- Most of the hostile player monsters and the dedicated monster system will be removed.
- Players will spawn with 3 friendly player monster tokens.
- 0-score monsters will not cost a friendly monster token to summon.
- Friendly monster tokens button in the player monster menu will be active by default.
- 0-score monsters can spawn as hostile monsters.
- It's possible that the facehugger and air drone bomber will be enabled for hostile monsters (pending tests).
- Hostile pm abilities will be removed (Pickup Traps and Amp Damage). Players that purchased those abilities will have their stat points refunded.
- Temporarily removed pm abilities such as Monster Strength and Resistances may be rebalanced. Stat cost for those abilities may be adjusted.
- FPM monster requirements may be adjusted knowing that they can only be fpm controlled. FPMs that are strong against players but weak against monsters (such as the Dryosaurus, Angus, Electric Slith, Beam Waillord, etc...) will have reduced requirements. Powerful fpm monsters such as Earth Dragon, Ion Dragon, Titan, Carcharodontosaurus, etc... may have increased requirements.
Here are the pros and cons of the hostile player monster system.
Pros
- As a human, you'll run into interesting encounters.
- Players may run into tactical ambush points (ie: attack at unpredictable or inconvenient times).
- Player monsters' attack behavior is different from the AI monsters (dodging patterns, attack intervals, human aiming, etc...)
- As a dead player, you have something to do. This argument is no longer valid since we now have friendly player monster options.
- A method to receive RPG data when you reentered the server as a dead player. This argument is no longer valid since we now have infinite 0-score friendly player monster options.
- A method to slay idlers. 0-score hostile monsters are sufficient to accomplish this.
- A method to trade lives. An example of this happening yesterday is when a player accidentally team killed another player, and this player offered to exchange their life to the player they killed. 0-score hostile monsters are sufficient to accomplish this.
- Get to play as monsters that would be overpowered for fpms (such as titan, ion dragon, spinosaurus, etc...). To counter this, I can have a fpm-version of those monsters.
- Provides a different gameplay perspective.
- Hostile player monsters often causes hostility between players: people leave the server, player monsters are the root of many grudges, I get E-mail complaints, people kick vote others for being a monster, quickly diminishes the friendly atmosphere when one is killed, etc...
- Players become hostile player monsters to get revenge upon individuals.
- Players use hostile player monsters a method to sabotage the team or to end the map early. I don't find it fair that it just takes one player with a high score to be able to end the map (even if everyone else wants to play the map). Sometimes you can even end the map with a low score.
- Hostile monsters are not balanced. It's not even remotely fair if the players need to fight against a player monster Spinosaurus.
- The PvE aspect often conflicts with individuals who only want to play in co-op.
- Significantly slows down the map progression.
- I don't find it fair that the high score player (often means the veteran) can decide to kill another player (often a low level new player), for a resurrection. Causing the veteran to play some more, and the new player to wait some more.
- Spawns more server rules to be reinforced. In the past we had issues with players sticking nades on hostile pms to be suicide bombers, players being useless hostiles to give free xp/souls/adren, and pms blocking AI monsters. Dedicated monsters had a host of rules to enforce, too.