Party Quests Incentivize party play in dojo

The big hp increase at Manon in dojo bosses and a lack of comparable increase in training point causes players to just speed run the bosses before this. Furthermore, because solo play rewards one extra point per round (which is quite noticeable, even at 6 points per round 7/6 == 16.7%), playing in a party is much worse than playing solo. This leads to dojo being very boring, and dead from a multiplayer perspective.

Example: running solo to manon takes basically the same time as running in a party. But the points awarded respectively are:
Party: 1*5+2*5+3*5+4*5+5*5+6*2 == 87
Solo: 2*5+3*5+4*5+5*5+6*5+7*2 == 114
114/87 == 1.31
Solo play is ~30% faster than party play. This means that for every hour you spend partying in dojo, it would have been about 15 minutes faster for you to solo.

One simple solution is to increase the training points awarded on completion (ie killing Mu Gong) so that actually completing the boss run is more time efficient than just running solo up to manon over and over.

This change would encourage parties to group to complete the run faster. A counter argument might be that "if you want to play in a party, nothing is stopping you". However, this requires you to find other people who don't mind the efficiency loss from the extra solo training point per round (dojo is almost always completely dead). Furthermore, partying it is still currently inefficient to try to complete the run due to the lack of increased points.

tl;dr

Being incentivized to run to the middle, attack once, and run to the portal and getting punished for partying leads to very boring gameplay. Buff training points rewarded on killing Mu Gong to counter this.

 

Agreed. Killing mu gong giving like 50-100 points would be great. I mean with the way the medals work there is no real incentive to beating the last boss of the tower.

However I do feel that the lvl restriction is a good thing. 30 is a wide range already and I wouldn't want to see a bunch of low lvls just standing in a corner while a high lvl attacker does all the work.

 

Fair enough, I left out my comment about the level range initially because it is probably more realistic to just get one thing changed rather than attempting tack on additional changes. I definitely think it's a very minor thing compared to buffing encouraging party play.

Edit: I removed the comment about level range in order to keep the focus of this thread on a single change.

 

I would certainly love to see dojo being made much harder for higher levels characters (some multiplier to hp?). Many of my party members complained about falling asleep and understandably so when we spend more than half the time running it the next level. Making it harder could incentivise more party play. The points gain should be increased too, to reflect the increase in difficulty.

 

Hm, while I agree that dojo should be harder, I am not sure if that is the correct way to do it. A multiplier to hp punishes lower lvl players, and is simply a time increase unless such a change was accompanied by boss damage increases (for example, consider a King Slime with 50 million hp hitting you for 1 damage).

I also feel that a difficulty change like that is erring on the more "custom" content side of things, and is unlikely to be implemented. I do agree that it would accomplish similar things to increase Mu Gong reward points (encourage party play), but I feel that increasing Mu Gong points is a less jarring and stays more faithful to gms while providing similar benefits.

 

I 100% agree with this post, as is currently it's simply inefficient to run with a party, and even less efficient to actually finish the pq.
I personally would suggest adjusting the boss list so that the difficulty of dojo is on par with how much stronger the average player in royals is compared to the average player in GMS. Re-designing which bosses come when, where, and how much points they give. Adding ToT bosses, Capt. Latanica, Dragon rider from Dragon rider pq, among others, and adjust Mu Gong accordingly to be a real monster to deal with.

Because it is kinda sad to me that my favorite PQ is so easy to complete, and yet so not worth completing.

Personally, I'd adjust dojo to look more like this, to increase difficulty & load the points towards the end of the pq

Spoiler

Right side: Running total of solo & party points

Round 1 - Time limit: 5 minutes. Each boss awards 2 points (1 points for parties). 10 5
Mano
Stumpy
King Slime
King Clang
Giant Centipede
Round 2 - Time limit: 6 minutes. Each boss awards 3 points (2 points for parties). 25 15

Faust
Mushmom
Timer
Dyle
Alishar

Round 3 - Time limit: 8 minutes. Each boss awards 4 points (3 points for parties). 45 30

Tae Roon
Eliza
Chimera
Enraged Lord Pirate
Papa Pixie

Round 4 - Time limit: 10 minutes. Each boss awards 5 points (4 points for parties). 70 50

Poison Golem
Jr. Balrog
Richie
Frankenroid
Capt. Latanica

Round 5 - Time limit: 20 minutes. Each boss awards 10 points (9 points for parties). 120 95

Headless Horseman
Manon
Griffey
Ergoth
Leviathan

Round 6 - Time limit: 30 minutes. Each boss awards 20 points (19 points for parties). 220 190
Dodo
Lilynouch
Lyka
Papulatus Clock
Black Crow

Round 7 - Time limit: 40 minutes. Each boss awards 50 points (49 points for parties). 320 288
Dragon Rider
Mu Gong (Buffed)

I feel like the list I gave (Or anything similar in philosophy) would make dojo more fun to do, since the boss redesign makes going further into dojo more rewarding, and making the final bits so stupidly hard that you need a well balanced party to really have a chanc, and even the meter bar becomes more useful since it'll have more uses throughout dojo, & everyone won't just "wait till pap/mu gong to use it". For the record, as it currently is, I've been able to solo dojo since level 147. But there's no point, it's just a waste of time since by the time I've cleared Levi->End, I could've solo'd all the way back up to Levi again & then some.

 

I personally feel like the points rewarded overall should be increased for the higher floors of dojo, whether it's solo or party. The farthest I can make it through dojo is getting to Papulatus, then I have no more time to try to kill him, let alone survive him. The farthest I can go through with ease is up to Griffey, as Griffey's 1/1 and debuff are too much to deal with as a solo player the majority of the time without your power bar maxed out. I could honestly deal with the harder bosses by myself if they spawned more than only two waves of minions to drop potions. After those two waves are gone then you're screwed if you can't save those potions for later in the fight against Leviathan or Papulatus. So I'd hope for a point increase for these harder bosses to give me motivation to even try to push past Manon as 7 points isn't even worth the time to fight a boss that takes longer to kill than the first 5 bosses of Dojo that rewards 10 total points. Mind you, this is all coming from the perspective of a Bucc, where I can use my I-frames from Demolition and Barrage to dodge almost any attack and yet I still can't make it past Griffey without major luck so I can't imagine how the other solo players' experiences are with the later bosses.

I agree that party play should be more incentivized, but keep in mind that parties are able to completely clear the dojo with relative ease if they have a bishop, while solo players generally won't make it to the end, especially within the time limit, unless they are ranged and/or very funded, so putting a huge point bonus on solely Mu Gong would mostly be to the benefit of parties. (On top of all this, I am an Ironman so I am not allowed to party, but I'm not saying these things only for that reason.)

 

If we want to keep the original total points intact maybe we can try the Fibonacci number for both solo and party with a boost for the last two stages. There shouldn't be any difference in solo or party imo...at least for the first ~30 stages.

Stage 1 - 5 = 1
Stage 7 - 11 = 1
Stage 13 - 17 = 2
Stage 19 - 23 = 3
Stage 25 - 29 = 5
Stage 31 - 35 = 8
Stage 37 = 21
Stage 38 = 30

 

Keep in mind that nerfing dojo to be slower than it is now will just cause resentment among players who didn't grind it before the nerf, so care should be taken that the changes do not result in the optimal points / hour being significantly less.

 

The points accumulated are still the same, just moved around to increase the incentive to party like this thread suggested because the best reward is in the end.

Or are you just trying to buff the point earned instead?

 

Imo, by maintaining the same points & loading the later stages with the points, you are effectively nerfing the points. Not many players can clear the entire dojo solo, and sometimes not even with a party (I've seen many-a-people wipe on pap & mu gong). Having to finish for the same amount of points, whereas before you only had to get to manon for about 80% of them comes as an indirect nerf to points

 

How do you increase the incentive to party without making the solo less appealing then? Because if solo is faster and more effective, then there is no reason to party which take up time and strategy to clear the entire thing.

 

My solution is to make dojo harder, make it so that soloing dojo isn't feasible, but soloing it is possible up to a point. Making Dojo harder & give more points solves a lot of the issues with it (Check my spoiler list to get an idea of my thoughts on how it'd look)
Since daily points cap at 1,500 it actually doesn't really make farming belts faster, just less tedious

 

I meant you make party play more appealing without nerfing solo play. So don't nerf how much points/hour solo play is, but make partying a more attractive option (for the reasons I put in op). Obviously from a zero sum perspective solo becomes less appealing if you look at points only, but solo play has advantages such as not needing to find party members and no down time / go for as long as you want.

 

Ah, so you want an increment of total points for defeating the Mu Gong / last few stages? Well, my point still stands if the GMs don't want to increase or decrease the total points then. I'm not a fan of increasing or decreasing the total points accumulated.

 

I'm fully in favor of making dojo more of a party-based challenge than what it currently is. Instead of the atrocious point grind of walking through solo and leaving at manon there should be some sort of incentive to make it all the way through.

Going all the way through should be the fastest way to earn points by way of some completion bonus for the final floor.

 

Just want to let you know that we have implemented some changes that incentivizes party play at dojo, the changes are now being tested.

Disclaimer: this is not a guarantee that the changes will be part of update 60

Edit: as mentioned in the update 60 thread, the changes are now live. If you have feedback to give us about it, please create a new thread!