Since I seem to be posting everywhere tonight, might as well add my thoughts:

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> 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?'.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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?)
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> 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.
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Hmm... they'd have to remain really inexpensive though, otherwise there'd be no point to buying them until the very end unless you absolutely had to to win a match... and then everyone would just buy the maximum number of them possible at the end anyway.


> 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.
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> 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).
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Another way would be to switch/adjust the resale penalty percentages on the preliminaries and the elimination rounds (5 and 15%). Currently, the way things are set up, you essentially HAVE to have almost all your main weapon/armor buying done by the end of the preliminaries or you start suffering heavy resale penalties. Since you can't afford to be paying 100+ gold for one stat point after the first couple of elimination rounds if your opponent isn't doing so, you pretty much have to have all of your permanent stat points bought by then as well.

I wonder what would happen if we started with a penalty of, say, 30% in the first round (there shouldn't be that many people selling things in the first round anyway), but then dropped it by about 3% or so each round? Maybe have it stop at a minimum of 3-6% near the beginning of the Elimination Rounds; you'd have to be much more careful about when you resell things at the beginning, but by the end we could be seeing massive shifts in strategies thanks to there being almost no penalty for rearranging your equipment.

Of course, it could also be completely chaotic too :D Anywho, there definitely should be some kind of shift here, as currently there's really no incentive to buy anything beyond a War Hammer unless you're trying for the Jupe/Auto strategy, or just playing around ;P

> 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.
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This is a rather neat idea, I like it! I dunno how you'd be able to figure out what are good 'levels' for the different difficulties of opponents; you'd have to make the 'hard' monsters REALLY tough, as in some of them would have to require you to take temporary enhancements or something just to survive, or else the reward would have to be pretty small; otherwise the top players would always just go for the 'hard' monsters (if you look at the top 4 players in almost any given month currently, they're almost always capable of winning all of the preliminaries without spending hardly anything on temp.enhancements, if anything at all). Sam seems to have figured out something that's apparently fair enough so far though, so I guess he could work something out :)

> 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.
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Actually, I was thinking: why are we allowed to see anything at all about other people's results before we sign up? Knowing even just how many people are participating in a given month so far can be a factor in strategy (for example, using 4/4/4 3/3/3 because you suspect that there won't be 64 people playing in a particular month ;) ). Of course, I do an analysis on each of the computer opponents as I encounter them anyway so I'd know which ones are more difficult than others even if I didn't know if they were coming beforehand, but it does seem like this is an advantage to those who wait until the last day or two to play (of course, they have to make sure they get completely caught up too :) )


> 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.
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> 5) More item slots. There could be new item slots other than weapon/armor to buy.
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> Right now there are basically the following ways to distribute money:
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> 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).
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I've been wondering if there'd ever be, if nothing else, some kind of "Agility" item. Also, another option would be to throw in Special Item Properties. For example, a Blood Sword might have -1 Attack power, but you'd get back 1 HP for every hit you make; or a Massive weapon would have extra attack power than other weapons at the same cost, but misses every Nth attack (or maybe the character has to rest on every Nth attack). Or a Rapid weapon that has 0 Attack Power, but increases the user's agility by 1.5x. You wouldn't have too many options since you wouldn't want anything that has a random chance element, but there are still some good possibilities.

> 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).
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Yeah, this would work well with some new items too; there's 3 ways it could be done 1) Purchase weapons/armor and abilities separately and just have a limit on the number of abilities you can buy for a character, 2) Purchase weapons/armor and then choose abilities to attach or not to them (probably one ability per weapon); this is sort of like the first option except that as part of the weapon, the ability would be transferrable to other players, and then 3) Have ability weapons/armor that you just pick from.

> 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.
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Yeah, you could probably tie this last group of ideas together and completely change the way the game works; maybe clerics could be the only ones that could buy/use Cure Staves or the Healing ability, or only fighters could use that guard ability.

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

Hehe, well, one last thing I'd like to say is something that I hope is kept, and that's the "no random element in the system" part. I like that the only random part of the game is in who you end up fighting against (which there's really not a whole lot you could do about unless you just ended the game after the prelims :) ), so I don't think that should change. Anywho, I should probably stop typing so much and finish preparing for the semifinal round :P