What would make a good International Event?

[RonPope]

Future Server Event Suggestion

FIRST THE PROBLEM:

One of the biggest problems with the EoTW event and this Anniversary Event is that you're having servers compete against each other for the "fastest/most" prize. This is usually never fair and a huge demoralizing problem. Had you guys gotten rid of that as the factor of this competition, you wouldn't have a problem as much. Just dangling the 100,150,200% carrot prize would have been enough really. People are going to donate anyways to get the prizes.

But right now, a lot of people are pissed because the servers aren't fair and you're dangling this 'fastest/most' prize crap. People are not happy, because of a number of factors in the way this event is handled. (starting time, late announcements, unbalanced server merges, some servers have more active players than others. etc. etc. Also- donations are a bit unbalanced and unfair as well, some people donate more than others and end up getting the same prize as the guy who donates less or nothing at all. and then you had the whole hoarding balloons in hopes to profit when its all over through the provision house coin conversion. Too many problems here. as you can see. ) Server against each other competition is a failure.

I understand that this event helps 'sink' the economy. People donating stuff to get rid of things in the economy for almost nothing in return. Your goal is probably to create an economy sink and a sense of server team work.


SOLUTIONS:

1. DO NOT offer "first/most" prizes forcing servers to compete against each other. Stop the server competition crap. Don't do it again.
2. Create an event that is GOAL driven.
3. Create an event that offers donations some sort of 'chance' to win something.

During this event, I noticed some players decided to create a Raffle contest to give away 100,000 coins. I want to say these guys came up with a brilliant idea. The problem is the participation is mostly handled outside of the game. No way to honestly track the donations of course. Not saying that anybody has been dishonest with their submissions. And also there are people who don't participate because its too much trouble to post screen shots etc.

My idea is for a server event is to have a "Carnival Fair" or something. Where if you submit balloons, you get 'raffle tickets'. The more you submit the more 'tickets' you get. Each day there can be some sort of raffle. That will 'consume' all the tickets you've earned that day for the 'miscellaneous prizes.

The event window can be modified to keep track of your daily tickets. So each day you can announce. Here are the prizes for today. This can be the same each day if you want. So people can have a 'chance' to earn prizes each day. X number of Y prizes are given out.

Now as for the goal driven prize, you have a big meter similar to the balloons donations for the server. This will be the final event prize. Its the grand prizes. Basically, you can say if everybody donates enough balloons to get to 100% the first milestone of grand prize. It will be the grand prize used at the end of the event. If the meter reaches 150% the grand prize pool goes up! etc. Its like a growing jackpot lottery. The more balloons the server donates the bigger the jackpot prize. This will encourage team work across the server as you want the jack pot prize to go up.
It could be also that if these goals are met, everybody will win something, but also a few lucky winners will win the jackpot prize.

So the prize can be mixed up to be server reaches the goal, everybody gets the goal prize, and the jackpot prize has increased (only a few lucky winners will get).

So how do you determine who gets the jack pot prize. It's the total tally of all your daily tickets of course. The more you donate the greater your chance of winning the jackpot prizes. (this can be X winners.) maybe you can have 10 winners if goal is 100%. or 100 winners if goal is 200%. just another idea for making the donations even more enticing.


As you can see this event I described can solve a lot of the problems for a server wide event.
1. Donations now become useful to the individual with raffle tickets.
2. Goal prizes increases based on donations. Team work.
3. The more you donate the greater your chance of winning.
4. The more you donate the greater the prize will be and more prizes given out.


Please consider this as the next Event, instead of trying to do Server to Server competitions.


Thanks for reading. Sorry it was long.

[Dorotheus]

It is a fundamental law that Developers underestimate what players are capable of, this has proved true for every online game I've played including this one. It is now obvious that by nature of the servers, server v server will not and will never work. By the same token individual v individual will not work down to the level differences of individual players. This leaves us with a possible answer, guild v guild. A guild v guild competition eliminates the argument of favored servers since all competing guilds are on the same server. It does not cost more than server v server to implement yet may promote sales which at the current time server v server do not.

[Sto_Helit]

I have some experience of an online game that is round-based, with the goal of making the greatest amount of coins as possible by the end of the 3 week period. I will describe it in TSO terms:

1. Everyone starts with the same resources and at level 1, with the status of citizen.

2. The goal is to make as many gold coins as possible during a three week period, by whatever means, within the rules of the game.

3. The beginning and end of the event are clearly defined in advance, eg 10.08.13 - 24.08.13. About a week before the event starts, this is updated to Event starts: 14.00 on 10th August 2013. Event ends: 14.00 on 24th August 2013

4. There is one overall winner of the event, who wins a prize, Supremo Citizen status and his name in the Hall of Fame.

5. The top 10 players receive the status Super Citizen and rewards.

6. The top 20 players receive the status Advanced Citizen and rewards.

7. The results table at the end of the competition shows the position and amount of coins owned by every single player that competed.


This model works; the game in question has recently celebrated it's tenth anniversary and the players are still motivated to play and win a particular round. Each round is entirely separate to the previous one and the amount of coins that it takes to win depends on the people playing in that round. The winner of the round is unambiguous, as are the top 10 and top 20 players, since the results show the amount of coins each player owned at the end of the round. On a personal level, my highest position was 21st (out of 800 players) and I knew that I had missed out on the top 20 and Advanced Citizen status by 4k coins; that was concrete and acceptable.

This might be difficult to implement within the current servers of TSO. I would suggest something new; would it be possible to have an Event Server which anyone can sign up to, and everyone is under the same conditions at the start of each event? Eg, a bit like the Test Server, but for international competitions.

[Morpheea]

Hi guys

I have an idea to solve the transparency issue. I think at the beginning of the event like this one, or end of the world, everyone should have got a number they should achieve to get 200 %, so for example for balloons let's say 1 million on average. we do not know how many active players we have on the server, so we wouldn't be able to work out how much we need for a total anyway. as the event progresses, the numbers would go down across the server, taking into account the donations, so it wouldn't matter if you donate 1k or 200k, as the average for everyone would go down based on the donations.

so let's say first day you have to donate 1 mil to get 200 %, but after a week od donations it would be 500k, after 2 weeks 250 etc, going down based on contributions. it would at least give us an idea we are working towards, and I think would make people chip in more, as they would have a realistic goal.

at the moment it seems, that the more I donate, the slower we go lol

[veganbot]

+1 larill - like the castle idea
+1 Ronpope - like the raflle idea and dropping the fastest server

I will add, that the event must have a LOT less clicking involved, the balloon process is tedious and could have been made a lot better if devs had just given us the tools to convert as much of each resource as possible in one hit and the ballons had gone straight into the warehouse instead of the star menu,

Maybe the event could be an adventure that lasts for 3 weeks and instead of just being battles, it's actually a fresh island for us to build up as quickly as possible, as our individual islands build up the server score increases and our castle progresess in it's construction. we could have the raffle to win prizes to help build up our adventure island, it could have a few bandit camps to clear before we can build and we could exchange resources in the game to turn into 'event resources' that can be used to build up our island.

[Larili]

Lets face it, its clear to see that BB have so little faith in their own ability to run an inter server event, that they deliberately hide behind these obscure % targets, and depend on this veil to adjust the figures behind the scenes. Remember phase one, when it quickly became clear they had set the target too high and that it was clear not even their precious top German servers were going to be able to make it, they got caught red faced there . I asked a simple question of clarification on these % figures over a week ago, still keeping the faith......response from BB total silence. As someone posted, the ranking table could be being drawn up by the work experience student ( obviously doesn't work on weekends ), for all we know based not on balloons donated at all but on gems bought by players on those servers giving a set % rise in the time frame. We only `trust' that is not the case, without the figures to check we are left with nothing more, the problem BB have is that trust is wearing dangerously thin, they are two for two in a poorly managed inter server events, only a fool would give them a third opportunity. They may have listened to feedback from EotW, but they clearly were not capable of learning all what is needed in running this sort of event. All relevant information to be disclosed from the beginning, a clear target, a worthy prize ( based on the real `in game' values) a clear time line and a better assessment of each servers `active' players and there levels and access to game content, to ensure a degree of fairness. ( Interestingly I think the pairings between the German servers were quite good, and contributed to a sense of competition, but I also think that it is obvious that all the other servers were not given the same amount of thought )