I don’t see why you’d need to make a bug report for something that might not be a feature as well. I’m sure EHG is watching feedback from both channels/forums.
My two cents is that, as things stand, Gaze of Orybos stacks and direct corruption gain should be treated as separate (but obviously closely-related) issues because players have control over one but not the other. The lack of Gaze of Orybos stacks for qualifying party members feels like a glaring miss to me, to the point where it understandably feels like a bug, and maybe it is. Reason being imo is there’s no drawback to getting those stacks (at least in non-HC), beyond taking a dive to Shade of Orybos to get rid of the stacks if you don’t want to cash them in. This would be a little clunky ofc, and admittedly HC would need different treatment, but would at least allow party members to manage their GoO stacks in SC.
As I’m writing this, though, it’s occurring to me that a cleaner option might be to add a popup panel for party members to choose whether they want to join the monolith boss fight, along with a little checkbox option that lets them decide whether or not they want to gain the Gaze stack. Idk, just an off-the-cuff thought. Might be too intrusive to add a popup for Mono boss fights, though they would be quite similar to the dungeon boss fight popups, and I think a little warning that you’re going into a boss fight without relying on the party leader to communicate it might not be a bad thing.
The timeline corruption gaining for party members - which I think shouldn’t be conflated with the GoO stacks because a solution (without a popup) would be a little more problematic to implement because you have to think of all the use case scenarios. The problematic scenarios are those where party members might not want that corruption gain. For example, maybe someone is being hard carried by a friend in 500 corruption monoliths but can only handle 100’s when they are alone. Extreme example perhaps but even if the gap was narrower, the issue would remain. You also have to think of the new player experience, and try to make it so they can’t accidentally “brick” their timeline(s) by playing with friends without realizing what they’re doing. Yes, you can dump / walk back your corruption level but that is a time-consuming and potentially frustrating exercise if you cannot manage the echoes solo.
So again I think part of the goal here would need to be to make the corruption gain manageable for all players. Again, the point of control for the player could be a popup before the boss encounter. Could either have a second check box for “corruption gain” separate from the Gaze stacks or, honestly, just combine them both into one checkbox.
There are of course issues with adding a popup box before boss encounters like people forgetting to click it every time if they don’t want the default setting, the impact it would have on the flow of the gameplay loop, and dev time investment. I don’t think any of these issues would be insurmountable though, as there is precedence with the pop-up panels for the “ready check” for boss fights in dungeons, so a) we have the technology! and b) a popup for a monolith boss fight wouldn’t be that jarring and would even add a bit of consistency to the UI/UX across systems.
However, as I write this and the ideas keep churning in my noggin, It’s occurring to me now that perhaps the best place for the checkbox(es) might be in Gameplay Options and you might only need the one checkbox since this solution skirts the problems outlined above. One checkbox labelled something like “Enable Corruption Gains as Guest in Parties” for both the GoO stacks and the direct corruption gain would probably do it, but the could be separated out to two checkboxes if there’s some reason to keep them separate that I’m not thinking of. This would solve the problem of player control over timeline corruption while requiring minimal dev effort; it wouldn’t effect the gameplay loop at all so it’s not at all intrusive; and it could be set to Disabled by default so that new players don’t accidentally bork their timelines. It also has the added benefit of being fire and forget - once you set the gameplay option it’s taken care of and you don’t have to deal with it any more.
Would be great to hear from EHG to find out if one or both of these issues are bugs or working as intended or a work in progress. <3