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Post by Derek Coll on May 6, 2016 6:26:48 GMT -7
I was thinking of an idea for investing DG Influence to upgrade your Dragons Gate account. I had first thought of only one effect of upgraging the account but I believe other uses of it could be interesting to consider. What I had in mind was using DG Influence to allow you to invest in your account raising the starting lvl of other characters you make from lvl one to lvl two. And you could invest more to upgrade it further still (It doesn't have to be one lvl at a time, it could be it raises to level 2. I dont know what an appropriate price to payout balance should be). This was actually introduced in a recent patch to the video game Darkest Dungeon.
The issue I was thinking this would solve was how creating alternate characters and getting them up to snuff with all the tricks and toys you had in mind is an investment of 100 - a couple hundred hours of session time, and for a lot of people that can be asking a lot. If Influence from any of your characters were used as the currency then it is a reward that players can only acquire via playing in DG and can't be farmed in the downtime system. If DG GMs get Influence along with exp and gp to a character then they could also use sessions they are GMing for to help upgrade their account.
And perhaps if lots of alts aren't one players interest alternative ways to upgrade the account could be found. If I remember right players can only have 1 "premium" race character or something like that? Maybe a player might rather use their influence to make it so they can have that one more slot for one more alt of a premium race and then lvl them the old fashioned way unless they have also upgraded their account with the lvl floor raised.
Essentially this results in players investing wealth from their other characters which is accumulated only through directly playing in sessions, and increasing in a more predictable and controlled manner than other capital and gp, and the investment of wealth buys experience for other characters. Characters that hopefully those players will continue to play in DG. Everyone wins!
I expect the result would be that players who play a lot in DG as either player and or GM will be able to get alternate characters up to higher lvls a little faster than players who havent bought into that upgrade yet. And the character roster will fill up with higher lvl character faster as well.
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Post by Derek Coll on May 6, 2016 8:12:52 GMT -7
Afterthought: It could be advantageous to create enough ways to spend Dragons Gate influence on your account getting it to the point where the player never has enough influence to do all of it, and will always want a little more. Then you also have a system that incentivizes play as well as rewards play... purchased with a currency gained from play. Players will want to play in sessions to get the next few influence points and wonder what to spend it on, or if they should keep enough on a character for them to revive themselves.
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Post by bioa10 on May 8, 2016 14:53:00 GMT -7
This seems like a cool idea, more uses for influence would be useful as I currently have a ton of influence sitting around in case I die.
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Post by spacemanspoof on May 9, 2016 6:08:33 GMT -7
And what of those who don't get to play often, and thus have less influence to spend? Tying influence directly to what you can do in-character keeps things balanced, as the influence you get by playing games is spent in subsequent games, so it doesn't matter how frequently you play. But turning in-game influence into some sort of permanent reward suddenly creates a huge imbalance - some folks would only be able to earn, say 2 influence per week on average while others get 10 or more. That creates a very real danger of a feedback loop.
Let's say, as in your example, you can use influence to start new characters at a higher level. The overall result of that is fewer lower-level characters, which means fewer lower-level games, which means those of us stuck with lower level characters would have even less opportunity to play and earn influence.
The stated goal of DG, at least according to the wiki, is to allow people to play regardless of schedule. Creating a system that gives greater rewards to those who have a more flexible schedule seems counter to that goal.
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Post by Derek Coll on May 20, 2016 13:30:51 GMT -7
I think there are some fair points there and some moot points Spaceman. People who play less often will have less rewards. That is the way it is in any game and it is that way in DG presently as it is. If the stated intention is to " allow people to play regardless of schedule" then that is achieved via not holding people to a regularly scheduled game. The format of pickup games and scheduling games and allowing for multiple gms is what really achieves that intention.
It is worth considering that some players who might choose to use DG influence to start characters above higher lvl could result in a smaller low lvl character pool. But thats not to say that those players still might not keep a low lvl character around to play in low lvl games. Because if a low lvl is the only thing that people are looking to get going and they need one more then that player who usually doesnt have to play low lvl characters can still hop in if they choose to; and they would be incentivized to because they would still be able to earn 1-3 DG influence which would then be applicable to account bonuses if they want to. Its right to look at the implications of these types of changes. There could be some negative results but it also seems unlikely to lead to a complete collapse of DG; that would be a slippery slope.
So some people may only be able to play once or twice a month. They will only have a couple low lvl characters anyway. They aren't being denied access to anything. I like many other players have bought world of warcraft. Investing both hours and hours of time (and in that case money as well). And while I could afford more time than someone who can only cue in Looking for Dungeon twice in a play session a couple times a month, I also couldnt afford the amount of time it would take to actually max out a character (only ever got 1 char to max back when I played wow) and the rest of my characters were all really low lvl because I couldnt afford that sort of time investment.
So I think the player who cant afford very much time at all is just a very casual gamer. And they arent excluded from anything. They can still always find a game. And their character can always exist in DG. And they arent kick out of the play group because its a play community that allows people to play regardless of schedule. What I think is worth considering is making something available to all players to allow you to exchange hours played into something that can both accommodate you in a humane way as well still be an incentivizing system that is gained through direct investment in hosting/playing sessions.
Setting a balance would be important. 2 influence comes at 3 hours? 3-4? So the question would be for DG leads to think about saying after hour many hours of a player playing and or gming could they extend them the ability to say they dont have to play those lvls on any alts saving them large amounts of busy work if that is their play style.
But I think you raise a good point and it got me thinking about the casual player who cant participate in very many sessions. I think making multiple ways to spend Influence could find ways to benefit the player who has less influence. Off the top of my head perhaps that making an account upgraded so you can make characters start at lvl 3 costs 80 influence (just a random number). Thats a large number of hours played for the player who can afford that and a big reward if they are the type of player who likes to make many characters and wants to see them reach higher lvls. Well perhaps there could be something that has a scaled down cost and a scaled down benefit for the player who cant afford the time to make that much influence. Something like that influence could perhaps be used to advance that player's Character A so while they cant afford much time to play they can still find a way to be rewarded for playing and get to play in the high lvl games and have that high lvl character with a little bit less of a demand on them for time. Perhaps using influence for experience for one character going at a scaled down rate than account upgrades would allow that player to do something like this instead; Rather than boosting Character A to get one higher lvl a little faster, they could use their influence from games on Char A and the occasional game on Char B to boost Char B and perhaps just about keep it at the same lvl as Char A.
You make a good point that influence should be able to be of the same benefit to player regardless of how much time they have. There are ways Influence could be used to help any player regardless of the amount of time they have to play. It would be a matter of setting the scaling of how much influence things would cost in relationship to the benefits.
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