I'm reevaluating my plans concerning "How to gain Cosmetics" in my dormant Free2Play multiplayer game
Snake World.
a) I want it to be fair and not-annoying.
I occasionally play on Mobile, and I noticed I centered almost completely on OpenSource games. Because the usual bunch in AppStores is literally unbearable. Anything in a game is now OneArmedBandit, chests with random items or similar. I want to do better.
b) It should be engaging.
Simply buying the hat with in-game tokens might be simple and direct, but is probably too boring. The player buys the two or three things she wants to equip, and then has no interest in going on.
Do you think this is a serious threat to retaining players? Or should I keep treating people as adults?
One approach, inspired by the early Rocket League:
- you find tokens while playing
- you can by a random item from one of the cosmetic categories (e.g. a Hat)
- items come in Tiers
- you can merge three items of the same tier to get one random item from the next tier.
Slightly altered approach:
- The tokens you can find immediately advance the count towards a random cosmetic category
- Say: you collect one token, dice says "a hat", it increases "random hat progress" from 2/4 to 3/4.
- Another token randomly assigned to "hat" advances the count to 4/4 and you get a random hat of "basic" level.
The merging allows to hand out the same items over and over again, so I can tune the rate to one item every half an hour or something and still manage the launch with ~20 items in every category. Allowing to buy items directly puts a hard limit to the time range in which getting tokens feels meaningful. Random items and merging smoothes the limit to a asymptotic curve - it's less and less interesting to get tokens, but never useless.
The first approach obviously allows to work towards a specific category, the latter is less controllable.
Can you think of any other approach to Cosmetics? It should both treat the player fairly and not immediately cut off the incentive to get more cosmetics.
Developer
