[CONCEPT] a progression system
It is no secret that i have been making a lot of minecraft servers. Thankfully whatever mental illness compelled me to do that is currently in regression but i cannot guarantee that i will not make another in the near future. And every time i make a server, i build upon the foundations that my previous work and the work of others on the field have built. The process of perfecting my live service shall never end. This post is merely another stop in that journey. Every try thus far has been met with the eventual fizzling out of the live service, no matter the improvement. Every time i find a mountain of issues to tackle, but at some point i thought that i reached a point where i couldn't find enough fault with the design or execution to say that it would fail. Yet, nevertheless, fail it still did, which prompted me to begin looking ways to foster and retain an audience. That search eventually had me landing on gacha games. I specifically enjoy Limbus Company's story, aesthetic and mechanics. It is a complete package in my eyes but i never saw the work that a live service puts into servicing its audience as important, since i am a game designer. It just kinda seemed like a secondary thing to support the meat and potatoes or worse a way to extract cash. But now i realized that i have lots to learn from Project Moon. So now i will try to fashion a live-service model into a minecraft server.
Following my previous servers, i am adapting this live service system to a Geopol. The issue with a geopol is that there's this catch 22: if there is progression, the players will blast through it and get burned out in two weeks. If the progression is ever reset though, then progression becomes meaningless, since why would you grind hard just to have all your work deleted.
In Limbus Company, there are little timeframes where things like mini-seasons happen. During those mini-seasons, players can obtain certain characters and also special currency towards unlocking those characters. What's the point in giving a crap about the special currency if it all gets cleared at the end? Well, all the special currency at the end gets converted to the persistent, common, overarching currency that the game has. That whole thing however gave me an idea! What if a Geopol could wipe every 2 weeks or so and reward its players with currency that persists and they can use both outside and inside the wipe cycle?
The idea is pretty simple. The players get to enjoy their short cycle of progression, with a new map, maybe some additions, surely new ideas and after the wipe is done, the value of their progression is accounted for and they are awarded a persistent currency which can be used to unlock cosmetics, collectibles or boons for the next cycle. The system makes way for both a breezy, snappy wipe cycle but also a feeling of constant progression.
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