Grouping

[Higa Yamamoto]

As of right now, I dont' see any point to grouping. I heard about flist, but I'm not sure about the mechanics on that with groups. You get bonus exp when in a group nothing really calls for a necessity to party.

An idea I had was to allow party members to improve AC of party members during a fight. A fraction of my AC is added to my teammate(s) and vice versa. The improved AC would mean that a party could take on much harder mobs in newer areas. The idea is that in a team, one can help parry and block attacks against team members. Successful blocks/damage reduction(or prevention) should net exp to the helper (the main reason being exp is not shared during a fight, gaining exp for helping a teammate should be an added incentive for grouping).

This grouping mechanic of shared AC should also work for enemy shinobis (making mobs more challenging, for bosses that might drop pieces of equip, or just normal mobs as well).

This shared AC should be split amongst all party members. If it was a 2 person team, lets say 20% of my negative AC is shared directly to my partner. If it was a 3 person team, then the same 20% is shared between those two (reason being i can only provide so much help at a time); at the same time I will be receiving bonus AC from my party members as well.

Maybe even bonus % of shared AC to those that are on flist (better friends you are, more sharing you get).

[Isamu]

I like this idea. The 20% going into the collective pot would be rather helpful. I'm not sure of the shared xp, simply because you already get boosted xp from being in a group. The only benefit I remember for Flist is when 2 people reach the highest level of friendship with each other, they can hear each others thoughts. I think this bonus % would be an immediate benefit.

[Higa Yamamoto]

I'm not saying to add shared xp, i'm just making a point of its non-existence to support the idea of you gaining exp for succesfully blocking a blow for your teammate.

[Keiko]

Shared XP would be nice. It'd be very nice.

[Kioshi]

This sounds interesting, although grouping seems to really only be for exp purposes at this point in the MUD because it's still in an Alpha stage. There really aren't any uber enemies to fight as a group. As far as I've heard you can pretty much do everything by yourself (and it is in fact encouraged) so I don't know how you could encourage people to group when they don't even want to do it to level.

Maybe design an area kind of like MMO instances that need a group of people in order to complete so that players are encouraged and rewarded for grouping.

[Gatz]

As far as I've heard you can pretty much do everything by yourself (and it is in fact encouraged) so I don't know how you could encourage people to group when they don't even want to do it to level.

I dunno who told you that, but it isn't true. There a lot of systems to encourage grouping, including experience bonuses and also combination (help combination, http://narutofor.us/help.php?file=combination) and combo (help combo, http://narutofor.us/help.php?file=combo). A lot of skills only really can work decently when you have a partner to help you pop them off. I think there is a lot of team work aspects to the game, but I dunno about doing pooling of experience or AC. We have things like rescue, radio and the friend list.

I think giving bonuses is one thing, but pushing it into making it so grouping is really the viable option for players is another. I know how everyone works, if experience for groups became ungodly, then no one would ever wanna gain by themselves and then you get this power struggle between grouped vs non-grouped, but right now I feel it is pretty fair. I'd rather add a new ability or small add on to the group system, then a major bit that drastically changes things.

[Higa Yamamoto]

About the xp portion, all I had in mind was you getting the same amount of Xp as you would from a normal hit against the enemy.

If you normally get 3-6k from one hit, then a successful block for your partner would give you the same amount. Not so much as completely sharing exp or anything like that. The idea came to me where I saw green text (in my head) saying XXXX blocked/parried a hit for you amidst all the fighting.

Then it evolved into giving bonus AC to party members which would represent such an event occuring.