New Difficulty Mode Suggestion: (Chaos)

[ty_taurus]

At this point, I think the vast majority of players are fairly familiar with the various difficulty "tags" we see attached to various pieces of content, things like (extreme), (savage), and (ultimate), amongst a few others. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a new difficulty tag: (chaos).

What is (Chaos) difficulty?

(Chaos) difficulty would be about taking content that's relatively easy, ranging from dungeon bosses to normal raid bosses and arranging them in a sort of rogue-lite randomized fashion where each fight has no mechanical changes, but now adds randomized hazard-type effects to each fight. Think FF7's Gold Saucer Colosseum. At certain set intervals, a random hazard is applied to the fight for the rest of that fight, and gradually, those hazards start making the fight more and more hectic the longer it takes you, things like adding a thunderstorm to the fight that has small circle AOEs striking around the arena, a flickering ice floor that turns on and off, adding that giant rolling ball from Alexander 7, etc.

The different releases we could see would be categories of which bosses would be randomly pulled from, like A Realm Reborn (Chaos) would pit you against random ARR Dungeon bosses with random trial bosses every X fights, to a total of Y fights. Outside of expansion based challenges, you could also do things like Variant (Chaos) Set I, which features Variant Dungeon bosses from EW, whereas a future Variant (Chaos) Set II could feature random Variant bosses that we eventually see in DT.

What are your thoughts on a difficulty mode like that?

[Saraide]

You had me at rogue-lite. I think taking normal mode content is a really good idea because those fights feature a lot more leeway when it comes to adding random arena hazards. Even if those random hazards overlap all safe zones in a mechanic it's still probably going to be liveable.

For me a roguelite game mode should also include gaining randomized actions or be made up completely from randomized actions, leading to unique rotations every run ideally. Balance does not need be the primary concern here since every run should be different anyway.

[Gemina]

Adding randomized effects to increase the fight's difficulty would be introducing mechanical changes to an already existing fight. This already happens to a certain extent in the EX/Savage versions of existing NM 8-man encounters. Not necessarily random, but adding additional mechanics not present in the NM fights.

What the Gold Saucer colosseum did was take existing monsters in the world of FFVII and introduce handicaps to the player. Things such as breaking their materia, weapon, armor, etc. In a sense, we have this as well in Deep Dungeon content which also handicaps players by taking away their natural regen, abilities, making the enemies stronger, and so forth.

However, I still like your idea and I think something like a boss rush mode wherein players face random bosses that could essentially be just about any encounter currently in the game that introduces a random handicap that stacks with the handicap from the previous round. You can also give each boss an enrage timer to increase the stakes of each encounter. The handicaps can be anything from level reduction, DoT infliction with increasing potency, stat breaks (ilv reduction), movement speed reduction (making it more difficult to escape enemy telegraphs and positioning, removing items like pots and tinkers, taking away raise, among other things.

Rewards would have to be pretty good that increase in value as the rounds progress and get more difficult due to the handicaps. It would be interesting to let players know what they will win should they succeed so they can make the collective decision to continue, or walk away with their current rewards. If they fail though, they lose everything and get a consolation prize akin to a fete present that more often than not turns into something like a token that can be accumulated and traded to a NPC for an item of their choice that is still somewhat useful.

This could be a new type of treasure map instance. I like this. Make it happen SE.

[Saraide]

Adding randomized effects to increase the fight's difficulty would be introducing mechanical changes to an already existing fight. This already happens to a certain extent in the EX/Savage versions of existing NM 8-man encounters. Not necessarily random, but adding additional mechanics not present in the NM fights.

What the Gold Saucer colosseum did was take existing monsters in the world of FFVII and introduce handicaps to the player. Things such as breaking their materia, weapon, armor, etc. In a sense, we have this as well in Deep Dungeon content which also handicaps players by taking away their natural regen, abilities, making the enemies stronger, and so forth.

However, I still like your idea and I think something like a boss rush mode wherein players face random bosses that could essentially be just about any encounter currently in the game that introduces a random handicap that stacks with the handicap from the previous round. You can also give each boss an enrage timer to increase the stakes of each encounter. The handicaps can be anything from level reduction, DoT infliction with increasing potency, stat breaks (ilv reduction), movement speed reduction (making it more difficult to escape enemy telegraphs and positioning, removing items like pots and tinkers, taking away raise, among other things.

Rewards would have to be pretty good that increase in value as the rounds progress and get more difficult due to the handicaps. It would be interesting to let players know what they will win should they succeed so they can make the collective decision to continue, or walk away with their current rewards. If they fail though, they lose everything and get a consolation prize akin to a fete present that more often than not turns into something like a token that can be accumulated and traded to a NPC for an item of their choice that is still somewhat useful.

This could be a new type of treasure map instance. I like this. Make it happen SE.

I dont think people should be punished for trying and failing. IMO games/gamemodes like this function well and are engaging when you can enter at any time and when you keep rewards/unlocks even if you do fail. We should encourage people to try and go beyond their abilities in a game mode like that.

[Gemina]

I dont think people should be punished for trying and failing. IMO games/gamemodes like this function well and are engaging when you can enter at any time and when you keep rewards/unlocks even if you do fail. We should encourage people to try and go beyond their abilities in a game mode like that.

On the contrary, you accomplish encouraging players to go above and beyond through trial and failure. There is far too much handholding and participation trophies given in this game as is. It has made it stale and strips longevity away from the content. Players absolutely should not be rewarded for failure. Like I said, they can quit after the completion of any round with the rewards they have acquired. Knowing they can try the next round and still keep what they've earned lowers the stakes, and when you reduce the stakes you take away tension along with the motivation to do better and give it your best. This type of content would give the game a run on the treadmill that it seriously needs right now.

[LianaThorne]

Adding randomized effects to increase the fight's difficulty would be introducing mechanical changes to an already existing fight. This already happens to a certain extent in the EX/Savage versions of existing NM 8-man encounters. Not necessarily random, but adding additional mechanics not present in the NM fights.

What the Gold Saucer colosseum did was take existing monsters in the world of FFVII and introduce handicaps to the player. Things such as breaking their materia, weapon, armor, etc. In a sense, we have this as well in Deep Dungeon content which also handicaps players by taking away their natural regen, abilities, making the enemies stronger, and so forth.

However, I still like your idea and I think something like a boss rush mode wherein players face random bosses that could essentially be just about any encounter currently in the game that introduces a random handicap that stacks with the handicap from the previous round. You can also give each boss an enrage timer to increase the stakes of each encounter. The handicaps can be anything from level reduction, DoT infliction with increasing potency, stat breaks (ilv reduction), movement speed reduction (making it more difficult to escape enemy telegraphs and positioning, removing items like pots and tinkers, taking away raise, among other things.

Rewards would have to be pretty good that increase in value as the rounds progress and get more difficult due to the handicaps. It would be interesting to let players know what they will win should they succeed so they can make the collective decision to continue, or walk away with their current rewards. If they fail though, they lose everything and get a consolation prize akin to a fete present that more often than not turns into something like a token that can be accumulated and traded to a NPC for an item of their choice that is still somewhat useful.

This could be a new type of treasure map instance. I like this. Make it happen SE.

Agree with the person above me that nuking rewards would probably demotivate those who don't want to bash their head into something over and over again (i.e. non-savage crowd or the non-deep dungeon crowd). I'd say rolling back a tier or two of rewards upon failure would be more suitable as it's still a punishment but doesn't feel like a complete waste of time (if I spent like 3-4h in here and died and only got a fete present I'd probably never touch it again lol). If that's not acceptable than perhaps an "Accursed Hoard" option could be available so people can pick up sack equivalents on the way that they can't lose and roll for rewards afterwards. As far as tokens go, I'm open to it but I don't believe it should be double digit tokens to get one item. Ultimately it needs to respect the time of the player attempting it in some form, otherwise I feel a large percentage of people will avoid it for other content that is more flexible with its offerings.

Not against the idea, it's interesting. I just am wondering with the way the devs are currently modeling the game (making things easier), if they'd be open to throwing something like this into the game if it's supposed to be extremely punishing. I agree that the game needs more harder content for midcore and I'm hoping that in DT we start to see the signs of the trend shifting to more harder activities, but who knows.

[Saraide]

On the contrary, you accomplish encouraging players to go above and beyond through trial and failure. There is far too much handholding and participation trophies given in this game as is. It has made it stale and strips longevity away from the content. Players absolutely should not be rewarded for failure. Like I said, they can quit after the completion of any round with the rewards they have acquired. Knowing they can try the next round and still keep what they've earned lowers the stakes, and when you reduce the stakes you take away tension along with the motivation to do better and give it your best. This type of content would give the game a run on the treadmill that it seriously needs right now.

You should get the rewards for the fights you beat and you dont get the rewards for the fight you dont beat. That's not rewarding failure.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

What are your thoughts on a difficulty mode like that?

Interesting idea in execution, but it would require a lot of playtesting and a 'per-fight' selection of hazards due to some combos being instantly lethal with no counterplay.
For example, take the final trial of EW, where one of the mechanics involves expanding AoEs that cover about 98% of the arena's surface and force you close to the arena's edge. Trying to slip and slide into that small safe spot without sliding off will be very difficult, or if those safe spots get covered by aoes, you result in what is effectively RNG failure states outside of player control.

Or take something like the buzzsaw add phase during Engels in Copied factory, where you're forced into a small section of the arena - trying to avoid the Alexander death ball during that part will be effectively impossible.

Not that I dislike the idea, mind you. But it would likely be something akin to unreal where they would realistically only release one (or a small number) of fight(s) that have been vigorously playtested to make sure even with all combinations of hazards and mechanics, it will still be entirely within player execution hands on whether they succeed or fail. Haphazardly slapping them onto any fight with no playtesting would be a recipe for disaster.

[Mosha]

At this point, I think the vast majority of players are fairly familiar with the various difficulty "tags" we see attached to various pieces of content, things like (extreme), (savage), and (ultimate), amongst a few others. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a new difficulty tag: (chaos).

What is (Chaos) difficulty?

(Chaos) difficulty would be about taking content that's relatively easy, ranging from dungeon bosses to normal raid bosses and arranging them in a sort of rogue-lite randomized fashion where each fight has no mechanical changes, but now adds randomized hazard-type effects to each fight. Think FF7's Gold Saucer Colosseum. At certain set intervals, a random hazard is applied to the fight for the rest of that fight, and gradually, those hazards start making the fight more and more hectic the longer it takes you, things like adding a thunderstorm to the fight that has small circle AOEs striking around the arena, a flickering ice floor that turns on and off, adding that giant rolling ball from Alexander 7, etc.

The different releases we could see would be categories of which bosses would be randomly pulled from, like A Realm Reborn (Chaos) would pit you against random ARR Dungeon bosses with random trial bosses every X fights, to a total of Y fights. Outside of expansion based challenges, you could also do things like Variant (Chaos) Set I, which features Variant Dungeon bosses from EW, whereas a future Variant (Chaos) Set II could feature random Variant bosses that we eventually see in DT.

What are your thoughts on a difficulty mode like that?

Yeah, this is a rad as fuck idea.

I'll add that you should be able to mix and match the sets or just turn them all on so the boss rush can pull from any fight in the game.

[Mosha]

Interesting idea in execution, but it would require a lot of playtesting and a 'per-fight' selection of hazards due to some combos being instantly lethal with no counterplay.
For example, take the final trial of EW, where one of the mechanics involves expanding AoEs that cover about 98% of the arena's surface and force you close to the arena's edge. Trying to slip and slide into that small safe spot without sliding off will be very difficult, or if those safe spots get covered by aoes, you result in what is effectively RNG failure states outside of player control.

Or take something like the buzzsaw add phase during Engels in Copied factory, where you're forced into a small section of the arena - trying to avoid the Alexander death ball during that part will be effectively impossible.

Not that I dislike the idea, mind you. But it would likely be something akin to unreal where they would realistically only release one (or a small number) of fight(s) that have been vigorously playtested to make sure even with all combinations of hazards and mechanics, it will still be entirely within player execution hands on whether they succeed or fail. Haphazardly slapping them onto any fight with no playtesting would be a recipe for disaster.

I would still want this even if it took a lot of dev time and trial and error to work out the kinks. This is like the perfect I have nothing to do content and I can just boot into a boss rush.