Events and Balancing playtime

Hello, Dear community,
Thank you all for joining in,

I have heard in past events and event ideas, one of the main concerns is how do we balance players that are online 12+ hours a day and players who simply cannot afford to be online for hours on end due to all kinds of reasons in a way that players who are playing more still have the advantage (obviously, playing should pay off) but players who cannot be online so much don't fall behind too far so that they are essentially no longer competing.

This sparked the following idea in me, keep in mind this is all very rudimentairy so I'd love some feedback and most of all, more ideas!

1. Offline resource gathering. I am looking to make a way for players to select a resource to gather while they are offline this would come down to about 40-60% of what you would gather while being online for 1 hour. (this would count minute based(Say you're offline for 1 hour and 21 minutes, you'd get 81 minutes of resources)) I'd need to run some tests to see how fast resources are gained. To balance this with players who are online, offline resource gain would be disabled after playing for X amount of hours?
   
   
   
2. Supply crates. Every X amount of hours spent offline you would gain a bundle of higher valued loot to balance out the lowest playtimes (1-4 hours a day)

Please fill in the Xs and give me all the ideas you can come up with! If you don't agree with these points, let me know as well! These are just ideas, perhaps I am overthinking all of this!

Thank you all for being an awesome community!
Kind wishes,
Jitrid

 

Not to sure about the idea of just implementing passive resources gathering across the board when you're off with out having to build something to gather it.
You could reduce the cost of the gold chunk loaders or perhaps a chunk loader just for resource gathering stuff that works on say ore miners or somthing.

 

I feel you! I had made this into the idea but not written it here! Just like the Multiplex portal, you would have to unlock your "Mines" or an item you'd have to click with.

 

How about a timer on say the mining world so if you spend X amount of time mining in a day you don't get the offline bonus. That would balance any type of idea like this.
Also there would have to be modifiers to this. For example hand mining is 1x time spent, query is 5x time spent.

 

so it becomes an idle game?
sounds cool

 

This is what I am trying to avoid by limiting resource gain while offline to an extend where if you'd be idle all the time, you wouldn't get nearly as much as when you'd play all the time. Could you elaborate your concern?

 

Would we be limited to one resource? Would it be possible to gather all sorts of rarer resources or are you limiting it to basic ores? What about wood or crops?

 

I'm not planning on limiting anything, but you would have to "Buy your way in" by unlocking it with in-game items, to make sure you're not mining diamonds 2 minutes into the event.

 

Or iridium

 

I think there must be a gating system where we submit ores/ingots/singularities (Avaritia) and be valid for such resource pools.
Like tier 1 would have copper, tin, lead, so and so.
And to balance that out, Tier 1 items would have greater chance per item, while higher tier ones would have lesser chance per item; it's like a shared pool of 100% instead of like a x% chance to get.

Regarding resource gathering cooldown times, I think it would be alright if the cooldown time is also equal to the time spent playing on the server. I haven't thought it through but it's just so to strike a balance in the offline gain vis-a-vis online gain.
For the supply crates, I think it's also safe to go for either same tiered system or for players who play less, a relatively small chance to get a higher tier item to compensate for the time they cannot or don't play on the server

 

What I am getting from this, please correct me if I'm wrong:

For example, I make my OfflineMiner - Gold by ex. crafting a wooden pickaxe with 8 blocks of gold and get a maximum of 1000 gold in a day.
I make my OfflineGrinder - Singularity by crafting a Block of Dirt with 8 singularities but I only get a maximum of 10 singularities in a day?

Numbers are not final - just a way to indicate difference.

 

Well, that's a good thought too, a hard cap on the ability to gain resources.
What I was thinking was if it's more of like a vanilla Dungeon chest/loot box method where there's a shared chance, from 100%, to get resources, like if tier 1 would just be iron, copper, tin, and lead, they all have 25% to drop from the supply crate. While let's say Awakened Draconium or Neutronium tiers would have significantly lower chance because they share the resource pool total chance of 100% with common items like Iron, Gold, Silver, Diamonds, Iridium and whatnot.

For the OfflineMiner/OfflineGrinder system, this could be akin to Fluid Cows balancing. Whereas Lava Cow would have a low cooldown after extracting fluids from them, and Molten Infinity takes 3 to 4 hours to get a bucket out of. We can make it so that common resources have a generation time of maybe 1 ingot per 5 minutes, and singularities maybe around 1 day or so.

Those numbers are just for scale of reference.

 

I think planetboom nailed it.

 

Just a thought, Offline players get a small percent of what the online players got.
Ie Im offline, Wyndman goes and mines 100 Iron ore while im at work. I log on and get like, 25 Iron ore.
He still has more then me because of his playtime but im not super left in the dust.
This would still need a lot of balancing besides just x% goes to offline palyers

 

I don't get the problem. Just go by playtime on a server. If someone finishes the event after 20 hours within a week, he/she was faster than someone who finished it in a 22h uninterrupted session.

I think the question is more how you can prolong the lifetime of a pack in normal playing. It seems that only a few packs are able to hold a community that is interested in community building instead of rushing through a pack.

 

Without giving out too many details yet, this idea is for an upcoming event. It is not based on first to beat something but rather teamwork and resource gathering.

 

When will be launched event based on building things? That's way you can get free spawn for new servers xD

 

We've had several of those already. Spawns aren't really an issue since we have a build team who make great spawns lol

 

wouldnt this make it better to have loads of offline players in your party to gain a free % of what you do? the idea sounds neat but theres no sense of achiving anything if you just go offline for free stuff

 

Thats why there is rule teams can have max X players - previous evet to Pixelmon had 2 players teams so...