Dry pompous ramblings #1...

[ZoeyLovecraft90]

So after Coh closed I went on a quest to find another game to fill the gap. I played pretty much everything. I mean EVERYTHING. I eventually settled in Team Fortress 2 and found some great people there who I still play games with even today.
We played other games. One of our members "Taco" has a love for old dungeon crawlers and introduced me to the genre. We played Diablo and Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile. All masterpieces in my opinion.

While playing Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile I found a thing those games have that I call the "Dungeon Generator" In Torchlight 2 its a little cool looking room called "Mapworks" where you can buy and activate a map into the machine and it will randomize and generate a dungeon for you and your friends to complete with customizable difficulty and length and theme. Path of Exile has one too but on a more sophisticated and better funded level. I love it.
You and your friends can gather around this machine and press the button and do the dungeon.
But it never the same dungeon twice. It's always randomized.

So upon discovering this genius idea in those games I thought that Coh could have used something like this.
I'm one of those people that really thinks that AE was one of the things that caused our downfall because of all the exploits.
I think that it ruined the point of actually progressing slowly and getting to know your character. I think that the real artists who built awesome missions in AE were unappreciated. I remember a point when Atlas Park became a power leveling zone and with chatbox being filled with Influence offeres for farming runs.

My point is that a dungeon generator described above would have served us better and took away the ability to break the game and get to level cap in 2 hours. Plus i think if Coh ever does come back out I think it would be awesome if we could have a "Mission Generator" instead of a "Level generator".

[Aggelakis]

What you describe sounds like Radio/Paper missions.

[Clave Dark 5]

AE had something like that.  You could designate your map to be something like "Old Warehouse" category and offer your choice of "Old Warehouse" number 1, 2, 17, etc. (and see how big or small each was and what layout it had), or just choose "random" under "Old Warehouse" and the system would put your creations down on a randomly chosen.  Still not truly random as it would still be the story you wrote and the foes you designed (or chose).

I'd think something truly random ("Skulls in Old Warehouse #23, two bombs to click") would make for sort of non-stories, but I'm not familiar with those games mentioned above, so I could be wrong.  And that does also sound a bit like newspaper missions in fact.  I sort of wish they could have kept adding to that pool of possible newspaper results, but we had a good number of them as it was.

[Auroxis]

What you describe sounds like Radio/Paper missions.

Not quite. The radio/paper system gave you a very limited choice-set and didn't scale interestingly in terms of risk vs. reward.

If I were to simulate the map system PoE offers, it would involve revamping the difficulty scaling NPC:

1. Select mob difficulty as per usual (up to +4, x8)

2. Select extra difficulty levels: 1, 2 or 3 randomized difficulty modifiers. For each extra randomized modifier you get an extra random reward.

Difficulty Modifers can be:

• An extra AV/Hero per mission
• Mobs have +100% recharge and movement speed
• Mobs have +50% Mez resistance and +1 KB protection
• Mobs have +20% Damage and Resistance
• Mobs can spawn with an elite boss with leadership powers

Rewards can be:

• One bar of double XP gained at mission completion
• A glowing clickable in the mission that gives you a random rare invention recipe
• A glowing clickable in the mission that gives you a lot of influence
• Your inspirations all become tier 3 at mission completion
• Gain 2 reward tokens at mission completion