New Event Type Idea

Data1001

I believe this general notion has been brought up before, but perhaps not with these set of particulars. And although it is my understanding that any ideas presented here become the intellectual property of Tilting Point/Wicked Realm Games, if that is not the case, I hereby relinquish all rights to this idea to said company. Blah blah blah legal disclaimer blah blah.

My suggestion is to create a new event type using the Gauntlet framework.

Hear me out, though — unlike the regular Gauntlet, this would not be a player vs. player setup. That would of course be cruel and unusual to give others the ability to slow or reverse your personal progress in the event. Here's a basic rundown of how I envision it:

• First off, there would be three difficulty levels: Normal, Elite, and Epic. Each respective level would provide corresponding amounts of VP per individual battle.
• Everyone's "opponents" (the crew you battle) would be randomly selected from a list provided by TP/WRG, of one or two dozen crew per difficulty level. For example, for Normal, they might choose Away Team Neelix, Cmdr Chakotay, Seven in Blue, Persis, Brainless Spock, etc.; for Elite, a selection of Rare and Super-Rare crew; and for Epic, a dozen or two 5* crew.
• Here's the fun part: unlike regular Gauntlet, players are not forced to select their crew ahead of time and be stuck with their choices. Players can use any active crew in their roster for the battles. However, using main event crew in any single battle would give the highest amount of VP, bonus crew would get the next highest amount of VP, and any other crew would get the lowest amount of VP per battle. (Also, matching a predetermined trait might either give a VP boost, or give a slight boost to proficiency. Just an idea?)
• Similar to Expedition events, there would be rounds, and tickets for said rounds.
• Within each round, your crew would get progressively exhausted, like in Expeditions. (Your "opponent" crew would always remain at full strength.)
• Regarding spending of dilithium, you would not be able to revive a singular crew like you can in the regular Gauntlet. You could, however, spend dilithium to purchase additional tickets.
• Right now I'm thinking it's best that there be no Merit refreshes of opponents, because of the limited number of available crew per tier, and the fact that a refresh might bring you 5 very similar crew to what you had before, or possibly even the exact same lineup.

That's pretty much it. Would be interested to hear feedback from other players. Things to add, things to subtract, etc. And of course with the understanding that TP/WRG can legally use any ideas mentioned in this thread in any way, for perpetuity. (Again, blahblahlegaldisclaimerblahblah.)

Gib - Admiral Mariners

Data, So a combination of crew per skirmish and tickets per expedition. Sounds interesting.

Prime Lorca

I think I had a similar idea, once upon a time. Not so much detail. And I thought about loot tables similar to skirmish and some sort of currency like Intel, which would be gained from away missions.

I love the idea, @Data1001 , whether my little twists were part of it or not.

Edit: I dug up my old thread and I didn't have the away mission idea. But a less detailed version of this idea is in there.

Data1001

Prime Lorca [10FH] wrote: »

I think I had a similar idea, once upon a time. Not so much detail. And I thought about loot tables similar to skirmish and some sort of currency like Intel, which would be gained from away missions.

Edit: I dug up my old thread and I didn't have the away mission idea. But a less detailed version of this idea is in there.

Either it's because I'm "blessed" with a dearth of long-term memory, or because I didn't really read that thread from last year, but I'm going to go with the latter, and just say Great Minds Think Alike.

Yeah, I think it'd be adding unnecessarily to the complexity to have to do away missions or space battles on top of everything. And having tickets like in Expeditions takes care of that pretty handily, imo.

However, I think there's merit to your idea of making it easier on those people who don't have dil to spend to purchase extra tickets, and thus having it be part of a hybrid (at least initially). Or perhaps it could be something done as part of the new mid-week mini-events they've been considering. Or we do away with the idea of purchasing extra tickets entirely and award an extra ticket as a bonus for successfully completing one or more winning streaks (of lengths of maybe like 6 or 9 wins, for example) within one round.

Prime Lorca

Winning streaks is a great idea instead of my per-round lootbox.

My main hesitation on the tickets is a comment that Shan made (probably off the cuff) about not wanting another full expedition again. My other concern is wanting to make something significantly different and fresh compared to expedition. But in defense of the ticket idea: it would probably be easier to use existing code.

Bylo Band

Color me....interested but skeptical? Convince me this isn't an expedition with a different skin.

Data1001

Yeahhh, I think you guys are getting hung up on me saying that parts of it are like an Expedition. In actual gameplay, it'd be nothing like an Expedition. Yes, the ticket (and corresponding rounds) idea is cribbed from there, as is the fact that your crew tires (which they do in the regular Gauntlet, so…), but that's pretty much it.

The creation of the event should be fairly simple, once the basic coding is set up, as there are no paths to come up with like in Expeditions, nor any involved storylines to create, really. But WRG would have some income from players who wanted to spend dil on extra tickets, so that's a selling point for them.

And for the players, you could log on pretty much any time during the day and burn through your tickets whenever you wanted.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many different types of game mechanics available for potential new types of events, so anything from this point on is going to contain similarities to some parts of the game, or in a smaller way, to other existing event types.

Prime Lorca

Data1001 wrote: »

Yeahhh, I think you guys are getting hung up on me saying that parts of it are like an Expedition. In actual gameplay, it'd be nothing like an Expedition. Yes, the ticket (and corresponding rounds) idea is cribbed from there, as is the fact that your crew tires (which they do in the regular Gauntlet, so…), but that's pretty much it.

Expedition is one of those hot button topics, so please forgive us.

Data1001 wrote: »

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many different types of game mechanics available for potential new types of events, so anything from this point on is going to contain similarities to some parts of the game, or in a smaller way, to other existing event types.

I did a poll a while back and players are generally ok with using existing game modes to create new events. I suspect that this idea would be reasonably popular.

Bylo Band

I give you my word I was not influenced by your use of the word expedition, to me the description just vaguely felt like one, what with having three difficulty tiers, an entire roster to sort through, crew getting fatigued after use, and the ability to buy more tickets.

I'm sorry, I am supremely tired, I wish I could be more helpful presently

Dirk Gunderson

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

I’d also throw out there that I suspect the second biggest reason for the limited number of Expeditions, besides the effort level required to tailor nodes for the event crew, is that tickets being the only thing for sale doesn’t provide all that much revenue. What if another Skirmish concept was ported over and you could pay a small amount of dil to get bonus streak rewards?

Prime Lorca

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

I’d also throw out there that I suspect the second biggest reason for the limited number of Expeditions, besides the effort level required to tailor nodes for the event crew, is that tickets being the only thing for sale doesn’t provide all that much revenue. What if another Skirmish concept was ported over and you could pay a small amount of dil to get bonus streak rewards?

That's a good solution to the search problem. And I suggested lootboxes too, so I like that, obviously. Would you make them the same lootboxes to streamline coding or go bigger to 20, 40, or 60 dilithium?

Data1001

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

A valid point, what with part of the issue of frustration with Expeditions being that it's a pain to scroll through and select your crew each time out. But I'm wondering if 10 would be enough. Hmm. Maybe it'd be fine.

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’d also throw out there that I suspect the second biggest reason for the limited number of Expeditions, besides the effort level required to tailor nodes for the event crew, is that tickets being the only thing for sale doesn’t provide all that much revenue. What if another Skirmish concept was ported over and you could pay a small amount of dil to get bonus streak rewards?

Another good suggestion, if I may add a minor tweak — I think 5 or 10 dil for a bonus reward after every 3-streak sounds like a good idea.

Dirk Gunderson

Prime Lorca [10FH] wrote: »

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

I’d also throw out there that I suspect the second biggest reason for the limited number of Expeditions, besides the effort level required to tailor nodes for the event crew, is that tickets being the only thing for sale doesn’t provide all that much revenue. What if another Skirmish concept was ported over and you could pay a small amount of dil to get bonus streak rewards?

That's a good solution to the search problem. And I suggested lootboxes too, so I like that, obviously. Would you make them the same lootboxes to streamline coding or go bigger to 20, 40, or 60 dilithium?

I’d probably leave them the same for ease of coding but a mini-event would be a great place to experiment with different price points to see if going lower or higher yields more overall sales.

Data1001 wrote: »

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

A valid point, what with part of the issue of frustration with Expeditions being that it's a pain to scroll through and select your crew each time out. But I'm wondering if 10 would be enough. Hmm. Maybe it'd be fine.

10 was a mostly random number. It could be larger, to the point where the limiting factor in the number of useful crew is the number of bonus crew with decent proficiencies plus the number of non-bonus crew with excellent proficiencies. I just figured that a cap on the number of crew would help because of two things: selecting shared crew in Faction events or selecting gauntlet crew can be a pain because there is no search function even though the boxes with names and stats are large, and selecting Skirmish crew can be a pain because the boxes with faces and stats are so small despite the presence of a search function. Going through the full crew list one time when selecting the crew you intend to use (which you could go back to later if you realized you made a mistake) rather than every time seems to me to be the easier UI choice.

Prime Lorca

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

Prime Lorca [10FH] wrote: »

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

I’d also throw out there that I suspect the second biggest reason for the limited number of Expeditions, besides the effort level required to tailor nodes for the event crew, is that tickets being the only thing for sale doesn’t provide all that much revenue. What if another Skirmish concept was ported over and you could pay a small amount of dil to get bonus streak rewards?

That's a good solution to the search problem. And I suggested lootboxes too, so I like that, obviously. Would you make them the same lootboxes to streamline coding or go bigger to 20, 40, or 60 dilithium?

I’d probably leave them the same for ease of coding but a mini-event would be a great place to experiment with different price points to see if going lower or higher yields more overall sales.

Data1001 wrote: »

Dirk Gunderson wrote: »

I’ve been waiting for a gauntlet-inspired event type for a while now and this looks like a pretty solid plan to me. I would, however, probably not have our entire crews available to search from...sort/search functionality helps, but if we kept it to, say, ten crew instead of the usual five in a gauntlet, I think it would provide a good balance of ease of use and crew flexibility.

A valid point, what with part of the issue of frustration with Expeditions being that it's a pain to scroll through and select your crew each time out. But I'm wondering if 10 would be enough. Hmm. Maybe it'd be fine.

10 was a mostly random number. It could be larger, to the point where the limiting factor in the number of useful crew is the number of bonus crew with decent proficiencies plus the number of non-bonus crew with excellent proficiencies. I just figured that a cap on the number of crew would help because of two things: selecting shared crew in Faction events or selecting gauntlet crew can be a pain because there is no search function even though the boxes with names and stats are large, and selecting Skirmish crew can be a pain because the boxes with faces and stats are so small despite the presence of a search function. Going through the full crew list one time when selecting the crew you intend to use (which you could go back to later if you realized you made a mistake) rather than every time seems to me to be the easier UI choice.

Ten seems a good number. 3-4 event crew (4 during mega events and re-runs), plus one additional crew for each skill. That's 9 or 10, so may as well go with 10.