AKA Bea's Bounty Board
(Scroll to the bottom for mockups and a TL;DR!)
The basic idea, in short
A new NPC is added to the Trading Post. This NPC hands out coliseum bounties: you can claim a bounty from her, which assigns you a random specific Coliseum enemy and a random (between 20–50; subject to rebalancing) amount of this enemy to defeat. Your progress in defeating these enemies is tracked and, if you complete your bounty, you can return to the NPC to receive a reward.
Why?
Variety, mostly. There are two primary ways of grinding the Coliseum at the moment: fodder training, and hunting for specific profitable drops. Both of these are heavily focused on certain venues, meaning that people looking to profit will rarely leave these venues. The bounty system, with its randomly assigned enemies, will ensure players have a reason to regularly visit other venues, and are rewarded for doing so.
Furthermore, many players (and I include myself here) struggle to grind the Coliseum at all without clearly defined goals. The Coliseum is, frankly put, monotonous; in the absence of a total overhaul of Coliseum mechanics, the next best thing is to set specific goals for Coliseum grinding, rather than just endlessly farming the same items or endlessly rolling fodder through the Mire. To some extent, player-created challenges alleviate this monotomy, but these are not without their own problems: not everyone uses the forums, not everyone knows how to find these challenges and not everyone wants to bother keeping track of their progress.
Finally, this system is intended to be available to everyone — and that includes not only experienced, but also brand-new players. New players may not be aware of the profitability of Coliseum grinding; they may not know what 'fodder' is or what to do with the dragons once they're leveled; they may not know what items are currently valuable on the AH. The bounty system is intended to give them a point of entry into the Coliseum, one that goes beyond having players level their dragons with no clear indication as to why they are doing this. To make the system more newbie-friendly, one possibility is to have it check your lair for your three highest-level dragons, capping the venues for which a bounty can be given based on that. This keeps venue variety as high as possible, but prevents new players who don't have leveled dragons from getting stuck by constantly rolling high-level bounties. [If this is not technically feasible, Oranitha has proposed an alternate system in which the NPC functions on an experience system akin to Baldwin and Arlo, unlocking the ability to roll bounties in higher venues as the NPC's level is progressed. This would also allow the player to manually cap the possible venues, rather than the cap being automatically determined.]
I propose the bounty system as a site-integrated challenge system; something that is simple and easily understandable, but provides the player with two vital additions to the Coliseum experience, these being 1. variety, and 2. a definite, feasible goal. New, experienced, social and solo players should all be able to make good use of the bounty system.
Rewards
Doing bounties — that is, hunting specific but random enemies — may seem pointless to players who are just as willing to train fodder or farm specific drops. That's unsurprising; the latter two are more clearly and consistently profitable, while the randomness of bounties prevents them from being similarly profitable, especially as the only profit here comes from random Coliseum loot which is obtained in any case. Therefore, the bounty system needs to have its own rewards, to make them worth doing.
Upon completing a reward, you will be presented with one or more chest items (the Seekers' Spoils, as I refer to them in the lore explanation and mockups) of varying tiers. Having different tiers of reward chests as well as allowing them to be given in varying quantities ensures that every bounty is adequately rewarded: longer and more difficult bounties should feel worthwhile to do!
For the most part, the contents of these chests are essentially the equivalent of extra Coliseum loot drops, though the available loot will be from multiple (all, in some chest tiers) venues rather than only the one the bounty was completed in. Following Coliseum droprates, this means you'll mainly see food and materials/trinkets, the occasional familiar or battlestone, and — if you're lucky — less common drops such as apparel, scenes, vistas, genes and even eggs. I do not have any exact numbers to propose here; these 'extra loot drops' are primarily intended to establish a baseline of profitability to ensure that completing bounties is a viable alternative to fodder training and farming specific drops as a method of grinding the Coliseum.
In addition to the bonus Coliseum loot received from the Seekers' Spoils, there is plenty of room to introduce unique rewards! These should ideally be relatively rare, so that they can retain their value for a good while (at least until new bounty-exclusive rewards are added) and remain genuinely exciting to find, though not impossible. There's a lot of potential for these rewards: new recolored versions of battlestones (since the concept was unfortunately abandoned after its introduction to Baldwin); unique vistas (like a wanted poster) and scenes (a campsite? The NPC's stall at the Trading Post?); apparel themed after Coliseum enemies and their drops; or special familiars. The possibilities are endless, and they should hopefully give players a reason to give bounties a try!
Availability
To put it shortly: this is not a daily. It is not in any way intended to be.
Part of the idea behind the bounty system is that it's an activity that's always available, after you've done everything else. This is true for the Coliseum itself as well, so why should bounties not be? They are meant to be an alternative to existing grinding methods, methods which many players dislike because they lack a specific end goal: bounties break the Coliseum experience up into manageable chunks, and restricting them to being available only once or several times a day both restricts the positive impact bounties can have on how players use the Coliseum, and unnecessarily pressures people into completing these daily bounties so as not to miss out on rewards.
To ensure players don't get stuck doing a bounty they do not want to do, for whatever reason, I propose the addition of bounty rerolls. These are made available over time, and can be stacked up to a certain (low) cap. As their name implies, rerolls allow a player to abandon their current bounty and exchange it for a new random bounty, thus giving players a slight amount of control over which bounties they end up doing. Players who are already grinding in a specific venue can use rerolls to aim for a bounty in their venue so that they can combine the two; players who want a quicker, more casual bounty can try to reroll for one with a low enemy count. The pace at which they are made available ensures players can't entirely manipulate the system, but also that no one ends up stuck in the Golem Workshop or Forbidden Portal (barring extreme bad luck).
Lore
In my mockups for the bounty system, I refer to the Trading Post stall as "Bea's Bounty Board". Of course this is entirely subject to change at the developers' discretion, and indeed I fear it's unlikely that Bea will stick around if this ever becomes a reality, but I do want to highlight the thematic suitability of a Gaoler NPC: the Seeker Order of Gaolers is specifically concerned with "hunting the lands of Sornieth to capture and contain Shade creatures". The Shade maintains a (slight) presence in Coliseum enemies, and so the lore idea behind Bea's Bounty Board is that the NPC, Bea, is recruiting other dragons' aid in keeping the threat of the Shade to a minimum by sending them to places that need some help.
The Seekers' Spoils — named for the Seeker Order — also have a lore-compliant explanation: according to the Gaolers' encyclopedia entry, they do not typically keep hoards or anything that is not of some practical value. So what happens to the loot Seekers should be getting from battling these same enemies? It goes into boxes and becomes payment for dragons taking on bounties.
The lore theming is ultimately up to the developers, but I do hope they'll consider keeping it themed after the Gaolers' Shade-hunting mission — it fits so perfectly that it feels a waste not to do so ;)
Special bounties
A possible addition to the bounty system is special bounties that don't necessarily follow the same rules as standard bounties. These'll give special loot, of course, depending on the bounty. A few possibilities are as follows:
Boss bounties: These rare bounties task you to defeat a specific venue boss a number of times (drastically reduced to make up for their rarity). These give unique Spoils with better rewards. They could be made so that they can be rerolled for free, if necessary.
Event bounties: Practically all events have some sort of Coliseum component to them, though I'm mainly focusing on elemental festivals and the two other major events (Night of the Nocturne and Warrior's Way) here. If you have ideas for how other events (such as microholidays) could work, I'd love to hear it!
Elemental festivals would come with uncommon new bounties that ask for enemies of that festival's element to be defeated, rather than specific enemies. These could still be tied to specific venues or specific venue level ranges to keep reward tiers intact, but otherwise are meant to offer a little more freedom — and a hefty chunk of festival currency (and the possibility of skin chests) in the Spoils you get at the end!
Night of the Nocturne and Warrior's Way both feature special Coliseum enemies unique to those events; special bounties offered during these events will ask you to defeat them, instead of the usual foes. Warrior's Way bounties will give you a good amount of Arvelle's currency in the Spoils, whereas Night of the Nocturne bounties will give you the special NotN food/trinket drops as well as, less commonly, (but at least one guaranteed, and likely more) Strange Chests.
Mockups
Here are a few mockups of what Bea's Bounty Board could look like, if implemented. All credit for the artwork goes to the fantastic GlacierWinds!
(Enemy and Venue names link to their Game Database entries, and clicking Bea's mention of 'seekers' will bring you to the Gaolers' encyclopedia page!)
TL;DR
A new Gaoler NPC at the Trading Post, Bea, gives out bounties to defeat a random specific Coliseum enemy a random number of times. Complete them for a reward, consisting of mainly extra Coliseum loot and rarely unique items. The system is intended for everyone, no matter how new: the higher-leveled your dragons, the more venues you can get enemies assigned from, and the more difficult your bounty, the better your reward will be. It won't be the new profit meta, but it will be a viable alternative; its definitive end goals ensure that doing bounties isn't as tedious as other forms of grinding tend to be. Bounties are entirely unlimited and you can claim them as fast as you can complete them; rerolls, that let you switch your bounty for a new one, are slowly made available over time.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy this idea; I'd love to hear ideas for potential additions to this system if you have them, but if not, even just support is wonderful to hear!
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hi! i'm meteor. check out some of my projects? → or the coliseum bounty npc suggestion! » the bestiary outfit project » cross-flight outfit project » 100x100 bio icons » accent shop |
