Reward Tokens

Suggestion about adding, unlockable, tasks, rewards and credits to the game.
Locked
Szei
Posts: 218
Joined: Sat Nov 15, 2008 8:14 pm
Location: USA

Reward Tokens

Post by Szei »

http://wololo.net/miki/index.php/Wagic/Dev/RewardTokens
Psyringe wrote:Instead of unlocking a random set, award the player with a token that he can trade for a special treat in the shop. Such a treat might be unlocking a new set, or getting a choice of one out of 5 rares from a given set, or free boosters, etc. This would ensure that the player gets a reward he actually enjoys (or at least a higher chance for that, and less of a chance to get a reward that's actually detrimental to his enjoyment of the game.
I thought that this was a great idea and wanted to know other users' opinions. (as for why unlocking expansions could be detrimental to a player's experience, read the first entry in the link I posted)

On a side note, I think that it would be interesting if users could unlock AI decks. Since there are already 50+ decks and more to come (after the 1st AI deck competition is over), I feel that it is getting to the point where having to unlock decks would be viable (5/10 at a time or something like that and start off with 20/30 decks).
Image
Daddy32
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2009 8:20 am
Location: Slovakia

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by Daddy32 »

Minor modification, simpler to code and just as good (in my opinion):
Present the player with the mentioned options right after winning the game, with certain probability (rising with credits earned?). So, once in a time, player would be getting list of ~3 random rewards he could choose from - these would be proportional to the credits earned, with added benefit being the ability to choose the one most interesting to the player. As it could make the game easier, I would probably give the option to claim one of the rewards _instead_ of the credits (maybe with the exception of set-unlocks, which are currently 'free').

As for the AI decks - I think that newcomers could be currently overwhelmed by the amount. Getting to know your opponents is interesting part of the game, which is made very confusing by having 50-100 of them from the beginning - that's why I agree, that game would benefit from presenting them to the player at slower pace. And of course, more unlocking content of any kind should make the game interesting longer.
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by wololo »

Agreed with the AI unlocking thing. When we had around 15 AI opponents, I new each of them by heart and it helped a lot to give them some kind of personality. Unlocking them progressively would help that. It doesn't sound too difficult to do.
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by Psyringe »

Daddy32 wrote:Present the player with the mentioned options right after winning the game
The idea behind reward tokens was that such tokens lend themselves well to a nice visual representation, something to admire in a "trophy room" and be proud of. :) I also thought about having tokens of different types, which imho would go well with the general concepts of a trading card game. I've got a very rough draft of such a system in my drawer, throwing it into the discussion now:

Colored Reward Token System

- Player gets awarded tokens for "unusual" victories / achievements.

- Each token has a color. The color matches the achievement. Examples (these would definitely need work):
- white token: victory with more than 50 life
- red token: bringing the opponent to -30 life or less
- green token: winning with 20+ creatures on the board
- blue token: winning by milling
- black token: winning with 1 life left
- token of the color of a random card from the player's deck: winning a tournament, or winning x games in a row

- Tokens are awarded with 100% chance the first time the player meets the above condition, chances then go down each time the player gets this token awarded again, to prevent token flood / token grinding.

- Tokens are awarded for winning quests or tournament, to provide a steady supply of them

- Tokens can be traded for new game features. Examples:
- two tokens of different colors: unlock a new "small" set
- three tokens of different colors: unlock a new "big" set
- two tokens of the same color: get a free booster pack
- three tokens of the same color: get a free booster pack in which all cards have this color
- (common card's double mana cost in tokens): get that card (e.g. you could trade in two white tokens plus two tokens of any color for a Youthful Knight, but not four black tokens)
- (uncommon card's triple mana cost in tokens): as above
- (rare card's quintuple mana cost in tokens): as above
- two white tokens: unlock the quest "Freeing the Princess"
- two black tokens: unlock the quest "Leading the Undead Horde"
etc.

As I said, this is pretty rough at the moment (and definitely low priority), and it hinges on a lot of other concepts that aren't implemented yet, but since there seems to be some interest in a token reward system, I wanted to share the thought. :)
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by Psyringe »

wololo wrote:Agreed with the AI unlocking thing. When we had around 15 AI opponents, I new each of them by heart and it helped a lot to give them some kind of personality. Unlocking them progressively would help that. It doesn't sound too difficult to do.
We could use the results of the AI Deck Comparison (will be updated when I add more decks) to assign the decks to groups of increasing difficulty, and then unlock the groups in the order of their alleged difficulty. The grouping won't be perfect (since a deck that's a tough opponent for the AI is not necessarily a tough opponent for a human player), but it would be a good approximation of a deck's power level which doesn't require any additional analysis (since I'm doing the AI comparisons anyway).

Personally I'm still not that fond of the idea of locking AI decks in the early stages of the game, but I understand the reasons for it (and I realize that I'm probably in the minority with my opinion ;) ). May also have to do with my own preferences as a player, I absolutely love to be overwhelmed by a game, and I love complex situations. It's possible that things which I find enjoyable (like having 100 different opponents to figure out) are actually deterrent for other players, while the things that bore me (like having to play against the same decks repeatedly before I can unlock new ones) might be more enjoyable for other players.

Still, I personally would prefer a system which has all AI decks enabled from the start, but helps the player in finding opponents for his (and his deck's) playing strength. Examples are a general "difficulty rating" for each deck, or the implementation of tournaments in which only decks of a given difficulty rating participate. I'd then enhance the personality and recognizability of the decks with avatars, flavor text, and infos about past games against this deck. I won't cry if we do locked AI decks instead though, the latter is probably easier to implement anyway. ;)
wololo
Site Admin
Posts: 3728
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:42 am
Location: Japan

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by wololo »

how about an extremely simple rule?
only the first 10 decks are unlocked first, and to unlock the 10 next ones, you have to have played at least one game against each deck?
And so on...
Psyringe
Posts: 1163
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:53 am

Re: Reward Tokens

Post by Psyringe »

wololo wrote:how about an extremely simple rule?
only the first 10 decks are unlocked first, and to unlock the 10 next ones, you have to have played at least one game against each deck?
And so on...
Yep, that would probably be the easiest solution (if we're going to lock AI decks, but it seems we are ;) ). I think this one might be very easy to implement. When constructing the AI deck menu, we're accessing the statistics anyway. So we could do:

Loop: read next 10 decks and their statistics and add them to the menu
- count how many of these decks the player has already played against
- break out of the loop if that number is <10

We can also set the criterion to <9 or <8 if we don't want to force the player to play every deck.

Also, we can set a flag if the current number equals (criterion-1), and later (when the statistics get written after the game has finished), we can display an "unlock" screen if the flag has been set and if the number of games against this deck is now 1.

Potential complications:
- Currently the only statistic that's easily accessible is the victory ratio, so we'd either need to add a statistics funtction for querying the number of games played against a deck, or we could base the "unlocking" of having a victory ratio >0 against the X decks (instead of having played against X decks).
- AFAIR Deck statistics are calculated seperately for each player deck, so we'd either need to calculate totals over all player decks, or we'd get a situation where each deck of a player has its own set of opponents it can play against (might be desirable, might be confusing).

But I get the feeling we're veering off topic here, we should probably either just implement the feature or open a new thread. ;)
Locked