lockdowns etc - will likely have less time to play, so long raids may be less desirable than they used to be. 3-4 hr Plane of Time raids probably aren't going to be popular to a large portion of the community. However a 12 minute Tacvi raid probably is a tad on the short side. An hour for 2 groups may be a better time to aim for.
The coin loot system should stay. It's created some really strong and supportive behaviours amongst the community. No one is arguing over loot, and no one gets excluded from things because they're new. Everyone can share in the rewards.
Paying to enter the zone is a model worth keeping.
Ideas we'd like to put forward - Raiding:
We thought that two zones that might serve as good candidates for new Fabled or Legendary style content could be Temple of Veeshan or Ssra Temple. We picked these zones as they have a good balance of armor and weapons, but also are larger in size than Tacvi, give a wider array of options for people to get gear (less cookie cutter style toons). They have clickie items, as well as different types of encounters that give a variety of fun.
Ssra Temple:
There's multiple mobs that could be raid targets and has a dungeon crawl type feel. The bane approach could help pull melee back a little bit in terms of raid desirability and improve casters in terms of their function on a raid. This zone would also give some utility classes (bard / enchanter) for example the ability to contribute via scenarios like crowd control, without needing to do DPS. Saving the raid from being beaten on is just as important as killing a mob in some scenarios! There's a lot of trash mobs, so potentially keep the hit points low or remove some of them from the zone to speed up the crawl, without trivialising it.
Temple of Veeshan:
The quest armor would be a great way to put in a time sink, and encourage use of some of the old zones. We all thought how cool it would be to fight dragons again, and the fights having AEs etc would bring in some different gearing strategies than the ones most folks have today. Putting an emphasis on heroic resists rather than other heroic stats. The instance could be done as just the NToV section, or you could put in Halls of Testing too, to open up folks to either having Skyshrine armor or Kael Armor. We figured this would probably only be feasible if you could do a lot of copy paste for the recipes.
The armor could be made to work with real faction (so modify the way faction works for these to be closer to live) so people have to choose to be loved or hated by one or the other. If you want to swap it up, you need to work the faction and sink the time to do it.
How it could work:
We figured to encourage folks to continue climbing a progression path, the same type of currency should be used as Tacvi. This would mean all the coins leftover from tacvi raids would still be useful in the new zone. It would have two benefits we feel. 1) It would encourage folks to continue going to Tacvi and help those new to the server, as they'd still get credit for coming and be able to use it in the new zones/people wouldn't feel their effort was wasted and 2) The newer guild members would still be able to come to the new content, but buy the old items from Tacvi to get upgrades.
Alternatively, the ability to currency exchange between Fabled - Tacvi and the new Currency could be added to the vendors, similiar to the Tower Coin exchange. The ratio on how many Celestial Remnants to New Currency could be set depending on how expensive the new items should be in relation to the Tacvi items
To prevent folks stockpiling the coins and then just buying everything they wanted on opening day, the cost of the items should be increased if the currency is kept the same. For example, if it takes 10 remnants to buy an upgrade now, it would take 20 or 25 remnants (depending on how many bosses you can get in the new zone content) before you can buy the new gear. Additionally, the new gear should probably only be a moderate upgrade to the existing Tacvi gear. So we'd suggest that the gear be equivalent to Tacvi in a ratio which was something like a +2 Tacvi item = +1 new content item. Whilst a Cap could be put on remnants to stop the stock piling, this may have the adverse effect that people stop raiding when they hit that limit and therefore new people don't get supported to gear up.
Alternatively: Maybe to ensure some veterans of the server keep supporting newer folks through Tacvi, an item could be put on the Tacvi vendors that allows you to use your existing remnants to have permanent access to Fabled-Tacvi, without the 500k pp entrance fee. Maybe it's 100 remnants to buy, but would mean you no longer need to pay each raid. This feature could be implemented when/after the new content goes live.
To keep the time synch going, we suggest the Tacvi items be used as part of a recipe to upgrade to the new content. So the +2 item from Tacvi would be used to uprade to the base item from the new content. This has the risk of people going backwards in gear momentarily, before than can go forward again. However this would be temporary only. Maybe you lose some heroic stats, but gain some heroic resists in its place on the first item.
If the above is taken up, we would suggest giving increase rewards for the new content, so 2 remnants for example instead of 1 for a boss. 1 for a mini boss (for example the Rhags in Ssra would be 1, Arch Lich would be 2. Emperor has 2 bosses, the Golem and himself so would be worth 4). The increase in remnants would off set the higher cost of the gear, if you were accruing them in the right zone, but if you just wanted to do Tacvi to try buy the new gear, it would take twice as long.
Lastly, the entry fee for the instance. Although this seemed intimidating at first, keeping the same cost as Tacvi would be a good benchmark. However, we are concerned that it would mean some newcomers to the server would spend predominantly all their time getting experience to come raid, rather than going to enjoy some of the other content you've made available, like Ultimate augs, prestiges, Good/Bad Ash, etc. Maybe the fee could be lowered slightly to be roughly equivalent to the PP gain by doing all the daily quests in Lobby. This would let folks keep their AAs from doing the dialies, but require all the PP they obtained in the process.
Ideas we'd like to put forward - For times outside of raids:
More time-sinky goodness here.
Many of the existing out-of-raid time sinks have been achieved by a decent portion of the server. But we are missing further time-sink like content the equivalent of say the Good/Bad Ash, Tower climbs, Prestiges etc. Although these can become a bit daunting at first because they can take weeks/months to complete, if they have an item that is Best in Slot as the reward, it's like the movie Field of Dreams. If you build it, we will come.
A suggestion might be - to draw on the theme above, a new Bad/Good Ash style content, but tying it into the Temple of Veeshan raid content. There could be a series of Assault style content with Giants / Dwarves / Dragons as the content givers. They could give a new faction needed to get the ToV armor from the raid zone, as well as an augment or item at the top rank. This could be for example - a Fabled quality item for killing the opposing King. So like the items Yelinak would give for killing Tormax, but Fabled.
People could go do all three to get the item for each, but they'd need to swap faction, and start at the bottom rank - but at least the end result would be a different item which could be seen of value, rather than an augment with simliar stats that fits into say legs - thinking of the Good/Bad Ash augments dilemna some folks have.
Other things we could throw out there are the Breakdown in Communications quest working.
Making the III upgradable by combining two Lvl 200 III Augments to create a Lvl 400 one
Another item for 250 or 300 hunts, such a unique ornamentation or mount.
Support:
There's some folks (myself included) that would be more than happy to do some of the leg work to make it easier to implement. For example, if it were putting recipes components into an excel spreadsheet/CSV file, so that you could "import" them into your code, we'd be happy to do the legwork to take the burden off you two. Not all of us can code (let alone in PERL), but we'd be happy to do whatever we can to support you to introduce new content, and get the server population buzzing again.
Footnote:
We thought we'd put this out there for feedback and to generate discussion. We recognise that this is your server, and you're rightfully proud and protective of it's content and reputation. We know you have a vision and this may not fit it. However because of the sense of community that you've established, we all feel a part of this as a virtual home away from homes and had the passion and desire to truly want to contribute to it rather than just experience it.
We hope the above is taken in that context and not as a criticism of what you've created so far.
Thanks to my co-conspirators inspirers for the banter and ideas that helped formulate the above: Ruckus, Corpus, Taurus, Benji, Trutz and Jarjar for projecting ideas through his use of the force.
Vive la imperium!
For a core part of the server's community, they have caught up on many/all of the custom quest lines and content and have been farming the same raid zones/arena for several months. These zones are now starting to no longer hold any desirable rewards, so they have - semi retired / tried other games / gone to other servers.
Proposal:
We love your custom content, but realise it can take a significant amount of time and effort to not only design, but also code and test that same content. It's what makes the server great, but it's a huge commitment/imposition on you and we devour it fairly quickly. So, we'd like to propose a new time sink, that would give us something fun to do that would take a while to exhaust but at the same time buy some time to implement your next fun and crazy ideas.
Assumptions:
If an existing zone could be re-used it would make it "faster" to implement than new expansions or zones, as much as we are keen to see it.
There's a level of copy and paste about implementing some new items, like recipes (assuming they are very similiar).
We believe everyone - especially coming out of COVID lockdowns etc - will likely have less time to play, so long raids may be less desirable than they used to be. 3-4 hr Plane of Time raids probably aren't going to be popular to a large portion of the community. However a 12 minute Tacvi raid probably is a tad on the short side. An hour for 2 groups may be a better time to aim for.
The coin loot system should stay. It's created some really strong and supportive behaviours amongst the community. No one is arguing over loot, and no one gets excluded from things because they're new. Everyone can share in the rewards.
Paying to enter the zone is a model worth keeping.
Ideas we'd like to put forward - Raiding:
We thought that two zones that might serve as good candidates for new Fabled or Legendary style content could be Temple of Veeshan or Ssra Temple. We picked these zones as they have a good balance of armor and weapons, but also are larger in size than Tacvi, give a wider array of options for people to get gear (less cookie cutter style toons). They have clickie items, as well as different types of encounters that give a variety of fun.
Ssra Temple:
There's multiple mobs that could be raid targets and has a dungeon crawl type feel. The bane approach could help pull melee back a little bit in terms of raid desirability and improve casters in terms of their function on a raid. This zone would also give some utility classes (bard / enchanter) for example the ability to contribute via scenarios like crowd control, without needing to do DPS. Saving the raid from being beaten on is just as important as killing a mob in some scenarios! There's a lot of trash mobs, so potentially keep the hit points low or remove some of them from the zone to speed up the crawl, without trivialising it.
Temple of Veeshan:
The quest armor would be a great way to put in a time sink, and encourage use of some of the old zones. We all thought how cool it would be to fight dragons again, and the fights having AEs etc would bring in some different gearing strategies than the ones most folks have today. Putting an emphasis on heroic resists rather than other heroic stats. The instance could be done as just the NToV section, or you could put in Halls of Testing too, to open up folks to either having Skyshrine armor or Kael Armor. We figured this would probably only be feasible if you could do a lot of copy paste for the recipes.
The armor could be made to work with real faction (so modify the way faction works for these to be closer to live) so people have to choose to be loved or hated by one or the other. If you want to swap it up, you need to work the faction and sink the time to do it.
How it could work:
We figured to encourage folks to continue climbing a progression path, the same type of currency should be used as Tacvi. This would mean all the coins leftover from tacvi raids would still be useful in the new zone. It would have two benefits we feel. 1) It would encourage folks to continue going to Tacvi and help those new to the server, as they'd still get credit for coming and be able to use it in the new zones/people wouldn't feel their effort was wasted and 2) The newer guild members would still be able to come to the new content, but buy the old items from Tacvi to get upgrades.
Alternatively, the ability to currency exchange between Fabled - Tacvi and the new Currency could be added to the vendors, similiar to the Tower Coin exchange. The ratio on how many Celestial Remnants to New Currency could be set depending on how expensive the new items should be in relation to the Tacvi items
To prevent folks stockpiling the coins and then just buying everything they wanted on opening day, the cost of the items should be increased if the currency is kept the same. For example, if it takes 10 remnants to buy an upgrade now, it would take 20 or 25 remnants (depending on how many bosses you can get in the new zone content) before you can buy the new gear. Additionally, the new gear should probably only be a moderate upgrade to the existing Tacvi gear. So we'd suggest that the gear be equivalent to Tacvi in a ratio which was something like a +2 Tacvi item = +1 new content item. Whilst a Cap could be put on remnants to stop the stock piling, this may have the adverse effect that people stop raiding when they hit that limit and therefore new people don't get supported to gear up.
Alternatively: Maybe to ensure some veterans of the server keep supporting newer folks through Tacvi, an item could be put on the Tacvi vendors that allows you to use your existing remnants to have permanent access to Fabled-Tacvi, without the 500k pp entrance fee. Maybe it's 100 remnants to buy, but would mean you no longer need to pay each raid. This feature could be implemented when/after the new content goes live.
To keep the time synch going, we suggest the Tacvi items be used as part of a recipe to upgrade to the new content. So the +2 item from Tacvi would be used to uprade to the base item from the new content. This has the risk of people going backwards in gear momentarily, before than can go forward again. However this would be temporary only. Maybe you lose some heroic stats, but gain some heroic resists in its place on the first item.
If the above is taken up, we would suggest giving increase rewards for the new content, so 2 remnants for example instead of 1 for a boss. 1 for a mini boss (for example the Rhags in Ssra would be 1, Arch Lich would be 2. Emperor has 2 bosses, the Golem and himself so would be worth 4). The increase in remnants would off set the higher cost of the gear, if you were accruing them in the right zone, but if you just wanted to do Tacvi to try buy the new gear, it would take twice as long.
Lastly, the entry fee for the instance. Although this seemed intimidating at first, keeping the same cost as Tacvi would be a good benchmark. However, we are concerned that it would mean some newcomers to the server would spend predominantly all their time getting experience to come raid, rather than going to enjoy some of the other content you've made available, like Ultimate augs, prestiges, Good/Bad Ash, etc. Maybe the fee could be lowered slightly to be roughly equivalent to the PP gain by doing all the daily quests in Lobby. This would let folks keep their AAs from doing the dialies, but require all the PP they obtained in the process.
Ideas we'd like to put forward - For times outside of raids:
More time-sinky goodness here.
Many of the existing out-of-raid time sinks have been achieved by a decent portion of the server. But we are missing further time-sink like content the equivalent of say the Good/Bad Ash, Tower climbs, Prestiges etc. Although these can become a bit daunting at first because they can take weeks/months to complete, if they have an item that is Best in Slot as the reward, it's like the movie Field of Dreams. If you build it, we will come.
A suggestion might be - to draw on the theme above, a new Bad/Good Ash style content, but tying it into the Temple of Veeshan raid content. There could be a series of Assault style content with Giants / Dwarves / Dragons as the content givers. They could give a new faction needed to get the ToV armor from the raid zone, as well as an augment or item at the top rank. This could be for example - a Fabled quality item for killing the opposing King. So like the items Yelinak would give for killing Tormax, but Fabled.
People could go do all three to get the item for each, but they'd need to swap faction, and start at the bottom rank - but at least the end result would be a different item which could be seen of value, rather than an augment with simliar stats that fits into say legs - thinking of the Good/Bad Ash augments dilemna some folks have.
Other things we could throw out there are the Breakdown in Communications quest working.
Making the III upgradable by combining two Lvl 200 III Augments to create a Lvl 400 one
Another item for 250 or 300 hunts, such a unique ornamentation or mount.
Support:
There's some folks (myself included) that would be more than happy to do some of the leg work to make it easier to implement. For example, if it were putting recipes components into an excel spreadsheet/CSV file, so that you could "import" them into your code, we'd be happy to do the legwork to take the burden off you two. Not all of us can code (let alone in PERL), but we'd be happy to do whatever we can to support you to introduce new content, and get the server population buzzing again.
Footnote:
We thought we'd put this out there for feedback and to generate discussion. We recognise that this is your server, and you're rightfully proud and protective of it's content and reputation. We know you have a vision and this may not fit it. However because of the sense of community that you've established, we all feel a part of this as a virtual home away from homes and had the passion and desire to truly want to contribute to it rather than just experience it.
We hope the above is taken in that context and not as a criticism of what you've created so far.
Thanks to my co-conspirators inspirers for the banter and ideas that helped formulate the above: Ruckus, Corpus, Taurus, Benji, Trutz and Jarjar for projecting ideas through his use of the force.
Vive la imperium!