New Arena?

Some of you might have played my arena, and heard that I am remaking it.

I was doing that, but then the other day I was playing a game of it with two friends of mine. I have known the main problems in the map for long, but I suddenly got an idea about how I could make it better!

The major problems in the latest released version of my arena (version 1.5) are:

• Imbalances - There are both some imbalanced heroes and spells, but the biggest problem is actually that once you are winning, your enemies will have almost no chance to fight back, so unless you are on the winning team, only the first 5 minutes of the game are funny.
• Gameplay - The map's gameplay is a bit boring now, because of the imbalances, but also because it is too slow and not very much is happening.

So, the other day I got this idea that I have been thinking about since then.

I want to change several things, not all of it is decided yet, in fact I have not even decided if I will do this or not, but I like the ideas I have till now.

Hero levels will be dropped, at least they won't work the normal way. Heroes won't become stronger the more enemies they kill, and they can't level up their abilities either - they start with all abilities.

This means that the map won't enter an evil cycle where you can be sure to win the map if you get the first 5 kills. This means that it will be more about tactics, aiming and so.

It will be faster to move and attack than normally, spells will have less cooldown and revival times will be shortened too. This will (hopefully) make the game faster and less boring.

Random events will occur, this can be everything from weather that affects the gameplay, earthquakes, tornados or other random effects that will appear and affect the gameplay. This is supposed to make it more fun and more interesting.

It won't be so much about teams and healing anymore, teams will be dropped and healing abilities will not play as important a role as they did before. The fountain will be removed too, so people can't just stand being healed out the time.

There will be items, but they will not work the same way as before. When you kill a creep, an item might drop. This can be either a consumeable item or a temporary item - Temporary items are like normal items that boosts stats, gives an ability or something like this. Temporary items will have a maximum duration that they can be in a hero's inventory (I will use charges as a countdown timer), after they have been in an inventory for that duration they will vanish. If an item has a duration of for example 60 seconds and it is dropped on the ground after 40 seconds, it can stay on the ground as long as possible, it will first disappear when it is destroyed or a hero picks it up and holds it in his inventory for the last 20 seconds.
When a hero is killed, all his items are dropped.

The terrain will be a small arena where all the action will take place, and I don't think there will be any real special areas. There won't be any duel arena (I think), nor will there be any safety zones. When killed, heroes will respawn at a random point in the arena and be invulnerable (this is the only situation where a hero can be invulnerable in the map) for some seconds.

As for victory conditions, I plan to keep them the same way as they were before, this means that the player with most kills after a duration that is based on a voting in the beginning of the game will win.

I think that's pretty much it for now, those are the main ideas I have.

As said already, I don't know if I will make this, at least I won't start yet, as I am too busy at the moment.

But I would like some feedback, so please tell me what you think about this.

Getting rid of levels is good.

Random effects aren't good. You should have effects happen every X seconds. Like elevating platforms that elevate to different heights every 30 seconds, or something similar to that.

As to terrain, numerous stages would be awesome. Like, a desert stage, a forest stage etc. all with different random/timed effects.

If you went with the numerous stage ideas, it could have a kill limit in every stage, and once all stages are cleared, the one with most victories wins.

Thanks for your feedback, I will think about it :).

Would like some more feedback.

You are entirely right about a hero arena, as it is, not being much fun.

By removing the leveling that has no purpose in a tiny arena and reducing cooldowns 'til you get an action-frenzy game, you will get something that makes a lot more sense, so you are probably on the right path.

Yah the hero arenas I have played( and I havent played yours) are usually about getting the first kills and the tomes. So doing item charges, and the levels away with should make this very interesting. I would suggest thought that you do make these levels like Dom-Male suggested, differant effects in each small arena, differant items..etc.

Yes, that was exactly the plan. The idea of a hero arena is generally not that it is supposed to have an important story or require very much brain to play, so I personally think it will work a lot better this way, with more action in a typical arena.

I would like more opinions on the random effects.

The random effects sounds cool as long you don't use too much fog. My computer was having a difficult time playing your arena when I tried it the last time. :(

Yes, I know, fog is too laggy. But I did not only mean weather effects, but I will not use so much fog anymore, that's for sure.

A few things I have to say:

1) Abolishing levels is good, makes it much harder for me to pwn you all

2) Timed items are also good, no crazy tanking and whatnot

3) Random effects, well I don't dig that quite as much...Something I always thought was cool was that if someone could make a random terrain reset that would cause the terrain to morph itself every X seconds(Think AVP, the latest movie and the reconfiguring temple).

The reason I don't like random effects is because it's about luck. Using the effects that happen every so often requires skill and is a lot better.

Agreed with the timing effects, and I love the ideas youve had in the first post. It is also cool if the single arena changes to different styles, enabling the specific timed events. Somewhat like pokemon stadium level in Super Smash Borthers Melee for the Gamecube, if anybody knows of it.

Some examples:
A lava stage - A volcano in the center of the arena (or maybe Erwt's new model ; ) ) and the event is an erruption whch sends flying volcano rocks around the arena or pours our lava waterfalls, something like that.
A forest stage - The timed event is that a bunch of the trees start randomly breaking and falling over damaging people who get toppled over by them.
A mountain stage - Timed event is a mudslide, so it starts raining and a waterfall of mud pours down the mountain pushing people off the arena.
A desert stage - timed event is a big tornado rushing throught the center of the arena, casting something like cyclone onto the people it hits, and maybe throwing some off the stage.

What I mean of course with falling off the stage is only if you stick to Tim.'s style of floating platforms and just chage the terrain on the platform. I think that would come out pretty neat.

I like your ideas about changing the terrain and that, and it will be relatively easy to do, just worked on something like that for UL the last week.

For the falling of the stage, I am not sure how that will affect the gameplay so I don't know. But I will think about it.

Thanks for the input all of you.

I might make sketches of some stages if you'd like. I have some nifty ideas :)

That would be nice, just make all of them have the same shape (an equal square, most likely something like the center region of the newest version of the map. Let's say 32*32 grid cells or something like that).

If you have the ideas, it would be awesome if you shared them :).

Okay, here's an example of a map. There is a castle in the middle, with four bridges and two levels, a ground level and a higher level. The catch is that only one bridge is up at any given time. Every fifteen seconds, the bridge begins to rumble, and sinks into the water, killing whoever is still standing on it. Another bridge is raised in a clockwise order. The rumbling goes on for 5 seconds, so people will get a chance to run, but if they are for example rooted they can be killed easily. People with jump/blink skills can then jump past the moat.