Don’t Remove Seasonal Monsters Every Season

改善/Improvements
, ,
1

提案/Suggestion

At the start of a new season, all monsters that were previously available but not part of the initial launch remain available for everyone who has already unlocked them. New players, or those who were previously unable to complete all urgent quests from previous seasons, should have an option at the start of the season quests to either play through the current season of quests or launch a truncated form of previous season quests, from some sort of archive. This would be available once for each old season containing urgent unlocks, shorter than the original season was, and potentially with no urgent quests that did not directly add new monsters to the field. This helps new players get caught up as soon as possible and lets them minimize the time they spend with their main quest not as the current season.

No hunter’s medal should be awarded for playing through the heavily truncated “season archive” quests. Players who have completed all content to date will never even see this system.

As an example, at the start of upcoming Season 3, there would be 3 archives for a player fresh out of the Pre-Season Story to choose from: “Season 0” which would feature Radobaan, Banbaro, and optionally Barioth (who will eventually return to the field), “Season 1” which would feature Tzi-Tzi Ya Ku, Odogaron, Pink Rathian, Azure Rathalos, and Black Diablos, and “Season 2” which would feature Basarios, Khezu, Coral Pukei Pukei, and Zinogre.

現状/Current Status

At the start of every season, all monsters that have been added since the game’s full release last September are “temporarily removed” from the field, until their urgent quests in the current season are completed. This has 3 major side effects:

Monsters that were part of the base game are treated differently from monsters that were added in updates.

Old seasonal monsters become unavailable until the player finishes the new seasonal story.

Thirdly, and most critically, every single normal monster added in a season must show up in every season afterwards or it faces removal. If Banbaro does not have an urgent quest in Season 3, Banbaro will not be present at all in Season 3. This treatment is exclusive to the seasonal monsters. If Diablos did not show up for a season in urgent quests (and I do believe he is not in Season 2) it will not suddenly be removed from the game until the next Season.

This will have 2 impacts on Seasonal Stories going forward:

They will get much, much, longer.

Monsters from the base release will eventually get crowded out of all representation from urgent quests.

2

I have to disagree. The reason why seasonal monsters are temporary unavailable is due to clutter, which will be an ever growing issue. A player has to have a reasonable chance of experiencing new content. If that means some monsters had to be hidden for an arbitrary amount of time, that’s just how the cookie crumble. We are just at season 2, and there would be no chance to get a decent amount of Khezu or basarios materials if we were to have full roster on the map from the word go

2 Likes
3

Completely disagree with you.

First of all, both numbered seasons have started with “kickoff” events, that give increased spawn rates to all new monsters. This is good design and should stay. I am simply calling out the restrictions on what else can spawn at a season’s start.

Secondly, “clutter” is an irrelevant argument at this stage in the game. This was an issue only before the Monster Tracker feature was added. To bring further attention to the necessity of this change though, I would like to point out that when seasonal monsters are removed from the field “temporarily”, they are also removed from the tracker.

4

Tracker is a fancy system for farming specific monsters. There’s no way I’m gonna stick basarios there for a month to “experience new content” fully. I will at most spend a day worth of tracks and go back to whatever I was working on. That’s not a way to experience new stuff.

And clutter is an issue. Before tracker was implemented, finding, say, jyurathodos in the wild was borderline impossible for instance, once in a blue moon experience. And that was before seasons even exist. I’d rather run around for a week or two with limited monster roster than pray upon a star that new stuff spawns

5

I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about. New monsters are not rare at all. They have highly elevated spawn rates for 2 week events at the start of a season.

Speaking for myself, I would rather have slightly slower spawns for new monsters while knowing they will always be accessible than the uncertainty that any of them could disappear for 3 months at a time or longer. Remember the outcry when this happened with Barioth? Niantic responded by bringing it back into HATs, which was a good decision on their part, but this sort of treatment should not be considered as “normal” in any capacity.

I don’t care how infrequently I get to fight Basarios, as long as I know it’s out there. But Basarios coming into the game shouldn’t mean another monster gets removed.

6

What I’m talking about is the current decision of keeping every monster but gating it behind urgent quest progression. This is fine. It’s better than counting on higher spawn chance at least

As for barioth, it’s a curious case cause this monster is nowhere near the level of a HaT capstone. It’s gear is all right at best, weapon is comparable to legiana, nothing to write home about as far as boss monsters goes

Back to the topic at hand, as long a monster is not just gone, locking it behind progress is fine. Moreover, with the current policy of increasing appearance of monsters after introductory season (flower raths, BD and pickle last season; water pukey and zappy boi currently) it feels like proper seasonal progression. So this is fine

7

I agree with most of what you just said. But think about this: 5 seasons from now, with the current implementation, either the season will last 20 chapters and feature only seasonal monsters (since “base” monsters don’t need urgents to remain unlocked) or Niantic will start cutting monsters out of the seasonal story to keep the length roughly appropriate. And every seasonal monster that gets cut from a season story is completely inaccessible for 3 months, because it was removed at the start of the season and it did not have an urgent fight to re-unlock it.

8

I can say a lot about niantic but I can’t say they are this deviljho. I’m going to assume, that, as you said 5 seasons from now, you will fight a monster that gates a bundle of previous season. For instance, if we are to assume that season 2 apex is mizutsune, you will have to fight mizu in order to unlock him, basarios and khezu. At least that’s what I would do if I were designing urgent quests

9

But that isn’t how it works, in the current implementation. Defeating Urgent Zinogre in season 2 does not bring back Radobaan and Banbaro spawns - defeating Urgent Radobaan and Urgent Banbaro does. This is in alignment with how the game has worked since the very start, where the first time you fight any new monster is through story, barring events spawning new or rare monsters. The problem is that the list of Urgent monsters that must be in every season is rapidly growing. That is the entire reason I am making this suggestion. If monsters did not disappear from the field at season start, the season story would not need to bloat so much, and it would not prevent players from hunting monsters introduced in previous seasons.