Wednesday, October 29

Zombie Battleground!

With the zombies gone i was thinking just how it was and what a shame it would be that this would be gone and lost to us now, at least untill they decide to re-use it for the next expansion.
And suddenly an idea sprang to mind: A Zombie Battleground!
Maybe you could see it as a PvP thing but with some tweaking i might actually be on an idea here.

Imagen people joining the Zombie Battleground, let's call it the Mall for now.... it wouldn't matter what the Alliance-Horde ratio was but the server tries to balance it a bit but if queues become too long it will be less and less worried about the ratio. What the system should do is get as many people of the same server in the Mall, it's more fun infecting people you know right?

So let's say we're going for a 25 man battleground. I'd say that 5 of those players are regular players and the other 20 hunt them down.
If you die by the hand of a zombie, you become one aswell (obviously) and if a zombie dies it becomes a regular player.
Zombies wouldn't need to eat to stay alive but if they eat they will get a stackable buff, i'm suggesting a minor speed and an increased ranged of their Retch (the gascloud "spit" which slows players down and infect them if they stand in it too long.
Hitting a player will still infect them as it did but this time the debuff lasts 5 minutes and each hit will take an extra 10seconds off that.
It is not cleansable except by two pools of Holy water and opposite ends of the battlefield, when you get cleansed you will get a debuff, not allowing cleansing for the next 3 minutes. (this should avoid people camping in the pool)

There are 3 rounds, a point for the zombies if they manage to zombiefy all the players and a point for the players if they manage to kill all the zombies.
After each round 5 other people start out as regular players, not everyone will get a shot at killing zombies straight from the start but that shouldn't be too much of a problem
So it's best out of 3. If we would like to keep this in a PvP setting it would be possible to award points, as it's impossible to either reward zombies or players so they get points per round and time played till the end (either winning or losing it) and they get points per zombie kill or player turning.
As players might be limited it's harder for zombies to turn someone so they get points for infecting players aswell and every hit they manage to put in, lowering the infection timer.

Now balance is a hard te determine thing, depends alot on the player(s)... but also the battlefield is important, you don't want too open spaces so zombies are getting AE'd from miles away. Then again a good chase might be good fun aswell, Zombies working together might pick up enough speed to get out of AE anyway.
We also want to avoid people "freeing" their zombie buddies who willingly let them get slaughtered to turn to the other side, this might cause to end rounds to fast aswell.
The least we can do to counter this is make zombies rez as zombies when they self-explode, after a period of time they will be able to self-rez on the very spot they died to make sure they keep somewhat together with the pack. The self-explode should get a longer CD because of this, perhaps 3mins or so.
This ability does make it possible for a single zombie to infect a large pack of players and turn the tide so to speak if the zombies are limited. Players can cleanse themselves in a pool but a second exploding zombie can end everything then... perhaps some CD tweaking on cleansing is needed then.

A different problem might be for melee classes, perhaps those should standard be zombies but they might miss playing the opposite side.
This made me wonder if we should shift the context of the Mall, perhaps make zombies near unkilleable and create more of a zombie chase where players just need to stay away from them as long as possible till the round timer ends.
We could also some tricks like some ammo crates with grenades around the battlefield which have alot more effect then the average AoE making it a must to get this weapon. Or Magic missile launchers with a CD and limited ammo... Perhaps barring yourself in is good for the suspense aswell trying to delay the zombies from reaching you while you try to take a shot at them. Killing zombies while barred in (which is also trapped once the zombies have hit the door often enough to break it) should be alot harder then when out in the open, zombies stacking Retch at such a point might be enough.

Ow soo many possibilities! Quite some tweaking required i'll bet but wouldn't it be the ideal partygame to play with your guild?
Now to just get my idea to Blizz someway.

2 comments:

Wow Panda said...

Great ideas! but a small modification. When players die they turn into zombies, and when zombies die they kick out of game. Make more players but the zombies should be tougher. And see if players terminates zombies or zombies infested all players.

Yep, so many ideas :-)

Anonymous said...

I like this idea. I got a number of zombies pissed at me during the event because I loved killing them and as a mage, I was good at it. Some of my guildies were infecting NPCs and building an army in the basement of the Redridge inn when I showed up and slaughtered the lot of them in a blaze of fire.

My suggestion would be something like Andorhal where equal teams of zombies and players descend on the town, attempting to infect and protect the NPC inhabitants.

I'd love to be able to fight more zombies.