Party Play And Group Activities

Party Play
There is an existing problem with facilitating and encouraging party play. The main hurdle is the fact that after you add more than two people to a party, your exp gains are crippled. The other problem is the lack of rewarding activities to do as a party. Many people are here to play WITH people, and i have noticed allot of disappointment with this situation. Every day people log in and search for a group, not necessarily because they NEED a group, they just don't want to play alone. High level players tend to not want to sacrifice the balance of time vs gain unless they are community leaders that are organizing such activity specifically to address the issue. Also... why on earth do resource nodes not respawn when in a scene with a party, yet speed up greatly when solo? We used to have combat orientated players clearing mobs so the crafters could harvest, now.. not so much.

Perhaps the +% per party member equation could be looked at again. Control points come close but are too much of a grind for many people (before somebody points it out, i am clearly not talking about myself) The Rise is an excellent location for mid to high level players to play as a group, The Compendium is a great location for low to mid level parties. These two areas actually have OK exp gain for full parties, but nothing spectacular. If areas like this contained larger rewards (both exp and loot) it would go a long way to making people better enjoy group activities. If mobs like the obsidian troll had a larger exp reward and a higher than average chance for jackpot loot drops then i believe it would really get people excited. To prevent them from being farmed by those of us that tend to take things to the extreme, perhaps the exp and loot could be awarded in full to each party member instead of divided amongst the party (instead of raising the exp value for the kill). The mini boss fights are fun, people like them but successfully killing them tends to be disappointing. Maybe we could gain trophy deco from the kills? can we mount that troll head (trolls can drop heads)? could the phoenix drop an egg that we can place on our coffee table? Things like that are a different approach to the same problem without the need to fine tune exp gain.

This need not be limited to combat, group activities for crafting would be fantastic. Rare spawns of giant yew trees in scenes could require teamwork to fell with two people operating a crosscut saw while the rest of the party holds rope anchors in place and keep the wolves at bay. Carpenters, tailors and blacksmiths could come together to create stationary lift nets or fishing wheels that could then be operated by teams of fishermen for unusual or increased fishing yields. Maybe some tamable creatures can only be tamed by a party of players with the appropriate skills. Motherload ore veins could be discovered that require the construction of mine-shafts and worked by a party of miners. Things like this would REALLY make the game appeal more to those looking to play with their friends and make new friends while playing.

 

First Onlinegame I play which feels like forcing players to do all on their own instead of in party........its like "Sorry,would like to group but I need to get EXP for my skills"

 

It would be AWESOME if there was a looting control mechanic. Every time I go into a party, loot gets left on the ground because nobody wants to be a ninja and ruin the fun. However, even the junk weapons have salvage value and vendor value and it is such a waste.

This alone makes it advantageous to play single player in many ways.

 

For boss loot, they could just make it so that you only have a chance at the bosses' special loot so many times per week. After killing it however many times is the limit, it will just drop it's standard loot (what they drop now). Make the boss challenging for a group. This would help prevent those who play 24/7 from farming these bosses to the extreme while promoting a reason to group up at least a few times per week. The hard part to balance is the items they would drop. You wouldn't want them to be so powerful that they make crafting worthless or make fighting these weekly bosses an obligatory chore.

 

Allowing a proportionately faster respawn of resources/exp sources would be enough to fix this issue. I believe its currently backwards

 

Adding some more group-friendly dungeons similar to Chillbain would be nice too.

 

I was actually hoping to get in with a group of people to do some harder stuff just for fun. I agree that there could be more incentive though.

 

I totally agree.. It feels like working with a group only hinders your progression 75% shouldent be that way. I want to do group pve and eventually raid pve but also gain almost the same as if i was soloing or even more

 

I think 1 chance for special loot per day would be enough ... I hated this "once per week" mechanic of other MMOs cuz it felt to atrificial. For the "normal" loot I would like to have an additional function for bosses or "named ones" - Loot per player. In short: While normal creatures and foes just have one loot drop (which should be managable by a loot mechanic chosen by the group, like @Tahru suggested) the bigger enemies should have a loot drop for every player so that it is awarding to lay them, even if coming in a bigger group. Of cause this drop could become bigger if the group is smaller (like 3-5 items if 1-3 players, 2-3 if 4-6 players and 1-2 if 7 or 8. The special should stay uneffected by group size (if it would be bound it would encourage to form only small parties, which is against the "we want party play"-logic).

 

absolutely AWESOME ideas!!
100% on the mark! I hope the devs are listening.

 

Great ideas Themo, hope they can think about this and add some crafting-adv teamwork content in a near future.

 

I couldnt agree more with what has been said thus far. As someone who organizes weekly group activities for a guild, we just need more group content and better rewards.

Fortunately, there have been a few threads popping up on the forums here recently about the need for more group content and incentive, hopefully this is something that they make a priority.

 

There is simple and very effective step to make reliable reward for party grinding: make all 5skulls zone PVP zones, so it would be dangerous to grind alone, and we all will grind 5skulls zone in parties

 

Uh... no. Not everyone enjoys PvP, but there does come a point where 4-skull scenes don't net you a lot of xp. All of the control points are 5-skull also, which simply cannot be made PvP, at least not permanently.

PvP is not a solution for what to do with groups of players. They both need content, but not full overlap.

 

I'd love to see a system, like mentioned with the mining shafts, that would make it profitable to form gathering parties. Agreeing also on the EXP and the need to improve group loot mechanics/options.

 

Huge ammount of game aspects in sandbox mmo are easily can be balanced by risk/reward concept , from the other side sometimes they are very, very, hard to balance without risk/reward. So its not very good choice when problems which are easy can be solved, will be solved by big, hard and long to implement constructions.
P.S. Making control points to pvp zone(with deny to teleport out of region) will make even better impact on whole game(regional economy, community cooperation, sandbox mechanics and etc) than just 5 skulls zones. But I understand that for now it would not be.

 

Maybe this is due SotA being originally designed and described as a "story driven basically soloplayer experience with the option to play online".

 

Not really, but i am glad you wont let that go since we want to play that also!

 

I would not mind it being equal per person on each mode. No mode should have advantage over other. Rewarding one play style is penalizing another. Having said that lets finish what we have going on now like bucs den instead of adding more to the pile.

 

These things are already in the pile, it is more a case of how they get implemented and fine tuned. Basically all i want to see is the ability to progress as a party at the same speed as when we go solo, and a few fun activities to do as a guild. Right now there is is only PVP or control points (i like both of those things mind you).