Sam posted about possibly making changes to monster arena, and I think this would be great. I love the puzzle aspect of trying to figure out the optimal strategy/strategies, and new stuff would give the game this feeling again.

Thoughts on current game mechanics that might change:

1) Enchantments. I like how you can spend money to get temporary buffs during the 7 computer rounds. These can help you to beat a difficult computer team you wouldve lost to, or simply to improve your seed. I like the tradeoff of 'is it worth paying some money to get a higher seed?'.

But during the elimination rounds it is different. In the later elimination rounds, everyone is using enchantments. It basically acts as a huge money sink making it so its really hard to buy more upgrades once you reach that point. In the early rounds it is a big random factor. If you get paired against an opponent who doesnt use them, thats a big advantage. If you manage to not use them yourself (or go only partway), and still win because your opponent didnt use them much either, you get a big advantage.

In world of warcraft, there are temporary boosters like this (mostly potions), where you can spend gold or farm materials to make potions, or sharpening stones, or whatever, and improve your power for a short time. You are allowed to use either one 'battle' (offensive) potion and one 'guardian' (defensive) potion, plus usually some special thing on your weapon, like somethign to make a staff do more magic damage or a dagger do more physical damage.

One possible change would be to eliminate the current enchantments which are just +1s to str/con at increasing costs, and make new stuff that you could buy for a boost for that round. And you could pick just a couple of them. (Maybe this would limit the cost to a reasonable amount, so there wouldnt be a big potential gain for 'getting away with' not using them in the elim rounds?)

Basically I think temporary enhancements are cool and should be there in some way, but they are currently too swingy in the early elimination rounds, and too big a money drain near the end when everyone must use them.


2) Item Prices. Obviously one change could be to change these. Currently the high cost ones are expensive enough that they arent worth it. The low cost ones are useful at the VERY beginning, before being quickly replaced by the ones you want later. It might be cool if the transition happened a bit later. For me I tend to buy a couple staves and cloth/leather armors on round 1, that I replace during rounds 2-3. And thats all the replacing that happens.

One possibility could be that you start off with less money, but that the amount of money you gain each round increases and increases (like a normal rpg). Then once the player vs player part starts, I'm not sure what to do (probably hsouldnt keep increasing).

3) Multiple sets of computer opponents to choose from. There could be one set of 'easy' monsters and a set of 'harder' monsters each round that gave a bigger reward. You could pick which to fight each day. Some days the gap between them might be small and other times large. There would be some skill involved in determining if you can beat the hard ones, or if you should avoid them.


4) Monster sets should tell you if they are going to attack 2vs1, or 1 each on all 3 of your characters. Right now one of the main thigns that makes certain days hard and others easy is wether the monsters gang up 2v1 on one guy, or not. I personally wait until day 7 of each month so that I can check out the match results so far for the game, and see which days a lot of people died, and which days a lot of people won. Then I can see what the hard days are and what the easy days are and plan for that with enchantments on the hard days. But people playing it through daily dont know if its goign to be a hard or easy day. This is unfair to the people playing daily.

One way to combine suggestion 3 and 4 would be that the 'hard' monster always attacks 2vs1, and the easy one splits all their attacks. The hard and easy monsters could be the same monsters, or alternately they could be different.


5) More item slots. There could be new item slots other than weapon/armor to buy.

Right now there are basically the following ways to distribute money:

Base Weapon
Base Armor
Weapon&Armor enhancements
Elemental weapon&Armor enhancements
Temporary enchants
HP
(Cybernetics, which no one uses because they basically do nothing with less than 128 players).


6) Some kind of defensive abilities / ways to distribute attacks among your team / ways to heal during battle. For example, a character might have an ability to take an attack in lieu of one of your other characters getting attacked, occasionally. Then it might be worth it to have one character with extra defensive power. Right now, balanced defense is the way to go because you dont know where the attack is coming (or you can guess and buff up one person and have a 1/3 chance of being right).


7) This one would be a massive change and probably way more work than Sam wants to do. But you could add classes into the game, with different abilities. Like fighters, wizards, clerics, etc. I would think it would be very interesting to choose your class makeup at the start of the month, and then to see how combinations of classes work against other combinations.



Anyway, thats a bunch of ideas to think about for ways to mix up the monster arena game. :)