Task/Strike Forces: Daily Doubles & Hot Zones

This is an idea I'm asking the devs to ste...err borrow from Everquest 2.

In that game, instances (best equivalent here are Task/Strike forces) have two bonuses intended to get people doing as much of a variety of content as possible.

The first is daily doubles. In EQ2, we have a thing called void shards, which is effectively merits here. Every day there's a zone that gives double shards. The zones rotate on a set schedule. Now while I think double might be too much for City of Heroes (although a Dr. Q at over 200 might finally get me to run it! ), perhaps a bonus merits of about 1.25x to 1.5x.

The second is hot zones. There rare loot drops with greater frequency. They don't tell us how much. Applied here, what if, high level (cap 50) TFs had an extra chance to drop either Pool C/Ds from bosses OR an enhanced chance of purples. NOT BOTH.


Well that's the idea. Stealing a fun feature from other games. It does work, as you'll always see people posting for the daily double or hot zone in EQ2. I'm thinking that while some people won't run really tedious TFs for any amount of merits, it could make for a nice feature.

OK guys, it's your turn to mock this idea and question my sanity for proposing it.

I'm ok with the idea but only If villains can get a full double merits from their hot SF or maybe even triple.

Because in a game world crime should pay.

Sounds good to me. Would also encourage people to run less-done TF's like SSTF, etc.

Zolgar would agree. It could be fun.

Taskforces have the irritating ability to send the hero all over the map. A special happy zone day would not be of any use for this feature. All it would do is concentrate the population to do Radio missions in the hotzone.

And I fear that would not be a good idea having experienced a zone meltdown in Croatoa when the first banner raid was going on at Union Server.

Since Architect I suspect fewer people are doing task forces, which makes recruiting difficult. For the player who especially likes to experience this part of the game, it can be very frustrating when you have the time but can't find enough players to begin. I think an experiment of a "double merit" weekend would be a great opportunity to see if there is a demand by players who like TF/SF's to schedule some time, and to introduce players who have not yet experienced this aspect of the game to try it. Since the merit system and the tickets in Architect were introduced, I see no appreciable drop in the prices of the most sought after recipes and enhancements, and this can be researched easily by data mining if the TF/SF rates are in fact falling and prices are still stable. I wonder if others who read this would support this experiment. I've heard some grumbling by some about the TF/SF situation, especially on less populated servers, and I wonder if others feel the same way I do. I see in this thread support for something of this nature.

This is a cool idea to breath life into the old zones and I hope to see it implemented one day.

I like this idea. /signed