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Soft Cap Sucks, & other suggestions (improving team, deeds, daily rewards, global refresh)

suggestions teams soft cap heroic deeds special missions updates

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#1 mogiks

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Posted 24 January 2013 - 12:49 PM

Currently, hitting soft cap (level 249+) is like a death sentence. Progress slows to a crawl and gets slower and slower the longer you stay. Most players quit the game long before soft cap, but the ones who do reach it, your most dedicated players, are not rewarded; if anything, soft cap feels like a punishment or unconcealed neglect. I hear increasing disillusionment from my fellow players at soft cap. I see decreased participation in the game, or people quitting entirely. This is not good for the game. It is not good to drive your most dedicated players away. It is not good to discourage post soft cap players from buying donuts due to the way soft cap works. That is your income, your business model, and you're ruining it with the soft cap experience.

PROBLEMS WITH SOFT CAP:
  • The amount of experience needed to level up is BRUTAL. It is impossible to level more than once every two days even if you spend FIVE HOURS EVERY DAY using all your energy; most players need three days or more to level up just once. The direct result is feeling far less rewarded for the time you put in. The experience jump is, in my opinion, far too drastic.
  • Due to levelling up less frequently, the amount of coin and experience you earn for missions does not increase as fast as it used to. Every day you use all your energy and spend all your coin on stats. Your stat costs rise and rise but your coin income cannot keep pace because you can't level up enough. This means your stat gain takes a huge dive and continues to go lower and lower as time goes on.
  • Due to levelling up less frequently, the items available in the shop, from villains, and through random drops do not improve as quickly as they used to. This means you cannot replace your items as often, largely eliminating any of the reward and excitement felt by getting new and better items. Attacking the villain in the hopes of getting a better item swiftly becomes pointless because you are not levelling enough to get any noticeable improvement. This also means level 249+ players who used to buy donuts to spend on the villain will no longer bother because there is little reward in it for them.
  • Due to levelling up less frequently, you rarely get a global refresh on missions, which means that as time goes on your missions get worse. After levelling all your missions refresh and you get a nice collection of hard missions with excellent coin and exp reward. However, over the course of the next few days, these missions will dwindle and you will be left with pathetic coin and exp reward for your time. This makes doing missions feel less rewarding. and makes you question why you are spending five hours for so little reward.
  • There is virtually no content specifically for players level 249+ except for parts of the special missions (which take far too much time to beat because levelling up and gaining stats becomes so slow after soft cap) or a few deeds (which become fewer and farther between - the gap between the level 250 deed and the level 275 deed will take AT LEAST 2 months of playing, and the reward itself for at least two months of playing 5 hours every single day to spend all your energy is... 2 donuts. 2 DONUTS?!?! COME ON!!). The majority of the deeds left by that point will require buying donuts or many long tedious hours of playing. There is, in essence, no way soft cap players are rewarded for their dedication, and what reward there is (2 donuts for one deed... SIGH) is so ridiculous as to feel like we are being mocked. New content lags far behind the soft cap; the latest zone, Paris, is for level 130+. At this rate we will not see a zone specifically for level 250+ for many many months.
WHY THESE PROBLEMS ARE ALSO PROBLEMS FOR PLAYATA:
  • Level gain, stat gain, coin/exp income and item replacement all take a huge dive downwards. Players therefore make less progress and feel less rewarded for the progress they do make; it becomes harder for players to justify the many hours they put into the game every day when they are not enjoying it as much. Players leave due to boredom and move on to other games.
  • The current crop of players at soft cap includes many people who bought donuts in large amounts previously. However, due to soft cap in general meaning players make less progress, donuts have less of an effect, so players are less incentivized to continue buying donuts, and may be driven away from the game due to boredom.
  • Spending donuts on a villain will become pointless: the item will not be a significant improvement, the coin reward will only be a tiny fraction of the cost for your next stat, the exp reward isn't even noticeable on the exp bar. As a result, post soft cap players who can do the most damage to the villain don't bother to attack it -> the chances of defeating the villain are slim to none -> none of the lower level donut buyers bother to spend donuts on the villain because they think it won't be defeated -> the villain cannot be defeated -> none of the lower level non-donut-buyers get the fun or excitement of defeating a villain. In essence, if post soft cap players have no reason to spend donuts on villains, it has a knock on effect for the whole server.
  • Players become disillusioned about lack of content and feel that their voices are not heard or the suggestions and desires of the player base are not being addressed. There is a lack of communication about what will be in future updates and therefore players assume nothing will improve much and they decide to quit.
  • Considering the experience they have had here, players will be less likely to consider playing or spending money on another Playata game.
In essence, the soft cap contributes towards your most dedicated players buying less nuts, losing interest or quitting, and this has an effect on the entire server, discouraging new players from staying and buying donuts. Even if you are expecting a large player turnover and a loss of interest from most players due to the nature of browser games like this, shouldn't you take measures to combat it and increase the longevity of the game in order to make the most of the player base you do have? Don't you realise that many of the players at the soft cap now are extremely dedicated and would keep playing for much longer if you made updates to keep the game enjoyable for them? Shouldn't you reward the players who play for a long time in order to provide incentives to keep playing, and make them feel that their voices are heard? Shouldn't you give a great gaming experience and give people positive views of Playata as a developer, so that you can build on the experience if/when you make more games, and attract players of Hero Zero who might like to play another game of yours?

So... well, I may have got carried away there and written a whole essay. But anyway.

MY SUGGESTIONS (BOTH FOR SOFT CAP AND GENERAL GAME EXPERIENCE)
  • Preferably raise the soft cap, or keep the soft cap at 249 but make the amount of experience needed to level up a little less (e.g. 200k exp needed to level up from level 249 to level 250, and increasing steadily from there.) At the very least this would make hitting soft cap less of a shock and increase rate of progress for those who reach it.
  • Add new content specific to soft cap, i.e. new zones, new deeds. Even better would be a new feature entirely just for people level 249 or more, such as some sort of game through which coin, exp or donuts could be earned, in order to speed up level and stat gain after the soft cap despite the increased exp requirements.
  • Make items, coin and exp income improve faster/more with each level after reaching the soft cap to offset less frequent levelling, or implement ways to get better items and more coin or exp, such as aforementioned game. In particular there is a need for more ways to earn experience. Someone suggested in the comments on Kongregate to have a new feature like working, but instead of earning coin you earn exp instead.
  • Make coin and exp earned in other features (e.g. villains, special missions, team gang fights) larger for players at soft cap. At present the coin and exp rewards for these things are completely negligible for anyone level 200+ and the rewards barely seem to rise as your level rises, if they rise at all. making virtually no difference to anything. In addition, improving the coin/exp reward for villains would encourage more higher level players to attack the villains even if the item won't be an improvement. Getting more people to attack villains will excite new players and encourage donut spending.
  • Add a way to refresh ALL missions in ALL zones, like the Christmas or Halloween missions do, but not exclusive to the holidays. This could be exclusive to soft cap players, or not. I suggest it should either be a rare occurrence (like a rare random event that pops up, or a rare mission which has a small chance of appearing every time you complete a mission) OR a "researching new missions" feature which will take, for example, 30 minutes or 5 donuts to refresh all your missions.
  • Drastically improve the rewards for deeds that can only be completed late in the game, to reflect the difficulty of attaining them. 2 donuts should not be the default for months of work reaching level 275 when you can get 2 donuts for other deeds which take far less time to do; improve it based on the effort it takes to get the deed.
  • Make level reached deeds closer together after the soft cap; for example, add deeds for reaching level 255, 260, 265, 270 etc., to reflect the difficulty in levelling after level 249. Also make more intervening deeds for days active. At present it jumps from 100 days to 365 days - that's a space of roughly 9 months. how about intervals of 50 days instead?
  • Add new deeds; Some sets of deeds can be completed quite early in the game and it would be nice to have more added so older players can continue to be rewarded for playing. For example, we need new honor deeds (the last one was 50,000 honor reached, and there are players on this server with over 150,000 honor now) and new deeds for number of attacks on the villain, and new "All Rounder" deeds, new duels fought deeds, new duels won deeds, new coins spent in a day deeds, etc. etc. It would also be nice to have some deeds for last strike on a villain, highest number of attacks on a villain, and 25 attacks on the same villain, 50 attacks on the same villain, etc., again to encourage people to attack and spend donuts on villains.
  • Add more special missions, make the level gap between each boss smaller so that you don't spend weeks on the same boss, and improve the items that are rewarded for beating them. (Sometimes by the time you can defeat the boss the item is actually worse than what you already have, which seems counter-intuitive; perhaps the stats on the item could improve by a couple of stat points EVERY TIME you hit the boss, so that your continued effort is rewarded.)
  • Add a new sound effect for when your courage fills up to 20 points, so that if you are away from your computer or looking at another window or tab, you will know that it is time to duel.
  • DRASTICALLY IMPROVE THE DAILY REWARDS AS DAYS OF CONSECUTIVE LOGINS INCREASE. At present, the rewards for reaching day 50 of consecutive play seem almost identical to the rewards you can get in the first few days. Shouldn't it keep getting better and better to encourage people to keep logging in every day? I.E. day 1: 2,000 coins, day 25: 15,000 coins, day 50: 40,000 coins etc., same for exp and donuts. Also a way to restore your consecutive daily login streak if, for some reason, you can't log in one day - perhaps by paying donuts.
  • CONFIRMATION MESSAGES FOR SPENDING DONUTS. The comments on Kongregate are full of people complaining about accidentally spending donuts. How about there is by default always a confirmation message that pops up before you can spend donuts. Then, in the settings, it is possible to turn off one, some or all of these messages off (one option for each feature - duelling, boosters, villain, etc.) so that people who regularly spend donuts can turn some or all of these messages off depending on what they regularly spend donuts on so they are not bothered by the messages when they don't want to be.
  • Increase communication between Playata and the players; tell us what will be in future updates so that players will have something to look forward to and stick around for.
Also, these are rather significant suggestions to how teams work so I'll group them all together.
  • First of all, make a high level requirement for forming your own team, or being the leader of a team; I think this should be at least level 50. This is because a lot of new players make their own teams without understanding anything about teams or the game. It may be wise to increase the coin cost of making a new team also. Otherwise there is a graveyard of empty teams full of new players who have quit the game. This makes the team list really cluttered, and makes it hard to find an active team to apply to.
  • Make it easier for new players who don't understand how to find a team to find a team: for example, add a feature where team leaders who are looking for new members can input a minimum level requirement for potential members. The game then has a button that players can press called "Find me a team" which searches various teams and gives a list of teams which are looking for new members and accept applications from whatever level the player is. Only active teams should appear on this list. This applicant level requirement will also mean high level teams will not be bothered by applicants from very low level players.
  • Give leaders and advisors a different colour text in the team chat box so that the things they say are more noticeable for other members. Also it would be cool :)
  • Give leaders and advisors of teams some extra benefits, for example a small boost to stats - 10% extra stats for the leader, 5% extra boost to stats for advisors, or something similar anyway. However, in order to prevent this from being abused, the coin cost and level requirement of making your own team should be quite high. Also it should not be possible to make all members of your team advisors, to take advantage of such boosts. Perhaps have a default maximum of five advisors by team. Anyway, these extra benefits would encourage people to be more involved in the team/social aspect of the game and lead their team properly. Or you could have a "member of the week" bonus voted on by all members to give a small bonus to one member for the duration of a week.
  • Implement a way to kick inactive leaders without contacting support: this is a very common problem.
Phew. Apologies for the length of the thread >.>
  • Maddog and zaobrioak like this

#2 dcasso

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Posted 24 January 2013 - 01:12 PM

Im also a lvl 249+ player and i am having the same issues. Im down at using about 80 energy a day or something in the area, because the incentives have gone away. Only reason for me staying in the game, is because of a great team to talk with. And the lack of features added to the game for nearly two months are appalling.

#3 mogiks

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Posted 12 February 2013 - 07:35 AM

Happy to see that two of the things I suggested have been implemented in today's update.

 

• You get an acoustic notification, when you gathered enough courage for another free attack
• Some heroic deeds got new tiers

 

I don't know if this thread influenced the devs' decision to implement these features (I would be very pleased if so) but either way I am happy. It was nice to open up the deeds list and see 11 of the new deeds already finished. Now just to wait for more of my suggestions to be added to the game in one form or another :)



#4 Rafael

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Posted 12 February 2013 - 09:47 AM

Hello mogiks,

 

We're glad you liked today's patch.

Of course our players' suggestions are the key to improve Hero Zero. That's why we always keep an eye open for your ideas, even when you think we don't. ;)

 

Best regards,



#5 Baka

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 09:28 PM

I really approve of moggys suggestions!!


Dark Þrúðvangr

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