Personally I like the idea of having duels in the PvE world. The ability to just click a button and duke it out real quick can be fun. It can be fun if you want to try something out against a friend or just goof around. As a computer science major in college my mind instantly tries to figure out a solution that has as few bugs or cons as possible and here is what i came up with.
A system where you right click on a name and you have an option to “Request a duel” from there a message pops up on your requested persons screen (for x amount of time) where you can either Accept, Deny, or Block. Block would add them to the blocked list on your contacts page. This would need a confirm button and once on the blocked list you wont be able to request them to duel and neither would they. This allows you to be able to duel players while stopping annoying players without turning the dueling system off. Speaking of turning it off, in options there should be a way to auto deny duel requests. Another way you could implement an annoyance free system would be to have a drop down setting in options with 4 possible options: “Allow everyone to request duels”, “Allow only friends to …”, “Allow only friends and guild members to…”, and “Do not allow people to request to duel”. That I think is the most ideal system, and would make the block feature not necessary. Once you have sent a request you have a pending area until they accept it where you can cancel. While your request is pending the option to duel other people would be grayed out. When you accept a request all other request are sent, “Player is dueling someone else”. That message would also display if you request someone who is already in a duel.
Mechanics:
Once your duel is accepted you get a short countdown(like 5 seconds) then once that hits 0 you can start to damage the other player. The win condition would trigger when the players health from damage would cause them to have 0 health. A system similar to how some skill points work where once you defeat them they turn into an ally and start regenerating health. During the duel, where the initial accept was you could replace that with resign and it could show a timer. You would also place a circle on the ground showing where you can move while dueling. Leaving that area causes you to resign and a warning of when you are approaching the boundaries would also be necessary.
Making its a fair match:
This alone is the biggest problem. Do you use PvE or PvP skills during the duel? Do you scale both players to 80 or scale to the lowest players level? How do you scale gear? Honestly I don’t know what the best way to do this is.
Problems/UI:
There is no way to get make a dual system that is perfect in a PvE environment. There will be mobs that get in the way and you cant make a system to avoid mobs without people exploiting it. Another problem is how you deal with multiple duel requests at the same time. I would want the UI of this implementation to be minimal and not require any UI space when not active. There are two ways you can implement the UI, one that all requests are put below each other on your main screen, or one square that when you have one request it has options and if you have more then one when you click it opens up a window with everyone that has request for you. Personally i think the second option is the best.
I know this is kinda a long post but if you think that i missed something in my analysis let me know. Hopefully ANet implements a duel system soon!
(edited by TyGamer.3547)