Implement challenge of the week game mode
issueid=3170 07-18-2014 10:01 PM
The Creator
Number of reported issues by adom-admin: 499
Implement challenge of the week game mode

Challenge of the Week (one run in one dungeon with similar preconditions, separate high score)
Issue Details
Issue Number 3170
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Implemented
Priority 2
Suggested Version ADOM r50
Implemented Version ADOM r51
Milestone Initial Steam Release
Votes for this feature 5
Votes against this feature 0
Assigned Users adom-admin
Tags (none)




07-18-2014 10:32 PM
The Creator
Extra suggestions by Zeno:
- Each week, a race and class are chosen randomly
- You descend a dungeon. The dungeon is similar to ID, but you can only go down, and more interesting (has shops, good items, vaults, and other cool stuff which does not normally appear in the ID).
- You can play only once. Compare your depth/gold/XP with other players doing the challenge.
- RNG is seeded in such a way that each player gets a very similar dungeon. Same starsign, initial attribute and skill values, same monsters and items encountered. (Not sure how easy it is to do this in ADOM -- for example, making items dropped by monsters also looks tricky, but possible; ideally, the random effects of using items (reading spellbooks, scrolls of familiar summoning, potions of exchange, etc.) should be the same, but this one is probably very hard to do, as it would have to be done case by case.)

07-19-2014 08:05 AM
Ancient Member
Actually, these extra suggestions were mine.

07-19-2014 08:31 AM
The Creator
Quote Originally Posted by Zeno
Actually, these extra suggestions were mine.
Whoops, sorry. That's what I get for typing late in the evening with 30+ degrees celsius. My mind was... confused ;-) I'll adjust the comment.

07-19-2014 10:35 AM
Ancient Member
I love the idea. Additionally, I would suggest the possibility of being able to play in the interesting infinite dungeon at any time (without the fixed weekly seed or the weekly high score entry, of course). Many community-organized challenge games (Weakest Link, Duel to the Death, etc.) take place in the ID due to being infinite and without interruptions, and it would be interesting to have an infinite dungeon with shops, pools, etc. as an alternative.

07-19-2014 12:33 PM
Senior Member
This reminds me a little of spelunky, and the daily challenge there really makes the game tempting to come back to! Massive yes from me! I'd like to see the whole drakalor chain get a fixed map layout seed/fixed race+class and weekly highscore!

07-19-2014 06:53 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Al-Khwarizmi
I love the idea. Additionally, I would suggest the possibility of being able to play in the interesting infinite dungeon at any time
I completely second this.

07-19-2014 11:28 PM
Member
Quote Originally Posted by Al-Khwarizmi
I love the idea. Additionally, I would suggest the possibility of being able to play in the interesting infinite dungeon at any time (without the fixed weekly seed or the weekly high score entry, of course). Many community-organized challenge games (Weakest Link, Duel to the Death, etc.) take place in the ID due to being infinite and without interruptions, and it would be interesting to have an infinite dungeon with shops, pools, etc. as an alternative.
The question is what to do about corruption?

Basically, corruption works as a time limit in ADOM, but it would be nice to have a game mode with no background corruption, "take as much time as you want" leisure exploration...

07-20-2014 06:25 AM
Junior Member
For the online high-score, I can understand if you want the challenge-of-the-week attempted only once. So how about introducing a bit of a gamble to this:

If the RNG smites you early-on, you are welcome to try again. But, you only get to post a better score *if* your score is better than the last. Every attempt that is worse results in the difference being subtracted from your online high. (So if you do really badly, your online score is decreased significantly .. if you almost beat your last, it's not so bad.)

Once you feel that you've achieved the best score you can, you can lock it in. At that point future games you play in that challenge are offline, and purely for your own interest.

07-20-2014 07:25 AM
Member
Quote Originally Posted by tkoyah
For the online high-score, I can understand if you want the challenge-of-the-week attempted only once. So how about introducing a bit of a gamble to this:

If the RNG smites you early-on, you are welcome to try again. But, you only get to post a better score *if* your score is better than the last. Every attempt that is worse results in the difference being subtracted from your online high. (So if you do really badly, your online score is decreased significantly .. if you almost beat your last, it's not so bad.)

Once you feel that you've achieved the best score you can, you can lock it in. At that point future games you play in that challenge are offline, and purely for your own interest.
This touches another thing, that players are generally happy for new stuff in game, but unhappy when something is taken away. So if a challenge is sufficiently "unique", it should be definitely available all the time, for players who like it.

I'd suggest to make them a bit more unique, they might be more of "challenge of the month" than "challenge of the week". Slower release would give more time to make them different from each other, and it would also allow players to participate more.

The thing is: if there is one challenge dungeon and the only conditions are that everyone starts with the same character, it might be repetitive and tedious. It will need many more knobs to turn.

I'd suggest:

1. No surprises. By that I mean that each challenge should spell beforehand the exact conditions.
Reason: If the contents is completely surprising, players attempting the challenge later will be spoiled by those who attempted it before, giving them advantage.

2. Dungeon knobs: every dungeon feature separately could be set to level 0-5, where 0 means it doesn't appear at all and 5 means it always appears. For example, setting shops to 5 would result in a "shopping mall dungeon" with a shop on every level. Setting "trapped doors" to 5 would result in a dungeon where EVERY single door would be locked and trapped (and of course, players would play Thieves in such dungeon to make it more fair).

3. Time limit: it could be set that, for example, your character can only spend 2 hours of game time on every floor, and after that you are automatically teleported to next level. This would mimic such challenge conditions as "descend the moment you see the stairs".

4. Talent lock: condition where your characters couldn't select their talents, and instead their talent progression would be locked into a specific sequence, usually one that players wouldn't choose on their own.

5. Single-weapon challenge: only one type of weapon would be generated.

6. Corruption speed: from none to insanely high, maybe with option to either acquire or get rid of corruption by going through stairs (so each stairs would give or remove a fixed amount).

7. Starting equipment: characters could start with some unusual items (like amulet of life saving, a pickaxe or even a specific artifact), or they could start "naked", with no items at all.

8. Item drops: for example, in a challenge enemies would never drop corpses and you'd be limited to food you find -- or alternately you'd have to do with nothing BUT corpses. Or maybe items would be only generated as drops. Or, in a Thief challenge, you wouldn't be able to get scrolls and potions except pickpocketing.

9. Unusual vaults: challenges would be a good place to test new vault designs or to make players overcome a vault that would be deemed too "unfair" for general play -- for example a vortex vault with down stairs in the middle so the player HAS to go through.

10. Starting skills: characters could get some modification of their starting skills. There could be a dungeon made from cavernous rooms where PC's would be helped by starting with Courage, the Iron Chef dungeon where there's no food except for corpses, but you start with Cooking and there's a guaranteed cooking set in first five levels, etc.

07-20-2014 08:37 AM
I'd be happy if we just got some of the old *man challenges implemented with leaderboards.

07-20-2014 11:50 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Marek14
The question is what to do about corruption?

Basically, corruption works as a time limit in ADOM, but it would be nice to have a game mode with no background corruption, "take as much time as you want" leisure exploration...
It would be a pity not to have corruption, it's one of the coolest mechanics in ADOM. Just find SoCRs and RoDSes!

07-21-2014 11:47 PM
Junior Member
I think corruption could be one of the variables that would be useful for these challenges. eg: have a corruption challenge where the background corruption is 2x, 5x, or even 10x .. have more corruption traps, scrolls or corruption removal, and/or corrupting monsters, and have corruption be the main barrier between you and your goal. ..Maybe in some of these challenges the changed corruption needn't be mentioned .. let the players find it out the hard way. :)

Also, I can envisage challenges where there is some other goal, and the game-maker wants to make that the main focus so turns corruption down to zero.

07-22-2014 05:48 AM
Member
Quote Originally Posted by tkoyah
Maybe in some of these challenges the changed corruption needn't be mentioned .. let the players find it out the hard way. :)
As I said, I wouldn't recommend that, since it would give advantage to later players.

07-22-2014 11:59 AM
Junior Member
Quote Originally Posted by Marek14
{about hidden conditions}
As I said, I wouldn't recommend that, since it would give advantage to later players.
{shrugs} I wouldn't stress too much about it. Not all the players are going to be monitoring the forums looking for tips.
And for those trying to go into it spoiler-free, they get to be surprised. Discovering some of the challenges as you go can add its own form of fun. ..We've all been dealing with corruption from the beginning of the standard game. Discovering it's changed when you're already well-corrupted could be a challenging twist.

Not every challenge has to have all conditions spelled out. Would spice the challenge games up a bit to have unknown elements on occasion.

However you design it, some will try to game the system -- trying it with an alt account first, using CheatEngine/ArtMoney, etc. I wouldn't worry about any of that. Just try to make it fun for those who want to participate in it in the spirit intended. Have fun, and enjoy the challenge -- there will be another next week. :)

08-05-2014 09:19 PM
Junior Member
ADOM would be awesome with challenge modes. A few different ones based on different variables would be ideal in my opinion, rather than just one. Maybe use a system where you can toggle challenges, each having a significant positive and negative effects and modifying score. Ideally some would be just more fun. Like maybe a infinite dungeon to a certain level speed challenge with increased XP/$/Shops/Artifacts.

Out of the numerous people I have introduced/talked to ADOM about over the years I don't think a single one cared about leaderboards/highscores. I don't think it's important to the majority of players, just a core group of players that are very vocal in their support. Which is cool that they are into it and it keeps them talking about ADOM, but maybe should not be a high priority overall.

I am not a fan of the idea of weekly/monthly challenges for similar reasons.

08-05-2014 11:55 PM
Senior Member
The ID dungeon dive with a few variable changes is a good start, but I believe the challenges will need more variety rather than tweaking traps, corruption, and descending levels.

Examples of ideas:

1. ID dungeon dive with tweaked stats (like Thomas previewed)
2. Puzzle challenges (like the ones in the forums. I'm not sure how high scores can be factored in here perhaps in game time).
3. Tower defense/ maze challenge (have a cavernous room with a wand of door/wall creation. (Have the ability to summon familiars like barbarians to shoot down the monsters as they go through your maze, etc)
4. Complete certain side quests with larger limitations (ie complete the puppy quest with only wielding food or something).

08-06-2014 01:30 PM
Junior Member
I like the fixed starting state (effectively the same character), but I think the dungeon should be random - perhaps with a few fixed hidden extras (specific predetermined levels etc) or altered 'world' details (faster corruption, differing monster distributions etc). These alternations from the norm should probably be stated as part of the challenge, even if its only alluded to in a vague manner.

I think the "win" condition should be leaving the dungeon though. You start at level one, on the stairs up, and exiting counts as winning. However score is determined by how deep you got, and how much "wealth" you have on you when you leave - as well as perhaps specific challenge based awards, like monster kills or solving puzzles/killing 'bosses' on certain set levels.
You can only summit one "win" to the scoreboard, but deaths are logged in another scoreboard, allowing you multiple "attempts" so long as they all fail.
I love list of death messages on a scoreboard, but if the goal is to just keep going till you die, you have fewer interesting choices presented than if you have a specific end state to try and strive for.

Two weeks would also be better for the challenge for those with a busy lifestyle, although I guess it depends on how much interest there is in the challenge and how much custom content would be included with each one. Both as additional custom work takes time to produce, but also because people generally don't like missing out on cool new things because of small time windows of availability.

08-11-2014 12:48 AM
Junior Member
I'm kinda in agreement with PseudoFenton here .. This is one of the general problems with a mode that operates in real-world time: Make a challenge of the week, and some players might be able to try it 50 times, while some of us old chaps, with life and family getting in the way, might not get to try it at all on some weeks.

What's the solution? Hard to say, as I haven't seen the first implementation yet. One, as PseudoFenton said, is to extend the time-frame. Another would be an option to try past-weeks challenges too, with no option for glory (because the challenge has expired), but you can still try older challenges out. And yet another option would be to not worry about this at all, leave the challenges changing weekly, and have the server putting old challenges back into rotation (randomly? chronologically?) if no new challenge has been submitted for that week. (I like this last idea, because it keeps the challenges coming, even if the developers themselves get distracted by other projects, or move on to ADOM II development, or real life, etc.) :) ..probably best just to wait to see the first implementation before looking at this aspect closer, IMHO.

08-11-2014 03:50 AM
Ancient Member
The screenshot TB posted implied you would get one (1) chance at the challenge. This is, imo, a fine solution.

08-11-2014 06:07 AM
The Creator
The current rules are:
- You can score but once with a challenge game - on your first game.
- While your first game is active you cannot play another one.
- You can have an arbitrary number of challenge games active for differing weeks.

I guess this should take into account all interests mentioned :-)

And I hereby close this ticket as the initial version of the challenge mode now is complete. But I need to define more tickets to correctly set up the infrastructure around challenge games.

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