Tower of Kings - Revamped and Reloaded

[Meikura001]

I know I had posted something like this before on replies, but I had taken some time to gather my thoughts together for a much more detailed schematic when it comes to designing the difficulty scales and fights of the Tower of Kings feature. In any game, there will always be an easy difficulty where it shows you how to play the game so you can get used to how it is played, and there will always be other difficulties to be taken on if you get bored with the current difficulty. Most of my console games I had played (with Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid being the top two), I had gone to Professional Mode (hardest of all modes) and lived to tell about it. Below is a design plan for ToK:

Tower of Kings - Easy Mode
Requirements: Unlocks at Level 38
Opponent Composition: 4 Shadow-based Clones of Players/NPCs scaled to difficulty setting
Opponent Sylph: Not Used/Present
Opponent Eudaemon: Not Used/Present
Opponent Eud Sylph: Not Used/Present
Rewards: Minimal Rewards
Notes: Players who are level 38 and above can take on this difficulty. Players with sylphs and Eudaemons will have an easier time since the opponents do not have sylphs/euds. Fight 1 is going to be the easiest as Fight 5 will be hard for those without a sylph/eud. This is the basic difficulty setting to accustom players to the feature and what to expect.


Tower of Kings - Normal Mode
Requirements: Unlocks at the completion of Easy Mode
Opponent Composition: 4 Shadow-based Clones of Players/NPCs scaled to difficulty setting
Opponent Sylph: Used/Present
Opponent Eudaemon: Not Used/Present
Opponent Eud Sylph: Not Used/Present
Rewards: Average Rewards
Notes: Players who are level 38 and above can take on this difficulty with a challenge or with a team that has sylphs/euds to pass it. This difficulty should be made for composition of 4 shadow units with basic (first tier) sylphs only (Iris, Pan, Eve, Amazon, Hades, and Apollo). Fight 1 should be easy for a team with full euds/sylphs to handle while Fight 5 will pose a bit of a challenge to prepare them for the next mode.


Tower of Kings - Hard Mode
Requirements: Unlocks at the completion of Normal Mode
Opponent Composition: 4 Shadow-based Clones of Players/NPCs scaled to difficulty setting
Opponent Sylph: Used/Present
Opponent Eudaemon: Used/Present
Opponent Eud Sylph: Not Used/Present
Rewards: Moderate Rewards
Notes: Players who are level 38 and above with no sylphs/euds can take on this difficulty for an extreme challenge or with a team that has sylphs/euds/eud sylphs to pass it. This difficulty should be made for composition of 4 shadow units with evolved (second tier) sylphs only (Hercules, Poseidon, Cerberus, etc.) and the introduction of Eudaemons (scaled for difficulty). Fight 1 should always be easy, but a challenge for a team with full euds/sylphs to handle while Fight 5 will pose a true challenge for such a team if they want to unlock the final mode, Nightmare.


Tower of Kings - Nightmare Mode
Requirements: Unlocks at the completion of Hard Mode
Opponent Composition: 4 Shadow-based Clones of Players/NPCs scaled to difficulty setting
Opponent Sylph: Used/Present
Opponent Eudaemon: Used/Present
Opponent Eud Sylph: Used/Present
Rewards: Best Rewards Possible
Notes: Lock and load, boys and girls, this is the big leagues coming to you live courtesy of R2. Both sides, full teams, difficulties of fights scaled that when completed will earn you bragging rights and folks will look to you as a 'god' as the system chat announces the completion of this said mode. Opponents sylphs are at merged sylphs to make this one hell of a mode to be trifled with and a 38 should not visit unless they have really powerful friends to accompany them on their journey.

As you can see with this, 98% of the players will be able to pass Easy mode (2% won't as they either don't have anyone strong to journey with or they are in new servers without cashing); 75% of the players will pass the Normal mode (once they get all built up to take that mode with ease); 45% of the players will pass the Hard mode (takes a while for most to get first tier or second tier evolved sylphs); and 20% of the players will pass the Nightmare mode (for those who are shelling out hundreds of USD for tens of thousands balens to make merged sylphs or having very powerful 2nd tier evolved sylphs, equipment, eudaemons, etc. to take on said challenge).

This is my final design and thought process. All others I had made on this very subject is now obsolete.

[Ztarku]

Or... instead of all this work they could easily fix it for everyone by making tower of kings go by server only and not cross server ranking.

[Alsatia01]

Or... instead of all this work they could easily fix it for everyone by making tower of kings go by server only and not cross server ranking.

Well on servers with a particularly large amount of whales, the problem won't be fixed. Meikura's idea is good but I see it as overly complicated. Wouldn't it just be easier to scale down the BR of the enemies against the BR of the team who fights them? That way even level 38's with with 30k BR wouldn't be completely Cupcaked.

[Meikura001]

Actually, this is the only way, boys and girls, for everyone to really enjoy the feature. Two years ago, before I took that break (to play Shadowbound) from Wartune, I even had a problem trying to pass the first Easy stage at level 38 (when it opened); I had to be at least 50 with a sylph of my own just to combat the first stage. That's a 12 level spread and wait (there were no 1000% world prosperity back then) which translates to being lied to that it takes a level 38 who was starting out. The problem is that when set at the current "generic" rates, the gap opens more when it comes to the new servers who are connected to the cluster (either by merge or just classification). This design cancels all that and uses fixed values only.

But you did raise something; if it's something R2 would get off their duff in implementing. Personally, if I were to program difficulty settings along with the environment associated with such, I would not have a problem since it's only 4 base environments (difficulty levels) along with 5 sub-environments (the fights within) leaving with 20 possible environmental scenarios. It's like doing DI or Spire where the difficulty of the encounter raises slightly, probably making the fight fun to be engaged; or at least it was for me until certain "performance optimizations" in the form of latest patches took a southern turn that I had to do AFK most of the time.

[R217953291]

This is a good idea and really should be implemented because the current tower of kings is too difficult the low levels/br because they have to deal with strong players with all their extra combatants, which is honestly way too unfair.
Plus, if R2 wants to keep its players, they should consider making things easier so it appeals to more people rather than driving them away by making things too challenging.

[Meikura001]

Exactly, I am on a server that the top players used in generating are those who have merged sylphs (aka the 600.00 USD ones) and around 5 million BR (our top player has close to that much and is used). If I started on a new server, with these folks as the top players of such server cluster, then basically I am <expletive>ed. There will be no chance, even with a stronger team for the server, that I will be able to pass the first stage of Easy to enjoy the rest what the ToK has to offer (if better rewards).

[R24210451]

Its also very hard to decide which TOK to do everyday when the equipped pets shown in the ranks are not the ones equipped when we actually do TOK. thor-odinx3 turned into frigga x2-thor-odin...not cool at all.