Unofficial "Iron Man" Permadeath Challenge

[Hood]

I had some fun with this challenge. I grouped up with a VERY FRIENDLY new player in serbule...just clicked the accept button out of habit. he invited me to Asheron's Legacy! I saw nothing wrong with accepting the guild invite but I quickly ran away so he wouldn't help me kill mobs.

As you can see, I chose Subtype 2 Elf. I didnt actually know this was possible. I rather enjoyed making a vegetable lady.

I chose my skills bc they're the most defensive other than animal forms. I didn't get very high level and I didn't die. Mainly because I just have so much to do on Hood in preparation for the new dungeon. These time restricted challenges are a bit harder to motivate myself to do. If I had 1-2 months and a prize pool reward, I'd be fully in on this.

Also, for a challenge like this, there's really no shame in trying again....since there's no reward other than bragging rights. And I'm happy I got as far as I did. I spent quite a lot of time dreaming about how I'd get Cow Form

[simplybob]

I made it to 25 sword/ 23 Psych and when I did my screen capture noticed that somewhere along the line I had picked up one item from another player (probably a mushroom that someone had dropped). I was disappointed that I'd let this happen and disqualified myself from the submission. It was a good challenge and I'll definitely try again with the next challenge that comes along. I found that keeping in good food was the hardest part, since I didn't want to distract from the hunt to do much crafting.

[Oxlazr]

I got to about 15 psychology/pig, I forget exactly which - character's still alive and well.

Unfortunately didn't have enough time to play within the window, but it was a fun little test for how these things might work.

And yeah, the food part was definitely the most tedious. I do think these challenges, if at all possible, should allow trade between competing players so not everyone has to cover every angle - but that largely depends on what the challenge is.

The tracker is definitely neat, and I see the very important stat for being milked (specifically as a cow, thankfully) is included.

A few ideas going forward, though:

- Increased non-combat experience and income - if the character is temporary and cannot trade with other players, this hopefully shouldn't be an issue and would mitigate repeating tedious but important tasks each attempt.

- A combat experience multiplier for each unique boss killed solo (Just to encourage people to kill bosses as soon as they can. I found this really helped keep things interesting)

[Citan]

Thanks for the feedback and help with playtesting this! I've made some small tweaks to the /behaviorreport command for the next snapshot, and will be adding some more functionality to make it easier to do these in the future. But I could still use more ideas regarding how to keep egregious "twinking" behavior from running rampant -- it's a shared world, so some level of interaction is going to be unavoidable even in a "challenge" contest like this, but I'd like to come up with some ways to reduce its impact, or at least tell when it's happened. (The most important "twinking" scenario being "a high-level guy goes ahead of you and kills the bosses in a dungeon, so you get credit for killing bosses without being in any real danger." And similar scenarios.) If you have ideas that aren't in the thread yet, please voice them!

Also congrats to Cocytus, who is the winner of the unofficial contest!

[Aedorn]

There's another issue of being able to get a high level BC player to give out a fully modded Extra Skin buff. Basically immortal for quite a long time at low levels.

A thought on grouping: I would think if there was a possible flag to account for grouping with someone X levels above in Endurance. So a character of say endurance 10 would be flagged as grouping with someone too high if they grouped with someone at endurance 20. Or something.

As for bosses: Maybe make an option on the corpse like when you do an autopsy. When it's used, then store the contribution (damage/healing/etc) done, and the level when it was killed. Can weigh level against contribution as a score mechanism. I thought about just taking a screen shot of autopsies on bosses, but there's the potential to fail it at lower levels (or sometimes, higher levels depending on the boss.)

Also, I think it would be cool if this was more continuous. As Hood said, I too had so much to do on my main character I didn't play my alt nearly enough. It's hard to break away!

[Niph]

But I could still use more ideas regarding how to keep egregious "twinking" behavior from running rampant -- it's a shared world, so some level of interaction is going to be unavoidable even in a "challenge" contest like this, but I'd like to come up with some ways to reduce its impact, or at least tell when it's happened. (The most important "twinking" scenario being "a high-level guy goes ahead of you and kills the bosses in a dungeon, so you get credit for killing bosses without being in any real danger." And similar scenarios.) If you have ideas that aren't in the thread yet, please voice them!

The way I see it, is that it's legit to follow a high-level player, or a group of players, to the boss room, and then wait for the boss to repop to kill it. What is not is of course to receive help doing so.

I think some support code already exists to know if you received help:
. A flag that tells when a monster reset health and armor, is back to his spot, with no debuffs, and has aggro cleared.
. A count of how many characters participated to a fight.
And to come: code that links a boss to their minions.

With this support, one can tell if a character did the kill solo, and if so they can receive boss loot, notoriety, quest reward, experience and so on. If they didn't they can just receive the usual trash loot.

With this in mind, I think a /challengemode command could be issued after the character has been created, and before they start killing, accepting money etc.
In challenge mode, a character would receive reward only for solo kills or grouping with other people in challenge mode.
In challenge mode buffs from other players would not land on you (unless coming from other characters in challenge mode).
And so on.

I think it makes sense to accept guild invite, however a character in challenge mode would not get guild credits.

It looks like this may need a lot of development time.