Rewards, Economy and Monetisation Pt 3 (Economy)
In terms of the economy in the game, I came to a realisation that the currency earned for the player currently was in-line with the EXP they would earn, now this would be a bad thing because by a technicality there would no limit and the money inside the game would keep getting pushed into the game’s economy, effectively making it worthless. So the question arose is how could I limit the amount of currenecy earned by each player?
Restrictions
The player needed to be limited in how much they can earn in one time which leads on to players having certain challenges to complete, but these challenged shouldn’t limit the players potential the play the game. This inherently would also reduce playtime, but it would also give an extra incentive for players to keep coming back. With the inclusion of Log-in Rewards, which are already limited, the amount of currency earned by challenges should be done with a certain structure.
The player should only be able to gain currency from these challenges limiting the amount they can earn in-game, although with the addition of a premium currency being the Cosmic Credits, the value of the Galactic Credits can stay somewhat consistent. Additionally the player can earn EXP from completing these challenges, not a big amount but something to keep them going. Now what is the reason behind these types of challenges
The point of Daily challenges is that they would be split into two separate categories, Easy and Hard Challenges which obviously the Easy Challenges offer a little bit of currency and the Hard Challenges offer more. Now the challenges themselves don’t actually need a difficulty setting assigned to them, it’s more about having an increased amount of time doing certain tasks in comparison to the initial challenges but the player.
With Weekly challenges, there won’t be a specific challenge the player would need to complete for the week, just the player would need to complete a set number of daily challenges and would receive a reward for doing so. Mainly, these leads to other customisation options but the player can also earn a limited amount of Premium currency every week which would help with the store.
Seasonal Challenges would be at task all by itself. In terms of the how the player will interact with it, the concept for this game that these challenges are understood as a separate entity with the player trying to amass a certain amount of points. It could almost be considered as a separate EXP bar which doesn’t correlate with the Daily and Weekly challenges. With each ‘level’ achieved within the seasonal challenges section, the player will unlock a specific item related to the season’s theme to do so they have to gather a total number to achieve it. This will be capped at a certain point but the aim is to give the player a sense of something earned, but this will also not be affected by the season pass aswell and would be available to all players of all in-game skill levels.
Next Steps
Now it’s about defining all of these concepts for the player as the daily challenges are the main form of earning currency in the game, the player would like to know if it’s worth trying to complete any of them. The weekly challenges should help with this, as the player would know how much extra they can earn, but the daily challenges need to be defined to understand the economic climate of the store and cosmetics. Additionally, the seasonal challenges have been defined but as a set number that they need to achieve what needs to be defined is how this can be something that all players can earn and not sacrificing the potential monetisation of the game. Again, the model that is going for the game is allowing players to pay for things whenever they want to and not forcing them to pay for things that really change the gameplay.