After a week of adventures, I think it is a good time to summarise where we are at with them and how I see things I guess.
Adventures in a general sense of the word are a great addition to the game, they are something to do when there is nothing else to do in the game. A great way to kill any downtime if you have it. Thank you for the new feature. However there are several things which need working on in my opinion.
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These range from the afk person almost single handedly ruining his teams chances of success in an adventure. If the afk person would somehow revert to tan AI after 2 rounds of inactivity, then that said afk person would not impede his own team nearly as much. You can win with an afk person, but it is nigh on impossible unless the other team is a complete shambles of teamwork.
On that token, people complain about the event winners' guns. 'These are unbeatable, they are this, they are that', they are not unbeatable by any means, they are hard to beat but only if you are unable to work as a team with a clear, intelligent and coherent strategy with everyone on-board then of course you will not win. This is no different than a normal game within reason where solid teamwork and strategy is needed, just the difficulty level rises a little against an 'op' gun.
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There are lots of small features that should be implemented too in my mind
-Reflect adventures on the ingame stats page. Total number, amount of vp's earnt, amount of wins etc etc
-Give us an ingame report like you would get for a market purchase, or a duel. This way you can analyse the report by yourself or with a friend. This way you can figure out how to try to refine what kind of adventure set up you would like to use.
- The chat problem you have if you close the chat box mid adventure. If you close the chat box mid adventure you lose any whispers, or previous chat rooms if you attempt to open the chat box up again.
- The ability to maybe get in and out of adventures easier to monitor other things you have ingame. Not sure how this one would work, but it would also be nice.
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Right now though the person with the fastest connection does best in adventures usually, this is a good thing and a bad thing in some case. Maybe it could be worked to have the first person to click gets their first action performed first and then everyone else gets theirs, and then we proceed with the second action. Again very minor though.
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This is the biggest concern of mine though, the rewards system and the ability to do an adventure over and over and over again. The rewards are just too high if you have the ability, like I do, to just sit there and do the adventures over and over. This has a couple problems in my mind. You get easy cash, easy xp. Sure some people will stop a little as soon as some of the polish of the new 'play thing' wears off and most get parts of the outlaw set.
Them doing them over and over still has a couple detractors, the first being it kills off any social element the game has because we are all too busy in adventure chats getting all our awesome rewards to worry about what is going on in our alliance, our towns or in the saloons. FF attendances are also down, not sure if we are wanting to hinder FF's here but we are doing a really good job at it on our own as players without help from Inno Games developers
As adventures are right now, you only have to be online to do well in the game, there is no skill, no account management, no time management that needs doing because the rewards system is flawed. You just have to be online to get loads of xp, loads of cash. If you want to reward the person who can be online the most, they probably should have some sort of account management skill whilst they are at it. This is of course if you want to reward stupidity, then I am completely mistaken and we can leave it as it is currently. When a person was online all day with job to get xp, they had to have some sort of management skill, be it buffs for HP/energy etc etc.
What would I suggest we do to counter this, actually have the person who has that ability to sit online doing adventures for 16h a day not rewarded to the extent it is now. Tie in the rewards from adventures to other parts of the game, give us duel buffs, fort buffs, job buffs. A game with less independent parts allows us to experience more elements and more parts of the game. I'd also remove the damn potions and lower the drop rates of outlaw items in the loot chests(or make them more costly). We don't want people to stop doing adventures, I just think we don't want them to only do adventures.
I think that is it