Topic: Bridging the new player gap (brainstorming session)
Hey guys.
With the recent influx of players from Steam Greenlight, we've been faced with a familiar question again: how to give newer players the option to somewhat catch up to older players without 1. making this option mandatory 2. making the game pay to win.
Here are the two ideas we came up with, but before acting on these we'd like to hear your opinions on them.
1. ICE (Integration Cycle Extender)
This idea is one that has been requested many times by many people, we just never got around to implementing it. The ICE would be an ingame, tradable item sold in the Perpetuum webshop that - when consumed - grants one month of gameplay. Basically this is a way for people to legally and securely trade game time with other players for NIC without inflating the value of NIC. This should help new players acquire some starting funds if they feel the need.
2. The EP catch-up game
The other issue new players tend to have besides the lack of funds is the feeling that they can never catch up to older players. In the past we argued that older players can only be more diverse in their skills, but anyone can easily catch up in a certain area. While this is still true to a certain extent, we realize this may not work forever as the game continuously expands and becomes more complex. This is a tricky question, and most ideas we discussed were shut down by the "this makes the game pay to win" or "this is just like increasing the monthly subscription fee as it introduces a semi-mandatory item to buy each month" arguments.
What we want is a system that enables three things: 1. It keeps the level playingfield intact, 2. It enables new players to somewhat catch up to veterans 3. It still gives veterans an edge
What we came up with is an optional EP booster package players could buy that would grant X amounts of EP (this could possibly tie into the ICE system as well by having an option on what to get when an ICE is consumed) - however the catch is that a player could only get extra EP in such a way until he caught up to Y% of the current maximum EP a player could have (so this would be a rolling limit). For example if the maximum amount of EP any player can currently have is ~1.000.000, these packages couldn't be used if a player is over... say 250.000 EP (25% of the max).
This way new players could catch up to a point, old players would still always be ahead without having to do anything, and a new player would eventually reach the point he's allowed to catch up to without using this option.
We'd like to hear your opinion on these ideas!