Let's talk about channels

I think this is a well intentioned change and also agree that people should branch out more from the popular "meta" training maps (for example, I used MP3 instead of GS2, and I also highly favor dual ghost pirates for example).

However, users worried about lack of available boss spawns definitely have warranted concerns. In this game people camp bosses relentlessly and usually have all timers. If you've ever tried to kill Deo to complete the ariant quest line you might have experienced a night lord coming in after you waited for one hour for the spawn and kill it with one triple throw. It would just get very frustrating I think.

 

The boss concern is a serious one, and bosses dropping chairs is the cause of it. If channels get reduced then bosses should also drop chairs easier otherwise you will have high lvlers camping a boss for longer just for the sake of the chair.

About maps getting reduced, that will be a big issue for high demand endgame maps like petris or skele. There wont be much of an issue for anything else. A channel reduction in this case should be compensated for by having mini dungeons which are basically duplicates of the maps.

 

I don't think bosses should change, our population is a lot smaller than what it was in GMS and making things easier cause of # of channels isn't an optimal solution. Chairs shouldn't be easy to get, and prequests or quests for these bosses shouldn't be easy either, they're still available and the competition for these bosses is not between 100k users, but between a couple of hundred users.

tl;dr # of channels shouldn't be a factor to make the game easier

 

Then what about this: adjust the boss waiting time to the amount of channels. Say for example right now with 9 channels you wait 2 hours to get Mushmom spawned in 9 channels. Then that would be effectively the same as waiting 80 minutes for mushmom to be spawned in 6 channels. It is just a thought, but I definitly think that bosses will get more difficult to do with channel reduction, seeing that right now everyone is doing bosshunt for cards or chairs.

 

It'll be the same level of difficulty because when people do area bosses the one person generally clears all the chs and then gets the timers.

If people are that worried about getting their equal share of area bosses it'd be better to just randomize all of their spawn

 

I'm fairly new and thought that some input from a fresh mind would be good.

I won't talk about the grinding/boss maps because if something is taken or already dealt with, I don't mind waiting or searching for a different map (which to me, is part of playing an MMORPG). For things like grinding/boss maps, in my mind, it should be considered special (it's a simple supply and demand thing.. rare things are special, it creates meaning). For example, when someone completed the quest for that fancy blue lounge chair from NLC or when someone was able to find and successfully kill Pianus.

Anyway, what I care about is the social aspect. I have yet to interact with 5+ people within the past 3 days I've been playing, and I'm going to blame the widespread channels. If the channels were down to... probably 5 (since 500 seems to be average), while walking through henesys/kerning/ellinia, perhaps I'd see a couple of more faces.

I know that when I go to spots like pig beach and slime trees I'll definitely see people but I want to just pass by at least one person while just moving around within the world. :')

 

late to this convo, but reducing channels to 5 is fine. I think boosting the spawn of certain maps to stop gs2, petris from being overcrowded and fought over would be fine. perhaps spawn balancing of the other ghost ships (3, 5, & 6) as well as other maps beyond petris (looking at dukus) would mitigate this problem and offer some new areas for training (leeching...) + bonding.

 

Yes, population has certainly fallen from its peak roughly a year ago. Reducing the number of channels is probably a good idea. But, the demographics of the server have changed...

Not only that, but with the recent addition of monsterbook, player activity and tendencies have also changed.

I think we need to reduce the spawn time of bosses, overall. But also, in order to prevent people from keeping a lock on timers, we need more variation in spawn times. I think there is some variation on spawn times, but it isn't much. We need more variation. This will give other people a chance to kill a boss.

 

the time variation is 10% of the initial timer.
Example: 2hr timer = 120minutes. 10% of that is 12minutes before/after initial timer

 

So I think the best way to reduce boss spawn time is just to make the variation +10% and -40%.