When was the last time you entered a party with someone who wasn’t already your friend?
Have you ever done so?
Proposal
It has been noted by many that Arcane Odyssey’s player interaction is lacking. Besides trading in the Auction House, duels, and people offering the most godawful trades you’ve ever seen for one of your seasonals, it’s an almost-singleplayer experience. And maybe that’s okay most of the time, but sometimes, I feel that this odyssey is best sailed with a partner or two. A Eurylochus to our Odysseus.
What I am proposing are a series of changes to the long-implemented Party system to encourage its use.
Details/background on your proposal
There would be two major changes to parties: party tags, and party benefits. I’ll cover the former now. See the mockup below.
Party Tags would be a fairly simple system: when creating a Party, you can now select a tag which will be included with the invitation, specifying what you want to do. Additionally, if you’ve created a Party with said tag, it will display above your character to other players, indicating that you wish to do said activities with others’ help.
Now, I doubt this tag system alone would be enough to encourage cooperation. Thus, the second part of my proposal is a more mechanical change. That being to provide players with benefits for being in a Party. These effects would require that:
- The Party contains more than one player.
- The other player is nearby and actively participating in the activity. The detection for this would vary.
- For more mobile activities, simply being nearby would be sufficient (as I doubt it would be easy to program a check to see if both players are hunting treasure). For more stationary ones, the detection would require said player to be performing the activity with the target.
- For example, when fighting bosses, both players must have dealt enough damage to the boss to receive drops.
The benefits apply based on the detection condition, not based on the Party Tag, and, if the individual condition is met, would be as follows:
- Players farming bosses cannot receive a drop they have in their inventory until they’ve received all of them, preventing duplicates.
- Any Party Member holding a treasure chart will cause that chart to display on the screens of party members 10 studs away or closer. In addition, all unearthed treasure locations will have their secondary loot (galleons, gems, cannonballs, etc.) split between both players. The primary loot (modified armors), however, will be rolled individually for each party member, resulting in a net gain.
- Parties in the Dark Sea will receive minimal changes, besides being highlighted through walls when downed. However, each Sea Sector will now have a Sailors’ Lodge-like ‘island’ along the boarder, effectively being a large dock facing the Dark Sea. This could serve as a meeting place for players planning an expedition into the Dark Sea.
- When fishing together, all Party Members will receive a fishing speed bonus of +5%, and the duration of the window to reel in fish is doubled (giving the player time to react if they were chatting).
- If underwater and out of stamina, you can continue to swim so long as a Party Member within 30 studs of you still has some, allowing players to save companions who mismanaged their stamina (or ones lower than the max level). This is indicated by aura-like particles swirling between the two players.
- Players sailing close together and traveling in a straight line will move at the mean average of all ships’ Sailing Speed. This means you can use a fast, yet weak ship to bolster a slow, yet powerful one in getting to your destinations. This would cease to apply in combat.
Reason to add/change
Right now, the party system is functional for the purposes of keeping an eye on your friends’ location and health, but it does little beyond that—and it certainly doesn’t do anything to encourage you to join up with strangers seeking the same goal as you.
You can argue that the proposed systems would be a bit overpowered. I don’t disagree. However, given that the end outcome will be an encouragement to cooperate and a friendlier community, I say that it’s perfectly acceptable to implement what are effectively Quality of Life buffs.
Also, most of the playerbase can’t chat right now, so this could help communication in a way Roblox can’t crack down on.
