#2 - New Ideas for PVP

[Mariner-1212]

Todays’ Discussion:
NEW IDEAS FOR PVP
I've gone through the LAD thread (http://forum.ironmaidenlegacy.com/showthread.php?9483-Live-After-Death) and separated all of your great ideas into 2 main categories - WANTS (changes to current PVP) and NEW IDEAS. This thread is meant to expand on the NEW IDEAS presented, to form some more concrete thoughts around these. When we ran the Trooper thread, all of our opinions came together to form some really excellent, well thought out ideas. Let's do the same here.


Directly from Sparton:
We want the Arena to be a reflection of people's capabilities to compete against other players' teams, and to be able to reward both active participation and high win rates (with end-of-week rewards primarily benefiting win rates more than participation, and store purchases primarily benefiting participation more than win rates, but being good in both areas helping for both reward mechanisms). Overall, I'm interested in everyone's ideas for what would make PVP more interesting, or engaging, or different from week to week, and then we can see either how we'd tackle that after we release the teased new game mode (either by updating one or more existing game modes with changes or by creating a new one that takes into account what the community is interested in).


Proposed Solutions:
- Addition of guilds (Slauki)
- Addition of raids (Slauki)
- Trooper team up? (Amarthir)
- "Go blind" - RNG will randomly pick any of your 3 defenses so anytime you fight the same player you won’t fight the same defense (Kamuz)
- give a twist to pvp every month like been able to bring a second Eddie but not like in pve where you can switch Eddies; Character class restrictions, Talisman or power move limitations (Kamuz, Ezz)
--- other ladders in PVP (above concepts, but done in separate PVP instances) (+ only sentinels, no power moves) (surfingwithdje)
- New Competition formats, such as Monthly rewards for top cumulative point standings for the entire month, Tournament of some sort (Ezz)
- Hall of fame (slauki, surfingwithdje)
- A "skin soul" that would give the winner a toon with different color (same abilities and stats) - something like a black nomad, that would be awesome and clearly would reward a player to fight for a top spot. (Carlos)
- Fragments drop for special characters, not an event but something ongoing where you needed 5000 or so before claiming a special character (chaosego888)


Ideas for different ladder models:
- Multiple Eddies mode - ability to bring in All Eddies, not just one
- Only [Class] mode, where it's Sentinels vs Sentinels, etc.
- Powerless Mode - no power/fury moves allowed
- Talisman limitations, such as only being limited to one use of a talisman set per team (can't use 2 sets of Energy, etc).
- ...?


General Guidelines:

For all solutions, please keep these things in mind:
1. Sparton's guidelines above
2. NF needs to make money.
3. There needs to be a ‘free play’ aspect to whatever solution is proposed; it can't be something that requires a purchase to participate.

[Amarthir]

Eddie vs Eddie mode.

I think either 1 Eddie verses 1 Eddie

1 Eddie with two others to switch to

Or 3 Eddie's vs 3 other Eddie's.

[Mariner-1212]

I'm going to expand a bit on the idea Carlos came up with of introducing new skins.

I think this has infinite potential. There could be Skins that are exclusive to those who have won eternal, and you can't get them any other way. Win it twice and get a different exclusive one. And with the introduction of skins, you can now make other skin packs available for purchase in the store (limited time)... and it would be managed through a Skins button in the toon's profile.

4195

So for example, a Warship package in the store that gives you a Viking Eddie skin with a warhammer, and some Valkyrie skins that make them look like Vikings. Sell the pack for $24.99.

No changes to the toon function, strictly skins.

[slauki]

i think it could help to have two or more weekly winner. like a midweek eternal on wendsday and a regular on saturday. right now only saturday matters and everyone who cannot play then is screwed. so we could think about at least one more chance to get eternal during the week. could be good for the devs too, since we would have two chances to burn our ironite during two weekly rushes. aside this every fight should count for another monthly leaderboard with different rewards. that way we would motivate everyone to play throughout the month. so players who play constantly every week would benefit a lot this would lead to more played matches in the whole field i belive.

one main problem for me right now is this: most of the time i can reach top 10 with no refills at all and get decent rewards. if i push a little i will get one more g/a and one more skillshard and some more ironite.
but to get eternal i would have to tripple my effort and my time investment just to get a bit better rewards than i get anyway...well find the error. eternal is so hard to become, the player who makes the effort should get some really special rewards. everyone in the top 10 should get different rewards too btw. this would make the competition much more intensive. only reason to be 2nd is to end on carlos spreadsheet and on the poster (LOL!) well if you ask me i'd take the 5th place with the same rewards all day. not the smartest rewarding system if you want competition. but that's the problem of maybe 50 guys overall, so not many guys are affected at all.

one additional thing to adress is that pvp takes huge amounts of time. it hurts us all and the devs because the time factor is correlated with the refills.
i rarely clear a list under 30 minutes nowadays. there were times, where i could cut through it in between 15-20 minutes. well possible that i suck (lol)
but talking with other top pvp players lead me to the conclusion, that it's not only me. that's one main problem but not sure if something can be done about that.
what i really like is the balance aspect in pvp. there is no outstanding toon anymore (aside broken aof, who should get fixed asap) maybe that's a direct consequence of that.


aside that:
i'm not a fan of a blind/random defense pick. this would make the strategy part way less relevant. we would have to take one standard team which we would bring against everyone.
that's not the way it should be played since the adjusting part is the real interesting one for me.

i think carlos brought up the idea of some PVP tournaments too, not sure how it should work, but maybe we can figure out something usefull togetehr. something like a virtual world championship in LOTB sounds wonderfull and makes me dreaming :D

[Amarthir]

I know it's been said often before but I'd just appreciate there being a bit more in between the Duelists and Warlords.

Besides, since you usually have to have around 3000 or more to hit the Top 100 depending on the week, why not just adjust the point requirements so that you need say, 2500 for Warlord III, 2900 for Warlord II and 3200 for Warlord I, and take out the rank requirements for that section. That way you still have to actually work for it, but you won't be excluded if you tried so hard to only get the same thing you'd get with 1900

[Patrice-1201]

My first suggestion is to change the reward system as it is always the same 100 who are benefiting and it must discouraging for a lot of people.

I also think that there should be special arena tournaments with group stages and playoffs and maybe an all Eddies team mode.

Basically, introduce limited time changes to make it interesting

[Mariner-1212]

My first suggestion is to change the reward system as it is always the same 100 who are benefiting and it must discouraging for a lot of people.

I also think that there should be special arena tournaments with group stages and playoffs and maybe an all Eddies team mode.

Basically, introduce limited time changes to make it interesting

Surfingwithdje threw out the idea of having different ladders, which I think would really suit the concept of limited time changes. So one would be your traditional PVP as it is now, one could be an All Eddies mode, and then the third could be whatever special ladder was going on at the time.

Maybe one week it's a succession mode, where you have one team and cannot switch them, and you see how many battles you can make it through without losing. The battles would just automatically load in one after the other, no ability to skip or to change out your talismans, etc. I'm sure we can come up with plenty of ideas for new ladders.

And I love the idea of tournaments/playoffs, and also incorporating guilds or teams into things (maybe each week you're randomly paired with 2 other players and your team competes in a tournament).

[Chaosego888]

I think bonus points for list clears and win streaks would be a great thing. The rewards need to be completely reworked. I also think Eternals should be rewarded with a 5 star character ( rotating through the full pool of 5 stars, a different character each week) an actual 5 star character, not a soul! I love Carlos' Skin Soul idea but if this is implemented, all past Eternals should be rewarded the appropriate amount of these so past champions aren't forgotten. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have fragments drop for special characters, not an event but something ongoing where you needed 5000 or so before claiming a special character. Thanks Mariner for getting these discussions started.

[kkkreg5]

1. Revamp rewards
2. Shorten the gap between Duellist and Warlord.
3. I'd like a shot at the top 3 from anywhere in the rankings once per week. If I win, I get x amount of points and opponent loses minimal to no points. If I lose, I lose x amount of points and opponent gains x amount. Make it risk based. The larger the risk, the greater the reward.

[Mariner-1212]

I think bonus points for list clears and win streaks would be a great thing. The rewards need to be completely reworked. I also think Eternals should be rewarded with a 5 star character ( rotating through the full pool of 5 stars, a different character each week) an actual 5 star character, not a soul! I love Carlos' Skin Soul idea but if this is implemented, all past Eternals should be rewarded the appropriate amount of these so past champions aren't forgotten. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have fragments drop for special characters, not an event but something ongoing where you needed 5000 or so before claiming a special character. Thanks Mariner for getting these discussions started.

Good stuff chaos, I've added it to the main thread, thanks.

For the skins, how about the first time someone wins eternal (and for all past eternals) you get the Stranger In A Strange Land skin for Cyborg? That one is one of the most iconic, and would reward past winners while really driving others to make a run for it at some point. And then anyone who wins eternal a second time gets another skin, etc. but maybe that doesn't apply retroactively since it might be tough to launch with 10 skins right out of the gate. Just don't want to discourage the devs with some big undertaking that gets the idea canned or pushed off for months, but I definitely agree that the past winners should get something.

[slauki]

most european football leagues give stars to teams that win the championship. why not adjusting it and giving stars (or eddies) as an icon right to the players name. one eternal one golden eddie. 5+ eternal some blackish badass eddie icon. and so on, something in this direction would be cool too. so everytime you see the name in arena and trooper section (or hall of fame :P )your name will popup with a eddie icon. or in iron maiden letters...
but well another thing that only affects a few people, so not worth developing time i fear. or you give it to the top 10 in different colours, that would affect far more people.

[slauki]

one small but effective change would be to add a "go first" and a "go 2nd" checkbox when testing your defense. it's soooooo annoying to restart when you just want to test your def going first.

[Chaosego888]

one small but effective change would be to add a "go first" and a "go 2nd" checkbox when testing your defense. it's soooooo annoying to restart when you just want to test your def going first.I completely agree, this is a neccessity... 80% of the time in Arena you go 2nd, 80% percent testing defense you go 1st!... Why?