Challenge achievements, min ilvl and grade 7 materia

Since the Masked Carnival came out we've seen renewed calls for some implementation of the special-condition and time attack challenges on normal content. Random shower thought on how that might look:

1) Transform the min ilvl sync option into the "challenge mode" option. Selecting this option syncs you down to the minimum ilvl, disables echo and (on the backend) turns on the kind of action/event tracking they have in the Carnival.

2) On some sort of schedule, have a list of accumulating and/or rotating challenges for players to complete. These could be as simple as 'clear x in y time' or 'clear x with no deaths', or more wacky like some of the BLU challenges are.

3) As for rewards, I propose clusters for grade VII materia, coupled with making them not otherwise as common as grade VI are. Rewards would scale with challenge difficulty, so you could just always have a 'freebie' or two like a no-death dungeon run each week (and/or other limited means of procuring it) so that everyone can get materia over time. Just those with more ambition might be able to get five or eight a week or whatever.


Obviously lots of details could vary, but the core point is that something like this is readily possible. If SE can do the Carinval stuff, they can absolutely do this, they'd just need to find a good answer for what the structure / rewards would be.

Just to be fanciful, imagine if there were a board with a list of challenges available, some weekly, some monthly or even patch-long. And then four weeks after 4.5 the board looks like:

(note these all would be min sync / no-echo and my times are largely made up)


-- Expires 2/11 (weekly)

(1 cluster) Clear Gimlyt Dark in under 15 minutes

(1) Clear Sohr Kai with no deaths

(1) Clear The Whorleater (Hard) without killing any of the Sahagin adds

(2) Clear Kugane Castle under special conditions (*challenge mode causes certain mystery alterations this week)

(3) Clear The Wreath of Snakes (Extreme) with no deaths


-- Expires 3/5 (monthly)

(5) Clear Orbonne Monastery with no deaths

(5) Clear Alphascape v4.0 (Savage) in under 10 minutes


-- Expires 5/7 (quarterly or something)

(10) Clear The Burden of the Father (Savage) with no deaths

I like the idea of creating challenge modes, it would definitely allow them to re-use old content for a new purpose.

It would need a proper reward structure though to make it worth while, and I doubt your materia idea would work (I doubt SE would ever want the "best" materia simply made exclusive to challenge mode content). Maybe they could create a similar system to Wonderous Tails, complete enough challenge modes per week but instead of having RNG rolls, just give set rewards. Perhaps one of them could be weapon/armor glams (I'd say give away titles, but I get the feeling many people don't REALLY care for those as much).

Yeah. Leveraging materia is a little ambitious in terms of odds, it just works as something that would interest all players so you could have everyone participating to some degree (i.e. always have some basic not-really-hard "challenges" available). You'd still make materia available otherwise, just not to the free materia everywhere extent you do now.

The WT structure exactly, would not work because in order to have ambitious challenges they'd need to be available for more than two weeks and you'd need everyone to have the same ones. I guess they could have Khloe offer a separate list of "bonus stamp" challenges that don't expire and everyone can do, and say they allow you to stock up bonus stamps to put down a 10th, an 11th, etc. up to all 16 if you want. Then so long as SE tends to the three line rewards and maybe adds a little extra spice to them people could be compelled to take on some extra stamp challenges.