I have a very serious question to all veteran players. Newbies can skip it.
We're thinking about finally adding premium accounts into the game. Those will definitely remove all ads and improve your CPU situation, but we're pondering additional bonuses.
The two we currently argue about are x2 ship repair speed and x2 skill gain. Ship repair is pretty tame, unless we're in planet warfare situation, where faster respawn will definitely provide an advantage to attackers (with premium).
Skill gain is a larger can of worms. So, here is the actual question:
- Assuming you're not interested in purchasing premium account, would you feel cheated as newbies (with premium) get to skill up faster?
We are very very fond of our veteran players (because they mastered the game, showed us lots of cool stuff, helped improving the game, gave us ideas, etc) so we really don't want to offend you guys. If the majority decides x2 skill gain is too much of a bonus, I'll fight very hard to stop it from happening.
Its kind of a half and half situation with skill points to me. There are some skills it really wouldn't bother me at all with but i could see a few like aim, evade, shield recharging and such that would quickly become unbalanced at double pace. As an alternative I would suggest the possibility of giving a small bundle of skill points with the purchase of a premium account that each player could distribute as they see fit with a cap on how many can be used in one category.
For example, the number is arbitrary but lets say you get 30 skill points on purchase to give you a bit of a boost but can only use a max of ten in one category to prevent anybody from just adding 30 levels of evade and being ridiculously hard to hit and so on. and this way its only a one time deal so the gap between players still distributes fairly naturally based on their play.
One other thought I had that may or may not be worth sharing is the possibility of a passive resource boost. In this scenario I would recommend it be randomly assigned which resource each player gets it applied too to avoid it becoming a way for people to simply increase whats already their best choice automatically though. So essentially, you buy the account and the resource wheel spins and says you get a 5% increase to argentum mining or whatever percentage you guys feel is appropriate and that person then gets a 5% increase to the speed of their mining on any planet that is mining argentum.
Obviously the % would have to be quite low but it would have the benefit of increasing what a player feels they can get from the game without giving an advantage that would allow them to hold it over anyone who doesn't go premium while at the same time giving them something that will last past that initial point of purchase and make it feel like their choice had a lasting effect for them. It might also add to combat incentives if players have a reason to want more planets of a particular type, but that's a sideline thought and may not happen at all of course lol.
an alternative would be to let the player designate a "home planet" and instead they get a 5% boost to all mining done on that planet regardless of their chosen resource.
There's a couple other thoughts kicking around in here but the only other one sorted enough at the moment to be possibly worth it is something along the lines of giving their equipment a decent % chance to not cost a cpu point on each use. That would extend their time in between captcha's which everybody seems to be after (I'm still riding happy thoughts from the increase to 30 lol
) but it would not be regular or consistent and so would not be able to be counted on by anyone trying to use bots or the like..... as far as i know anyways but that might not be very far at all.Edit to add: Planet starter kit?. 1 biodome, 1 quarry, 1 defense grid, and 1 warehouse with say 5 slots. Helps older players a little and makes getting that first one going quite simple for newer players...... not even sure how i feel on this one really, just figured id throw it in here.