First of all, I envision an aboveground arena, in a physical building that looks like a small colosseum. Bringing the arena aboveground, into the light of day makes it stand out more and encourages players to use it more.
This colosseum would have a front door through which both fighters and observers enter. On the inside is a hallway with two doors, one leading to ring side seating, the other to the ring itself.
Both of these doors lead to the same map, but to two distinctly separate portions of it. The map for the inside of the colosseum has an inner ring or square in which PvP can be turned on and off dynamically. The outer ring, where observers are seated has PvP turned off.
The ring itself, as I envision it is a relatively small arena with one end funnel shaped, for a purpose that I will explain later. This ring will have to be relatively small, both to keep the games exciting, and to allow observers, who may have low screen resolutions to see the entire ring from their seats in the stadium part of the colosseum.
Fighting in this colosseum is divided into rounds, with each round divided into three parts: target experience harvesting, betting, and PvP combat. I will now explain these three divisions in more detail.
The main problem with the current PvP is that no one wants to loose experience because their level 60 characters was killed by a level 90. In my envisioned system the experience from a player kill comes not from the killed player, but rather from an external experience source. Here’s how it works.
When a round starts the players are gathered in the main part of the arena, facing the funnel end. A game master, or colosseum worker spawns a large number of black scorpions, or another monster in the funnel end, and this monster horde advances on the players. During this time PvP is turned off in the arena.
The players in the arena must fight the monsters to kill them all off. All the experience from these monsters kills is put into a jackpot, hopefully measured on a dynamic sign that shows the experience jackpot for this round. Perhaps, all drops could also be put into the jackpot. This time allows both the players and the observers to see each players fighting style, strengths, and weaknesses.
When all the monsters are killed, or when the jackpot reaches a designated value, the survivors wait in the arena, healing while the observers bet.
Each observer in the audience can place a bet with a NPC bet holder. The bets are always a standard 100 gold. Each player in the arena has two funds associated with him: “player dies†bet fund, and “player lives†bet fund. Let me demonstrate with a hypothetical situation.
Players A,B,C,D have survived the monster attack and are waiting in the arena.
An observer in the audience plays a 100 gold bet that player A will survive. Two observers each place a 100 gold bet that player A will survive. There is now 100 gold in the “player A survives†fund and 200 gold in the “player A dies fund.â€ÂÂ
After the bets are all placed the third section of the round begins. PvP is turned on in the arena, and the remaining players in the arena fight each other. When half of them have died, the remaining half get the jackpot of experience divided equally between them. In this way, the losers don’t loose any exp for fighting, just time, and perhaps money in the form of an entrance fee to fight. The winners get a nice chunk of exp for their efforts.
Now suppose that during the fighting Player A, previously betted on survives. In this case the 200 gold in the ‘player A dies’ fund is put into the ‘player A survives fund’ and the survives fund is distributed equally among the people who betted that Player A would survive. In this case it was just one person who bet that he would survive, so that person gets 300 gold back on his 100 gold bet.
If player A dies, then the gold in the player A survives fund is put into the player A dies fund, and the fund is distributed equally among those bet that Player A would die. So those two players that bet he would die would each get 150 gold back on their 100 gold bets.
What if no one had bet that player A would die and Player A survived? Then all the people who bet that he would survive would just get their money back. But if the reverse was true, and player A survived, but everyone bet that he would die, but no one bet that he would survive then all those people who bet that he would die, lose their money.
Who would get the money in the player A survives fund? I think it only makes sense that Player A would. Alternatively, the money could go into the jackpot for the next round, and would be distributed evenly among the survivors.
In this way, this system would make a fun environment both for players competing in the arena for experience, money, and drop jackpots. Also it would be exciting for observers to bet on their favorite players, and potentially make or loose money.
To keep things interesting the rounds would have to mixed up, for example a level 60 player fighting with his bare hands, against 10 newbies armed with daggers. I don’t know which way I would bet in a fight like that….
Also newbies could fight, with the experience source being a horde of maggots.
Anyway, requirements for this feature would be the ability to make one part of a map PvP, rather than the whole map, and the ability to turn PvP on and off in that area. Also, there would need to be some way to automate the spawning of the monsters, as well as adjusting the type of monster, so that a group of 10 newbies fighting in the arena would only have to fight maggots or plain scorpions, whereas high levels would have to fight black scorpions, snakes, grass snakes, etc.
The betting system probably wouldn't be too hard, but it would require some way of detecting whether a player was alive or dead, and also it would be necessary to detect when half of the players had died during PvP so that the round could end.
But anyway, that’s the idea and you are free to improve, implement, or criticize if you want.
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