Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 3.7K All Categories
- 3K The Midnight Age
- 757 Announce posts
- 125 Newbies
- 6 Class Guides
- 804 Harpy's Head Tavern
- 57 Echo Canyon
- 310 Self-Affirmations
- 163 Town Crier
- 135 The Exchange
- 167 Sparring Grounds
- Combat Guides
- 30 Combat Logs
- 188 Idea Box
- 9 Classleads
- 578 Roleplay Logs
- 107 Aetolia Development
- 5 The Void
- 744 Miscellaneous
- 9 Announcements
- 417 OOC Chat
- 217 Tech Talk
- 47 Scripts
Looking for more active discussion? Join our Discord at https://discord.gg/x2s7fY6
Greater Lessers - The End of The Missing Numbers
I think there has been some productive, if fraught, conversation in the pet peeves thread, but that's not the best place for a discussion about improvements. In the interest of having that conversation, I'm just going to start this thread with a few good criteria, some criticisms, and, finally, my ideas. First, a few, hopefully uncontroversial, criteria for a good event:
In addition to this new mode, I also suggest a new drop for eld at team events: ylem motes. When you slay an eld at a Lesser, Greater, or Major, you have a chance of receiving a ylem mote. These motes may be traded in at the pylon for a ylem shard, or used on another eld, slaying them for no experience, but causing them to drop one extra guaranteed mist. These would be very valuable to crafters and people without Shackle. A shop or other uses would also be great. The 3 players on the hill should also be able to collect a handful of ylem motes as a Greater collapses.
- Accessibility is the goal of any team event. No one should feel like they cannot participate because they are bad at combat, or that unskilled participation drags down the rest of the team.
- Numbers should improve your chances of success, but not overwhelmingly so. No one should feel like they have to participate or they are letting their side down. Also, the strategy of the participants and the execution of that strategy should be the greatest factor of success.
- Team events should be exciting and interesting. A stale meta will get old fast and it will be incumbent on the playerbase to keep engagement up against boredom.
- Team events should have clear winners and losers, while winning and losing should not be the only fun to be had. Something of value should be gained, possibly even for the losers.
- All current events are very accessible. No one should ever feel like they cannot participate because they will just be a detriment to their team. The only point against accessibility is that there is a requirement to have some sort of leader calling targets. No leaders? No contest. No fun. A-
- Numbers improve your chances of success, but Lessers do little to nothing to get smaller groups any sort of chance to catch up. It is, ultimately, up to the participants to try to eke out a win. The various modes of Majors do some things to help with this, but steamrolling with a large group is still the dominant strategy when numbers. Orrery benefits slightly from having some non-group strategies ("keep away" with the orb), but those are not very fun to play against and there's nothing to do with a small group if the large group has the orb. D-
- Majors handle this well enough. Two contentions of four or five different types is pretty good. Lessers and Orrery are very samey. The different circumstances and class mixes create some novel encounters, but they are mostly bash fests. B-
- Gateway Majors and Orrery do very well with having clear winners and losers, but Lessers and other Majors do not. All events value the losers only to the extent that people can earn a lot of experience. However, if you don't get kills, you don't get anything. C-
- Found similarly to Lessers, they show up as a node in a room on LEYLINES, and spawn randomly alongside minors.
- Unlike Lessers, their room is not a room within that area. Instead, they exist in a separate, instanced area (the "hill"). To get to the hill, you will use a new refining ability, Attuning. Simply REFINING ATTUNE [SPIRIT|SHADOW] anywhere from the Greater's area to begin an uninterruptible 5-second channel to teleport to the hill instance. Only 3 players per tether are allowed on the hill at a time. Neutral players can choose which tether to attune as. As long as only one tether has players on the hill, the Greater is being extracted by that tether. Otherwise, it is contested, does not progress, and may end before being completely extracted, similar to Majors running out.
- This splits participation into two different modes: 3 players on the hill, and everyone else. Everyone not on the hill will be able to help their tether by slaying eld that spawn in the area, similar to Onslaught. Slaying eld while your tether is also controlling the hill speeds up extraction. Conversely, slaying eld while not extracting denies those eld to the extractors. Overall, your tether will need to be in control of the hill the entire time or slay a decent number of eld to fully extract a Greater.
- These are not totally separate modes of play, however. The people on the hill may take channeled and directed actions to help those at the Greater, a few examples will be provided below. Ultimately, the goal will be to give the advantage to the tether controlling the hill while not improving the ability to control the hill too much. These actions will only be available while the hill is uncontested. There also exists the slight ability for those in the Greater area to protect the hill, in the form of the Attune time. This should be a minor factor, however.
- channel to increase the eld spawn rate;
- channel to increase the Attune time to 10 seconds;
- channel to create a 3 second movement delay across the entire area, for all players;
- channel to give all allies in the Greater area perfect out-of-room stealth;
- channel to give a returning-like defense to all allies;
- action to permanently "shrink" the hill, reducing the max number of players per tether to 2;
- action to reverse this "shrink", only usable by the tether that did not shrink the hill in the first place;
- action to revive an ally in the Greater area, as long as their corpse is still on the ground;
- action to swap places with an ally in the Greater area (they get pulled into the hill and you're out in the Greater);
- action to give all enemies in the Greater area hidden shyness (untethered are unaffected).
In addition to this new mode, I also suggest a new drop for eld at team events: ylem motes. When you slay an eld at a Lesser, Greater, or Major, you have a chance of receiving a ylem mote. These motes may be traded in at the pylon for a ylem shard, or used on another eld, slaying them for no experience, but causing them to drop one extra guaranteed mist. These would be very valuable to crafters and people without Shackle. A shop or other uses would also be great. The 3 players on the hill should also be able to collect a handful of ylem motes as a Greater collapses.
Didi has expressed her esteem of you for the following reason: Smart organized leader.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
8
Comments
I do agree that we need to find a way to 'refresh' the notion of Lessers or ylem conflict. When @Tiur mentioned the notion of shake-ups, I was excited for ylem conflict to finally get a brush up after 5? 6? years of very little in the way of modification - only to find that it was just a plan to add a new boss to the rotation when Gateways is the contention type. My personal belief is that a new game type might not be the answer - it didn't pan out well for Orrery. I think the actual gameplay of Lessers is fine, it's just that it has gotten too stale and there's no Great Equalizer to make smaller teams feel like they can tackle bigger teams or to force smaller team engagements so a weak time zone isn't an automatic surrender.
I remember also considering this for Hunting Grounds; for instance, making a 'rogue's gallery' of different items that Keroc and Raz can cycle in and out of the available items you get via HG offerings. Make a bunch of new ones that could shake things up via area or room effects, etc.
I'm pretty curious, do you happen to remember any affixes you had in mind? I did a search for threads like this but only found Moirean's from 7 years ago.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
1. No more than 1 player per tether may be present in the same room
2. All rooms are indoors/outdoors
3. All rooms are closer to x plane for y effect
4. Players share the highest stats in the room (i.e if someone has the most STR, every has that STR)
5. X category of afflictions has Y sideffect
6. Everyone has Soul Poison constantly!
Stuff like that. Obviously, some of these are ridiculous but they're all for the sake of example. But I think you get the picture - area-wide effects or in room effects that drastically change how an engagement is approached.
I might recommend having some bonuses towards getting newer people into the actual fight, nothing gamebreaking but maybe bonus rewards or something if the people in the "hill" haven't been in a recent one. That way we avoid the thought process of only sending the same groups in every time, without forcing it. Idk, just a thought - not everyone's going to be interested in doing the small group combat itself but it'd be neat to have a gameplay incentive for it to support a community incentive.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
Something that was pointed out to me when discussing an idea I had, there are going to be people (let's call them Scrooge McDuck) that spit on people who are part of an A-Team that decide for a day they don't want to fight. Let's say Enorian has their designated A-team and then all of a sudden one of them decided they didn't want to fight in a King of the Hill because they're having a bad day IRL/IG, there's an RP session going on, or maybe they aren't feeling good IRL, or god forbid they're in bed and get pinged at 2 in the morning and don't respond.... Scrooge McDuck is going to spout on about how that individual is a piece of shit and is doing a disservice to their city and that despite whatever is going on, they need to fight.
Sure, you could have a B-team, a C-team, and so on, but now you're essentially telling ANYONE who isn't on the A-team that they just aren't good enough to be their on demand fighter. You're vilifying them for not being good enough. People will dismiss them in a sense of 'Aaah. You're not important. You're on the C-team. Sit down, shut up, and just look pretty.' This will happen by Scrooge McDuck players.
Furthermore, this would increase burnout real quick. Because if you're part of the A-team, you're going to have a certain expectation of you to ALWAYS be ready, ALWAYS be willing, ALWAYS be available, and ALWAYS be at every fight. The one time you're not, you become a target for Scrooge McDuck. While the playerbase can usually handle Scrooge McDuck, it does not mean it doesn't affect the mentality of the team member. While the playerbase will outcry and say "We don't have Scrooge McDuck", we do. Those people know who they are, or maybe they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter but with -any- idea you have to account for Scrooge McDuck.
Overall, your idea is a solid A+ that does effectively cover a lot of the bases. 8/10 would agree and would be willing to spitball modifications to your idea with you.
Ultimately foci problems revolve around the following problems:
- Scrooge McDuck
- player retention
- player importance/value
- burnout
- removing the idea that it's a job (because fighting in a Hill every 4 hours or so would become similar to a job)
- meaningful rewards
That said, I have my own ideas that I'm willing to speak to @Keroc or @Tiur directly on.
A loose example of sub-objectives i'd enjoy is something like at a Major, there's side areas of contention that close/open periodically. When they open, you can either have random pools of people that get sucked into them based on tether/team, or the team can designate who gets chosen by voting/marking them somehow. This opens up small skirmishes like 1v1's, 2v2's and 3v3's that have impact on the larger objective happening outside, such as (in the case of 3 lessers) a portion of each tick gets stolen for the winning team, or there's a chance that elds/minors you kill/extract(ylem field and onslaught) go to the winners on the sub objective.
I think the sub-rewards should be things that deny or hinder the main reward in some capacity, or even claiming some rewards for yourself/team but not necessarily to give the winners more buffs/advantages. This way if 5 people show up to a major with 13 people, they can do things to earn some rewards for themselves and deny the enemy a full victory.
Players tend to feel helpless when what they do doesn't feel that impactful, and the larger teamfights tend to get, the less impactful one feels as an individual. At the same time, I do not believe 1 player should be able to run circles around several times their number with hardly any effort.
It's just a thought, so take it with a grain of salt, but not everyone who gets into fighting is going to have or want to invest as hard as some of the people who simply fight regularly.
I'm of the opinion that newbies and less experienced people that don't do 1v1's or know how to behave in small skirmishes stick with the big group outside and roll with them if you're worried about unfair matchups. That's sort of the point - to incentivize people to improve themselves to be beneficial in a different way. It's not like losing the sub-objective means losing the entire game. It ultimately should not matter a whole lot if Benedicto and Illidan beat Vjeiric and Seirsha if the latter's outside team is winning. This is why people should be practicing and putting in the work if they care to improve and test their skills in battle. But I don't think it's fair to spend all your time doing anything but practicing combat, and then complaining about potentially having to fight people that are more practiced than you.
I also thought about doing something non-combat related, because there will always be people that complain about some level of disparity between one person or the other. I don't know how a puzzle system would function without people just eventually automating/optimizing it, and then when it comes down to who has triggers vs who does not we'll end up having this sort of conversation again.
Time
A once in a week event which lasts roughly an hour, starts at 0:00 gmt Saturday. But 6 hours later the next week, so it covers all times from 0:00 saturday to 0:00 sunday over 2 months time IRL.
Area
Any major area. The area being unknown keeps things more fresh.
Mechanics
Two-dimensional competition. The contention areas have a couple of randomly spawned Ylem Crystals through which both tethers can send a few players to a Ylem Maze, in which there awaits a quest/objective that is reflecting what's happening in Sapience. Objectives can be killing x amounts of mobs, landing the killing blow on a boss, retrieving items around and building an artifact with it, straight up team deatchmatch with collapse mode on, holding an artifact, defending an item/spot, a single long extraction, multiple short extractions. Anything. And in order for a tether to win the event, you need to win on both dimensions, else we call it a tie. (lol)
My reasoning as to why this is a good thing is that, it still retains importance of having numbers participation/coordination as a 50% requirement for success in Sapience. But it still gives an avenue to the others that'd like to participate and prove themselves despite the overwhelming odds in the maze.
Wishlist
Small traps/objects, not necessarily very impactful ones that can be activated by players randomly spawned through the area. For example, a barrel of tar that can be destroyed which will slow down anyone who would enter that specific room for 1s for the next minutes etc. Hidden levers that can be used to travel to a different room and stuff.
That out of the way, I just wanted to throw out my idea for the treasure hunt mode, because I think that addresses a few points that have come up, including sub-objectives and small groups. Continuing to play with the idea of tapping Lessers in new ways, I imagine this new mode would be accessible with a forged (with ylem shards) or purchased (from ylem engineers) item used at a Lesser location. When you place the Ylem Inverter at the Lesser node and fire it, you shatter the node into a dozen pieces, thus creating a Shattered Lesser:
- Sort of a mix between Ylemfield and Gateway contentions. When shattered, a large number of mini-gateways spawn throughout the entire area.
- Each of these mini-gateways can be very quickly stabilized, opened, and entered with slightly different tether restrictions. Each mini-gateway is accessible to both tethers, lacking the coherence of its non-mini cousin to be locked to only one tether, but entrance is tether-balanced. If you have X Spirit players within, you may not enter if there are already X+1 Shadow players, and vice versa (so, 1v1, 1v2, 2v2, 2v3 are all fine; 1v3 or 2v4 will not happen unless someone dies). Trying to enter a mini-gateway instance that is overpopulated by your tether will damage and stun you, so it is best avoided. It does not auto correct as people die or leave, so you may have 5 Spirit left over after a battle and they wander that instance happily.
- Within each mini-gateway, a small instance is spawned, containing a copy of a 2-room distance from the real-world entrance. Within each mini-gateway are ylem deposits, much like the ones in ylem mines. They can be mined, and usually just drop some chunk of crystalized ylem or spawn some eld. This should be a fairly simple PVE encounter with a little participation bonus (gold from the chunks of ylem).
- Each mini-gateway also contains a minor-like node which can be tapped, for all the usual trivial rewards. Doing so will precipitate the collapse of that mini-gateway instance, booting the inhabitant(s) out into the real world once more. Being booted in this way or abandoning the gateway intentionally will grant a 5-second phase-like state (between this mini-gateway and the prime material plane), giving you a chance to escape with your life if someone is outside with bad intentions.
- Each mini-gateway has a chance of a special node being spawned instead. These special nodes take a couple minutes to extract fully, and spawn mini-boss eld with new drops. Much like the boss eld, these drops could be used for temporary buffs of various sorts, usually affecting everyone in a given room or applying some effect to a given room. There are no shortage of options for what these drops could do, and the drops' effects has no real effect on the event, so I will leave that to your imagination.
- Special instances may be accessible by up to 2 or 3 of a single tether, without there being any of the other tether present (i.e. 2v0, 3v1, 3v4 and 4v4 are all valid; 4v6 or 3v5 are not). The mini-boss eld should be a challenge for a single person, and someone who has found one should ask for help over web.
- Once a mini-gateway instance collapses, a new one is spawned somewhere else in the area. Each collapsed instance advances the Shattered Lesser towards its conclusion, until all the essence has been drained from it. Special instances are worth as much as 2 or 3 normal instances, making them the hottest contests.
I think this is a little better at including everyone than Greater Lessers, since there's no "hill" vs "field" players. Instead, it's more "trenches" and "field" players, and you might be one or the other depending on what you want to do or need to do. The players in the trenches are actually doing the work, while the players in the field are trying to support their friends. This makes it a little less accessible,because it could not be very fun to be doing this PVE exercise for your team, only to be invaded by a whale from the other team and killed before someone can come help. Extra limits on entrance (channel times, warnings inside the instance) may help, but risk pushing all conflict to the field, instead of the tether-balanced trenches.Anyway, there's my treasure hunt idea.
EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think it should be possible to lock an instance to all intruders. Doing so would cost a lot of residual energy and be time consuming, but this would let the risk-averse hardcore PVE players steal a few nodes in hopes of finding the special node and taking it down themselves.
EDIT: I'm just going to throw in a few ideas for how to freshen up Lessers with less effort than affixes or new modes:
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
My one concern is that the changes here touch on Majors... which happen once a day. Do you have any opinions on making impactful changes to the much more common Lessers?
I have my concerns that it may not be popular though, so I imagine it'll be relatively basic. I don't see team duels too often even with it incentivized with milestone rewards, but you're more then welcome to encourage me otherwise.
The current problem around the foci environment is a multifaceted problem that needs assistance from many angles. You need players to feel like foci/ylem actually are worth something, need to give more than just combatants something to do -while- making them feel like their time to help is valued, you also need to give purpose to people who do want to fight but don't because foci/ylem is a pointless endeavor, you need to avoid the Scrooge McDuck players from being well.... Scrooge McDuck (see my previous post on who Scrooge McDuck is), and you need to make it so foci doesn't feel like a job. Foci/ylem breaks down to one thing: It is a side quest, at this point, that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things whether or not it is completed. Minors, lessers, majors, Fracture, elds, mines, even attuned offerings are all pointless because cities have. Bloodloch alone has 42M ylem, but only uses 42K daily... which leaves it in a state where if no one from BL did anything, it would survive for almost 3 years before ylem became an issue.
Given that this is just one city, I am pretty sure (and I would be willing to bet my retirement value on this), that the other cities are in the very same boat. This leads to the problem of foci generation and foci fights being absurdly pointless. This ultimately makes general players feel like their time could be valued elsewhere (RP, bashing, fishing, etc) because there's no point. People have straight up stated that they don't fight in foci or do anything with ylem because it is pointless and considering the above numbers, I would absolutely agree with them.
Now, in order to make the players feel like their time is valued, that their help is valued, and that ylem/foci actually -means- something, I propose the following.
Given that Delve has an extensive knowledge of the way ylem works, more so than the cities, let's focus on that. Every 5 IG years (250 RL days), Delve representatives come out of research labs and effectively reset the pylons. Ylem has been deduced as being deadly, dangerous to pylons, and overall dangerous to Sapience if it's built up enough (quite frankly, it makes me think of the Lifestream from FF VII, but that's me). As it stands, cities already require a sort of daily maintenance for the pylons to disperse the buildup inside it under threat of this building causing massive damage; mines will kill people if they sit in them for too long under the guise of ylem sickness. There is no reason why such massive buildups of ylem should not be dangerous.
During part 1 of these resets, the Delve team would disperse ALL but 100K of ylem inside the pylon to last the city a few days before they reach 0 and lose their buffs. No more tens of millions of ylem just sitting idly there. This would essentially put more value back onto the players because the cities now need ylem to continue using the buffs that the players love to use. Foci battles become more important, minors become more important, Fracture runs, mine completion, and even attuned offerings become more important.
During part 2 of these resets, players would be rewarded with gold and ylem tokens for their level of investment during that 5 IG year period. These ylem tokens would be able to be turned into your local pylon merchant for various wares:
- 1 RL month long amulets (all colors available)
- ylem shards
- rotating minipets
- rotating style scrolls
- other prizes that could be up to admin discretion
While the above changes won't affect the whole numbers problem, it could affect the numbers problem too. Instead of getting barely any players (for either side), you might have a majority of your city going to every fight or so. You might even have people who otherwise want to fight in foci battles but haven't because it was pointless, might suddenly pick up fighting and foci combat. It might even encourage people who would rather do minors, elds, and whatnot to give them an extra incentive to participate.
Counterpoints:
But Rhyot, don't cities already give rewards for ylem involvement? They sure do!! But having extra incentives to increase participation never hurts. I mean, look at what Tiur did for Orrery with introducing comms as part of the incentivized wins.
Hey, but there's already so many ways to get gold? Yeah, you're right there are. However, you cannot avoid a good gold income, even if it's a once/year thing. Everyone is always needing gold for various things, and while there are no decent gold sinks... that's fine. Look at this as a sort of tax return IG. You invest into your city's power, you get paid for it at the end of the year. This is a win/win for everyone.
Scrooge McDucks, this won't stop them will it? Not at all. But that's the best part of this too. Is if you see a player acting like a Scrooge McDuck, you can Scrooge McBan their pathetic sorry rears and let them go without a city. We, as a playerbase, community, and a game... don't need those pessismistic jerk players.
This really won't stop numbers though, will it? Again, not really. The numbers game just has to be an accepted risk to the grand scheme of things. You can't really stop it, all you can do is incentivize and hope to get more people involved. Sure, it's gonna suck no matter which side you're on to be roflstomped by superior numbers, but that's been the case for about 7+ years that I've been playing Aetolia. It'll never change, but maybe it will? Idk.
Either way, I think this would cover a lot of contention, animosity, and reasons for why people don't participate and get more people involved in so many various ways.
I actually really like the inclusion of amulets as a reward for participation. I'd say rewards should definitely move towards incentivizing individual participation, rather than team rewards. This gives players more opportunity to walk away with a good experience, even if their team loses. So, for example, here's an altered treasure hunt idea:
I agree with this with the caveat that limited participation systems could maybe fit well at main tether conflicts, but they should be side objectives. The Lesser/Major/Orrery itself should still be fought on the grounds of one full force versus another. No one should be excluded from an activity because it's at capacity, where there was no capacity before. But maybe give the pk bots some 1v1 duel area for a stalagmite or a minor node.
EDIT: I misread what Keroc had said. I guess a whole new foci type that spawns on its own timers, apart from Lessers/Majors, could be fine for a team duel type thing. I'd still appreciate Lessers seeing some love and getting something new, though. They seem like the most static event in the game, which is amazing given how well attended they are.
Really, the problem of low Lesser participation, and some of the stress/guilt over participation, may boil down to poor rewards. If you have a Lesser that is uncontested, you have up to 10 people.... waiting, basically. There's some bashing, but no one has fun at a Lesser for a Lesser's sake, except maybe the first few times. There's little personal incentive to show up and, as Rhyot has noted, there's barely an organizational incentive left, either.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
I thought about once per season, but that's every 12.5 days RL. I do not want to be sitting there devoting 50% of my online time to gathering ylem just to keep my buffs.
I thought about once every other season, but that's once a month. Again, I do not want to devote 50% of my time to gathering ylem just to keep my buffs.
While you could argue a reset every 6 months, I honestly feel the best course of action is a once/year reset. This gives people a bunch of time to gather ylem for their yearly rewards from Delve but also stops people from feeling like it's a job. This is a game, we're supposed to have fun.
I do see your point though Church, but I was unable to determine a proper timeframe of a reset beyond once/year before it felt like a job (at least from my perspective).
That's where the reset would be a little superior to instituting a cap, because the reset makes the time input feel valued. Whereas a cap just says "You can't have more than this 500K essence."
I'm not saying it wouldn't work, I'm just not sure how effective it would be in the long run.
It would put a renewed emphasis on mines and linked shrines. Which I like.
It could be worth experimenting with. Keroc seems to be onboard with doing something. So that's good.
Speaking of buffs, what are the buffs? Are any of them combat related? That would be a bad negative feedback loop if there were. I think it's just exp and gold drops from mobs though? Anyways. Good ideas.
Love the change.
Idea #1:
Allow Research Ministry to be able to create some sort of item, call it a 'ylem siphon' for now, maybe on a cooldown of one per day or something, that can be placed on a lesser foci that is being extracted that extracts drastically more ylem via siphoning it from the ylem reserves of one of(at random) or both opposing tether's cities. Leyline has to cease being extracted, then some amount of time needs to be spent uprooting it from the leyline, at which point it becomes discarded and destroyed. This allows us to 'risk' spending more ylem(creating the siphon) to steal ylem from opposing factions, or we create the thing and it doesn't gain as much as it spent and gets discarded.
More broadly with this idea, give us more things to spend ylem on so we don't have 3 IRL year supplies.
Idea #2:
A flexible buff/malus system to deter numbers disparity. If one tether has 10 people in the affected foci aura area, and the other tether has 5, either give the 5 significant buffs, or give the 10 significant maluses. Allow this to dynamically change based on numbers.
Idea #3(The Big, More Complicated One):
Give us more reason to want to participate, and want to win, than just keeping what we have and are used to. Instead of doing yet-another-open-pvp area like Shattered Vortex or Iernian Fracture, create an area that can only be reached via a portal once per in game year for a limited amount of time. Keep a scoreboard or rankings of yearly participants in lesser and/or minor foci areas while they're active, and also perhaps another scoreboard or rankings for total ylem gathered in a year, and allow the top 20 or more or less to have access to the portal to reach the area.
Now, as for what's in this area, ideally, and I know this might be a stretch because of what has been mentioned before, I think it would be best since the competition took place before entering the area, to allow each person to have their own instance of it. This way you could put a timer on how long you're allowed in it as well. The area could be reasonably large, include lots of bashing targets that are level appropriate, and lots of different NPC quests and/or vendors. Perhaps the vendors could have commodities for sale. Just a large swath of 'rewards' for every type of player. Maybe rotating minipets for sale, maybe you could dig up one or two relic pieces via a treasure hunting mechanic in the area, etc etc. Maybe you could even do some quest to allow you to spawn that one last missing colossal eld you can never seem to get via RNG normally, with the drawback of having to solo it within your instance's timeframe.
Give everyone a really, really good reason to want to participate and win, beyond what we've been given the last 10 years of this system. Give us things to spend ylem on so it's not stockpiled forever. Incentivize. Take some chances. Do something really interesting that you can be proud of and shout to the heavens to get people to come back and see.
Anyways, those are my ideas.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245