21 April 2008

Reward system

Today I came up with an idea that so far players seem to like:
Every week, there will be some small to medium scale events, for now only invasions, but possibly other things later on.
If the players manage to complete the objective in a certain time frame, they get 3 points. If it will take longer, they get two, 1, or 0 points, depending on the specific event.
At the end of the week, there will be a certain number of points that player can use, by voting, for things such as: Getting a few hours of a positive day, getting new monster spawns, and other things I will think off in the future.

There are many advantage to this system:
1. The whole community can participate (weak players scout to find the monsters, and the stronger players come to finish them off).
2. It promotes more exploration, so now players will want to familiarize themselves with the geography of the game (finding secret places, exploring caves and caverns, and so on).
3. Makes people work together as a team.
4. Gives them an opportunity to vote for the reward, so that there will be no more complaints that a certain group is favored (such as the fighters).

So far, everyone can vote, not only those participating in the invasions, and this might be a problem. If it becomes a problem, maybe I can devise a system so that only those participating can vote, although this will be hard and will require some thinking. One way would be to make all the invading monsters drop an item, then go with that item to a voting NPC and trade it for a vote. By placing weaker monsters along with stronger monsters, even those who just scout can get a kill and make their vote count.

07 April 2008

Arrows and the economy

The bows/crossbows are in the game for 2 days now, and from all the gold-sinks ever implemented by me, they are the best.
People love the new archery skill, and it seems that they do not mind spending a lot of gold on it. For example, we have an average of 4.5M gold coins entering the game every day, and about 3.7M exiting. The average gold increase is between 0 and 1M per day (which is normal, since many players are saving money, and many new players start playing for a while, then give up).
On April 5, we had 400875443 gold coins in the game. Now, 2 days later, we have 384574915.
That's an decrease of almost 4% in 2 days. The first day, ~11M went out (after deducting the gold income), and today another ~5M went out (again, after deducting the income).
Not bad at all. Obviously, this trend will not continue for too long, but I expect that the net gold increase in the game will be negative for another 2 weeks or so.

I am really curious if this deflation will affect the inter-player trade, and if so, how will the market react to it.