[damycles]

So, I've got ideas. Specific ideas. Ideas on the design of multiplayer focused experiences that happen to encourage the creation of communities and cooperation for the sake of achieving ones goals.

SL2, it's a game alright. But it's also a primarily multiplayer one. One could even say it's a bit... massively multiplayer- I mean, as far as BYOND games go that is. Now, I think for the most part the systems that exist are mostly fine in a lot of ways but my issue is that in the current state of the game, optimized play (Something that people will always strive to do no matter how hard you try to stop them) encourages a playstyle that is largely self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Now, this'd be fine if this was a primarily single player experience but it ain't. This kind of thing lives or dies by the strength of the community behind it and honestly... hot take here but...

I just don't think it should be possible to solo this game.

Now, you may so to me, "Damycles, even if I did agree with you, how the fuck do you propose we make that work?"

Well thank you random strawman I just made because allow me to explain:

You redesign the class system to force people to choose a specialty.

Damage, Survivability, Utility.

You get to be really good at one, kind've okay at the other, not good at all at the third.

The way to implement this isn't going to be easy. Honestly, it's probably going to be the most difficult balance change this game would see to date.

Basically, instead of main classes being a decider of what kind of locked off abilities and stat bonuses you get, you have to pick a main role. DPS, Tank, Support. That role will give you access to various abilities that are locked off behind a the role restriction, and the stat boosts you'll get from each role will vary slightly, depending on which class you choose as your main class to at least account for the things you'll probably need for said class. I mean, alternatively we could just get rid of class based stat boosts entirely and honestly the meta will just figure itself out from there.

Now, these roles will dictate which classes you can put as your main class since some classes may be able to fit into multiple different categories whilst others will be explicitly designed for one category only.

The main thing that this design shift will really focus on is the fact that best in class abilities for Damage, Survivability, or Utility/Healing, will be locked behind the main role restriction.

You can still choose to subclass into something that isn't your main role for a little bit of that but it will be nowhere near as potent or effective as someone who is fully committing to the bit.

What this effectively means is that a lot more abilities are going to be locked off and restricted which, at first glance, seems like it will reduce build diversity, but honestly speaking may in fact make a lot more kinds of builds actually viable and classes overall a lot easier to balance in the future.

The main side effect of this however which I think will be the real reason this kind of change will be worth it is the shifted incentivization structure of the mechanics. If you're only good at one of the three pillars and are not allowed to be well rounded then you're going to need other players if you want to tackle more difficult content or go against others with some semblance of safety and assurance. In other words, it's going to force cooperation through mechanics. You can't solo dungeons anymore because you'll need someone to either take the heat for you or keep you alive through healing and support skills. For bosses in particular, you may in fact need a balanced party of all three roles. It is an existing type of structure used in a lot of RPGs but in my opinion it's used in a lot of RPGs because it works. By dividing up the responsibilities of battle into clearly designated roles then you are naturally going to have people gravitate towards each other as a means of filling in those roles.

The specifics are... a lot... and I don't have the comprehensive system knowledge to go into the weeds of it, but this isn't about the weeds really. This is more about a base design philosophy that can be used to further fix additional problems that may crop up as well as fixing some of the core issues with the current system. If you wanna talk about it in more detail with me I mean, I'm on Discord. Regardless, I hope you'll at least consider the idea.