New Quest Format suggestion - Premade Characters and Quests

[KoobTheProud]

I'd like to suggest a new quest format for players to participate in. The quests would be designed with a particular class composition in the parties that attempts them. The idea would be to challenge traditional roles in an MMOFRPG with tasks and fights that pushed those roles to their limits.

To make the challenge real and to guarantee that the quests were completable each player would select a premade character from the ones available for that quest. Archetypes would include tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, trapper, caster DPS, healer and more depending on the specific quest. The players would enter a lobby at the quest entrance and then choose from the available characters, which would then swap their character for the premade. Each premade would be selected by a switch which was only usable once - guaranteeing that one and only one of that character was present in the quest.

The point of the premades would be to make sure that all of the players were at similar gear levels and overall power levels and that the quest itself was well-balanced for that party. This would put a substantial amount of play back into game in place of grind, since the devs could design the quests such that they weren't easy to blow through but required instead coordinated tactics and flow. Quests could be balanced and rebalanced as player patterns showed weaknesses in the build.

What would the point of the premade quests be?

1. Upon completion they would grant the usual XP to the character that entered the quest and was swapped, with proportionality based on the character level vs the quest level. This would allow newer players to the game to bring a low level into the quest, swap it out temporarily for a quest level character and then get appropriate XP at the end of the quest after participating as a full-level character. Theoretically newer players would feel as though they had played a real part in the quest completion and in many cases actually would have done so.

2. They would grant favor of whatever faction underpinned the premade quest. These factions could be existing factions or they could be new ones.

3. They would grant normal end of quest chests with rare loot at the discretion of the devs. These chests would have to be in the end lobby after quest completion so that the regular characters looted them instead of the premades.

4. They would give a real gameplay experience to the players involved with some dependency on each other to complete the quest.

5. They would add the possibility of putting recognizable named characters from DDO lore at the disposal of players for a single quest play through.

The premade characters would be use once and done - with no inventory other than items worn and quest items acquired during the run. They would never actually register on the player account as they were played and nothing they acquired in the quest would transfer to the end lobby when the quests were complete - with the actual character emerging from the quest into that lobby and then looting. Enhancements, feats, skills, action-bar setups, all would be pre-arranged with players given some latitude to swap feats and spells and attacks on the limited action bars available to them.

The idea would be to have fun at a level carefully controlled by the game system and to see benefits accrue to a player character/account afterwards.

The premades would be sold as a package in the store with purchase giving access to the quest(s) and once in them to the premade characters ready to go once the quest was entered. Once the lobby systems and swaps were figured out you could make a premade for many of the quests in game already. You would buy each premade once and then have it available to run as many times as you like, similar to the challenges.

In theory you could resell most of the content in the game as premades although odds are good it would be better to establish premades with new content before doing that.

In all of this you wouldn't be touching the rest of the game system much as players would still see gains from the premades filtering out to their actual characters. You could give cosmetics associated with a premade faction as additional rewards once favor levels were reached in that faction. As in the normal game favor would only be gained up to 3x base per quest per life. This means that it would take runs of many associated premades to reach the top rewards.

All difficulty levels would be available for a premade however no benefits from outside the premade would apply to the premade characters as they made their runs. No reaper points, no gear outside of what the premade came with, nothing but player knowledge to get around the problems the higher difficulties represented. Complete a quest on R10 in a premade? Now that would be an achievement.

[OfElectricMen]

This . . . is not a good idea.