Feedback Forum 10/1/17
Posted on October 01, 2017The immediate question I have for you all concerns the Shadow Stage Pamphlet. When I updated the Lycus' Secret Quest on Friday, I set the special items to have a 1-hour cooldown so that the lab would not give out quite so many as previous experiments. This affected all special items in Lycus' shop, however, and the cooldown on purchases is site-wide, so Club changed it back yesterday to prevent that issue. I was away from the computer at my other job all day and celebrating a friend's birthday in the evening, which meant I didn't change it back or correct it before the experiment succeeded.
I want to be up front with you all about the intent behind these changes, because I know it's not an easy transition to make! Our goal with all Gem purchases on the site is to never content-lock something to be exclusively premium; we try to stick with "play for free, pay for convenience." Wanting to reward our active users for participating in events, we also decided to release event items through the Experiment Progress Bar feature. We definitely underestimated how many of these would be picked up with the one-minute cooldown timer, which is why we came up with an idea to transition out of using the Experiment Progress releases for events by having a one-hour cooldown timer. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as planned.
So my question for you all is: which of these solutions would you prefer?
1. Delete all extra Shadow Stage Pamphlets from each user's inventory, so that each user only has a maximum of 5.
2. Allow users to collect as many event items as they want, but only allow them to be used until October 20.
3. Same as #2, but also keep releasing the event items through the Experiment Progress Bar in the future, with a 24-hour limit on use. (That would mean if you picked up an event item from the Lab, you could use it anytime within the next 24 hours. After those 24 hours, it would be an item with no use.)
4. Some other idea I haven't thought of?
Please keep in mind when making suggestions that we need to put a limitation in place. We recognize that newbies are having a difficult time staying motivated/interested in the site, but things like new Remnants are meant to be very hard to unlock, requiring months of work or a one-time payment of 1000 Gems. We've got plans in the works to improve this, I swear! Coding new features just takes a long time. Now that we've fixed up the Tutorial and sped up the backend on our slowest pages, we've got some great features coming your way soon. Take a look under the spoiler tag for more details!
Spoiler
Thanks to our recent Staff changes, I am slowly transitioning out of the event/writing side of the site. This should free me up after October/November to focus my efforts on getting more code and games for you! As much as I love running events, it's very time-consuming. Club will be heading that up for the most part once the September and October Events are over! I'll still occasionally come back to the writing team for some things, like events for certain characters that are dear to my heart.
Usually I would reserve this kind of information for a Behind The Scenes update, but I really wanted to show you what features are coming to ease the newbie crisis. My priorities for code updates are going to be:
- Improving the backend speed of Quest assignments. There should be only a minute delay between when you lose & when you receive your Quests once this is done.
- Switch the order of daily assignments so that new Quests are assigned before the 1 point of Reputation loss occurs.
- Create a "vacation" feature that can freeze Quest gain/loss for a minimum of 24 hours.
- Create a page listing all the NPCs, allowing users to see their Reputation at a glance.
- Create a new Kith Activity feature, allowing users to send their Kith on errands to bring them Shards. (This should help newbies and idle players get some Shards more easily than by grinding games or feeling "stuck" on Quests!)
- Create a Kith Quote trigger for Food/Book/Toy item use, so that Kith hint at what Personality points the item granted them.
- Create more involved games that aren't repetition-based, such as a maze or combat game.
One last question while I'm thinking about it. As much as we love interacting with you all as the NPCs, managing Trades and Messages has rapidly grown too much for our small team. While I'd ideally want to hire a dedicated writer to manage this if I could, we're not in a position where we can afford that.
What do you think about turning off NPC Trades and Messages? Also, we would be better able to respond to @ tags in the Forums and have NPCs more publicly interactive there if we made this change.
