Add Weekly Lv 200 Challenge to Proposed System

As there is currently no “challenge” after level 180 for the new HP system, I want to propose that the vacant 200 slot be repurposed into a weekly repeatable challenge limited to level 200 characters, not for HP purposes but for prizes (e.g. coins and/or cosmetics) as a sort of two birds one stone approach with respect to taking advantage of an existing (tentatively) system to give meaning and purpose to playing and continuing to invest in a level 200 character. Let me offer some context.

After hitting 200 for the third time at the end of last month, I was reminded of how gloomy the overwhelming majority of bossing is when exp is no longer a consideration. I was hit with that third bout of ML existential crisis, if you will, and left wondering to myself why I would even need a perfect knuckle or any other extravagant items anymore if all I’m going to be doing is weekly PB and daily Core Blaze. Most content just isn’t worth doing from a reward perspective after you remove exp from the equation and that kind of forces one to confront some “difficult” questions as to why one plays the game. And with sentiments like that it's no wonder most players just get their asses immediately shipped to retirement homes after hitting 200 if they don't have another character planned to continue the rat race to unsuspend their halted sense of progression.

I’m not expressing any novel sentiments there but I wanted to tie this back to earlier proposed ideas of extending the shelf life of level 200 characters by way of generating incentives to still keep playing on and investing in them, at least to some extent. One of my earliest thoughts was a level 200 ring that one would level akin to timeless and reverse gears so as to keep exp relevant and upon leveling it some amount of coins could be redeemed by talking to an NPC who would then reset the ring. However, I soon realized this idea had several issues and flaws, such as multimagers and 5-6 leech sellers not having to do anything extra to reap these rewards. Then after our first introduction to the new event raffle system during Valentine’s event, I thought that perhaps it could be akin to it but exclusive to level 200s and with more bosses required. There were still some kinks to work out with that however in that I foresaw that it could possibly reinforce level 200 characters as raffle mules in that many people would likely just bring their level 200s to runs alongside their second attacker just for poke or trade clears with other people and so it wouldn’t necessarily promote the active play on those characters that I had envisioned. A fix to that particular issue could perhaps be to simply tack on a necessary damage threshold to the boss for it to register as a clear for the quest, something like 10% (or 5% for a bishop, if necessary). Alternatively, have it so that the character needs to cross some threshold of exp received for it to count for the respective boss, i.e. they'd have to be in party and leech exp, which would act as a bit of a deterrent in the social bossing scene.

Anyways, I sat on that particular idea for a while as I wasn’t sure what would be the best way to integrate it into the game until the new Challenges system was introduced. After reading about the system, I realized it could be the perfect vessel to facilitate this level 200 raffle-esque idea, or rather a level 200 “challenge”. After all, it makes perfect sense that one who becomes a “hero” of Maple after hitting 200 should continue to perform heroic feats. And as the challenges are already designed to give prizes to those unable to opt in for the HP gains, it would not be out of place for this repeatable challenge to give out prizes as well at a point where everyone has already maxed out their HP gains. This 200 challenge would also add more incentive for those who are opting to wash the normal way to nonetheless complete all the challenges to unlock it, which would help to further populate the challenges scene and enable a healthy intermingling between new players and veterans, and the 200 challenge itself would also serve to bolster the bossing scene by way of injecting previously out of commission attackers and players back into the bossing pool.

The reward from the 200 challenge could be a pouch or some amount of coins, or even cosmetics and chairs. The basic idea is just to create an incentive for people to set aside some time to play their level 200 character rather than only PBing on them once a week and otherwise enacting out the “I don’t want to play with you anymore” Toy Story meme, and to bring some of the retired players who opted not to make another new character after hitting 200 back into the fold and into the bossing scene, without also making it feel like too much of a daily chore. I think it would be amazing to have an external incentive to do a variety of bossing on my characters again and I think this is a sentiment that many others can appreciate as well.

EDIT: Could even be implemented before all the challenge tiers are released in a fashion similar to Rosa's Charm, i.e. the character would be temporarily barred from participating whenever a new tier is released until they're up to date again, since who knows when they'll all be released :V

 

burgunt