Progressive inactivity bonus for major events and quests

[jhanschoo.5270]

So one of the problems in GW2 is that except for content with good rewards, old content tend to get dead, and not all of them are soloable. I was wondering if it would be alleviated by some form of inactivity scaling. This would be reminiscent of exp scaling on mobs, where inactive mobs can give you bonus exp. Events and metas that don't get run accumulate a loot bonus, and it doesn't even have to be smart; mere compounding unidentified gear rewards would do, and in fact be preferable.

[Randulf.7614]

It wouldn’t. If you did that, even if it attracted players, the inactivity bonus would go and players would realise it’s a pointless loop where if you do go to the event, you won’t get the rewards. Plus how would people know what has the inactivity bonus and what didn’t? 
 

Dead content is easier alleviated by either fresh carrots to chase (like the return to living world did so well) or improving the scaling so that more content is doable by smaller groups. There isn’t a huge amount of dead content luckily, but there are a few bits which can be frustrating players going through older maps in the seasons.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Randulf.7614

[Gibson.4036]

Never incentivize not playing.

Players are crafty, will figure out the reward sweet spot for not doing an event, and then you will have people yelling at others for playing the game because they engaged the event "too soon".

[kharmin.7683]

15 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Players are crafty, will figure out the reward sweet spot for not doing an event, and then you will have people yelling at others for playing the game because they engaged the event "too soon".

Ah, the old Queensdale champ train.  What memories!  Leveled my first toon to 80 that way.

[jhanschoo.5270]

On 9/20/2022 at 10:27 PM, Gibson.4036 said:

Players are crafty, will figure out the reward sweet spot for not doing an event, and then you will have people yelling at others for playing the game because they engaged the event "too soon".

I do agree that there is a possibility be insidious externalities, though I don't see them, but I don't see how it can work like having a sweet spot. In my proposal the rewards are just trash unidentified gear, and not very rewardingly. Any amount of time a community intentionally lets it lie inactive gives less rewards than doing it twice. The progressive rewards completing a quest would give you are hidden to save computational power and implementation effort. There can also be some degree of randomness in the progressive rewards.

 

Yes, players wouldn't know which stuff had an inactivity bonus, and which didn't. The point is to encourage diversity in the content each player plays, and building more community knowledge and activity in dead content, hoping for a lucky jackpot, that doesn't contain anything rare anyway.

 

Come to think of it, the progression of the progressive rewards can be personalized as well, and need not be something that can be reset by others. This is probably a better idea. In this other implementation, the rewards may be visible to the player. This would naturally give incentives to returning players. The progressive rewards should still not be very valuable, such that they should not displace farming the usual metas, but are eventually valuable enough that time and again one might run a grand tour of content.

[Gibson.4036]

1 hour ago, jhanschoo.5270 said:

I do agree that there is a possibility be insidious externalities, though I don't see them, but I don't see how it can work like having a sweet spot. In my proposal the rewards are just trash unidentified gear, and not very rewardingly. Any amount of time a community intentionally lets it lie inactive gives less rewards than doing it twice. The progressive rewards completing a quest would give you are hidden to save computational power and implementation effort. There can also be some degree of randomness in the progressive rewards.

 

Yes, players wouldn't know which stuff had an inactivity bonus, and which didn't. The point is to encourage diversity in the content each player plays, and building more community knowledge and activity in dead content, hoping for a lucky jackpot, that doesn't contain anything rare anyway.

 

Come to think of it, the progression of the progressive rewards can be personalized as well, and need not be something that can be reset by others. This is probably a better idea. In this other implementation, the rewards may be visible to the player. This would naturally give incentives to returning players. The progressive rewards should still not be very valuable, such that they should not displace farming the usual metas, but are eventually valuable enough that time and again one might run a grand tour of content.

It looks like you’re trying to have it both ways. The rewards wouldn’t be good enough to get players to try and game the system, but they’d be rewarding enough to make it worth doing content that hasn’t been done recently? 

Also, it doesn’t really matter if the reward systems are invisible. We already have a bunch of that in game, but players set up research pages and gather enough information to figure out such information.

 

[Khisanth.2948]

This looks like you are simultaneously trying to solve a problem that doesn't need solving as well as solving the wrong problem.

Pretty much all the events that people are referring to when talking about "dead content" have a timer. Finish it before the timer runs out or it fails so the idea is dead out of the gate.

[Randulf.7614]

1 hour ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

This looks like you are simultaneously trying to solve a problem that doesn't need solving as well as solving the wrong problem.

Pretty much all the events that people are referring to when talking about "dead content" have a timer. Finish it before the timer runs out or it fails so the idea is dead out of the gate.

Ignore my gibberish. This is it

[Veprovina.4876]

Yeah let's not have a "most efficient tactic available" for how much time has to pass before it's "profitable" to do an event like, seriously, you know people are going to try to optimise the crap out of it and that's the last thing we need in open world.

If Dragon's End is anything to go by, optimising, META and hardcore do not gel well with open world.

[Khisanth.2948]

42 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Yeah let's not have a "most efficient tactic available" for how much time has to pass before it's "profitable" to do an event like, seriously, you know people are going to try to optimise the crap out of it and that's the last thing we need in open world.

If Dragon's End is anything to go by, optimising, META and hardcore do not gel well with open world.

It would also turn into "waiting to have fun".

[Ashen.2907]

I can see some merit in the idea, but anything of this sort would have to be very carefully designed to avoid some of the pitfalls others have mentioned here.

[jhanschoo.5270]

20 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

Pretty much all the events that people are referring to when talking about "dead content" have a timer. Finish it before the timer runs out or it fails so the idea is dead out of the gate.

The primary reason why dead content is dead that I see is that it doesn't have rare rewards, not because of correlation with the content itself, considering that content frequently gets cheesed where it can.

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The rewards wouldn’t be good enough to get players to try and game the system, but they’d be rewarding enough to make it worth doing content that hasn’t been done recently? 

Well, that's what progressive is. Subsequent ley-line rewards aren't good enough to get players to farm it all the time every two hours, but they are eventually rewarding enough to make it worth doing every day (for some people).

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people are going to try to optimise the crap out of it and that's the last thing we need in open world.

People optimizing the crap out of progressive rewards means that they are going to do a grand tour of all the content in GW2, with varying frequency. I don't see how this is a bad thing.

Note, this is with respect to the personalized timers in my first reply, not as in the thread starter post.

Edited September 22, 2022 by jhanschoo.5270