Although the concept is neat, there are some major problems, some of which Kage does not recognize as problems, or thinks that should wait until after it is put on the main server.
- no quest leading up to it
- no in-game explanation of what in canon is happening (electricity? magic?)
- the rules and consequences are never explained
- a single person, intentionally or in ignorance of the rules, can kill everybody
- it is harder with more people
- there is not much of an indicator when you are taking script damage (there should be a very visible particle effect when you are taking damage due to ion imbalance)
- there is no indicator for when you have killed all the enemies
- no replay value
- no reward
- the map is too small
- it's not really located in a good position (through the snake pit)
- it's not nearly as level-agnostic as it's supposed to be
The point should to destroy/disable the pillars (to open a door a save a McGuffin?), and the pillars summon more sparks when they are destroyed instead of the current strange level system. I would suggest 2 particle effects, one for an active pillar and another for a disabled pillar that is giving off sparks (and no particle effect for a fully disabled pillar, which only happens once all of them are destroyed). Maybe, instead of throwing a switch to change your ionization, you have to "touch" a pillar, which necessitates taking damage?
I definitely suggest this become a quest like the Cindy quest: a group does the battle and gets some reward, but only one does the quest. It might also be cool for the solo player to have to do some solo battle afterwards.
It would probably be a good idea, instead of having this in a "natural" cave, to have an "artificial" cave with more of a SciFi feel (how much of a SciFi feel depends on whether the "ions" are electrical or magical in nature) - provided someone makes the tileset. White/black might make more storyline sense instead of red/blue, but perhaps not as visually apparent (perhaps off-white and off-black?)
Now that I think of this more, this quest looks like it would fit better in tmwA-adventures (which naturally requires a higher degree of close cooperation between players and, hopefully, has intrinsic replay value due to the score system) than tmwA-classic. Given how much work/time needs to be done/spent to make it reasonable, it probably wouldn't delay this quest too much to wait for me to implement tmwA-adventures.
