Jump to content

Game Development Discussion: New Players


Village
 Share

Game Development Discussion: New Players  

194 members have voted

  1. 1. (READ POST BELOW) Extended new player revenue bonus

    • 100% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 10% from C11 to C20 (C11 will have 90%, C20 will have 0%)
    • 100% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 20% from C11 to C15 (C11 will have 80%, C15 will have 0%)
    • 100% bonus for C1, decreasing by 5% from C2 to C20 (C2 will have 95%, C20 will have 5%)
    • 200% bonus for C1, decreasing by 10% from C2 to C20 (C2 will have 190%, C20 will have 10%)
    • 200% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 20% from C11 to C20 (C11 will have 180%, C20 will have 0%)
    • 200% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 40% from C11 to C20 (C11 will have 160%, C15 will have 0%)
    • Something else, put a comment below!
    • No change (can't move this to the top sorry)
  2. 2. (READ POST BELOW) Increased login bonus - max bonus

    • 500k (no change)
    • 3mil
    • 5mil
    • Something else, put a comment below!
  3. 3. (READ POST BELOW) Increased login bonus - if max bonus is increased, new player bonus is removed

    • Yes it should be removed
    • No it should not be removed
  4. 4. (READ POST BELOW) Increased login bonus - max daily increase

  5. 5. (READ POST BELOW) Increased login bonus - max new player bonus

    • Same as everyone else
    • 2x (no change)
    • 3x
    • Something else, put a comment below!
  6. 6. (READ POST BELOW) Raiding and inactive nations - should it happen

    • Nations should be raidable by anyone when inactive
    • Score ranges should still apply when a nation is inactive (no change)
    • Something else, put a comment below!
  7. 7. (READ POST BELOW) Raiding and inactive nations - considered inactive

  8. 8. Which came first?

  9. 9. (READ POST BELOW) Do you like this style of forum posts



Recommended Posts

1 minute ago, RandomNoobster said:

It's obvious that the chicken came first, don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. Chickens have always roamed the planet. Eggs were invented by humans in order to make more chickens. 

Oh ye but Humans outdated Chickens, we invited eggs to make chickens. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Village said:

Increased login bonus
I hope we're all familiar with our daily free 500k, however many might not know that nations under 60 days old can gain up to a million dollars a day. Since this login bonus encourages activity and helps both new and old players grow, we have a couple ideas below for improving it for everyone! (For this one I split it up into a couple polls to get a gauge on each component independently)

As Hwan mentioned, I don't think the economy needs more free cash injections for older players. We just need more catchups.

 

Another useful thing would be to somehow get the city cost reducing projects into the hands of newer players faster/cheaper.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Developer
10 minutes ago, Hwan said:

What's the point in letting players vote if they want more free money :v

Well the goal is that folks will be slightly sensible, as unreasonable as that might be. 😜

7 minutes ago, Marika said:

As Hwan mentioned, I don't think the economy needs more free cash injections for older players. We just need more catchups.

This is meant to be a catchup, as much as older players may get a login boost as well, new players get a significantly larger one making it easier to catch up, I do agree though.

 

8 minutes ago, Marika said:

Another useful thing would be to somehow get the city cost reducing projects into the hands of newer players faster/cheaper.

Yeah, I've got some ideas around that I'm going to be working through at a later date.

 

Thank you guys for the feedback! :)

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I actually like the motivation here, I think the game is very in need of things to help new players, but the reason we need that is so they can still compete with older established players in the long term. The daily bonus changes are helping not only new players but also established players. We already have plenty of new whale boosting mechanics, this might be small but it still exists.

As far as the raiding, do you mean only small nations would be able to raid up and down, or would everyone? If that's the case alliances with lots of inactives are going to find themselves getting raided all the time, and i'm not a milcom expert but I suspect this could be an issue in war too, where nations are declaring on random inactive small nations to fund things while in a blockade, etc, something not really possible at higher city counts.

Again though, interesting ideas for sure

  • Upvote 2

Peace in our time

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, MinesomeMC said:

Pretty controversial view from me but I do really think the egg comes first. Not only were eggs used way before chickens existed, chickens are just paid government actors with cameras planted by the government to spy on farmers. Chicken nuggets are just pork infused with chemicals to control the masses. Wake up people

a tyrannosaurus laid an egg. it turned into some old ass bird. that old ass bird laid another egg which turned into the first bawk bawk cockadoodledoo man

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Developer
10 minutes ago, The Titan said:

I actually like the motivation here, I think the game is very in need of things to help new players, but the reason we need that is so they can still compete with older established players in the long term. The daily bonus changes are helping not only new players but also established players. We already have plenty of new whale boosting mechanics, this might be small but it still exists.

Yeah, I agree. One way to solve that could simply be something like increasing the base bonus to 1mil and the new player one to something like 4-6x that.

11 minutes ago, The Titan said:

As far as the raiding, do you mean only small nations would be able to raid up and down, or would everyone? If that's the case alliances with lots of inactives are going to find themselves getting raided all the time, and i'm not a milcom expert but I suspect this could be an issue in war too, where nations are declaring on random inactive small nations to fund things while in a blockade, etc, something not really possible at higher city counts.

Yeah, it would be anyone. I didn't think of the blockade case, thanks for bringing that up, it's definitely something to consider!

 

9 minutes ago, FDB1204 said:

How is opening inactive war ranges to anyone going to help new players if it means effectively removing the one benefit that small nations have?

It's meant to help by allowing them to continue the most profitable activity they have (raiding) without being forced to stay at C3 by their alliance (which they achieve on day one and maintain for weeks or months), rather it allows them to continue growing and use their raid profits to do so without having to sacrifice growth and the engaging parts of the game found there. 

Just now, leonissenbaum said:

Allowing inactive players to be raided by anyone would be a massive nerf to new players, and a massive nerf to them catching up via raiding, since the good targets would be taken by the higher-tier active players who would also earn more money from the wars due to having a larger ground force to loot more from GA's, meaning the lower-tier raiders would struggle to get any slots, therefore making far less money. The rest of the suggestions seem reasonable, but letting anyone raid low-tier inactive targets would hurt new players far more than it'd help them.

That's a good point as well, I think its definitely worth exploring some way to balance that and ensure things don't get taken up by older players. Perhaps only nations created in the last six months are eligible for the open declare ranges? Or you can down declare on inactives 10-15 cities below you or something?

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Village said:

Perhaps only nations created in the last six months are eligible for the open declare ranges?

I have a few concerns about a time-based approach: 

There's a decent chunk of players who create an account, play for a day, then go inactive or vm for ages and come back later on. This would incentivize them to delete their nation and make a new one to get the initial six months of good war ranges, which probably isn't something we want to incentivize. There's other scenarios that can cause this dilemma, such as a new player who didn't raid much in their first 6 months, got to city 13 without UP or something, and should reroll, etc. Making a feature where the best thing to do may be "delete your nation and start over" doesn't feel great to me, especially when it can be used as an intentional strategy: "You've reached 6 months, time to deposit all of your money and reroll!"

 

24 minutes ago, Village said:

Or you can down declare on inactives 10-15 cities below you or something?

This would likely have the same effect of making the higher tier players suck up all the targets so the actual newer players can't get any targets. Having a large amount of new people raiding obviously lowers raid income for everyone, but another important factor is that higher city count players lower raid income for everyone due to taking more money out of inactive targets using ground attacks. If a target has 80m in cash, that'd be a good target for quite a few raids normally, but if a c20 with max soldiers and tanks does 10 ground attacks on them, that would take nearly 40m in cash from them just with the ground attacks, which would likely dry up raid targets faster than new ones appear.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The following is of my own opinion and similar to belly buttons in that everyone has one, not everyone may enjoy mine :)

1. I'd prefer to keep it in line with the resource project bonus and have it's effectiveness end at C15.

2-5. Increase the maximum login bonus to $3M for everyone and $6M for new players. Still keeps the catchup mechanic and incentivizes activity for older players. Change the daily increase to $100k per day.

6. The only alternative I would offer to the current setup is to double/triple the range in which they can be targeted. Allows some of the smaller nations to still dip into the smaller targets, or not be forced to delete cities to be in range, but I think the meta for them raiding is purely optional, as some alliances will opt to boost members to c10 right as soon as they can with all of the new player bonuses.

If the range is removed completely:

- You would need to adjust how nations coming off of beige who are active get auto-put on gray allowing c12-20 to get targeted by fully milled C40's, or else that would be absolutely abused.

- I would be interested to see how that would affect wars if everyone's slots were used to raid inactives'. I'd also be concerned about the veterans abusing it will simultaneously pushing the newer players with less experience beige sniping and finding targets in general out.

In summarization: Expand the range if people feel the need for raiding to be more accessible, but I think it's a fair and optional meta.

7. Leave the inactive range the same, 7 Days. I don't feel there is a strong need for this to be changed.

8. Obviously the chicken. Anyone else who says otherwise is eggtremely mistaken.

9. Ye


 

Edited by Hobbs
  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My main issue with this is being able to raid an inactive regardless of score. Personally I think this will do the exact opposite of helping new players. Well I understand it means players could get cities and keep raiding it also means that C40s with nothing better to do during peace can just steal the 30-40m inactive C4s have. This will not only mean a C40 can get an extra 150m every two days (30m X 5 wars) but it also means any good targets will be taken leaving new players with no one to raid at all. To put this into a bit more perspective let's say all of Rose can now raid any inactive that is 199 players being able to attack lets say C5 inactives. At 5 wars each that is nearly 1000 potential targets for new players to hit gone... by just Rose alone. There is also no reason for people not to do it as it will increase peacetime profit and have no repercussions because almost all inactives at that level are not in an alliance to counter for them. With that said my suggestion would maybe be that only new players can raid any inactive regardless of score. This would be similar to how new players get additional money for 60 days. After 60 days players can no longer raid any inactive player.

Edited by JoshMD
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Developer
20 hours ago, leonissenbaum said:

There's a decent chunk of players who create an account, play for a day, then go inactive or vm for ages and come back later on. This would incentivize them to delete their nation and make a new one to get the initial six months of good war ranges, which probably isn't something we want to incentivize. There's other scenarios that can cause this dilemma, such as a new player who didn't raid much in their first 6 months, got to city 13 without UP or something, and should reroll, etc. Making a feature where the best thing to do may be "delete your nation and start over" doesn't feel great to me, especially when it can be used as an intentional strategy: "You've reached 6 months, time to deposit all of your money and reroll!"

That's a good point, however there's already massive incentive for some of that with how profitable raiding is, and the fact that you awake from inactivity or VM to find your nation destroyed.

20 hours ago, leonissenbaum said:

This would likely have the same effect of making the higher tier players suck up all the targets so the actual newer players can't get any targets. Having a large amount of new people raiding obviously lowers raid income for everyone, but another important factor is that higher city count players lower raid income for everyone due to taking more money out of inactive targets using ground attacks. If a target has 80m in cash, that'd be a good target for quite a few raids normally, but if a c20 with max soldiers and tanks does 10 ground attacks on them, that would take nearly 40m in cash from them just with the ground attacks, which would likely dry up raid targets faster than new ones appear.

Also a very good point, thank you! I'm not sure the right way around that.

20 hours ago, Hobbs said:

- You would need to adjust how nations coming off of beige who are active get auto-put on gray allowing c12-20 to get targeted by fully milled C40's, or else that would be absolutely abused.

It wouldn't be based on gray, it'd be the last active time. I didn't have anything specific to say for the rest besides thank you! I pretty well completely agree with what you're saying. :)

20 hours ago, JoshMD said:

My main issue with this is being able to raid an inactive regardless of score. Personally I think this will do the exact opposite of helping new players. Well I understand it means players could get cities and keep raiding it also means that C40s with nothing better to do during peace can just steal the 30-40m inactive C4s have. This will not only mean a C40 can get an extra 150m every two days but it also means any good targets will be taken leaving new players with no one to raid at all. To put this into a bit more perspective let's say all of Rose can now raid any inactive that is 199 players being able to attack lets say C5 inactives. At 5 wars each that is nearly 1000 potential targets for new players to hit gone... by just Rose alone. There is also no reason for people not to do it as it will increase peacetime profit and have no repercussions because almost all inactives at that level are not in an alliance to counter for them. With that said my suggestion would maybe be that only new players can raid any inactive regardless of score. This would be similar to how new players get additional money for 60 days. After 60 days players can no longer raid any score players.

Thank you for the feedback! I've added a limit on the range as a potential solution.

Pre Edit: Removed a now hidden post quote. 

Edited by Prefontaine
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Village said:

That's a good point, however there's already massive incentive for some of that with how profitable raiding is, and the fact that you awake from inactivity or VM to find your nation destroyed.

We already slightly have that problem with deleting cities, true, but deleting your nation every now and then goes a lot further in my eyes, which I'm concerned about. I'm very concerned about the meta becoming "alright, your nation is too old, delete your nation now". I don't think that's the kind of attitude the mechanics should encourage.

Beyond that, it still has roughly the same problem as before with higher city nations doing ground attacks and eating all of the money, though it's not nearly as extreme as the other options, since people can't just do it forever (unless making people delete their nations becomes meta).

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't see why new people need more money.  The idea is to encourage them to join an alliance.   

As to raiding, that's what we need to bring back.  Many of the changes in the last few years have been aimed at stopping raiding.  This is a mistake.   Raiders add spice to the game and keep the pixel huggers on their toes.  I've  helped a few new people in this way.  Even if they don't become long term raiders they no long are afraid of getting their pixel singed.

  • Upvote 2

Legal Disclaimer:

My opinions do not necessarily reflect of the opinions of my alliance, allies, enemies or neutrals.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The chicken came first. But the reality is birds are government spies and the bird recharge on power lines. How do chickens recharge ? What part of the chicken is the nugget? How many nuggets are on a chicken ? How does KFC have nine pieces of a whole chicken when the rest of the industry has eight ? I want a bonus for crusty old guys over let's say 60 years old. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The chicken and egg question reveals quite a lot about the human psyche. According to evolution, the first chicken was hatched from an egg that was created by something that wasn't quite a chicken yet. Therefore, everyone who answered that the chicken came first, is in fact a creationist. :galaxy brain:

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Village said:

1. Extended new player revenue bonus

- 100% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 10% from C11 to C20 (C11 will have 90%, C20 will have 0%)
- 100% bonus for C10 and below, decreasing by 20% from C11 to C15 (C11 will have 80%, C15 will have 0%)
- 100% bonus for C1, decreasing by 5% from C2 to C20 (C2 will have 95%, C20 will have 5%)
- I also included some 200% stuff in poll at the last minute for feedback, not a commitment and not necessarily balanced :)
- Something else, put a comment below!

2. Increased login bonus
- Max login bonus is 1mil, 3mil, 5mil
- New player bonus is removed
- Max daily increase is at 50k, 100k, 150k, or 250k
- Max new player bonus is the same, double, triple normal login bonus

3. Raiding and inactive nations
At present, the typical meta for a new player isn't entirely healthy or a great first impression of the game. New players typically get locked into months of raiding in order to earn enough money to boost themselves to a higher city count and be worth investment by their alliance. While months of raiding might seem fine, it's definitely fun and profitable, but it forces nations into a monotony and forces them to stay at around C3 to C5 in order to have nations in range. To fix this, and open up raiding to a larger group of people, I had the idea to open up inactive war ranges to anyone, meaning nations are no longer locked into C3 to raid, rather they can raid any inactive nation up and down the score range at any city count. However, the big point of contention is at what point a nation is considered "inactive" and therefore raidable, that (along with support for this feature) is the subject of this poll.

- Nations are considered inactive after 3, 5, 7, 14, 30 days

I'm going to break down my take into three main parts similar to how you posted.

1. Extended new player revenue bonus
I think this one is a great option, as a newbie when I first joined I was pretty shit, but I really enjoyed tinkering with the bonus to maximise my national revenue while raiding. Having a bonus from c1 through c20 would work as a decent catchup and would have the additional affect of creating more diverse tiering. Right now the main clumps in city tiers are roughly c4, c10-11, c16, c20-c21 and 30+ these are basically decided by projects (UP, AUP or MP) or raiding. By adding a city bonus revenue it might geniunely be worth more to sit at a weird city counts like c17 to make use of that 30% revenue boost than to build a city that will only add at best ~5%-6% boost to your revenue. 

TL:DR - I'm all for it, using 200% from c1 through to c20 sounds quite interesting the more I think about it. (more diverse builds, tiers etc)

2. Increased login bonus.
Going to further break this into two sections, newbie login bonus and general login bonus

Newbies:
Personally I think a 2x bonus for newbies works quite well, it gives a nice revenue boost and gives incentives for them to log in for an extended period of time, ideally it should be set up (in my opinion) so that new players take AT MOST 30 days of consistent login to reach the max bonus, but at minimum 10-15 days. This makes it more rewarding for them to actively login and build up a routine for playing the game. (this is assuming the new player bonus last 60 days)

All:
For the general bonus I think an increased amount would be interesting, however in my opinion the way it works should be something like this:
Max bonus = 3mil
Your bonus increase = 50k
Failure to log in = 10% to 30% bonus loss

E.g each day I log in I get 50k closer to the max bonus, taking 60 days to reach it (for newbies they would get 100k each day), if I was at 1mil and missed a log in I would lose 30% effectively resetting me to zero. (30% of the max which would be ~1mil removed).
If I had hit the max bonus of 3mil I would only drop to 2mil on the first day I missed my login, 1mil on the second missed day and lose the entirety on the third. If the reduction was a lower percentage like 25% it would take 4 days to compleletly lose a max log-in bonus. This allows people a little bit of lee-way for missing a login while still harshly punishing them.

3. Raiding and inactive nations
Great idea, but it should work like the new player bonus.
E.g Starting from C1 you get a 100%/200% down/up declare bonus range, for each city after that 5/10% is removed from that bonus.
This means a c1 would have an effective range of 125% down declare (can hit literally anything below) and a 275% updeclare.
c5 would have 100% down declare, 225% updeclare
c10 would have 75% downdeclare, 175% updeclare
c15 would have 50% downdeclare, 125% updeclare
c20 would have the normal ranges of 25% down and 75% up.

The idea here is to allow this change to primarily benefit people below c10 while giving the sub 20s a bit more wiggle room when it comes to raiding.
(This "buff" could either only work on inactive nations or just be a general change to how war ranges work, I wouldn't mind low tiers having more harpoon abilities would give them more power during wars)

Inactivity should be based on 14 in my opinion, A week is quite short in the grand scheme of things since many things in life could screw you over there (such as power outage, hospital etc) but two weeks is long enough to remove 99% of reasons for not being able to log in once.

Also the egg came first just not from a chicken as we know it ;)

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe instead of removing war range for inactive people would be bad for people staying in lower city tiers to raid, but relaxing the range would be better, something like 0.5x - 2x or 3x ( promote updeclares )

i am literally a vegetable

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use and the Guidelines of the game and community.