can I get the Wet TP RanK? its the direct opposite of the Badass Rank. I want to show off how easily I kiss the floor in missions....

[i]*FACEPLANT*
"...hey look a dime! cool!"
*hits 'Return to Hospital' button and proceeds to do the 'Run of Shame' back to mission*[/I]

Go. Faceplant. Get defeated by Skuls.

Redlynne wrote:

Closest I'd want to get to that sort of thing in City of Titans would be something akin to an Ironman Challenge Rank.
Each piece of PvE content you complete has a flag that gets set for it. This is essentially a "one way ratchet" on that specific piece of content saying that you've Done It (already). A counter records how many pieces of PvE content you have completed without being defeated.
When you get defeated, this counter resets to zero, and all the content flags get reset as well ... so you can do them all over again starting from scratch.
Think of it as an optional Hardcore Meter, that shows how MUCH content you have completed successfully since your last defeat. The "one way ratchet" system is there to prevent farming of a single "optimal" mission to crank up this counter (repeatedly). That's because the intent is not to show how many times you can repeat a Farm Mission without being defeated ... it's to show how wide a variety of Missions you can complete without being defeated.
Relatively simple and straightforward, and also gives Players something to feel like they've got Bragging Rights to if they're "hardcore" survivalists. And yes, the idea is to have the counter for this one be visible to other Players, so as to demonstrate your aversion to Faceplanting.

Perhaps this idea could be taken one step further to provide a new level of challenge/reward that applies directly to your degree of Hardcore rank.

Maybe there could be a group of enemies that are linked directly to this Hardcore rating system. For example they could be like some kind of ancient order of ninja who only come to challenge people who they deem are worthy to fight. They start appearing (randomly) in missions once you've reached a certain Hardcore threshold. They would be relatively difficult to defeat, but to offset that extra difficultly they would be geared so that they have a fairly high percentage chance of dropping rare loot items. Basically this would work like Kheldians with their Quant/Void enemies but they would only come at you after you've become Hardcore.

P.S. To be clear the Hardcore person would not suffer from any particular weakness to the "ninjas" coming after him/her. They would simply be relatively harder to defeat. The big reason why people hated this idea for Khelds was that the Quants/Voids exploited the fact that Khelds had a built-in weakness to negative energy. My idea for this would not involve any "weaknesses" one way or the other.

Heck, database space is "cheap" so why not run with it?

The basic "hardcore" notion is that you increment a counter by +1 for each NEW Mission you complete, so as to prevent re-running "easy" Missions to rack up the counter. Name of the game is being able to take on ANY Mission, as opposed to merely being stupidly good at defeating just ONE Mission over and over again. The counter gets reset to zero if you are Defeated. So the counter functions as a Missions Completed Without Defeats and is publicly viewable.

So that's a big, broad, overview "generic" counter that points towards how hardcore your PC is when it comes to survival and resisting the urge to kiss pavement.

Which then begs the question ... could this sort of model be extended to any other activities than simple Mission Completion?

Well ... funny you should ask that ...

The thought occurs to me (I blame Lothic and Lutan entirely for this) that something similar could be done with respect to Foe Defeat counters.

In City of Heroes, the only information that got kept on Foe Defeats was "how many" regardless of conditions. An example of this sort of thing was the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Kill_Skuls_Badge]Kill Skuls Badge[/url] which required defeating 500 Skulls to earn, or the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Zookeeper_Badge]Zookeeper Badge[/url] (which originally required defeating [b][i]10,000 Rikti Monkeys[/i][/b] to earn.

But what if ... in City of Titans there was both an absolute numbers Defeated over a character's entire career ... AND ... a number of Foe NPCs Defeated by the character [i]since the last time that specific group or NPC Defeated the character[/i]? So rather than just requiring the defeat of 500 Skulls to get a badge, in addition there's a tracker showing how many Skulls you've Defeated [b]without being Defeated BY Skulls[/b]. This would mean that attributing the "final blow" to a specific source could then be used to key a reset of the "hardcore counter" used to determine how long your character has gone undefeated against a particular Foe group.

So if you go out and beat 490 Skulls, finally lose to one of the Skulls and kiss pavement, you'll still need to defeat another 10 Skulls to finally get the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Kill_Skuls_Badge]Kill Skuls Badge[/url] (to meet the requirement of 500 Skulls Defeated) ... but your "hardcore" counter against Skulls would read only 10 after getting the last 10, not 500.

Now, once you've got a "hardcore" record keeping system like that in place ... you can then use it to bring about the kinds of things that Lothic was talking about, but you can do it as a sort of "Reputation" thing instead where getting your "hardcore" counter up high enough would "unlock" certain additional possibilities and storylines. These "hardcore" possibilities could even be thought of (and designed as) [b]Bonus Content[/b] intended to challenge the Actually Hardcore Player(s), with a reward of either Bragging Rights (ie. a "permanent" record of your achievement) or even special rewards for successfully completing your long, hard slog. Essentially, it would be an opportunity to create content for the "so you THINK you're hardcore, do you?" crowd.

The forms of this extra content could even be a layering on sort of thing like Lothic was suggesting, where there are "extras" added to almost every Mission you take and everywhere you might go. Other possibilities inolve a sort of de-facto Reputation system ... where NPC factions that oppose the group(s) you have a high hardcore score on might be less willing to mess with you (reduced aggro radius?), while the allies of the groups you have a high hardcore score on are more than willing to try and gang up on you to try and (finally?) take you out. In other words, the higher your "hardcore" Defeat numbers go, the greater your reputation grows and the more notoriety you get in certain quarters. By selectively maintaining high hardcore counts with SOME factions but not with others, your character could be viewed as anywhere from "friendly" to being "at war" with a wide range of factions.

So this would be a way to kind of "backdoor" your way into having a Reputation System that involves "street cred" with all kinds of NPCs within City of Titans. And if you push your "street cred" high enough ... new opportunities open themselves up and become possible.

One of the first things that I can think of for how to use such a system would be for ... [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/world-pve-control-points-city-titans]Control Points[/url] in City of Titans. Once you get your "hardcore" fighter counter up high enough, you could go to a particular faction (who would be friends with you at that point) and initiate an assault on a Control Point held by one of that faction's enemies. Basic idea is that first you "prove your loyalty" to a group by taking out their enemies (without being defeated) for a long enough streak to build up a reputation for yourself ... and then you LEAD that group in an assault Mission against a Control Point held by that group's enemies so as to help them expand their influence. Extra bonus points for successfully capturing the Control Point (either personally or by an ally) without being defeated at all during the Mission.

This would be an example of using Hardcore Status as a springboard for promoting churn in a World PvEvP system that can rapidly turn into a bit of a free-for-all and would fit the prescription for a [b]Test Your Might![/b] sort of bonus content.

Thoughts?
Opinions?
Polite coughs of embarrassment?

"Well your not hardcore! Unless you play hardcore, Yes the legend, of the game, was way hardcore!"

And you could get badges for when you reach certain increments of Hardcore(5,10,25,50,etc)

I like this idea a lot! Especially how Lothic put it!