Forum Challenge?
I've been thinking that it might be a good time to think about doing some sort of a forum-wide challenge in the near-future. I've seen a fair number of new names on the boards recently, especially since the admission rules have cleared up and JADE beta has come out, so my thought was something fairly newbie friendly might be the way to go.
I'm leaning at the moment towards a reprise of the Mission ADOMPossible challenge that we tried last year. In that challenge, for those who don't know or don't remember, players were split into teams of 5, with 5 characters. Each person then played one character and had to complete a "mission" (eg. take your level 1 PC and complete a UD run) and every successful completion received a point for the team, and players rotated through surviving PCs after each mission. There were a couple problems with this challenge--the big one being that it took too long; we had to wait a week or more for each mission to finish, and everyone had to finish before we could advance. A month seems about the upper limit for how long people are prepared to care about challenges around here. And when someone died, they were out anyway, so participation still dropped off pretty fast, particularly among the newer players, which sort of defeats the purpose.
What I'm thinking is a similar sort of format, but try to streamline things a little bit. Namely that:
-Each mission would have a strict time limit (probably about 4-5 days, with maybe 7 missions total), location restrictions, and turn limit, (varies, but I think ~5000 or so should be appropriate for most of what I have in mind). Incomplete missions would not result in a death, just no points.
-If a PC actually dies, the team is allowed to reroll a PC of the same race/class and play the next mission with the new PC. This would mean that all members would stay in the game; however, deaths would significantly handicap the team because they'd still have to complete their objectives with the newly rolled PC. For example, suppose mission 1 was "Get to HMV" and mission to was "get to dwarftown". If the dark elf thief died in his UD run, then he'd be rerolled by the team, but would have to proceed directly to the CoC, bypassing the UD entirely. I'd probably allow some overflow turns for people having to do these PCs. This would leave some much more difficult challenges for more experienced players to try.
-I'm considering the idea of implementing "steals". What I was thinking would go like this: if a team manages to get all of their PCs to survive a mission, they get the option of stealing a PC from any opposing team that has at least one death in the same mission. So if you survive with all of your PCs, you could swap your thief for the another team's wizard or something.
-Server play would be strongly encouraged...
-I'd probably set the game to end by getting the Fire Orb rather than closing the gate. Or possibly getting the minotaur axe, because that's much more cruel, although the level-cap issue might cause problems there that I'd have to think about how to deal with (probably just adombot up the xps of all PCs below level 21 or something).
Is there any interest in this? Other ideas? Concerns?
Hoping to win with every class, doomed. Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastfighter, Druid, Elementalist, Farmer, Fighter, Monk, and ULE Priest down.