Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
I would rather a birthday or anniversary gift instead of a login reward.
I don't have a problem with daily login rewards and I think some free cosmetic items on the 15th log-in of the month for example are a very good idea! Give something to look forward to for some players!
Making this XP goal weekly as opposed to daily would also be great! If it would take ~8 hours of play to earn, players could earn this by either daily play or bigger sessions on weekends, while hopefully still feeling rewarding to both!
The reward itself could be a bundle of coins towards a cosmetic (as suggested by Steven in the post), however I feel like this game is already becoming a FOMO simulator with the monthly pre-purchase skins etc, so making these cosmetics time-gated wouldn't feel too great to me. This game is honestly shaping up to be so good, I feel like implementing loads of different timed cosmetics and locking players away from cool stuff could be its only downfall.
Have a lovely day
Talk to any marketing professional, and they can tell you that drawing people with contests and giveaways and freebies is effective - but those are not your customers. Those are not your long-term retention targets, and are there reasons outside of your core goals.
And, your core customers will come to resent it. If they're a long time player but maybe taking a vacation, or a break, they will resent you for making them feel like they're missing out (of really nothing) if they don't log in.
It's just bad.
That's it
So the coins wouldnt reset at the end of the month so you could just stack them and every month a new skin is added. That wouldnt be forcing people to login in order to get the coins since they could get the skin sooner or later but would make them want to login anyway to get as much skins the fastest way possible.
However, as I’ve read through the community posts and reflected on it more, I think it’s best if there wasn’t a daily/hours online reward (even if it is only cosmetic)
Although there are many great arguments in this thread already I will echo the ones that stand out for me:
1. I am mostly only focused in gathering herbs, if the bonus for daily log-ins was just a single unit of measure of one of the herbs that I gather, it’s devaluing the work I’m putting in. And devaluing the player driven economy.
2. Life is hectic as is and I don’t want to feel like I HAVE to log in to get a reward, I think that draw/pull to log in is unhealthy. I think me wanting to log in because the joy of playing the game is not only more healthy for the game itself but also for the IRL players.
3. If dailies were just cosmetics, I feel that the shear amount of cosmetics would gum up the inventory (Or create work to delete them), not to mention the wonderful work of all the devs and artist who designed each one would feel wasted as they likely wouldn’t see their work displayed proudly amongst the 1000s or other minor cosmetics (since I intent to play AoC for years 4 digits is reasonable).
4. Even with a coin system it still feels like an unhealthy way to "attract" people to log in daily.
Hope this helps,
Skylarck The Botanist
As soon as you put a stamp on it that says log in or miss out, it actually causes me to have the opposite reaction than what you probably intended. I want to log in by my own choice, and it’ll probably be every day or nearly every day. But you add those silly daily log in chores and suddenly it’s not my choice anymore. Huge turn off.
Not needed in a subscription game that will also have a cash shop. I will absolutely be putting money into the cash shop don’t worry about that. Log in rewards? No, it’ll kill the joy of logging in, not enhance it.
The rewards can either be directly in form of items or tokens/coins that let you exchange them for certain items.
To give an example on Stevens coin idea:
You get 1 coin for every day you log into the game (preferably, after playing x amount of minutes). Steven mentioned collecting 30 coins (1 every day for a month) to get a monthly reward. I would rather not have it monthly, but instead award 1 coin per day and have a NPC with different cosmetics at various price ranges to choose from. Change the cosmetics up once in a while.
Eternal Guild
( Web | Discord )
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- Reward us passively maybe for time played, I think someone who plays 5+ hours a day should have more "coins" by the end of the month than someone who plays 1 hour a day.
- Make monthly cosmetics casual affordable, something like 10 hours a month and you can buy 1 month's cosmetic.
- Don't give us FOMO for monthly cosmetic, create a login cosmetic reward library so we can choose what we want when we want it.
- Daily login pop ups makes games feel like a chore in my opinion
those are some quick thoughtsBut lets talk about daily rewards you can in fact have them if it is just kind of a perk a a small reward not enough so if a person does not log it does not feel like they are missing out. You may be thinking well that is the whole point...well that kind of back fires one you after a while like in the case of Mist of Pandaria.
Next thing I want to mention is I do not play games for daily reward (with exeptions). I played WoW and they and had weekly lockouts and valor point caps and weekly conquest point cap which was enought to keep me playing a lot but did not in fact log in every day. Then Mist of Pandara come out and WoW went down hill because of the daily grinds that they put into the game. They thought they were going to be smart and have people online. Matter of fact already made a thread called.....
Keeping People online pretty long post in fact so will not repost just suggest you reread that thread.
Best solution is make the game good. But besides that catch all.....
Events could be used to keep people online so people would be logging in to participate in events or if they are not anounce to see if a certain boss is up or see what is going on in the world in general.
Would support system centered about weakly and bi weakly. But one thing that I did like is BattleStarGalactica Online had this system were it rewarded you ammo and supplies based on the number of days in a row that you logged in up to five then if you miss aday start over. This was pretty clever of them cause it a Progressive system and gives a tiny bit of sense of accomplishment. Really smart of them.
PROS
CONS
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Some ideas to consider:
Repurpose the login system to encourage people to experiment with styles from the Cosmetics Shop: Instead of giving away exclusive cosmetics for logins, let the tokens be used to rent items in the cosmetic shop. This way, people can taste items in the cosmetic shops and try out new looks before commiting to a full purchase if they want it permanently. This will also encourage regulars to change up their wardrobe.
Another forgiveness mechanic that will reward casuals better: daily coins are automatically stockpiled even if you don't log in, but only 3 coins can be stockpiled until you log in. This means that a regular player has the freedom to miss one or two days without falling behind, and a player who can only play on weekends can earn a minimum of 4 out of seven coins per week. And players who haven't logged in for a while can enjoy 3 coins on their return.
Monster Hunter did a REALLY GOOD login reward that gave you basic necessities to get on with 2 hunts (30 mins gameplay). The equivalent in AoC would be a handful of potions and a 30 min rent-a-mount coupon, but this would eat into AoC's economy.
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Despite my suggestions, I believe login rewards don't belong in AoC - exclusive items should be earned by doing exclusive things. Please maintain that equivalence.
Its essentially a fraction of an item that you dont see or have any benefit from until you collect one every day for 30 days, which ends up feeling a lot less like a daily log in reward and more like a whole lot of nothing for 29 days and then on the last day a once a month reward that you might not even like. It sounds like it would create more negative feelings than positive ones since people logging in every day are going to do so with or without the benefit of a cosmetic once a month and people who're logging in just for the cosmetic may either dislike it and not log in at all or like it and feel pressured to make sure they dont miss a single day of logins all month (which usually breaks down into people that do make all 30 days feeling more relieved than happy and the people that miss a day or two feeling pissed.) All pretty negative outcomes.
I'd say go for login rewards for sure but make sure theyre something thats going to incentivize players to log in daily, whether that be rotating weekly rewards so it doesnt feel like your benefit for logging in is forever away or reducing the number of required coins for the cosmetic to 25 so youve got a couple days of grace if you do get busy or DRUNK AS FUUUUUK and forget to log in, but the cosmetic still takes long enough to get that it feels like a reward and not a handout. All things with balance my dude.
The GAME should motivate you to log in and play. Log in rewards are a chore and cause resentment because logging in will no longer be something they want to do but instead something they "have" to do.
You could have something that should be achievable within a week of playing. This could include killing enemies, doing dungeons, crafting/gathering/processing, monster events, and holiday events. These could each reward embers that when fully completed is enough to buy the outfit.
If they don't want the outfit they could save them up for different outfits, cosmetics like mount and pet skins, or monster coins.
I think it would be an obtainable goal that respects players time and gives them the liberty to buy and earn what they want.
Edit: I think it's import to keep the monthly missions as generic as possible. This way your kill objectives don't disrupt the economy by flooding it with specific monster components. Most players will passively achieve these goals by playing normal. However, if the objective is kill 100 bears suddenly the bear meat and pelt markets crash. The crafting and processing should help combat this but it will still affect it.
THIS!!
LoL is smart, and their "first-win-of-the-day" bonus has a 20-hour reset - which makes it much easier to manage.
The incentive for logging in should be an in game interest, a reason to actually play the game.
Incentivizing login rewards only incentivizes one to log in to get reward, then log out, no longer an indicator of you having created an interesting game.
Anything that is offered as a reward is almost immediately worthless.
- Frufire
Ofc its cool to allow people to collect rewards like Steven says but i feel like there are better ways of giving those away. There isn't much pride to be had over an item u got for just logging in, wouldn't it be cooler if that item was awarded in game for doing something (even if not time intensive or very hard) idk maybe a small monthly questline. Then you see someone with the cosmetic you know they shared that experience.
If the goal is to make an enjoyable game we don't need a login reward system.
These systems where you get showered with random stuff feel very free to play attention grabby, one of the things i like the most about subscription games is that they are very simple and clean when it comes to these things. I already payed the sub so i don't wanna worry about anything else and i wanna log in because i want to.