ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

OK, this one will sound a little weird. I more or less stole it from Steam's "free weekend games" and MOBAs. Allow specific birth options for a limited period of time, regardless of whether the player has unlocked them. It wouldn't make a difference to the long-time players, but it would allow the new player to try out some advanced classes up front, and it would encourage the occasional player to play more often.

This has been suggested in the past, with positive response. I think it's a great idea!

Does this include the occasional 'free donator weekend' where non-paying members get to have a little taste of stone warden? I could see that aspect of it going either way...

I like the idea of a 'free unlock' sample every now and then. Keeps folks interested, keeps them coming back, and shows them what lies ahead. Are we talking about rotating the 'unlocks' around, or just opening everything for a weekend? (I'd vote for the former, or attach it to a (much more uncommon) server push, for a random class)

Making donator options available is an interesting idea, but not something I would argue for either way. As for the rotation, I imagined that a handful of birth options would be available for a period of time (a full week or a weekend being the most obvious choices). The granted options could be thematic, or they could be chosen randomly. Random is certainly easier to set up as a recurring event.

I was also thinking this could be an alternate unlock route; make it to level 30 (20? 25? beat the game?) with any class/race and you get it unlocked permanently.

So... would saved games from those classes become unavailable after the week(end)? Otherwise you might get people making a lot of lvl 1 characters to continue them later. You can also limit the players to one save for locked characters, but then there would be problems if they lost the save of a char that's still alive.
Weekend unlocks work great for arena style games because they don't last long. There is no saving, no continueing the story over the week. For this game, limiting by time will cause a lot of problems.

I could see it working in the form of for example short adventures. Each class gets a short adventure. Each week, one class' adventure can be played even if you havn't unlocked the class. Because it's a short adventure, the playtime limit shouldn't be a problem. (You know, unlike the time required to make the content )

I don't see any reason for such restrictions. Let people have fun!

NEHZ wrote:So... would saved games from those classes become unavailable after the week(end)?)

No, that would be silly. Right now there are tons of easy ways to unlock everything, so the various exploits that would be possible are inconsequential.

Unlocks don't exist to force players to earn them, they're to give them goals.

NEHZ wrote:So... would saved games from those classes become unavailable after the week(end)? Otherwise you might get people making a lot of lvl 1 characters to continue them later. You can also limit the players to one save for locked characters, but then there would be problems if they lost the save of a char that's still alive.
Weekend unlocks work great for arena style games because they don't last long. There is no saving, no continueing the story over the week. For this game, limiting by time will cause a lot of problems.

I could see it working in the form of for example short adventures. Each class gets a short adventure. Each week, one class' adventure can be played even if you havn't unlocked the class. Because it's a short adventure, the playtime limit shouldn't be a problem. (You know, unlike the time required to make the content )

Actually, I thought about exactly that. A possible solution is to make it a random server push by DarkGod. Over the course of a week, at random intervals they would receive a one-time use of locked class X. That would prevent stockpiling (especially in the case of donator unlocks), and allow you to push a specific class frequently over the week. Trick would be tying the one use unlock to the profile, not the character, so that once you had one, you couldn't get another till the first had been used. (make it available to be pushed to that character again upon the death of the first.)

Other problem with this is that only people who make a account for the game would get them, which would limit the audience, since not everyone does that. It also limits it only to those who can play while online. Though a weekend unlock would probably have to be tied to being online anyway.

Benefit to doing it this way would be that you could even push several different unlocks over several different days, but they wouldn't have to be for the same class. You could theoretically offer a random push for a random class. That would spread the joy around a fair bit, and if you made the random push uncommon enough, that would be fair and easy on the staff, since they could set it and leave it alone.

I'm not sure what that accomplishes. You can still just give yourself the unlocks through editing the files. It'd only change the behavior of players who cheat "legitimately", and in return, lessen the experience for everyone.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with stockpiling characters in this way, if that's what people want to do. It's a single player game, we're not competing with one another or anything. The whole point of the mechanic is to make the game more fun and appealing - put restrictions on that and it could ruin the experience.

No one really cares if you bother to unlock things legitimately. The point of the game is to have fun.

Had an idea that could be of use for this thread:

Instead of having a random push of a class, we could have a monthly challange class (or race/class combo (or maybe even race)).
Relavent files should be easy to push from the server when needed?

Would give players a new challange to try and something of a competition. A leaderboard would be a must.

Requires some work from the devs to setup and maintain, but it also gives them a way of [strike]experimenting on players[/strike] testing new ideas and giving out teasers, without any long term impact on the main game.

HousePet wrote:Had an idea that could be of use for this thread:

Instead of having a random push of a class, we could have a monthly challange class (or race/class combo (or maybe even race)).
Relavent files should be easy to push from the server when needed?

Would give players a new challange to try and something of a competition. A leaderboard would be a must.

Requires some work from the devs to setup and maintain, but it also gives them a way of [strike]experimenting on players[/strike] testing new ideas and giving out teasers, without any long term impact on the main game.

That particular code doesn't work here, sadly. (shame, try shrinking the line that 'shouldn't be read', or putting it on the same color as the background.) However, while I don't know that we would get a 'leaderboard', I could see them doing this for (****s and giggles) testing purposes, if nothing else. I believe they did something similar with the Fylish islands, where those who cleared the event were pushed a one-time orc race character. However, I only have secondhand information on that one... I'll see if I can dig the relevant post up though.

OTOH, weekend challenge characters would be... awesome. So much more motivation to play new characters/combinations. I vote yes for the idea, even if I think the dev's won't do it...