Hello! I’m trying to post a suggestion here, hope you like it. Please note that it might be super hard and time consuming to program this, so maybe it’s more like a dream than a suggestion.
So, ahem, let me explain:
Magicaloss is a Japanese game that I used to play. The game is fully in Japanese, so unless you don’t know some Japanese like I do, don’t think about playing it, because it needs some understanding of buttons and text.
Anyway, in the game, you do the following:
-Design your room.
-Fight monsters when they invade your room - There is a timer, and when the timer reaches 00:00:00, your room is attacked by monsters. You can deactivate the timer by right-clicking and clicking monster block option. (useful if you want to decorate.)
-Collect items from monsters, and make furniture with them.
-The monsters that are spawned depend on the total level of all characters in the room.
Take for instance: You are a level 46 player, and another player joins you in one room, and he/she is level 30.
46 + 30 = 76.
That means the monsters in the game will be a total of level 76, so for example, you get this combination of monsters: 4 x Kobold [Lv.1] , 9 x Mandragora [Lv.8]
9 x 8 … 72 … + 4 … 76.
In short, the game randomly chooses a mix of monsters. Level cap of the monsters is the sum of all characters’ levels that were in the room exactly when the timer hit 00:00:00.
But Magicaloss is a game where the highest level player is level 1700+ something, and monsters?
Every player’s house could be able to spawn any pokémon you can find normally in any dungeon, I think?
Since every pokémon enemy has a level variable?
Imagine the possibilites! There could be new pokémon spawns exclusively in player houses spawned by random chances!
So for example, a completely new player to PMU would, for example, with a level 5 recruit, be attacked by pokémon of level 5…one level 5 pokémon or 5 level 1 pokémon…or three level 1 pokémon and one level 2 pokémon.
But what about level 100 cap? what if, for example, there is a huge gathering of pro players and all of them have four level 100’s in their team?
for example if it was 10 players…4 team slots…that’s level 4000!
Well, my idea is like…it could be just 40 level 100 pokémon? but again …that would be a lag… Still, it’s highly unlikely that 10 of such players would gather.
Items
As for items… I am not sure but…maybe you could get just anything the dungeon pokémon drop? I mean, IF this system used direct instances of pokémon from the database.
Maybe some completely new items? Only dropped by house pokémon?
I think that’s about it, let me know what you think of my dream feature. It would motivate more players to decorate their houses, and give them more reasons to stay in them.
4000 would not scale well, yes.
And no, that would not be “a lag” in itself. No again, it’s not unlikely because we had around 200 100s around a year or so ago alone, when the better training dungeons were just released.
I think in general, this is a little odd for PMU? We can’t have personalized mini-dungeons in people’s houses, since it would make actual dungeons useless?
But maybe, creating a sort of dungeon-editor + map editor mix, that allows NPC use, but does not allow EXP gain?
That way, there is still a challenge, but there is not a risk of breaking the game.
I certainly think its an interesting concept worth thinking further into. Not sure where to go for the item drops though… as it is player-customizable! Something to think about , but if anyone has ideas, that’d be nice.
As you said, this is something that will take a lot of programming, so it will definitely be on the back-end of ideas to work on. I appreciate the suggestion, very cool!
The following is an idea brainstorm, and I am just listing possibilities, please take into consideration that I just love to talk about ideas and possibilities, even if they are impossible or crazy, thank you.
Yes, it is a little odd, and I will tell you one thing,
Magicaloss by itself is an odd game, because you only decorate rooms and fight monsters, and there is no level cap. It’s a terrible grindfest, along with completely unbalanced combat system.
But one thing is true, it was interesting because the entire game world was composed out of player’s rooms, so for instance, you could connect your room with your friend.
There were 4 doors you could use per room, and each direction led to another room, if the doors had a connection.
With this, you could explore the world infinitely, and the entire world of Magicaloss depends on the connections that players make through doors.
Monster attacks were a 20 minute wait thing in average, so in order to level up quickly, you had to travel across other player’s rooms and see if their room’s timer is only like 3 minutes before a monster wave appears. If you had stronger friends as your neighbors, you also “leeched” out of their Offline level, no matter if the player was online or offline, they were still in their room, and so, since you could visit strong players’ rooms, you could level up quicker if you had good items and magic to beat stronger monsters.
The game felt quite sandbox, because if you imagine that enemies like Tiamat needs players to get together, since it’s a level 10000 monster, and it won’t appear at all times.
Anyway, I think there is absolutely nothing game breaking about gaining experience from hostile house pokémon attacks in PMU, because the amount of pokémon that would spawn…let’s say… every …15 minutes? Would provide so low experience that dungeons would still be better exp-wise.
What I wanted to say are certain possibilities, I think this system would motivate players to decorate their rooms and stay in them longer, and invite friends to battle pokémon together, or reach a certain goal - let me explain:
I got this idea, there could be a second layer “rarity” level.
The spawning could depend on a second layer level variable, each pokémon would have this variable, and the designers of the game could assign the number depending on how much they’d want the foe to be rare in rooms.
let’s say there would be a rarity level 1000 hostile pokémon that would be able to spawn in a house, the catch?
It could very well be just some… level 60 pokémon stat-wise, but it’s rarity would need many players to gather together, because:
[li]It could be a rarer recruit that you can’t find in a dungeon easily - no matter what stat level, so this could be an alternative to get it[/li]
[li]It could be a pokémon dropping some valuable or even normal rarity item as an alternative to dungeons.[/li]
[li]Alternatively, if some people missed an event, they could spawn pokémon which drop event items, BUT they have so insane rarity level that it would need them to team up with players. And even so, there would be a really little chance to actually spawn that pokémon - so more like - don’t expect it to happen and just have fun with friends.[/li]
Please note that even though the players would get the correct level, there would still be a queue of pokémon that are more likely to spawn, so even if the players would get enough rarity level with their stat levels, the house could still spawn perfectly normal “junk” pokémon that equals those levels, so it’s a dual rarity measure, player gathering level plus random chance.
The thing is that this system has randomness. And you never know if you are going to have a room infested with a bunch of level 5 useless pokémon, or a single pokémon that’s a challenge. Or even a legendary pokémon that only has a 1% chance to spawn, even if it requires players(team included) with a total level of 2000, for example.
So I think, this would be a way to bypass the Lv.100 cap, but not make a foe pokémon that’s overleveled to the point even a player cannot reach that level, but simply because it’s not power, but rarity of appearance, and to trigger this rarity, it would need players to gather together with their stat levels.
Whoever gets the rarer item or who recruits the pokémon, that depends solely on how players communicate… after all, no one had to ask you in Magicaloss if they could defeat the monsters, because the EXP you got was directly based on how much damage you did on the monsters, so if someone was a total meanie and abused their AFK friends, defeating all the monsters for themselves, no one could do anything, it was simply in the game’s unsaid rules.
Alternatively, there could be a no-cap level variable you could raise by doing missions,(but this could be rather weird and complex, because it wouldn’t be tied to levels of your pokémon team anymore), which would only be useful in house spawns, and would do absolutely nothing with your pokémon’s battle stats, but whether this idea is good or not, I can’t tell by myself. But this system would check the total stat level of everyone in the room anyway, to determine the power tier of the pokémon that should be spawned, and generally it would calculate the average level of the player team. But I don’t think this should be super forced, because getting a lot of levels from missions would need you to be strong enough to beat high level dungeons for high rank missions anyway.
This level could be raised even after getting the highest mission ranks, and it could generally mean that you would be able to attract pokémon which are rarer than others (only as a requirement for a chance to appear, there would still be a hard set chance for them to appear even if you get the requirement). The mix of pokémon that would spawn would be carefully selected so that it would NOT spawn a pokémon which has too higher a stat level than the highest level player in the house, so the actual battle doesn’t get too hopeless if a lot of less experienced players summoned a rare level 50 pokémon.
Other than that, the following criteria could determine the hierarchy of the list of pokémon:
Recruitment rarity
Item rarity
AOE moves - make some very annoying pokémon either have a high requirement for spawning. (or simply limit how many move-difficulty pokémon can more likely spawn at once, with a 1 2 3 … levels, with AOE monsters being 3, and the game would focus on not spawning way too many of them.
…In any way, please take these ideas just like some “inspiration” from me, maybe?
There are many ways to work with ideas, and I am just sharing what I came up with on the spot. :D
Still, it’s highly unlikely that 10 of such players would gather.
It would motivate more players to decorate their houses, and give them more reasons to stay in them. 