-IDEAS: WHAT TO SPEND SPACEBUX ON-

[Fork]

Ok so i'll give many ideas on what we could spend spacebux money on. Most of them will encourage basing in pub/ others are just there to tempt players to play more pub + fun stuff that only we can dream about.

Now before i start, Lets add "Base kill points" + make it visable on the screen (if not from a command) for players to see what their current base kill count is. The kill count will start at 0. Depending on what ship you use and location (flagroom, mid base, lower base) each kill in flagroom will give you some many points. Killing in flagroom will give you more points than kills made in mid base/ lower base. Outside base 0 points. The base kill points resets each year (Jan 1st).

For example a warbird should get lower amount of points for kills than sharks (because its harder to get kills in a shark). A wb would prob get 1 kill point where a shark should prob get 3-4 etc. They would need to figure out what ships get how many basing kill points to make everything equal + prevent players playing only warbirds.

With a Base kill count system, its not that easy to simply get rich in a matter of duels and buy what you want:



Idea One: Buyable upgrades (will reset each year). KP= Kill points. (Note the prices is rough guide)

-Hold an extra: Rep slot (Choose Shark/ Weasle/ Lev): Cost $100,000 + 2k base KP (Need 3k base kills to upgrade 2 ships, 4k for 3 ships)
.....................Burst slot (Terr):............................: Cost $200,000 + 4k base KP
.....................Decoy slot.....................................: Cost $50,000 + 1k base KP (base kills required goes up if buying for more than 1 ship).
.....................Add 100 extra energy (pick one ship)..:Cost $500,000 + 8k base KP/ Upgrade for 100 extra energy (same price but 15k KP)
.....................Upgrade Lev bomb (lev)...................: Cost $800,000 + 12k base KP.

Super item (SI):
....................Double Recharge (one ship)...............: Cost $2mill + 20k kill points (NOTE: KP required goes up 5k if buying more than 1 SI)
....................Double Speed (one ship)...............: Cost $5mill + 20 kill points
....................Double Energy (one ship)...............: Cost $5 mill + 20 kill points

Party Mode: (affects everyone playin in pub)
....................Douple money gained from each kill/ end of round win (for everyone in pub) for 1 hour: COST $150K
....................Each kill in base will now double the KP (kill in flagroom will be 4 points instead of 2). 1 HR: COST $200K
....................Each kill in base will now quadruple the KP for 1 hour.............................................. ....: COST $350k
....................(If jackpot was added) Jackpot rises faster from each kill in base for 1 hour...................: COST $150K


IDEA TWO: PUB Duel alteration.

ATM pro players can gain money really fast from dueling people for any amount. This devalues gaining money from pub basing.
This idea suggests that: You can only challenge anyone for a duel for a max of $5,000 spacebux at the start, but you can buy upgrades so you challenge for more:

.................................Upgrade: To challenge for up to 10,000 max.............. Cost $20k + 100 KP
.................................Upgrade: To challenge for up to 20,000 max...............Cost $100k + 500 KP
.................................Upgrade: To challenge for up to 50,000 max...............Cost $250k + 1500 KP
.................................Upgrade: To challenge for up to 150,000 max..............Cost $400k + 3000 kp
.................................Upgrae: To challenge Any amount............................Cost $1mill + 6000 kp

Note players don't need to upgrade for them to be able to accept a challenge for high amounts.

IDEA THREE: Another Gamble mode (100 sided dice).

So you can type a command + amount of spacebux and a dice will be rolled and a number will be displayed from 1-100. If it lands on a number over 65, you win your money back + 33% extra. Lose and you don't get anything back (players might enter all their money in a lose it all).


IDEA FOUR: WEEKEND TOURNAMENT:

A tournament where you can only enter if you pay so much spacebux. The winning player will get all the money funded by the entry fee from players that entered the competition. For instance if it costs 10k to enter (for each player) and 10 players entered. The prize will be 100k. Perhaps a tournament where more luck is required rather than actual skill.

IDEA FIVE: Double squad
(one player only). Perhaps a player is allowed to double squad for a cost: $1mill + 10k KPs. (one season only ticket)


IDEA SIX: Various player/ staff funded items are up for sale on the TW website "items for sale" section. These can be bought from spacebux + Kill points required. Someone could make 10 TW t-shirts and put that up for sale/ tw related items etc and a cost of each would be shown on the website. Players that want to buy any of these items will have to play alot of pub and speak to staff to make a purchase.


IDEA SEVEN: NEW game mode:

There is a hidden door in the circle of asteroids (that go around pub). To play this game mode, a player would need to ride to the door, type in a command and pay $50,000 spacebux to get warped to the otherside of the door (to prevent other players from joining). Once completely outside all of pub, you have around 60 seconds to drive into as many prize box's as you can find. These box's will be spaced out everywhere in the freedom of black space. ?perhaps add mini maze's. Locations will change every time a player decides to play this. When the 60 seconds are up, the player gets warped back to the other side of the door (in the pub territory again) and a list of prizes will show up what they have won. This can include money from $1-100k (rare to get more than 20k per prize box)/ Base kill points 1-300 (rare to get over 50)/ Ticket to enter again/ prizes with nothing in it (common)/ You can buy an item from the Party mode list for free (see IDEA ONE).

Well if i think of anything else i'll add to this list.

Please post on this thread about what you think you should be able to buy with your spacebux/ or thoughts regarding the ideas above.

[bkgmjo]

1. Against everything that got TW successful in the long run. Would completely ruin the mode of just enter and play and turn this thing into some sort of RPG which is a total conversion of the game.

2. Sounds good to reduce the spam of challenges with high amounts barely anyone can take anyways.

3. More gamble games seems nice.

4. Got Lost?

5. Would be nice if amounts were lower.

6. No clue if it would break anything, twd people would have to rate that. I kind of like it.

7. Fan stuff has been sold a few times, could maybe get back, but not from in-game cash. Possibly as event win. If you make it payable from spacebux it gives an extreme advantage to some people who play the currently very poorly balanced bux reward system on the side where they gain masses, while some team players (terrs, sharks, turret guards, lt hunters) almost get nothing at all.

8. Something like this could work to get one time tickets for a thor, super or shield when you are lucky, when you remove those items from the normal buy mode that is. Would also have to be lower prices to enter and a pretty low chance to actually get those things.

I'd personally find it more fun and fair if you got awarded with optional bonus games like these by what you do in pub though, like being a baseterr for so and so long, shooting down 5 priv freq lts, gaining x bty in ships. This way you could really make people play in teams and not reward things like stealing flag as priv freq weasel or mining tubes randomly.


To have good ideas for what to spend money on we have to decide what we want this game to be though. The basic idea was "come in and play with equal chances". Since pubbux and overpowered super weapons came it moved into a direction that gives some players extreme advantages already. To the point where vet players refuse to use bux because the buys are too unfair. At the same time the game in pub also benefited from the dueling and some awards given for certain actions like basing.

I guess buys which do not influence game play like gambling, alternate tile sets by !command, personal houses in some arena, banners, home arenas for twd squads and so on would be okay and beneficial no matter what, just need quite some implementation work. However, if you want to get in !buys which actually have an impact on the game while sticking to the game idea TW was and still is mostly, they should be passively helping your team with stuff like extra walls against LTs, Opening extra doors to flagroom, bricks, radar for all and so on. Every !buy that dramatically upgrades a single players ship over what can be collected by greens goes against the idea of being equal and as we can see perfectly atm benefits only a single players entertainment while throwing off others, often even the own team (super-shark/jav). Also every !buy that actively harms other players like nuke, epidemic, roof turret or even game-killers like purepub only pleases very few or only one while killing the fun for many others. If we really want to add/keep this kind of thing in TW we need to completely redesign the game and turn it into a full RPG similar to distension or hyperspace. For some reason I doubt the common TW player really wants this. In the end if we want to keep TW, we simply have to reset all bux regularly as it used to be with the score you used to buy.

One way to make players spend more bux and at the same time reduce unfairness like javs being able to become killing machines from anywhere with a ton of shraps or lagrocketing to no end would be to make any buy outside safe charge an extra of 500 or base cost times 5.

[Fork]

Well personally it wouldn't be that much different to TW now cept there is alot more incentive to play pub. The only thing this encourages is more kills inside flagroom= more basing. <-- this is the main purpose of pub so i'm really confused why this would be against everything? Encouraging basing isn't the right approach? The idea only suggests there is a count on kills made in base (that players can see on screen/ type a command) and you can only buy things based on kill count points + money. This means to buy anything good or even upgrade your ship- you need to play alot of basing. This would prevent players from playing duel only getting rich and buying all the super items.

Forget about RPG, this idea is basically another money system but for playing base except in kills.

Perhaps certain ships get more Kill points (if that ship is harder for them to get kills) to make every ship fair. A wb would prob get 1 kill point where a shark should prob get 2-3 etc.

-The items that do advantage the players will literally take them months to get: Which could be a good thing? If it any buy doesn't influence the game in some way, we're gonna really struggle to get players to spend spacebux= more spacebux resets= players quitting

-If a player wants to play freely- how does this idea stop that? heh :P.

-Personally i would be willing to donate an TW item if a player can get 20k base kills and have $2 mill spacebux, i would know they played alot= keeping pub more alive. You would disagree? :P Perhaps a player can only buy one item per year.

[Bukkake Surprise]

I'm not willing to do jack shit for pub bux at this point (and only an idiot would be) because the fucking mods will just take them away without warning again. They were a stupid idea before and they are a stupid idea now. Naturally, we're stuck with them forever (both the stupid pub bux and the stupid mods).

I had 2 000 000 bux and many base kills, and what good did it do me? Everything's gone cause some fucking retard on staff decided to reset the whole scheme (losing players in the process). Good job, Krynetix.

That guy is like Obama. He comes in pounding his chest promising change, then ruins everything. In the end, he delivered what he promised, no? Things have changed. They've gotten worse, but so what? He never said "change for the better". Luckily I wasn't stupid enough to believe either of them.

Give me my pub bux back, you thief.

[bkgmjo]

Dieing very often in one session is rewarded with bux, might be a way to get them back?

[Bukkake Surprise]

I'm not interested in earning what is mine. I already earned it once, I'm not doing it again.

[Fork]

I'm not interested in earning what is mine. I already earned it once, I'm not doing it again.

Unless you were told by staff that they will never reset your spacebux and implented another method (as well as spacebux) to buying items (as I mentioned in the first post) that resets every year. Yeh you lose all your hard earning base kill points (to buy u a nice upgrade) but at least u still keep your mill or 2 to show that u worked hard last year.

[bkgmjo]

Actually staff(dev) members talked about regular reset of bux after the last one, but then I guess they forgot to make it a rule everyone knows before and wait for another few players to explode when the next reset comes surprisingly.

[Bukkake Surprise]

So...business as usual.

[Fork]

Actually staff(dev) members talked about regular reset of bux after the last one, but then I guess they forgot to make it a rule everyone knows before and wait for another few players to explode when the next reset comes surprisingly.

Well i think they need to plan carefully before thinking about resetting spacebux in the future, because (at present) the only main purpose of spacebux is to collect it, so removing this is naturally going to piss off people.

Questions are:

-Do they have to remove spacebux?
-Why reset spacebux?
-Why are players holding money and not spending it?
-Is there something we can do to tease them to spending their money?
-What impact will it have by removing spacebux? (very negative impact last time but ?because it was very short notice/ out of the blue)
-Could they make it so spacebux never has to get reset but another method to buy items (along with spacebux) gets reset every 12 months? (that method could be basing pub points).

People need to enjoy earning spacebux to spend it on something they really want (cheap/ very expensive items). They will then enjoy pub more this way. If they had to reset spacebux, there needs to be a year warning before they do it. This is so people can prepare/ work out some goals in their head I.E; Theres an item they really want to buy but is it worth going for it? Do they have time to achieve that goal before the next reset. After the reset, players will prob dive str8 in to trying to buy these super items knowing in their heads exactly when the next reset will be.

Summary of how to make pub more fun= increase the population:

-Develop things that people would love to try and buy (but need to play pub alot to buy them)- this is key to making pub addictive.
-Prevent players who only duel (and get rich easily) from buying nice items (because it makes playing pub basing for money pointless); Have a new system in place where points are awarded for each kill in base + them points determine what you can buy.
-Add a jackpot that goes up on kills/ streaks etc and 10% of the total is rewarded to each player on the winning team.
-If a majority of people want a change (like old lev bombs back), this could be an item on the !buy list (expensive).
-inform people when resets are going to take place and give them a while notification.

I feel that adding a jackpot will make people want to play longer as the jackpot goes higher... so i suggest to increase the timer to 5 minutes per round and trial to see what happens.

^When a change occurs, monitor the effects. I don't mean what people say, i mean if pub gets more active/ are more people playing pub now with this change?

[Shaddowknight]

There is no pubbux reset schedule because dev doesn't want to reset it often.
If we would make a drastic change to what you can do with pubbux, there would be a chance of a reset.
Your pubbux are fairly safe for now. The only thing that would happen that would cause a reset would be a move to our own biller. If/when we the move, you can be assured a pubbux reset would occur (wouldn't want people to steal names with large pubbux on them already).
A year advance warning is not gonna happen Fork, 3 months maybe (we'd send a newsletter email about it too).
Sure we could make a bot that you can basically create your name for the new biller on from our current server, but there would still be people who are inactvie at times who would lose both their names and their pubbux, and we wouldn't want those names "stolen" and their pubbux taken away.

[bkgmjo]

The latest moment naturally is when the variable on either the bot, the database or whatever else is involved cannot hold the amount anymore. While this seems far away with dueling and betting high sums can quickly change in a few years. People went mad for a few millions already, just imagine the effect of losing 20 billions without warning.

[Bukkake Surprise]

"Develop things that people would love to try and buy (but need to play pub alot to buy them)- this is key to making pub addictive."

No, this is key to making pub a job. I played this game (together with many, many people) because it was a whole lot of fun for years before the stupid pub bux were introduced. I'd still play even without the pub bux.

You shouldn't be able to buy anything except in safe. It used to be that way and it was changed...why? Nobody knows.

If there's a server move, I want measures in place to make sure nobody steals my name. If people quit over pub bux, a lot more people will quit over their beloved name of 11 years being stolen.

Hey, where's the place you could see the Continuum-branded stuff for sale? Weren't there Tshirts? And some other stuff? I think a Continuum Tshirt might be good. As long as it's not overpriced.

[Fork]

"Develop things that people would love to try and buy (but need to play pub alot to buy them)- this is key to making pub addictive."

No, this is key to making pub a job. I played this game (together with many, many people) because it was a whole lot of fun for years before the stupid pub bux were introduced. I'd still play even without the pub bux.

You shouldn't be able to buy anything except in safe. It used to be that way and it was changed...why? Nobody knows.

Not too sure what you mean about having items thats worth collecting spacebux for would make pub a job??? It still makes it a game, not real life lol. If many people play more to try and afford various items then that should tell you that the games moving in the right direction. Would the idea of having nice items stop people from doing what they want? No... it would be exactly the same but at least spacebux has a purpose and is more valuable to collect it. They do however need to be careful about what items people can buy and how easy is it to get them because you dont want too many players becoming heavily advantaged/ ruining basing experience too much to make things unfair.

It would have been fun years ago because more people played pub back then when it was always active at any time. I log into pub now and see for hours 1-6 people in pub while 30+ are in spec.

Removing spacebux wont help increase this population because how does this make things more fun??? + Spacebux hasnt been fully tested until u add in items people would really try hard to get (Something thats not been done before) so why remove it?

[bkgmjo]

Playing for items that are really hard to get can be an incentive to play more. At the same time if those items give a benefit the casual gamer will not get, it makes players uneven and removes the idea of being able to just come in and play on the same level as all others. This is generally called an RPG game, which is totally different from what TW and most other zones are. We have distension as RPG game in here. While some people enjoy it and it is a nice addition to the zone, it never managed to collect enough people for a zone on its own or even a 24h hosting. We also have hyperspace with a similar base and very very nice additions that could be a benefit to TW, but it's not really the most popular zone. Also look around for other games:

Freelancer for example is really awesome to play and similar to subspace, just 3D. But the RPG elements require you to be permanently active, which keeps populations low.

Starfleet Academy could have been a challenge to SS zones around the time TW became big, but RPG elements requiring activity killed every server sooner or later. Same fate with Starfleet Command I, II and III.

Every cool buildup browser game at some point gets stuck, because some players become untouchable for others.

Even huge multi-billion games like WoW have this problem, despite all new content.

And a reset for everyone, well this usually removes a big part of the players who built up stuff for ages.

At the same time games where people can just play managed to survive for a very long time, even without major costs to keep upgrading them and often hosted by very small communities: look at CS, Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, TW. So it might be wiser to build on the strengths of TW (which made it successful for years), than to keep experimenting with new stuff. Especially when other zones already died from the exact same experiments with completely new maps or ship settings.