idea; Iron Man and Hardcore Iron Man characters

merpins

This isn't a new concept, but let me go over the core idea: what if, upon creating a new alt, you could flag your character as an Iron Man or a Hardcore Iron man, which would give you restrictions based on which one you chose? Other games do this to give people a challenge, and it could come with its own set of rewards for players that take on this challenge. I'll give a quick list as to the restrictions an Iron Man would face:

Basic Restrictions (both Hardcore and Normal)

1. You cannot trade with other players or access your account-wide bank or storages. Each Iron Man has their own bank and storage, which only they can access, and you have to upgrade your bank again for this character.
2. You cannot buy from guild stores, but you can sell things in a guild store however you are heavily taxed when doing so (50%-80% profit reduction).
3. You do not gain 1-50 level-up rewards as normal, however there might be Iron-man specific level-up rewards.
4. Your CP is reset on your Iron Man, and you must level it up from 0 starting at level 50. This does not effect any non-iron man characters.
5. Exp in overland content and overland grinding receives a minor buff after level 50, group content exp receives a nerf to match the approximate value of overland exp rates. You do not gain the large exp bonus from completing your daily normal dungeon or BG, but still do gain other normal rewards.
6. You cannot buy helpful things from the cash shop. Things like potions, poisons, crafting coupons, vampire bites, are greyed out for you and cannot be bought. If you buy a crown crate and pull potions, soul gems, food, or exp coupons, they are automatically converted to gems. You can use a banker or merchant you own.
Edit: 7. The Item set journal (the one that lets you remake stuff with transmutes) starts blank for an Iron Man, and must be filled in again manually for this character.

Hardcore Iron Man Restrictions

You have all the Basic Restrictions, plus the following additional restrictions:
1. You cannot trade things to guild stores.
2. You have 3 lives. Once you lose all 3 lives, your character is recorded as an in-game achievement and then deleted. Dying by falling in some circumstances does not consume lives. You can buy up to 2 additional lives for 1 million gold for the first and 5 million gold for the second.\



What do you all think about the restrictions? Should there be more for normal or hardcore?

Necrotech_Master

when i used to play city of heroes there were people who would just impose those rules on themselves while playing

i think that is a better idea than trying to add extra development time for a mode few will use

you could just easily play your character and on your first death, log out and delete the character if you wanted to play hardcore

merpins

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

when i used to play city of heroes there were people who would just impose those rules on themselves while playing

i think that is a better idea than trying to add extra development time for a mode few will use

you could just easily play your character and on your first death, log out and delete the character if you wanted to play hardcore

This misses the point, and is the argument I expected: no, because they could use the time spent doing this doing something else. That's not really an argument though, nor is it constructive.
More content in game and more options breathe life into old systems. You would have to play differently, not choose to, if you went this route. And as a note, you wouldn't have a cp restriction here.

The devs would need to do just a couple things here: 1. add some new hud and ui elements, and code them to work in their system. 2. Add a buff/debuff to iron-man specific characters, and restrict a few things for characters that select this option upon creation. 3. And this is optional, think up some rewards for those characters based on levels and/or achievements.

As someone that works in this industry (games and animation), I can say with some certainty that the amount of work necessary to get this to work in-game is fairly minimal, since it does not require any new animation, 3d models, or systems, just tweaks to existing systems, a bit of coding, and some balancing. So putting development time here is no issue, they could easily do this as a side project. It's less work than creating a single new quest for a new location in game.

Dark_Lord_Kuro

It looks like a waste of dev time to me and not fun

Blinx

this game needs things to liven it up not make it even more tedious, this would def be overlooked by me

sajackson

ZOS wouldn't do anything to the shop that prevents players from buying items. Sorry, not going to happen.

bmnoble

If you want restrictions impose them on yourself with your own will power. Waste of development time for a mode a tiny portion of the player base would ever consider using.

Chips_Ahoy

i tried Hardcore Agent in The Division 2 and what at first is interesting and funny, quickly becomes tedious and boring...

Use your willpower and create your rules with your character.

Kalik_Gold

I like the idea. Just let you flag the character on creation. People will say you can do it yourself, but for achievements, it should be tracked in game.

Otherwise what’s the point of an Ironman.

Jusey1

Oh, similar to the idea done in RuneScape? Not sure on how it would work overall in ESO in all honesty...

Amottica

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

It looks like a waste of dev time to me and not fun

I agree. I may have missed it but I do not see anything that would actually make it challenging. When I think of Ironman I think of a challenge. I also fail to see the point of the hardcore version as it would lead to anything but hardcore since no one in their right mind would do vet arenas or even vet or HM trials since they would be guaranteeing they would end up losing the character eventually.

BlueRaven

The main problem with "True Death" modes is that this is an online game and people get disconnected at times. If a player dies from a disconnect can they write up a ticket to reverse it? If they can then, it becomes an ongoing money drain to ZOS.

Danikat

I agree with the people saying if you want to add restrictions or special rules you can do it yourself, you don't need ZOS to do it for you.

I always find it kind of strange that these sorts of challenges are very common in single-player games and almost universally made up and monitored by players, with no input from the developers to support it, but then in online games people keep asking the developers to do it for them as if it's impossible to do without it being an officially designated game mode.

Pokemon has never had a 'Nuzlocke Challenge' mode, Zelda has never had a '3 heart run' mode, Sims has never had any special mode for the dozens of (sometimes slightly horrifying) challenges their players make up. But all those variations are routinely done by players, using established rule sets. The thing that makes sure you stick to the rules is that you want to do it. If you're tempted to cheat then clearly you're not actually enjoying the challenge and should stop doing it and play the way you actually want to. (And the nice thing about player-made rules is each person can tweak them to suit themselves - for example deciding which deaths are valid and which don't count, or how many lives you're allowed.)

Also for what it's worth the times I've heard of these things being added as an official game mode it's been after players started doing it themselves. For example Arenanet found out that Guild Wars 1 players were finding ways to get to the maximum level (20) within the tutorial area (which was supposed to get you to level 2-5 and stops giving XP by normal means around level 12). They added a title for it because it was popular and years later added quests to help people achieve it without very slow and not at all challenging work-arounds like letting enemies kill you over and over so they level up before you kill them for a tiny bit of XP.

I'm not doing this particular challenge in ESO but I am doing a similar one in GW2 (the main rules are 'permadeath' - if they die I delete them, only the lowest tier of gear allowed, no trading with other players and no items from my other characters) and I've got a character in ESO who "can't" use magic. Only weapon skills and other non-magical skills allowed, no joining the mages guild and any quest which I know will require using magic I'll skip. I'm going to have to allow the "destroy the whatever" quests where you inexplicably use some sort of spell to do it because I can't remember which ones do that and which have you pull a hammer or axe from no where to do it and can't be bothered looking up the ending to each quest on Youtube before accepting.

That's even less likely to be added as an official choice than permadeath characters, but it's something I wanted to do so I'm doing it rather than waiting for ZOS to tell me I'm allowed to make that choice.

By the way: congrats on being the one person I've seen suggest this who didn't end with something like "obviously all drops on this character should be purple or better and they should get double gold and a special title as soon as they start to reward them for the tremendous effort they'll be putting in". It's nice to see one from someone who at least seems to sincerely want the challenge rather than a farming character disguised as a challenge mode.

sajackson

I can kind of get with adding some iron-man like options during character creation, assuming they wouldn't be too difficult to add mechanically (and I don't develop ESO so I have no idea on that part).

Things like "death means death" (i.e. you die and that character ceases to exist), limitations on skill re-specs etc.. Basically anything that wouldn't require massive changes to underlying game code. All of these things would be entirely opt-in for players of course as it's not in ZOS's benefit to limit the appeal of the game to only a small section of players.

As I said previously, they will never put restrictions in the shop though because ZOS want people to buy stuff so putting barriers in the shop to prevent that just flies in the face of their business model.

KhajiitLivesMatter

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

This isn't a new concept, but let me go over the core idea: what if, upon creating a new alt, you could flag your character as an Iron Man or a Hardcore Iron man, which would give you restrictions based on which one you chose? Other games do this to give people a challenge, and it could come with its own set of rewards for players that take on this challenge. I'll give a quick list as to the restrictions an Iron Man would face:

Basic Restrictions (both Hardcore and Normal)

1. You cannot trade with other players or access your account-wide bank or storages. Each Iron Man has their own bank and storage, which only they can access, and you have to upgrade your bank again for this character.
2. You cannot buy from guild stores, but you can sell things in a guild store however you are heavily taxed when doing so (50%-80% profit reduction).
3. You do not gain 1-50 level-up rewards as normal, however there might be Iron-man specific level-up rewards.
4. Your CP is reset on your Iron Man, and you must level it up from 0 starting at level 50. This does not effect any non-iron man characters.
5. Exp in overland content and overland grinding receives a minor buff after level 50, group content exp receives a nerf to match the approximate value of overland exp rates. You do not gain the large exp bonus from completing your daily normal dungeon or BG, but still do gain other normal rewards.
6. You cannot buy helpful things from the cash shop. Things like potions, poisons, crafting coupons, vampire bites, are greyed out for you and cannot be bought. If you buy a crown crate and pull potions, soul gems, food, or exp coupons, they are automatically converted to gems. You can use a banker or merchant you own.
Edit: 7. The Item set journal (the one that lets you remake stuff with transmutes) starts blank for an Iron Man, and must be filled in again manually for this character.

Hardcore Iron Man Restrictions

You have all the Basic Restrictions, plus the following additional restrictions:
1. You cannot trade things to guild stores.
2. You have 3 lives. Once you lose all 3 lives, your character is recorded as an in-game achievement and then deleted. Dying by falling in some circumstances does not consume lives. You can buy up to 2 additional lives for 1 million gold for the first and 5 million gold for the second.\



What do you all think about the restrictions? Should there be more for normal or hardcore?

sound just like u would need to replay the boring part of the game

hafgood

Well one of the easiest ways of doing this is start a brand new account and just have one character on it, delete your daily rewards (or create a second character for them to collect them) and delete your level up rewards. Not much can be done about bonus xp for randoms - maybe don't do them?

As for putting this in game. No.

It isn't as simple to code as you suggest as all coding that is changed has to be tested to make sure it hasn't affected anything else. I'm sure a lot of players would be outraged if a small error in the coding meant when their character died for a third time it was deleted even though they were not flagged as hard-core.

You want something like this it has to be built in at the start as that way the coding is new and not full of changes. When you add something like this in its where errors happen, and errors in something like this mean a very very unhappy player base.

atherusmora

No!!!

KhajiitLivesMatter

atherusmora wrote: »

No!!!

i dont want it either but just writing "no" without any reason is useless - atleast state why u dont want it

drsalvation

I think games should be way more punishing when it comes to dying.
It always bothers me how lightly death is taken: In fallout 76, you just lose junk items, in ESO, you just lose equipment durability.
Why the hell does it say that your companion is "Dead" during combat? That alone is still bothersome as heck, just write they're unconscious (but it is a hard word to write so I think they just went with "dead"), since they come back to life after any battle. It's stupid. Why do other characters die and stay dead but your companions die in every encounter and they just walk it off?

I think there should be a challenge mode with punishable death, but the other alternatives you mentioned seem rather, boring and unnecessary.

JJOtterBear

This isn't Runescape, if you want Ironman/Hardmode Ironman, then go play runescape.

Although I do wish ESO had the skill system of Runescape, that would be awesome.

atherusmora

KhajiitLivesMatter wrote: »

atherusmora wrote: »

No!!!

i dont want it either but just writing "no" without any reason is useless - atleast state why u dont want it

No, no is enough to get my point across. I don’t have to provide a reason for not wanting something. Not wanting it is reason enough. Do you give a reason to the waiter/waitress when you decide to decline multiple offerings on a menu? Likely not. So, no.

Edited to add: only really need to provide a reason if I’m trying to persuade people to agree with me. Which, in this context, is not necessary for me to express my point.

spartaxoxo

atherusmora wrote: »

KhajiitLivesMatter wrote: »

atherusmora wrote: »

No!!!

i dont want it either but just writing "no" without any reason is useless - atleast state why u dont want it

No, no is enough to get my point across. I don’t have to provide a reason for not wanting something. Not wanting it is reason enough. Do you give a reason to the waiter/waitress when you decide to decline multiple offerings on a menu? Likely not. So, no.

Edited to add: only really need to provide a reason if you’re trying to persuade people to agree with me. Which, in this context, is not necessary for me to express my point.

The point of a discussion forum is to discuss ideas constructively. Kind of hard to do that when you don't provide reasons.

drsalvation wrote: »

I think there should be a challenge mode with punishable death, but the other alternatives you mentioned seem rather, boring and unnecessary.

Deleting a character is so easy to do and the rest of the ideas don't actually seem fun, so I wouldn't like using such a thing. And I wouldn't really want someone doing this in my group either.

AlnilamE

We already do this in our guild. We call them Iron Vestige.

When they die, they get memorialized in the Hall of Heroes.