Suggestion: Daily Alerts

[Spoon_Fed]

Concept:

 

Three alerts that activate for 24 hours 1 week that all offer some form of blueprint or artifact.  However, you can only choose one alert to run.  After you run the alert, the other two are missed.  This would implement some options for casual players to progress and also force some potentially tough choices.  Another possibility is to not announce which alert provides what reward in order to encourage the player base to discover and communicate what the alerts are.

 

 

Like everyone else, I love playing those fun alerts with the ?.  However, like many players, I have a job and a family and even though I follow the twitter feed, sometimes I just can't log on to get that artifact or blueprint I want.  Other times, when I have 3 hours to play, there are plenty of cash alerts but no ?s.  I can see myself trying to decide which reward I'd rather have or wait to see pop up some other time.

 

(Edit: Changed from daily to weekly due to some of the reasonable comments below.)

Edited May 1, 2013 by Spoon_Fed

[Drakofangs]

Nope ಠ_ಠ

[Waidas]

Yea, this would pretty much break the game... Unless the three missions all gave useless artifacts, but then again that would not solve the problem in the slightest. If you could get a rare item every day those items woudln't be rare anymore, because you could end up with way more than10 potatoes a month... considering that 10 potatoes is 200 platinum, so a little bit more than 10 bucks, for all of the players who can log in once a day, it makes a metric f***ton of money that DE isn't making, that translates into less resources for the game, and a worse game, and in the end updates would be so few and potatoes so many that you wouldn't even have a use for potatoes anymore.

TL;DR If you want a good game, let DE make money, and keep rare items rare and even pull of "Glaive accidents" on us. If you want rare stuff for free than soon there will be no game to use your rare stuff in.

 

About the alert thing: yes it is imbalanced especially for casual players with work/school. You can't change it to be more balanced towards these demographics. The solution is to throw the alert system away, and make something new, that gives a more balanced progression for both hardcore and casual players.

[Korevas]

I like the idea of unbinding it from the randomness we have right now, but one free artifact every 24h is drastically too much. Maybe a token system as an addition to what we have right now, like the first ? mission you do every 24h will give you a token, 20 of them can be traded for an artifact or a blueprint from a "token vendor" or something like that.

 

Even with a rather low playtime of 1-2h a day that would probably net you one potato a month, if you are using it for nothing else, which seems about right to me personally.

Edited April 30, 2013 by Korevas

[Waidas]

I like the idea of unbinding it from the randomness we have right now, but one free artifact every 24h is drastically too much. Maybe a token system as an addition to what we have right now, like the first ? mission you do every 24h will give you a token, 20 of them can be traded for an artifact or a blueprint from a "token vendor" or something like that.

 

Even with a rather low playtime of 1-2h a day that would probably net you one potato a month, if you are using it for nothing else, which seems about right to me personally.

This is a nice idea, but I think that what it would end up doing is encouraging a 10 minutes log in every day, unless you have to farm for a blueprint, credits, or materials. And since you would pretty much get very little more than you usally get right now in terms of stuff to build, it would work badly.

I would like an idea that makes you play the game more in order to get better things in the game, not log in once every day to get your best bet at getting better things in the game.

At the end of the day, if you give completely the same stuff to a guy that plays the game 5 hours a day, and a guy that plays 30 minutes a day, the first guy will get frustrated and will start playing 30 minutes a day, since he still gets the same good stuff...

This is my opinion, but keep in mind that i think that a game can have the most enjoyable gameplay in the history of everything, if you aren't given a purpose it makes you lose interest quite fast.

[Spoon_Fed]

I'd originally considered saying weekly instead of daily for the very reasons listed above.  Would that be a possible consideration?  I'm editting the original post to reflect that as well.

[Spoon_Fed]

This is a nice idea, but I think that what it would end up doing is encouraging a 10 minutes log in every day, unless you have to farm for a blueprint, credits, or materials. And since you would pretty much get very little more than you usally get right now in terms of stuff to build, it would work badly.

I would like an idea that makes you play the game more in order to get better things in the game, not log in once every day to get your best bet at getting better things in the game.

At the end of the day, if you give completely the same stuff to a guy that plays the game 5 hours a day, and a guy that plays 30 minutes a day, the first guy will get frustrated and will start playing 30 minutes a day, since he still gets the same good stuff...

This is my opinion, but keep in mind that i think that a game can have the most enjoyable gameplay in the history of everything, if you aren't given a purpose it makes you lose interest quite fast.

 

I agree, and I'm not recommending you do away with the other alerts that would allow a player with more time to progress faster, but with the current system it's a very real possibility that a casual player cannot progress at all, because a ? alert may not be available when they have an opportunity to play.  Personally, I have no qualms with paying real money to the developers, but there's no satisfacion in getting an item that way.

 

This leaves me the option to either pay for the item with platinum (for blueprints) and lose any satisfaction from earning it, or wait some indeterminate amount of time for the possiblity that an item will be available when I'm actually playing.  Which could be compared to farming for an item with a low drop rate, however KNOWING that there is a 0% chance of getting an item means that I'm really not farming, I'm just waiting and hoping.