General remarks - gamification

[vazco]

Part of my daily work is building gamification mechanisms. I like Naval Action a lot, however I can see a few problems appearing from time to time. Maybe my advices would be helpful for developers. There's a large chance you already know a lot of those rules.

 

 

Problems I can see:

- many mechanisms are not balanced. Recently it's economy, the same can happen to politics etc.

- many mechanics that are not modelled in the game are being modelled by players in their communities. Some of the new ideas can block or break those player-modelled mechanisms a lot. In general it's safer to empower them, not change.
- some mechanics don't play well with each other - eg. minimum price for goods and inflation creates economy of shortages (just like communism did) and switches one type of currency (cash) to another (mostly labour)

 

 

Advices:

- it's good to define "magic numbers" that tell you how good or bad given mechanics work. For economy it's eg. amount of gold in circulation per player per rank. If it goes up or down, it's generating inflation/deflation and it should be balanced

 

- it's good to have monitoring mechanisms to monitor magic number in real time, as well as historical logs, and tools to compare them in different environments (eg. between nations). This allows you to check how new changes influence numbers. You can think about this as automated tests for game mechanics. It's worth to think about those numbers before every change.

 

- it's good to model tools that allow you to easily tweak results of those magic numbers, which could even change automatically based on results. For economy this could be eg. a price for placing a contract, an average price of goods from eurotraders, fluctuating labour cost, etc.

 

- it's good to model in mechanisms that introduce abstraction layer, eg. by introducing points as a kind of currency. This allows for much easier tweaking of the system afterwards, without having to worry about a few mechanisms working separately from each other. You already do this with XP and gold. It probably should be done with political influence as well, so that you can control it's flow easily.

- it's good to give players a reason to spend a resource that they can get infinitely (eg. cash) on something that don't have value, but gives you prestige, and best only for a given amount of time. This gives them a reason to value cash even after they reach maximum rank, which limits inflation. Time limitation and abstraction layer allows you to control level of influence of this incentive. You could use standard gamification mechanics here (give recognition, unique access, power over others, or mix of those).

- since you have limited workforce and funds (everyone does ), it's probably better to create just frames for players and allow them to fill in those frames themselves. This means defining only basic tools, without strictly defining rules. eg. In clans those rules will define themselves. It's enough to create some incentives and support mechanisms for the start.

 

 

[haemol]

 Maybe my advices would be helpful for developers.

 

there is no plural of the word "advice"!!!