Teamwork For Longevity.

Sup.
In this thread I want to talk about something that exponentially contributes to the lifespan of many games - teamwork. And no, I am not talking about enforcing teamwork (ekhem, Bob's tomb), I am talking about making teamwork more beneficial, but not entirely necessary to progress - Encouraging teamwork.

Why is teamwork so important?

Co-op games contribute heavily to the flourishing playerbase for one major reason - playing with friends is always more fun than alone. From my personal experience, most people I see quit just because of not having anything to do with their friends. And if playing alone is the best and sometimes only option, it just doesn't feel so exciting after certain amount of time, because of how an end-game features turn out to be simply grinding same things, over and over. These are most common instances of "grinding" met in Wynncraft:

#1 Dungeons;
#2 Bulb cave;
#3 Professions;
#4 Lootrunning.

I have a few concept in my head for all those instances, except for bulb cave, or any other grind spot for that matter. Simply because it's kind of supposed to be a cluster of people murdering all they see in a big party, and one can't do much about it. With that acknowledged, let me introduce you to my personal ideas of how can Dungeons, Professions and Lootrunning be more beneficial through teamwork, thus encouraging it.

#1 Dungeons.

So, in order to make Dungeons more team-based, the rewards and difficulty scale should be proportionate to the quantity of people. What that means is that the more people, the higher difficulty and rewards. How? Parties could be utilized for this. Basically, before entering the boss room, a party shall be created and all players should join it. In order to determine the difficulty scale, the first player to enter the arena and trigger a boss spawn, will be the "influencer". The algorithm will check player's current party status:
-Does a player have a party? If yes;
-How many members are in that player's party?

This number will determine the difficulty. This is how much difficulty multiplier (boss's health) should be affected by the number of party members:
1 member - 1.0x difficulty;
2 members - 1.2x difficulty;
3 members - 1.5x difficulty;
4 members - 1.9x difficulty;
5 members - 2.4x difficulty;
6 members - 3.0x difficulty, and so on.

This also should include the reward scaling, adjusted accordingly to the difficulty, but that is a subject I leave for developers, if this sounds like a good suggestion. Next up, we have:

#2 Professions (more speciffically, gathering professions).

You're probably wondering "How are you going to make cutting down trees a co-op experience? Hear me out (I mean read). Imagine if players from the same world, in a party, could gather from the same single resource and benefit from it more than they would if they were to gather it individually. To make this idea both beneficial and balanced, let's name a few definitions related to Gathering Professions:
#1 Gathering points - This is the amount of points a player has to reach in order to gather a resource;
#2 Profession XP - This is the amount of experience a player can earn upon gathering a resource;
#3 Materials - This is the outcome obtained through gathering a resource.
#4 Gathering speed - The amount of Gathering Points inflicted with every swing of the tool.
#5 Resource type - A different resource type is obtained through different actions. For example, Gems are obtained through right-clicking an ore and ingots are obtained through left-clicking it.

I will use an "Individual" and "Party" scale to show you what I want to do with those factors, dependent on player's party status, just like I did with the Dungeons. So currently all those factors have a scale of 1.0x. Basically "default". This is how I want to manipulate numbers under certain conditions:

#1 When a player is NOT in a party - "default" setting is applied, meaning everything has a scale of 1.0x.

#2 When player IS in a party:
a) Change Gathering points scale from 1.0x to 2.5x (2.5x longer to gather a resource, making it 2x would result in faster gathering than without a party, which is not good, making a party should not directly buff the benefits of the solo player);
b) Change Experience points scale from 1.0x to 1.5x (instead of 100% XP you only get 75% when in a party, compared to what you'd be given if you weren't in that party);
c) Change Material gain from 1.0x to 2.0x (2 materials per 1 gather).

What happens when 2 or more players gather the same resource:
a) Gathering Speed is multiplied by the amount of Gathering Speed from 2 players' gathering levels and tools;
b) This means a resource is gathered faster, which not only makes up for the XP loss, but benefits with extra XP as a reward for teamwork (however, XP will NOT be awarded if a player doesn't inflict more than 25% total Gathering Points);
c) Every player that inflicted more than 25% of total Gathering Points needed to obtain a resource, will also be given 2 materials of a certain tier. All resources will be the same tier for each player who contributed to the gathering process. However, resource type is dependent on left or right-clicking the resource, for instance 1 player can receive 2 papers of 3* tier, and second - 2 wood blocks of 3* tier.

Conclusion.

This concept will benefit multiple players (no more than 3, however) who coordinate their resource obtaining with other party members, which then can be shared between if one wants to help another out with gathering, or just utilized to gain more XP and materials than without a party.

You think I am done? There's one more subject I want to touch:

#3 Lootrunning.

This one is however pretty short. And sadly quite made-up. The way Lootrunning could be under effect of a party goes like this:
#1 Party leader's Loot Quality and Loot Bonus goes under effect of every party member;
#2 Every other player can take portion (maybe half) of benefits from party Leader's extra Loot bonuses. The main purpose is to give players without Loot Bonus/Loot Quality sets an upper hand.

The primary concept is to speed up the lootrun dramatically for the cost of some Loot Bonus. I am frankly not sure on that one, I will leave this to your discretion.

Alright, that's it. I hope I didn't crack-open too many heads with that and molded some solid enough concepts.

 

Actually, that's a pretty good idea, as long as it's balanced properly.

Also pretty nice. Basically, if people get into groups they don't need bombs, and if they have bombs it would go even faster. Grinding is usually more fun if other people are with you

Not so sure on this one either, lootrunning isn't really a good multiplayer thing. Its hard to keep everyone together, and does the lootbonus sharing thing allow people to go over the soft cap? If it doesn't it would be nearly pointless, and if it did, well, there's a reason it's at 40%. Adding client side chests though would be good.

Lootbonus is also easy to get, I use clearsight spectacles + sky chefs apron + champions leggings. gives me like 50% lb with decent ids.

With that, you should be able to afford a lq set somewhat soon.

I actually find that bulb cave, with a proper party, is basically just free xp. I got from 104 to 105 in less than an hour because PUN or some other guild was grinding, with smaller groups, its harder, but also a bit more engaging because you can't expect to get shared xp from 5 shamans decimating everything. Unless you are going from 105-106, in which case you should stop complaining about a completely optional and almost pointless thing that wasn't even an intended feature.

 

There is a reason I did not open a topic about grind spots (but bulb cave is the most common, so I just said "bulb cave", not "grinding spots") aside from mentioning it as a "grindy" part of the experience. I mean, it literally has word "Grind" in it, I don't expect anything else than an easier way to gain XP from it, thus it's fine the way it is.


Also, for the subject of lootrunning, the reason I came up with that idea is to make multiple people loot run in different areas to complete a loot run faster. They take a crap ton of time alone.

 

Lootrunning is already the fastest way to earn emeralds, it doesn't really need a buff.

 

I really don't see why lootrunning should be a team effort. Firstly, chests would need to be client sided or it would be obnoxius and would actually make the run worse. Secondly, it's already the fastest way to get emeralds, and buffing it makes no sense.