The Labyrinth of the Lost

[SiliconScout]

Call me crazy if you want but I think I have stumbled upon an idea that just might make it easier for Turbine to separate some of our hard earned Turbine Points from us; and in a way that just might make us grateful for the loss at that. Keep in mind that this is a pretty rough idea, but I am thinking that I am just one guy, with the help of all of you we can probably refine this into something pretty darn cool and hey maybe it’ll catch the interest of Turbine.

In a nutshell it’s called Tournaments. And not some ripoff of the Cove or another event but an honest to Dol Dorn old school tournament. Take your party in, score your points and the best team wins, but since this is an MMO let’s give it that good old mindflayer twist.

What is that twist you ask, well Fred’s been counseling me and here’s what my mind has come up with. Not only do you compete against other teams in points, you compete against them directly.


The Setting
You see old Grampa Diggsby d’Deneith has decided that this retirement dung just isn’t his cup of tea. He misses the cry and clamor of battle, the excitement of facing unknown dangers, risking it all for the Glory heaped upon the victor. Sadly while the heart is willing the body is unable so he has set aside a sizable chunk of his personal fortune and created the Labyrinth of the Lost. Hundreds of brave adventurers go in but who will come out is anyone’s guess.

Picture a good old fashioned dungeon / maze, with 4 roughly equal “quadrants” and a circular room in the middle with the end objective. 4 Parties enter the maze, 1 in each quadrant and begin the hunt for the objective. These quadrants don’t exist in isolation either, they should cross into and through each other with regularity.
The dungeon should include special collectables (think here of Spawn of Whisperdoom) as well as waypoints that would be scored for finding.


The Dangers
The Clock: that is right the tourney has a time limit. 5 minutes, an hour, who knows it really depends on the dungeon. I think 30 Minutes would probably be a good target to aim for initially. This clock doesn’t stop until the quest objective is complete AND there is only 1 party remaining.

Random Traps: Yep that is random. They could be anywhere in the dungeon and should hit at about a “Hard” level of difficulty.

Shrines: There aren’t any… none. You take in what you take in and that is that baby. No time to rest and old man d’Deneith was never much for second chances.

Monsters: They should be level appropriate and have good synergies. Knockdowns with AOE casters, that kind of thing but their difficulty should be random (even within the group if possible) in that they should be from Casual to Elite difficulty. So you might get say 3 archers, 2 casters a cleric and 2 melees ambush you. 2 archers are casual powered, 1 hard bad luck for you the casters both hit elite but the melees are both normal. Really bad luck and they are all elite .. who is to say but the random is the fun (killing the elite is worth more points than the casual) and risk vs. reward is fully in play.
There would be Standard Yellow, Orange and Red Names.

Loot: Hey win it all and you get the phat loot baby because in this dungeon they aren’t handing you anything.

The Objective: This central room should have some specific objective within it could be that it’s killing a big boss there, it could be solving a puzzle it could just be getting there. Once the objective is completed however then you can choose to hold the room if you want or hunt down the other parties. The game doesn’t end until the clock runs out or they all die.

The Competition: That’s right baby, it’s the thunderdome down there 4 teams enters, 1 team leaves! The only rule is that there are no rules.



Pricing and the Prize
This should be pretty simple and in order to maximize participation relatively cheap.
Something like the following.

The Price
Party Charter: This allows you to enter one party in one tournament
Cost: 500 Turbine Points (includes 1 Jersey (see below) for the Party Leader

Team Jersey: This allows your character to join a party for the tournament
Cost: 250 Turbine Points

So assuming that you 6 man it you are looking at a turbine bringing in 1750 Turbine Points for each party.

The Prizes
First Place: Each party member receives 5,000 turbine Points and free admission into the next Tournament.

Second Place: Each party member receives 2,000 Turbine Points and free admission into the next Tournament.

Third Place: Each party member receives 1,000 Turbine Points and free admission into the next Tournament.

Fourth to Tenth Place: Each party member receives 250 Turbine Points

Also everyone is awarded 5 XP per point they accumulate per level of the tourney so if you earned 1235 points as a team in a challenge 10 tourney every toon would receive 6,175 XP. That’s right everyone wins … well kinda.



Scoring
Points would be awarded for the following.
01 Point per player per minute spent in the final chamber
01 Point per SP remaining in the blue bars at the Tourney’s end
01 Point per HP remaining in the Red Bars at the Tourney’s end
02 Points per CR of a defeated Yellow Creature
03 Points per CR of a defeated Orange Named Creature
05 Points per CR of a defeated Red Named Creature
10 Points per collectable Found (these do not refresh)
20 Points per minute left on the clock when the last member of the last of your competition.
25 Points per Opposing team player killed
50 Points per Waypoint Discovered (Awarded to the first team to find it)
100 Points for reaching the final Room
300 Points of completing the goal (whatever it might be, awarded to first party to do so only)
-30 Points per Party member death



The Teams
This is probably the hardest part to manage. How do you match up players evenly when there is such a wide disparity in gear, TR’s, etc. This is easily the hardest part to implement, but I think it’s possible to get a reasonable amount of parity here.

The easy answer is that everyone gets to pick one of say 10 pre-gen toons, but really we want to play OUR toons don’t we. With that in mind then I suggest the following:

First, each team will be given a set number of levels to use and a level range they must have all their toons in. For the example let’s use a level range of 8 to 11 with a total of 60 levels allowed.

Second is how we account for TR’s. Simple each past life your toon has counts as +1 Level in cost. Thus if you bring in a lvl 11 toon who is on his fourth life he’s going to cost you an additional 3 levels (14 in total).

Third how do we account for gear discrepancies? This is one that I agonized over because face it we likes our toys don’t we. I asked Fred and he just gave me this weird scalp massage, it was really relaxing and I think I kind of drifted off. Anyway, three days later I woke up with this wicked headache and an epiphany.

So I ran down to the Anvilfire Inn, shook Old man Diggsby awake and asked him to sort it out. I probably should have gone their first because he had an answer straight up. He looks me in the eye, brows furrowed and teeth gleaming and grunts. "It’s not the stuff on the warrior that counts. It’s the stuff IN the warrior."

See he figures that skill should trump stuff and that any adventurer worth his gumption will make due with what he’s given. Thus there would be several gear load outs to choose from (much like a veteran toon but better) with decent gear for the level. Each set will have a theme to it with tradeoffs and each would be clearly described so you know what you are getting. Another option would be to have several vendors who work as “quartermasters” who let you pick from certain load outs.

All will have some healing or repair pots included (some more some less). Probably some wands and scrolls Healing and combat, mixed into the mess.

All blue bars will be given 1 SP pot applicable to their level (say a standard mnemonic at this level range)

All blue bars will be given 50 components for each level of spell they can cast.

What happens to all your stuff? Don’t worry the guards will hold onto it and give it back to you when you come out. They will of course take back anything you have left over as well.

................................

So that is it, at least in a nutshell. We get an awesome throwback to the old days of Pen N Paper tournaments, DDO gets something that clearly stands apart from its competitors AND it probably makes them some decent cash.
I envision that you would hold 1 tourney per month per sever.

Per Server, Off the top of my head assuming we can find 1,200 players (worst case 200 teams) play you are looking at 350,000 TP coming in and awarding back (worst case scenario) about 58,500 back so a profit of about 291,500 TP. Assuming many points will be from the subscription freebies or bought at a discount so it should be reasonable to say that each point represents .5 a cent. Thus profit of about $1,450. X 7 that is over 10 grand a month.

Well that is a wall of text for sure but there you have it…. What say you?

[SiliconScout]

Dang, looks like the May long weekend isn't the best time to toss something like this out there huh? Or maybe I am just crazy and am the only one that would think this is kinda cool.

LOL.

yeah ... yeah .. this is a bump ...

[Mizzaroo]

Dang, looks like the May long weekend isn't the best time to toss something like this out there huh? Or maybe I am just crazy and am the only one that would think this is kinda cool.

LOL.

yeah ... yeah .. this is a bump ...

It is an interesting idea. But its a wee bit on the complex side me thinks.

[salmag]

The Competition: That’s right baby, it’s the thunderdome down there 4 teams enters, 1 team leaves! The only rule is that there are no rules.

So you basically want PVP in a maze...

No thanks

/not signed

[SiliconScout]

well yes and no.

See the thing here is that it's scored on points and while the PvP aspect has some merit in that it's something that really isn't possible in your standard Pen&Paper type of tourney it could just as easily be taken out of the equation.

The points from it could be replaced with a decreasing value based on time. Say for example you are given 30 minutes to complete the objective that is 1800 seconds so let's give each second a value of say 3 points. So you start with 5400 points for completion and that drops by 3 points per second.

So without the PvP aspect you would have it be that timing can make a big difference.

I am certainly not married to the idea of PvP in the tourney, I am more married to the idea of a tourney and thought that having the ability to PvP would or could be interesting. I also liked the idea of being able to have teams join up and merge if they chose to (assuming say 2 teams of 3 met) though that seemed really complicated to manage.

The system could be made simpler as well just by awarding XP, and make it real XP and that being your teams score. The thing here is that you need enough variables in the XP awards to try and avoid ties.

[Hafeal]

Way too much potential for griefing under your set-up.

They could not get a leaderboard for pvp to work (as I do not pvp, is it working yet?) so I am not sure how feasible your scoring board is. Aside from random traps, players will learn the layout and zerg it within a day or two, at most.

Overall, I believe your idea has limited replay value and would only benefit players who like pvp and would not have a mass appeal. Even if you were to say take out the pvp element, make it a race, unless you "randomize" the path every time (which would be cool), again, limitations.

Now, if it is possible, ala Harry Potter, to have something like the Hedge Maze which is random with each new round, walls moving, and all parties start at the same point (or at 4 points as in Shroud part 2), and a different set of creatures and traps with each instance [edit: and no pvp], with a timed race to completion, I like it. I don't know how "doable' it would be but I think it would be fun. Your prizes though are never going to happen and need to be re-thought.

[Memnir]

Speaking only for myself - I'd have zero interest in such a thing and wouldn't invest even a splinter of my game-playing time to it. Other folks' milage may vary, but for myself it'd be dead content like any other area of DDO that involves PvP in any form.

[SiliconScout]

Way too much potential for griefing under your set-up.

They could not get a leaderboard for pvp to work (as I do not pvp, is it working yet?) so I am not sure how feasible your scoring board is. Aside from random traps, players will learn the layout and zerg it within a day or two, at most.

Overall, I believe your idea has limited replay value and would only benefit players who like pvp and would not have a mass appeal. Even if you were to say take out the pvp element, make it a race, unless you "randomize" the path every time (which would be cool), again, limitations.

Now, if it is possible, ala Harry Potter, to have something like the Hedge Maze which is random with each new round, walls moving, and all parties start at the same point (or at 4 points as in Shroud part 2), and a different set of creatures and traps with each instance [edit: and no pvp], with a timed race to completion, I like it. I don't know how "doable' it would be but I think it would be fun. Your prizes though are never going to happen and need to be re-thought.

Well I probably should have explained that better.

This is not a normal quest you get exactly ONE run through the map, once that run is done you get your score and a hour or so later the winner is announced / declared.

Also you get one entry per account (not per toon).

Each month the tourney would have a different objective, perhaps even an altered map, so that say the first time it was just make it to the middle and beat down the purple worm.

The next month when it comes up the quest could be protect the Dwarves as they mine X diamonds.

The next month maybe it's find the 14 pieces to the staff of Bacon and deliver it to the Altar of Pi'zza.

Basically every time the tourney runs how to beat it is a different method so past experience in the tourney doesn't help.

Also there should be some randomization to how monsters pop up and where certain items are so that even people running Alt accounts don't really get much of a chance for multiple runs.

[SiliconScout]

Speaking only for myself - I'd have zero interest in such a thing and wouldn't invest even a splinter of my game-playing time to it. Other folks' milage may vary, but for myself it'd be dead content like any other area of DDO that involves PvP in any form.

True. And for the record I don't personally PvP and don't really "get it". Having said that I liked the idea on the surface of being able to "eliminate" the competition.

That said if it's perceived as a large negative then it's got to go. We all know the PvP crowd is a minority for sure so if this is going to fly then it needs to be something that a majority of players are interested in.

Let's take the PVP aspect out entirely, basically it's a traditional tourney style. You go in with a relatively balanced / equivalent group and you do your run, earn your points / XP and the best run wins.

Does that look like something you would be more interested in?