Revamp DAR penalty and Milestone Bonus.

[Ade]

Hi all,

In a 4-man party without Milestone bonuses, the DAR drops to 54%. This is low enough that some hunts become abysmal. It really demotivates people to play together. This needs to be changed because it causes a negative perception of Multimode when there's no Milestones.

My suggestions:

Lower the DAR when more people join, but lower it less per each additional player so that it doesn't hurt so much to bring more in. Here's how it should go:

1p: 100%
2p: 85%
3p: 75%
4p: 70%

So it drops by 15, 10, and then 5. This seems very liberal but it would make 4-man parties less cumbersome when trying to hunt something. Something is wrong when I would rather solo than play with friends, but take my Froozer hunt for example: I've been hunting FS with hit for over a year. I've found 23 Froozers without hit, but I've had 2 separate instances of SEVEN TORRS IN A ROW that didn't drop Froozers, and Multimode DAR is mostly to blame.

To balance this out, decrease the Milestone DAR boost to 17%, so when it's active, it will be:

1p: 117%
2p: 102%
3p: 92%
4p: 87%

This does a double service of decreasing the motivation to solo when the DAR boost is active (since it used to be 125%) and increasing the desire to play with others.

The main point of this is to boost the DAR to something beyond "terrible" in 4p parties for those long stretches when the DAR boost is missed and people get demoralized. This isn't going to cause some huge proliferation of ubers because it's not a huge increase, but it WILL increase enjoyment of the game, and it will also decrease the drop in participation that usually happens when Milestone bonuses are lost or events come to an end.

Please consider this seriously. The amount of time players spend agonizing over "how many people should we have in our party" should be eliminated because it's a burden.

Thanks.

 

[Matt]

We've already considered this and we had some working figures.

Specifically 2P would get nerfed down to 80% (from 82%), but 3P would be 70% (from 67%) and 4P would be 63% (from 54%). I don't think all categories need buffing, and we had some maths behind this which @emoticon can go into.

While 4P DAR still makes it better to play than solo-2P-3P mathematically, it doesn't really feel that way which is what's important, as perception is more important than reality for video games.

Personally I'm not against 100% DAR regardless of player number to make multiplayer always beneficial and promoted, however as the rates were balanced to be Drop Per Room instead of Drop Per Player, that would require a rebalance of rates (to be tougher across the board) since not doing so would cause some economical issues, however pretty sure nobody would be for that so I'm not going to do it.

 

[Ade]

Ah, pleasing to see. My guess is that the Milestone boost would stay the same on your chart? (Since it's lower than mine, but still way better than the current situation.)