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.