@Jirodyne I can agree with player-made dungeons and jumping puzzles. This is something I’ve talked about with a few members of Forgemasters and I believe at least one is going to be created. We’ve talked a bit about charging for entry, making a prize pool, things like that. Those sorts of creations are only natural for the “economy game” and have a place, kind of similar to carnival games where t hey can be curated and run by players, but only with the current resources in the game.
The thing about player-made game content dungeons is that when you give players that kind of choice, they also get to choose the reward. I don’t mean in the way we see rewards right now, I mean things like the “dungeon” is a pit that’s filled with 1000 elite roadrunners and you just go to town. One problem we saw with City of Heroes was that people made uberdungeons like this that invalidated a lot of other content. Even if you properly scale the reward based on the difficulty, the amount of cheese available for this sort of system is immense. That’s why I’m in favor of curated dungeons that provide similar resources to other activities so they are “a new way to play” rather than “a thing you have to do”
@shap3d I agree, people would just constantly grind them and there would be no reason to do anything else. That’s why I think the dungeon keys and possible cooldown mechanic are important, they can have a resource cost that make the dungeons more balanced reward-wise (you end up trading the “creation” resources for the “reward” resources, effectively from an economic standpoint).
The cooldown mechanic isn’t the best solution for sure, but here’s another option for you: If you do a corrosive dungeon, you become “attuned” to corrosive worlds and dungeons. The more often you do corrosive dungeons, the more attuned you become. This is bad, as you become more attuned, you become weaker against those enemies and they will become harder and harder until you’re simply unable to damage the related monsters. Attunement is cleared over time, and can be sped up by doing dungeons or existing on a planet of a different element. This encourages players to do different things and not just endlessly grind, since they will reach a breaking point where they won’t be able to continue. A soft-cap of the number of dungeons you could do per day, basically.
Also remember part of the idea for this was “Ease of implementation” so I made an effort to consider how much in the way of new features we’d have to get implemented for these things to happen.
We already have portals
We already have “loot chests”
We already have procedurally generated worlds
We already have atmospheric protection.
We already have scaling difficulty
A lot of the work for these is already done, and for a small indie dev team that’s SUPER important. Obviously some things would need to be brought in, like the portal keys, limiters on number of people through a portal, etc, but from what I’ve seen doing some hunts solo and in groups, we’re a good way there.