Don't permanently retire the best outposts!
Don't completely retire them. Reasons:
- If someone builds a really great outpost, then it should be played by as many players as possible. Builders want their maps to be played. And the players will enjoy playing beautiful and clever outposts!
- Builders spend a lot of time working on great outposts. But when they really perfect and finalise them, at level 10, suddenly the outpost is retired.
- Unavoidably, raiders need to play some mediocre outposts. But raiders should be rewarded with at least one "wow" outpost each day they play.
Retiring good outposts so quickly wastes the effort of builders, and reduces the potential quality of outposts available to raiders.
I would guess that currently a level 10 outpost gets played by 5% of the playerbase before it gets retired. What a waste! (Am I wrong with that estimate?)
I would suggest that the top 10% of outposts should be played by 100% of the playerbase, and the top 25% of outposts should also have a higher exposure.
I would hate to think that there are beautiful outposts out there which I never got to see. And some of the great outposts that I have seen were only played by a few people.
How to do it, in a way that doesn't punish new builders and over-reward excellent builders? There are many ways it could be done. Please discuss...
Comments
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Suggestion A: Let builders put their retired outposts in the active pools.
- When an outpost is retired, if the builders still wants people to play it, they can still keep it active.
- It will no longer generate rewards for the builder.
- But it will still be there for raiders to enjoy.
- It could be promoted more or less to raiders, depending if it is still receiving accolades.
- It could auto-retire itself after 90% of the playerbase have enjoyed it (or abandoned it).
- Perhaps it should be locked from editing? Perhaps not.
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Suggestion B: Tweak how prestige works.
I understand the current prestige system tries to promote good outposts, to an extent, but it has been made more forgiving since the playtests, which isn't a bad thing. Some suggestions:
- Prestige from levels 2-5 could remain easy to achieve, how it is now. New builders will not be demotivated by losing their outpost, and will have time to tweak it after watching playthroughs.
- Prestiging to levels 6-10 could become progressively more difficult, so the weaker outposts will eventually be weeded out. It should be difficult to reach level 10.
- The later levels could extend the duration of the outpost. So a level 8 outpost might live for a few days. And a level 10 outpost maybe for two weeks. (Well you can tweak the numbers. The point is that every raider should have a chance to play that awesome beautiful outpost!)
- (To balance the longer activation time, it might be suitable to reduce the builder rewards.)
- An alternative way to do this might be to cap prestige at 100 instead of 10, but ensure that 100 is very difficult to reach. So the best outposts will be seen by 10x more raiders than they are now, and good outposts by 5x more raiders.
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Suggestion C: Improve social raid discovery (simpler solution?)
- Let retired outposts go to social, as they do now, but:
- Promote the most popular social maps to raiders in the map UI (perhaps using ELO matching)
- Advantages: No changes to the economy, just some UI. Might be simpler to implement/balance.
- Disadvantages: Raiders won't get rewards for these raids.
- Additional suggestion for social discovery: After completing an outpost, offer raiders an option to "follow" the builder if they liked the outpost, making it easier to discover that builder's new creations in future.
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I would love to hear other suggestions from the community.
Post edited by noggieB on0