Pankration!

[Rhianu]

Personally, one of the biggest things that stops me from participating in Pankration, aside from the lack of rewards, is just how horribly boring the whole thing is. No offense, but Pankration battles are nothing but a big, giant yawn-fest. All you do is stand there and watch two monsters smack each other a few times. Sure, you can sort of take "control" of the action when your monster is in the ring, but it doesn't feel like you're actually in control, and that's the problem.

I leveled one monster to the maximum way back when Pankration was first introduced, simply because it was something new; it was a novelty. But once that novelty wore off (which was after about one week), I realized the system simply didn't have enough depth to remain entertaining on its own merits.

Adding new rewards to obtain is a step in the right direction, but if the dev team is serious about getting people interested in Pankration again, they're going to need to completely redesign the way Pankration battles work. If all they do is add new rewards and new pets, interest in the system will be piqued momentarily, but will die off again once everyone has gotten the new rewards.

If the dev team wants interest in Pankration to last, then they have to get people interested in the system itself, and not just the rewards it provides. To do that, they need to make the system fun. Right now, it simply isn't fun.

In my opinion, to make Pankration fun to play, SE should completely change the whole Pankration battle system so that the selection options during a Pankration battle aren't so horribly vague and generic. It sucks all the fun out of the system because it doesn't feel like I'm actually controlling what's going on. Give us specific commands so we can control the action directly, and get rid of the general options that don't seem to do anything or make much of a difference.

I want to actually feel like I'm controlling my monsters directly, not just cheering them on from the sidelines.

For example, instead of just having our Pankration monsters stand there and do battle automatically, it would be much more fun if we actually had direct control over them, just like we have direct control over our characters, and then we could use attacks and abilities manually, rather than having to just give boring, general instructions and watch our pets do their own thing.

At the very least, make it kinda like Pokémon, where you choose specific abilities from a list, and then your monster executes those abilities immediately. That would be much better and far more entertaining than just watching the monsters fight on their own.