@Reydann, @Cleaver (dev)
Thanks are in order for posting an enticing enough iteration of this discussion into the subsection of the forums most likely to actually be read by the devs, this opened up the opportunity not only for good discussion among the community but an actual dev reply. Cheers, friend.
My roses also go to Cleaver, thank you so much for sparking new hope in this discussion. I don't know if similar promises were made in the past but it doesn't seem like it.
My best wishes to the team and their current undertaking with modernizing the game, I can't imagine working with code this old greases the operation in any way but you're still doing it. I cannot wait for the mission/arcade update(s) you guys may have in store, here's to the future of SK!
I am completely late to this thread but here's my thoughts on it:
I also agree that it'd be a great idea to buff the arcade, either loot or flat rewards in some manner to at least rival Vanaduke runs (as well as buffing other places of interest like other bosses, shadow lairs, for drops/crowns). On paper it'd be a good solution to motivate players to do other content besides the same grind for loot.
HOWEVER, going back to the OP's post, yeah. Players optimize a game for maximum profit in shortest amount of time. This creates a problem with trying to come up with a solution.
Players have been doing Vanaduke runs since it came out and it used to take much, much longer. A lot of us veterans have been around to see both the speedruns and average runtime of them cut down to frankly incomprehensible times over the course of the years. That's because the playerbase was given so much time to do exactly one mission and to get better at it.
Just of the top of my head, we've:
- Broken down spawning mechanics to get them to spawn consistently
- Figured out the best possible weapons to use in what situation
- Normalized and exploited bugs that we now just consider a feature because we know it works reliably with the game coding (we are definitely not supposed to be hiding *inside* the boss!)
- Discovered out-of-the-box strategies that now everybody does because it shaves down time (pretty much the entirety of D26).
In buffing other content, the fine-tuning of what would be considered "balanced" or even "close to Vanaduke" is actually overwhelming difficult to gauge. We haven't done most of that in any places of the game so even if the theoretical profit is greater than Vanaduke, we won't be coming close to beating it and most people will still default to Vana for years to come as many of us can run it completely brain-off now. And if we do make more immediately, that will just become the new Vana and we'll optimize the heck out of that too. That just means it'll be even more busted than current Vana is in retrospect to crown generation.
I think it's definitely possible, but this change requires big commitment and long-term monitoring.