Pokemon lures (party hunting)

[Haneroze]

Hello folks!

 

A problem of Pokemon in an MMORPG format is that there's no real party hunting. When you hunt for pokemons, it's a very alone thing. If someone joins you in the hunt, it's usually because he also wants something there and is likely hunting for himself. Very rarely will somene actually "help" you in your hunt.

 

So I've been thinking, how to promote hunting in a party. What feature could make it so that people want to hunt together, in a mutually profitable way? And so, I came with an idea.

 

Pokemon lures. The idea is that someone places a lure on the ground, and everyone that hunts within the area of the lure gets an increased spawn rate of pokemons of the type targetted by the lure.

 

NOTE! This is NOT meant to be an easy Increase-spawn-rate feature, and is ONLY meant to be used along other players. If a player stays alone, it would be easier to hunt the pokemon directly than to go through the trouble of getting a lure first. Here's how I see them work:

 

-Time: A lure would last only 10 minutes. This is a very short time, but makes it much easier for players to alternate their lure. If you find 6 people to hunt with you, you could go for an hour if everyone uses 1 lure.

 

-Effect: A lure would increase the spawn rate of all pokemons of the same type by a small amount. I'm looking at a decrease of 1-2 tiers in rarity. At the same time, this also means that it might not work very well depending on the location (using an Electric Lure in the Power Plant would essentially only make Grimers and Muks more rare).

 

-Obtain Difficulty: A lure would be costly/difficult to obtain. It should be difficult enough that using it alone is not worth the trouble to get one, but starts getting profitable if at least 3-4 people join you and each throw their own lures. The difficulty could change depending on the type's usual rarity, with Normal type being the easiest and Dragon type being the hardest to obtain.

 

-Mechanic: When a lure is used, an item is placed on the player's tile, affecting all spawns within a small area (7x7 square). There can also be only 3 per map at once (could vary depending on map size) and cannot overlap. There is no need to be in a party like in other MMORPGs, meaning random players could also join in if they come across your lure. The lure itself does not block path but floats over players to make it clear what type it is, as well as a square effect to show the zone in which you must be. It is also possible to limit the amount of uses per day, as to prevent a zone being filled with lures for a whole 24 hours.

 

So the idea of how it would work is, someone plans to, let's say, start a Dragon hunting party in 2 hours. He finds people to join him and each person have to prepare their own lure before meeting up. 2 hours later, 6 people show up including himself. They can hunt dragon types together for 1 hour by each using one lure, but does not necessarily guarantee that everyone will find one as the rate increase remains rather low.

 

 

This is the basic idea, the idea could then be pushed further:

 

-Anti-scam measure. This would usually not be a problem in a guild, but with strangers, there's certainly the possibility that someone leaves when it's his turn to place a lure. To prevent something like that, it could be possible that someone places his lure first without activating it, other players stack their lures on top of it (window that opens when clicking the lure), and once every player have stacked their lure, the first one that placed his lure activates the whole stack at once. Problem is if the server crashes in the middle of the hunt, that's a lot of lures wasted.

 

-Shiny lures. Instead of increasing the spawn rate of a specific type, a different lure could also increase the shiny rate. Remember that different lures can't stack, so you wouldn't be able to use a Shiny lure + Dragon lure to specifically hunt for a shiny dragon pokemon.

 

-Event lures. Now, seeing right now how many people get cramped up in one spot for hunting Valentine pokemons, I don't think increasing the rate of event pokemons is a good idea. What I think instead for Event lures is that Event lures would allow Event pokemons to spawn even when the event has ended. These lures would however only be obtainable during the event.

 

-Lure exclusive pokemons. We could create certain pokemons that would never spawn unless there is a lure targetting him in the area. This would keep those pokemons at a very good rarity, as hunting them alone would probably end up being harder than your average Tier 9 pokemon. At the same time, this would give a very good incensitive for players to group together.

 

 

And thus is my idea. It would probably take a good while to code, and would certainly require some more indepth analysis so that it doesn't break the rarity of pokemons, but I believe it would certainly make the game far more dynamic and bring the community even closer to each other.

[Haneroze]

Uuuuuuh, bump? I'd like some feedback, but was it too long? Do we need a tl;dr? '^'

 

tl;dr: Expansive/hard to obtain item placed on ground, slightly increases spawn rate of all pokemons of a specific type in a small area for 10 minutes only. Meant to promote party hunting only as very inefficient when solo.