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Mission Rewards


RugesV

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TTRT

 

Territory Tax Reduction Tokens. 

 

You complete a normal difficulty mission and above and you get a TTRT. 

 

You apply that TTRT to a single territory.  and it reduces the taxes owed on that one territory.  (not all, just that one). 

 

First 100 tokens reduces taxes by 25%.  1,000 tokens reduce taxes by 50%.  100,000 tokens by 75%,  1,000,000 tokens 100% reduction in taxes on that territory.  (To put that into perspective, even on the fastest mission 1,000,000 tokens would take 10,000,000 minutes, or 19 years to achieve, so not realistic, but possible. )

 

You can sell, buy and trade TTRT on the market.  But once you loose, sell, trade the TCU, the TTRT are no longer applied to it. (maybe inside the cash shop you can buy an item that will allow you to transfer ownership). 

 

 

 

I think the mission system your adding in is great. but if your only doing quanta rewards, people are going to hop in do a couple missions, go, Cool story bro, and move along.  You implement this sort of faction system and now you got people grinding. 

 

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17 hours ago, RugesV said:

 

I think the mission system your adding in is great. but if your only doing quanta rewards, people are going to hop in do a couple missions, go, Cool story bro, and move along

 

No one expected real, full-fledged PvE content -- I think it's unlikely that people will even do "a couple" of missions to be honest.

 

There's that few players now...I mean it's ~50 DAUs a day on Steam, dramatically down from even a few months ago. No one is going to come flooding in to try this version of PvE...especially when the "payoff" is DU's clunky, crude, boring version of combat.

 

For few the people still left, it just doesn't matter. 

 

17 hours ago, RugesV said:

First 100 tokens reduces taxes by 25%.  1,000 tokens reduce taxes by 50%.  100,000 tokens by 75%,  1,000,000 tokens 100% reduction in taxes on that territory

 

I think this is a valid idea, but unfortunately taxes aren't a game design concept, really.

 

They exist to control cost -- and NQ hasn't shown a willingness to relax on costs and likely never will -- as player counts drop even further, they'll not want to relax cost controls like taxes. If anything, they will go the opposite direction and try to reduce cost even more. 

 

DU is now at deadpool level -- there's a tiny segment of players still left, but no way to NQ to turn those players into profit...and it isn't physically possible to earn enough new players to make things work because basic mathematics around churn rates prove that the game can't scale as a subscription.

 

Adding this simplistic "PvE" won't change that math, even if they did add more incentives like tax credits. They could 10x or 100x the rewards...I don't think it'd matter. 

 

Hence why NQ's focus is on three projects other than DU -- and honestly I have to give them "credit" for continuing to dev this game in some form, because a factual look at the game's performance and future would lead most studios to shutter dev completely a long time ago.

 

Maybe it's goodwill or maybe it's hubris, but I am surprised that NQ is still devoting resources to a game that would need to ~1000x its playerbase to become profitable. 

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21 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

There's that few players now...I mean it's ~50 DAUs a day on Steam, dramatically down from even a few months ago. No one is going to come flooding in to try this version of PvE...especially when the "payoff" is DU's clunky, crude, boring version of combat.

I dont think the numbers are great either, But I also dont think they are as dire as people think they are. 150 new accounts have been created, paid and joined the game in may.  There is over 20,000 claimed and taxed tiles. Unless your 50 people all own and pay for 400 tiles each. 

 

Also I dont think it breaks the cost control. I doubt many territories would go over the 25% decrease I proposed. And the more that reach that level the better. Since if your investing that much time in a non tradable territory your less likely to let your account lapse and loose that territory. And at the end of the it adds more game to the game that is lacking game. 

 

And what I propose is not some overly complicated system that is going to take a ton of dev time to implement. You add a new data item. Same as adding a new schematic. It does not need a 3d asset, Just a spirit and an alias ID. (IE the code is already there for items, adding a new one should be simple).  When the mission is complete add 1 of said items to the players inventory. The player can move it around just like they can a schematic paper, from container to nanosuit and back. they can sell it just like a schematic.  When a player goes to a TCU they right click it just like you can now,  and under the advanced options would be a new option to apply TTRT. (again the UI is already there for this, should be simple to add in a new line with a command that now applies 1 TTRT point to that territory when selected).  Under your wallet, and territories where it shows "Name" "Status" "Fee due in" "Balance"  Add in a new column to show the amount of TTRT's applied to that territory. Add in a 2nd column that is called current weekly tax rate.  Now when the fee is due it removes this number from the balance instead of the flat 500,000. 

 

To me the above sounds super simple to add into the game. So simple that a skilled dev should be able to pump that out in a night if not a week. Granted I am biased in my thoughts on that, So maybe its harder then I think. 

 

As far as content goes, Its these types of game mechanics that are missing from the game. I would even go as far as to say delay 1.4 a week to implement this feature. 

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6 minutes ago, RugesV said:

But I also dont think they are as dire as people think they are. 150 new accounts have been created, paid and joined the game in may.  There is over 20,000 claimed and taxed tiles. Unless your 50 people all own and pay for 400 tiles each. 

 

That's truly horrible from a metric perspective any way you slice it. 

 

The most important metric for a subscription service is churn rate, without a doubt.

 

A large number of new players is not really a sign of health in a subscription MMO, not that 150 people joining in a month is anything close to a large number. Frankly, that's bad even for a single player game

 

That's only ~$2,200 in revenue -- do you actually think that $2200 is going to make up for churn in the same time period...? 

 

Even if 100% of new players resub in June, that's nothing for revenue...and I'd be shocked if retention rates were even 50%

 

NQ's employees would literally make more money for the company if they all ran DoorDash. 

 

20,000 claims is not relevant at all, it tells nothing about the number of active subs.

 

That's why DAUs are a much better metric, and DAUs show a steady (and dramatic) decline month-over-month...from a high that wasn't very high to begin with. Yes, ~50 DAUs doesn't tell you the total active subs either, but it's the clearest picture of real engagement that exists in the stats we have. It's a far better indicator than claimed tiles. 

 

Further, these stats are mirrored in every social channel there is -- this forum doesn't even see daily posts anymore...it had been almost 2 weeks since the last post before today! The reddit is similar, with it actually losing members and rarely showing more than 10 people online at a time.

 

This idea that the game is actually not doing so poorly isn't grounded in any sort of reality that I can see -- every view of the stats we have shows a steady decline since launch, a decline that's mirrored across every engagement channel. 

 

The stats are as dire as people say....even a single player game wouldn't be able to justify continued development with similar numbers, especially for a studio of NQ's size. 

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18 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

 

That's truly horrible from a metric perspective any way you slice it. 

 

The most important metric for a subscription service is churn rate, without a doubt.

 

A large number of new players is not really a sign of health in a subscription MMO, not that 150 people joining in a month is anything close to a large number. Frankly, that's bad even for a single player game

 

That's only ~$2,200 in revenue -- do you actually think that $2200 is going to make up for churn in the same time period...? 

 

Don't forget to take out the cut from Steam, which is 30%. At 12.99 euros, that would only be 9 euros that DU gets. That's only 1350 euros in the end.

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I think NQ has giving up on DU a long time ago, it is now a side hustle then can do when the other games compile and for shits and giggles of cause. nothing more nothing less.

The cost is properly absorbed in other project as they share resources, other wise it would just be a waste of resources.

 

conspiracy theory: It is test to see how long they can string players along and still make them pay, but even that fails as most left in 0.23

 

edit:

oh stop posting, we almost got to 14 days with no posts again. 3 times the charm for sure :)

Edited by Kurosawa
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5 hours ago, Kurosawa said:

conspiracy theory: It is test to see how long they can string players along and still make them pay, but even that fails as most left in 0.23

By now I am 99.9% convinced the only reason DU still exits, is to try and avoid any more bad PR before they launch whatever new products they are working on.

I mean.. Being NQ "the metaverse company" and self proclaimed "voxel experts" is not an easy sell for any future investors and costumers, when your only previous project using your "revolutionary voxel technology" has failed spectacularly both technically and creatively.

 

Another reason for just letting DU slowly whittle down instead of just closing it, is as you touch upon to avoid to many reimbursement claims from players with long subscriptions.

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This is why people dont post on here.  Every post turns into a discussion of dead game. And allot of the people who have fallen off the fence want the game to die at this point. So they are justified in their decision to stop playing. But this thread was not the discussion for that. This thread was about implementing a game feature (a low hanging fruit) that would have a drastic impact in the incoming update.  An update that is practically a make or break point for DU. So if we can lets actually discuss that aspect of what I propose.  Because again I believe adding only quanta rewards for these missions will set them up to fail. 

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3 hours ago, RugesV said:

This is why people dont post on here.  Every post turns into a discussion of dead game

 

That's wrong, though -- people don't post here because no one is playing the damned game.

 

It's the same on other channels like Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit -- no one is posting about DU anywhere. If it were merely an issue with people not liking the forum negativity, you'd see activity...somewhere on the Internet. 

 

3 hours ago, RugesV said:

This thread was about implementing a game feature (a low hanging fruit) that would have a drastic impact in the incoming update.  An update that is practically a make or break point for DU. So if we can lets actually discuss that aspect of what I propose.  Because again I believe adding only quanta rewards for these missions will set them up to fail. 

 

First, I don't know why you think this is low-hanging fruit. Anytime someone explains how "easy" it is to implement something, I have to roll my eyes. Granted, you do acknowledge that it's just your perception that it'd be easy.  

 

All we know is that dev has been historically very slow and that the project is 8+ years old -- that doesn't communicate a flexible, simple codebase to me where this would actually be "low hanging fruit". Tax rates are not likely so flexible -- it means introducing new networked variables for every TCU and introducing a level of dynamism in the actual tax rate recurring "jobs" that might not be so trivial. 

 

Also, we do know that NQ's dev resources are now split among 4 projects. We do know that player counts have only decreased since launch. 

 

We do know that NQ implemented taxes as a means to control cost; it has little to do with design

 

To speak to the idea itself...I'm not sure that this idea will be so impactful. 

 

Adding incentives like a tax break doesn't magically transform a poorly designed feature (like combat in general, to be real) into something engaging and fun. If PvE alone isn't enough to create engagement (which I 100% agree that it isn't), I don't see how any level of incentive will really make the game more popular!

 

In most games, combat and fighting is the engagement point...saying "this isn't enough and won't work" only underscores how impossible it is for NQ to make this game scale. Even with tax breaks...will that be enough to 1000x the number of players? That's what it'd take, at a minimum...and that doesn't even matter if NQ can't retain those players. 

 

I get that the community here is negative...maybe unfairly at times.

 

Still, the game's population and the reality that even NQ is focusing on other projects...that's completely relevant to every idea as it speaks to the core of how NQ views the product and what steps are realistic for them to take...and puts any idea in a grim but fair context: which is that the game needs a lot to turn around from where it is today. 

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2 hours ago, blundertwink said:

Adding incentives like a tax break doesn't magically transform a poorly designed feature (like combat in general, to be real) into something engaging and fun. If PvE alone isn't enough to create engagement (which I 100% agree that it isn't), I don't see how any level of incentive will really make the game more popular!

 

In most games, combat and fighting is the engagement point...saying "this isn't enough and won't work" only underscores how impossible it is for NQ to make this game scale. Even with tax breaks...will that be enough to 1000x the number of players? That's what it'd take, at a minimum...and that doesn't even matter if NQ can't retain those players. 

Your telling me you never ground faction standings in a game? Its game mechanics like this that help player retention.  You start playing the game. buy your first territory. run missions to pay for that territory, Run more missions to lower that cost.  buy another territory run more missions to lower the cost on that territory too. Dont have a territory to spend those TTRT's on? Sell them on the market for an even bigger profit per mission. 

 

We need people running missions. As missions are going to be the resource sink the game needs. Ammo is expensive. and will become the single biggest resource sink there is in game. This will drive the economy in all other aspects. 

 

And regarding your concern of reduced quanta sinks that is territory taxes. The reductions I propose is not going to affect it that greatly. 100 missions to get a 25% reduction. Thats 50 hours of game play (average mission is 20 minutes, and lets say 10 minutes to fly to location) to save 125,000 quanta a week. And I dont see many going over the 25% mark as the % drastically decreases at 25% and 50% and 75%.  

 

But now that we have these numbers out. Lets say everyone ran misisons to get there territories up to 25%. 20,000 territories times 50 hours is Thats a million game hours worth of content.  Assuming an average play time of 10 hours a week. Thats 2,000 game years worth of content. Or about $288,000 to NQ.  If those 20,000 territories ran 1,000 missions each to get a 50% discount.  Thats $2,880,000 worth of game content. Pretty sure with that sort of cash infusion they could implement a new quanta sink (But I dont think its needed, unless PVE missions infuse to much quanta).  And how much would it cost to implement what i suggest? What are the other downsides besides lower quanta sink? 

 

And finally the reason I think this is low hanging fruit. All the components are already ingame. The UI is already there to support it. You cannot tell me adding a new item in the data base is overly complicated. I mean maybe if you had to design a whole new 3d placeable item with animation.  But this should be nothing more then adding a new line item with a new ID coupled with a new icon.  Adding a new option to click when right clicking a TCU (they just did this with setting schematics bins, even moved it in a patch to a new menu area so should be easy).  adding a couple rows to the wallet territory UI to show status of TTRT's to the player(again the UI is already there just adding new columns.  And finally having weekly deductions taken from this new variable instead of the flat 500,000. (Which is an action already done on a weekly bases).  So its not like I am suggesting a whole new game mechanic like gas mining, thus low hanging fruit, pretty hard to think of a single idea that would have such an impact for so little cost to implement. 

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4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

That's wrong, though -- people don't post here because no one is playing the damned game.

 

I think it would be cool if we could have a discussion on here about what NQ should do.  Without it being steamrolled with comments about what NQ might do, or what they've done wrong in the past.

 

It's one thing to say that NQ should do one thing instead of another, due to the current state of the game.

 

But if all someone has to add is that suggesting anything is pointless, i think the mature thing to do would be to take their own advice and just move on.

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