Arcade mode needs shortcuts

[KoBeWi]

I recently played more of the new arcade. The changes made the mode much more enjoyable and accessible. Playing in 2P, we were able to even reach Season Temple for the first time. However after multiple runs, there's one thing that really bothers me.

After each death, we have to start over. I know this is the base principle of this mode, but it could work if there were, say, 10 floors.With as many floors as there are now (and more are planned), full run can easily take 30-50 minutes. And that's assuming you always play perfectly and reach the highest floor you "can". In reality, we reached Season Temple once, Seasonne twice and majority of our runs ended at Pumpkin Woods/Flying Fortress. If we want to play more of the higher floors, or even see them, we need to play over the lower floors each time. Sometimes we double-S Pillar Mountains, sometimes we lose our Time Crystal at Evergrind Forest. It's just random and inconsistent. And even if you assume you can breeze through first floors perfectly, doing them each time is just fricking tedious.

So my proposal is that there should be a way to skip first floors as some shortcut. I know it was suggested numerous times, but I'm at a point in arcade where we need much more gold to upgrade town and there are no available quests right now, so it's just more like grinding for unlockables. Perma-death is a thing of the past, most modern roguelikes introduce some permanent progression (which Grindea already does) and some of them allow for skipping dungeon floors at certain conditions (e.g. Gungeon).

Obviously the "shortcuts" can't be free. They should be there available for a price and have some drawbacks, but ones that shouldn't bother casual players. My suggestion here would be that unlocking a shortcut would require you to first get a double S on particular floor and then complete a questchain (probably from Archie). The questchain should consist of some hard to achieve tasks that will prove that you truly "mastered" to floor. It could be completing the floor with some exclusive nightmare active or doing a certain thing you wouldn't normally. Also you wouldn't be able to make a shortcut to some floor if you didn't shortcut the previous one.

Now, when you SS rank the floor and complete the few related quests, you would be able to start at the next floor. E.g. if you unlock shortcut at Pumpkin Woods, you would be able to start directly at Flying Fortress or any chosen previous floor, but only at the starting floors of each area (yes, I assumed floors as areas). Obviously, starting at level 1 and no equipment would make no sense, so there should be a way to manage builds for each floor. Either the game could store last 3 builds you reached the floor with or allow to directly save the character state upon reaching the floor.

There are few things to consider regarding that.
What happens when you save a build and reach the floor with more players? I can think of 3 options:
-just don't allow that. If you don't have saved build for higher number of players, you need to first reach the floor and save the team's builds for all the slots. So each number of players would basically have a couple of build slots for whole team
-make additional players clone the first player, making them start with the same build
-allow to distribute saved builds between players. When you reach the floor, you save the build in one of 4 slots and then in multiplayer any player can start from that slot. Every slot has a level 1 character by default. Also, host can decide to store individual player's build at a slot upon reaching the floor

First option requires most slots to store (unless you limit number of slots per number of players) and 3rd one is the most complex. But personally, I'd prefer the last one as it's just flexible.

Another thing are potions, perks and treats/curses. Again, there are 3 options (unless someone thinks of something else):
-store them as part of build slot
-allow to change them independently
-allow to change them independently, but it requires to upgrade shortcut/shortcut NPC to allow that (possibly with potions/perks/(treats/curses) as separate unlocks)

Again, I'm for the 3rd option, as it's interesting and "earned".

Another thing to consider is what to do with the score. Well, I assume that players who use shortcuts don't care about score, but rather want to actually complete the arcade mode. So every time you start, your score starts at 0. Storing score in "build slots" are not an option, because they can easily be edited, unless the score is separately stored in cloud (if cloud was used for this, maybe starting score should be reduced as a penalty). Also, if you start at higher floor, it's possible to get higher score anyways if you survive it, than when reaching the floor and dying there.

Well, I hope I didn't miss anything. The shortcuts would make the mode more enjoyable for casual players. Even with all the improvements that made the mode easier and more accessible, it's still too difficult to finish it when you randomly die at first floors. You can't expect everyone to master the mode to always SS each floor up to e.g. Seasonne. It's unreasonable and also it's heartbreaking when single mistake can make your last 40 minutes invalid, because a boss/enemy acted in unexpected way or you were just unlucky and need to start everything over.

So, um, discuss. I guess there will be players against this for whatever reason (git gut probably, lol). But if the system will be designed in a way that players need to take some effort to actually allow skipping floors, but won't be able to take first place in leaderboard doing so, it will bring only positives (pro player won't probably be affected).

Now, I mentioned that there could be quests to unlock shortcuts, but actually didn't suggest one. I bet Pixel Ferrets will be much better at coming up for quests, or some of the top creative posters on this forum. I probably could design a quest for each floor, but well, I'm lazy This thread is a lot anyways.

But to give some examples, for Pillar Mountains:
-Slime Infestation - floors get infested by HORDES of slimes, green and red ones. There's a Gigaslime as a boss of second floor (hopefully HORDES of slimes give enough experience), which is also accompanied by a group of green/red slimes at start of the battle.
-A Lost Path - there's a secret path at Pillar Mountains that only a few people know about. With this quest active, first 2 floors are 2x/3x (or more x) bigger and second floor has enemies from Evergrind Forest.
-Rabby Grove - 2 or 3 special rooms at Pillar Mountains where there are lots of Rabbys, with 2 or 3 elder ones in last room. The place is magical and Rabbys have a power to kill in one hit.
-Master of Shield - you need to perfect guard every enemy in each room. If you kill an enemy without perfect-guarding an attack from it, quest fails. If you succeed, Master Ji gives you a prize.
At the end of these quests (special challenges), there could be some special item that allows Archie (or whatever the shortcut NPC would be) to make a shortcut to Evergrind Forest. These special quests could be fun to do, because they can alter the regular floor generation in some interesting way not found in standard run.

 

[XxX_MLG Noob_XxX]

Honestly, I kinda skimmed this so I don't know all the details. I'll make a few initial comments. But I'll make a more educated, more serious reply later.

For debugging/testing reasons, I consider "shortcuts" a necessity. I was actually thinking of putting post like this up earlier, though with less restrictions. I was talking with Pydoyks about what this game "needs most". I brought up the idea that I proposed in the discord some time ago: A full fledged training room. This would be a room where you can choose the enemies that will be in the room, choose how many are elites, choose the size of the room, choose the curse in the room, etc. etc. Basically, it would be a way to perfectly image any possible room in arcade. The importance of this is an accurate feasibility assessment. I think the devs (and many others) know full well how I am with these things. I play 2H melee like trash but others would argue I play better than average. And when I come across things that are repeatedly a problem, I'm likely to rave about it in #ideas_and_improvements. (Devs I love you guys. lol.) Hopefully I'll mature a little as time goes on. In any case, I rave. Sometimes the raves are accurate. Sometimes Pydoyks appears and says, "Shut up. You suck. You can literally do all these exploits." But it's never easy to tell when the concerns are valid because I don't know how much I suck, I don't know how infeasible Pydoyks' comments are (compared to literally the rest of the playerbase), and I don't have the opportunity to re-engage the specific cancerous scenarios over and over for strategy testing.

Now why did I say all that? That's kinda irrelevant. Well, part of it was for the devs to see. But the other part is that I genuinely believe that more important than any major arcade rebalances (including those in Chaldo's post) is the ability to perform accurate feasibility assessments. That is, myself (and others a few others I've talked to) would rather have the opportunity to test out the sexiest of practice rooms and the jankest of practice rooms to develop strategies. It also provides the ability to test new enemies, so that I can mess around with them in the training room instead of ranting in discord. lol. Above all, the opportunity allows players like myself to see when things are genuinely unfair and to see when I'm genuinely a imbecile. Of course, it provides regular practice for other players too.

("Noob where is this story going?" I'm getting there.) After my whole proposal spiel, Pydoyks said it would likely be too infeasible to do and said shortcuts in arcade would probably be better. It'd be easier to program; and although it wouldn't provide the control that a "Perfect Training Room" would afford, it would still provide several opportunities to encounter different rooms and assess their "jankness"...and the player's lack of skill. (I don't know how to do the @ thing, but Teddy, it would be cool if you could give any kind of idea how feasible -- from a time perspective -- the training room idea is.) Naturally, it has other inherent benefits, like allowing players who aren't so good to practice on higher floors. So floor skipping is a good idea -- especially if the training room can't be done.

A Few Responses on the Post
1) Skipping floors won't make grinding gold easier. Honestly, it makes much more practical sense to try the All-Elites run and grind gold that way. That may sound dumb, but the amount of gold you get comes out to be so much larger, even if you're on lower floors. You can easily have well over 100k before the end of a run, compared to maybe 30k-40k or so (if you're really good) at the end of a full run. (I'd kindly ask that the amazing gold rewards stay. I do think it's fair/balanced, especially for all the crap in places like Tai Ming and ToS.)

2) Allowing floor skips won't cause score problems. A lot of people probably know by now that I take score problems seriously. So I'm sure to jump on them and [attempt to] analyze them reasonably. I think I've at least done a decent job of that. While frosty and time crystals may be OP from a score standpoint, skipping floors definitely is not. By skipping a floor, you effectively waive your right to be atop the leaderboards. Why? It's because anyone in the top 10 or top 20 (maybe even larger) is guaranteed to have played through all the floors and earned every single point they could get. Naturally, your score would start at 0 if you start from anywhere, so there's no way you'll be on top of the world with your score. If you were paranoid enough, you could just keep any floor-skipping score at 0. That would be fair and I would be fine with it. But I really don't think it's necessary.

3) I don't think the penalties need to be strong. x2 S achievements are major challenges that are trophies. Several people have failed to do them, especially in places like Tai Ming and Mt. Bloom. By requiring players to x2 S areas, you're barring a large amount of the playerbase from floor skipping; this in turn means you're blocking a large percentage of players from incredibly useful practice. And for the few that do make it, you're forcing several people to cheese their way in by using certain treats or certain builds -- especially time crystal and FF. And no, that's not for me to rave on those 2 aspects of arcade. I literally had those guys at hand way way back when I was grinding the Seasonne item with melee. (I've changed now Chaldo. And I didn't really use those for the other areas. So if you see this, get off me.) This brings into question exactly how floor skipping should be earned, what builds should be concerned, and what score percentages are necessary (or which treats are banned). It's too complicated. I believe it is sufficient for a player to pass an entire area to be able to skip to it again via the Bishop or some other NPC. Perhaps a reasonable quest could also be added on if people really feel the need to "challenge" the player to permit them to practice higher floors. I should point out that I may be biased in my view of this because I primarily see testing value in this idea.

4) Slot saves don't have to be complicatedly "balanced". Just allow for use of any previous slot save like in the arena. Honestly, multiplayer characters are usually only a level or 2 smaller than a singleplayer character at worst. And most of the power comes from talent orbs and gold points from Grindea and Loods regardless. So there isn't that much of a need to be worried about "overpowered save slots" being used. (And if you're skipping floors, there's a sense in which you've already crossed the "OP line of arcade options" anyway.)