Recently I've had some more players giving The Lunarian Shuffle a try. A common point of feedback is that they don't care for how much time it takes to grind levels.
On one hand, this can mostly be attributed to the players not being FFIV speed runners; if they were, they would know to simply get one fight that was worth a lot of experience, and then kill off all but one character and win. This would multiply the experience onto one character, which would then get copied onto all the shadow party characters, making them super powerful when they rejoin. However, I cannot and should not expect all my players to be FFIV speed runners, so I should accommodate for them somehow.
On the other hand, FFIV speed runners had a different complaint - when a bad character such as Dark Knight Cecil or Edward joins the party, the correct decision was always to kill that character and leave him dead, lest he waste valuable experience and turns. If I simply multiplied the experience gained by fights, this conclusion would not change, and instead speed runners would simply need to win one or two fights and then the party would have gained so many levels that searching for equipment could be skipped for a very long time. That does not work well.
I can solve both of these problems at once by adding the option to remove experience division among party members. When selected, experience gained will always act as if each fight was completed with a single character. This is a significant change to the game's basic strategy that addresses a frustration inherent to the game rather than one caused by The Lunarian Shuffle, which lands it solidly as an optional feature rather than something mandatory.
And so, that is what I have done. Version 1.06 is now live, and it features the option described above, as well as a reorganization of the GUI to better support the growing number of build options.
No comments:
Post a Comment