"[IDEA] Daily Rival NPC Battles"

#PokemonGO: DISCLAIMER: As a fervent reader of this sub since the game launched, I realize that there is fatigue to proposals for new ideas for the game, as evidenced by the thread currently on the top page. This a very long, detailed post doing exactly that, so with that in mind, I've made an effort to add indented discussion questions about game balance that will hopefully spark some discourse worth of this sub. Apologies to any who may have shared similar ideas before (and those who feel they are reading the same ideas twice), but I've read this sub a good deal and I believe I am contributing with a fair amount of new material.Niantic has shown in their game alterations that they are careful in upsetting the XP/stardust/candy balance for progression through the game. The buddy system, a very welcome addition, changed it from "simply impossible" to a "real grind" to level up rare mons. The daily bonuses, while themselves certainly accelerating the XP/stardust process, were relatively modest and accompanied with pokemon diversity shifts and egg changes that made lucky egg evolution sprees harder to accomplish.So with these restraints in mind, along with the very apparent ideology that this game is about going outside and being active, I think this proposal manages to be consistent to Niantic's vision while fixing numerous glaring flaws of the game (discussed ad nauseam) in one fell swoop:Game play without going outside in cold weather, and a legal liability-free way to play while traveling as a passenger.Introducing classic Pokemon themes (battling your rival, vitamins, TMs) and a vehicle to tap into others (collecting legendaries, gym badges).Battles against all the different pokemon and pokemon types, not just the ones that are worth putting in gyms.A way to battle with your pokemon without being frustrated by sniping or by competing with spoofers/botters.Removing some traffic from the gym system, making it more possible to defend a gym while simultaneously keeping it just as easy to attack a gym.Providing incentives to keep leveling past 30 and keep your mons powered up (after much of this incentive was removed by the gym prestige changes).Improving rural gameplay.MECHANICSTo introduce your rival after the update, Professor Willow pops up with the same dialog professors used in the main games ("This is my nephew..erm what is his name again?").On your main screen, the compass would be moved to the top left, either above or below the spot for the white spinning pokeball of death. In its place in the upper right corner, you have an avatar of your rival that looks similar to yours in the lower left corner. It has the name that you've given him (hilarity ensues) and rather than the level number, you have his daily prestige amount.Your rival will have periodic pop up dialog boxes that challenge you, and either by accepting them or just clicking on the avatar, you can enter a minigame that mirrors taking down a level 10 gym. Your rival starts with 50K prestige and 10 pokemon, and you battle them in rounds until his prestige is gone and he has no pokemon left. You don't need to do it all in one shot.Note: One appeal of this idea is that it shouldn't be overly complicated for the developers to implement. I have zero developing experience, but I would have to guess that using the exact same pre-existing gym battling system to implement this functionality would not be a tremendously tall task (unlike how designing completely new minigames might be).As Gary in the anime had an enormous collection of pokemon, therefore so does your rival. Every day he presents a new challenge of 10 final-evolution pokemon. All of your rival's pokemon are at the level of your trainer's max level, so you should work to keep your best attackers maxed out even past level 30. Your rival's daily pokemon selection won't be completely random, with some from each tier of difficulty, such as: 2 weak pokemon (e.g. Butterfree, Fearow), 3-4 mid-level (e.g. Weezing, Clefable), and 3-4 tanks (you know the ones).Outside of a controlled difficulty level, it's completely random pokemon you face every day. It could be the same 10 pokemon for everybody playing that day (that would give all players something to talk about on a daily basis!), or randomized for each player.Once you take your rival's daily prestige down to zero, it isn't reset until the next day. Every day his prestige is reset to 50K with brand new pokemon, regardless of how much you've battled him the previous day.DAILY REWARDSAfter each round of battling, you are rewarded - and if you take his daily prestige down to zero, you get a bonus reward. Integral to this design is that you are not rewarded with XP or stardust. To level up your character and power up your pokemon, you need to go out and play the game! This addition is meant to supplement the game, not replace its core features. So what do you get?Per Battle: Revives and PotionsIn order to keep battling your rival, which is essentially equivalent to taking down a lvl 10 tower, you need to be rewarded with some level of healing items after every round of battle.BALANCE QUESTION 1: Should you be rewarded with exactly enough items to completely heal your team after every battle? A surplus? Deficit? My inclination is to provide a small deficit, so that you have to dip into your stock, incentivizing you to at least go out and hit up a few stops so you can battle your rival again the next day. However, I think there are arguments either way - particularly if you still want to leave trainers with healing items to battle gyms.Per Battle: PokeballsBeating your rival after every round of battle should provide you with some pokeballs. This should give trainers some incentive and increased ability to go out and catch pokemon, and would be a blessing to rural players who have limited access to pokestops (while they would be losing healing items in the process, with limited stops comes limited gyms so this would essentially be converting less-valuable healing items into more-valuable pokeballs).BALANCE QUESTION 2: Approximately how many pokeballs should be rewarded per battle? IIRC taking down a lvl 10 is about 45 battles, so my guess is about 1 pokeball per 2 pokemon defeated, leaving you with a collection of two dozen or so pokeballs and great/ultra balls post-battle.Full Clear: CoinsA big incentive for taking down your rival, for casuals and hardcore players alike. Your total coins per day are still capped at 100, but rival battle functions just like taking down a gym so you are rewarded in the same fashion. You only get to collect your rival coins once per day, but they come automatically after defeat, not when you redeem your gym coins.BALANCE QUESTION 3: How many coins for a full clear of your rival? I like the idea of tying it to your trainer level - this provides some small incentive to keep leveling up. However, Niantic needs to strike a balance with free coin giveaways where getting a little taste is encouraging people to buy coins from the store, and not making them too plentiful that they can replace the desire for purchased coins. I think a good balance would be [trainer level] / 2, with a minimum 10 coins (so between 10-20 coins) per full clear. With the last update, Niantic has shown that they are willing to give away more coins to get casual players involved in the gym game - this update would probably not upset the total free coins distributed from where it is now, as players who do battle their rival are likely doing that en lieu of taking gyms. And to the extent that they decide to do it on top of their previous gym taking schedule, that's still a big win for Niantic.Full Clear: Rare CandyThe real gem of the rival full clear would be a single rare candy, that can be converted into a candy for any pokemon in the game. The amount of time it takes to clear a lvl10 gym is close to how long it would take to walk 5km with your buddy, so this reward won't actually increase the number of rare candies you can get - it just provides a different path to getting them (one that is a very nice substitute during the winter months).BALANCE QUESTION 4: Should you be able to walk and battle your rival, accumulating egg/buddy distance as you play the minigame? While that would be really fun, my inclination is that leveling up rare mons should stay just as hard as it is now, and that your distance shouldn't be counted while in the minigame mode. Battling is also pretty engrossing, more so than catching pokemon and spinning stops, so it would be more dangerous to be walking around with your head down battling.7-DAY FULL CLEAR STREAK REWARDSAs with the daily first catch and first spin bonuses, you can get an increased bonus for 7 days in a row with a full clear of your rival.Double Coins and Rare CandyPretty self explanatory - you get coins equal to your trainer level (rather than half) and a second rare candy.Vitamins: Protein, Iron, or HP UpThis idea has been on this board before, and I'm a big fan. In the main games, you have ways to increase your pokemon EV/IVs. There's a great perfectionist appeal to a 100% pokemon, and even if it makes very little battle difference in PoGo, this is something that hardcore players would love to grind for. That said, we want to keep 100% IVs rare, so vitamins shouldn't be something you can accumulate by sheer volume of playtime, which is why tying them to a weekly reward system makes sense.BALANCE QUESTION 5: Should you be able to get a full vitamin after a week of gameplay? If that was the case, it would only take a month to max out a 91% pokemon, and 2 months to max out a 82% pokemon. That doesn't seem too bad, but within a year everybody would have a full squad of 6 100% IV pokemon. Perhaps there would be a way to break the vitamins down - so that you are only getting some of the component parts every week - to make it take longer to buff your whole team up.TMsDiscussed a million times. Arguments for: Twister Gyarados, Bulldoze Arcanine, Dazzling Gleam Alakazam. Arguments against: RNG making perfect mons rare.BALANCE QUESTION 6: How many? I think that capping out at three random TMs a week adds the perfect amount of RNG - with over 130 total moves by my count, that means you'll average about 1 of each TM per 10 months if you collect every week. Common enough so that you'll eventually get that Solar Beam, but you may get 10 Icy Winds first. It's still going to be very difficult to get that perfect moveset mon, but you won't be heartbroken when you evolve into a garbage moveset. And as with the vitamins, super grindy players can't get a huge advantage because it's tied to a static level of weekly rewards.EVENT FUNCTIONALITYA big perk of this system is that it would be easy to adapt for events that every player can take part in.LegendariesI think most people expect Niantic to do legendary events where you can travel to a place with a group of trainers where you battle the legendary pokemon with others, then can capture it afterward. But, not everybody will be able to attend an in-person event, so the idea I've seen posed before is a legendary egg given to each trainer by Professor Willow that takes 50km to hatch, which would be in line with the "go out and play to earn it" mindset.That said, it's definitely anticlimactic to just have a Zapdos egg handed to you. What if, instead, Professor Willow made the egg the stakes for a series of battles between you and your rival? You have to beat your rival three days in a row to add the egg to your inventory (your rival wouldn't just get it if you didn't beat him - it would just stay available in perpetuity until you can claim it from him).Region-locked PokemonSame idea with the legendaries - Professor Willow's been traveling the globe and drops a 25km egg with a region-locked pokemon on the table between you and your rival. Beat him 3 days in a row to earn it. Rather than this necessarily being an event, like the legendaries, this happens every time after 50 full clears of your rival.I believe that Niantic implemented region-locked pokemon with the vision that people would be able to unlock their pokedex by trading with others, but now seeing how a trading system could completely ruin the game, they need to provide a safe outlet for dedicated players to complete their 'dex.Gym BadgesYour rival's tired of you taking him to task day in and day out, so he takes a vacation. Niantic can run an event where a gym leader takes his spot, with a classic lineup of powerful same-typed pokemon. If you beat them three days in a row during the event, you get a gym http://ift.tt/2fWdzgm a system where you can battle your rival from anywhere, with an appropriately balanced system of rewards, could provide monumental steps in bringing depth and satisfying gameplay that PoGo currently lacks. Comment with your suggestions for how the rewards system could be balanced, and any other ideas that could make daily rival NPC battles work!EDIT: Yikes, my first post on Reddit, definitely don't have a grasp of the formatting - very hard to read right now and not as I intended. Working on fixing it.EDIT2: Looks much better now - if anybody else has formatting suggestions for this wall of text, I'd be happy to add them! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2fWxP30