Grace Xisthrith
Member
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I'm interested about discussing the donation contest this year. You may note it's quite early to be discussing it, and that's totally true. That being said, I brought something up for Frostvale in October one time on the forums, and I was told it was too late to make any changes at that point, so I'm starting early.
I think the donation contest format from last year has a lot of pros and cons, and I think having players discuss their views on the topic could provide useful information to the staff in how they plan to run this contest. With that being said, here are my opinions.
I think players designing sets to be recommended and put in game is really cool, particularly given it's exceptionally rare player suggestions make it in game, relative to the amount of releases each year. The one exception to this is the stat revamp, which featured a ton of player suggestions, but I don't have totally positive views about that in the first place... anyways, back on topic. Suggestions going into game are cool, and it's exciting.
The reality is that organized groups of players have consistently "won" the donation contest, having the most popular armor set suggestion become implemented in game. There's a variety of reasons for this, I'd propose the strongest ones are: staff are more likely to make items more players are vocally supportive of, more players working together on ideas means "better" ideas are likely to be made (debatable for sure, and depends on your definition of better), staff believe players are more likely to donate more and thereby spend more tokens if they have a very high chance of getting the items they want. I think there are pros and cons to this. I'd assume a majority of token purchases eventually feed into this event, and I assume if people weren't sure what items they were going to receive, there'd be a much lower quantity of donations. Those are both assumptions of course, and I could be wrong, but it's what I believe, and it is the basis my opinion that the pros for the AQ team of the donation contest being influenced by popularity of a suggested set outweigh the cons from their perspective. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, to be clear. I think we should be pretty happy the game is still going after all this time, and I personally think that despite some of my gripes and complaints, the AQ team can do whatever they want if they can keep the game running and fun 20 years later.
With that being said, I'd encourage staff to directly state this this year if that is going to be the case, and to have a poll of some kind 2-3 weeks before the donation ends. This would presumably not change the outcome, but it would be a more transparent process, and I think that's a big positive. Three things related to that poll. Firstly, only accounts older than 6 months should have their votes counted, so people can't influence the vote unfairly. I think that would solve most fake vote issues. Secondly, I'm led to believe there is a forums polling system although it hasn't been used in ages. If there isn't, then obviously there'd have to be another way to do a poll, or it would be impossible to have a poll. Thirdly, I think potentially the results of the poll should remain secret until after the donation window ends, so that players aren't motivated to stop donating if the set they don't want wins. You could also say publicizing the results of the poll would make players donate more, and that might be true, I'm not a psychology expert.
Now onto other topics. Last year, there was a donation set, a community set, and a second donation set. I encourage staff to take steps next year to not have two donation sets. I think this could be solved by not responding with a solution to player complaint within twenty four hours, among other things. Something like, "we see there's a lot of player frustration with the outcome of this donation contest, we'll meet as a team and have a game plan ready to address this issue next week," rather than immediately promising a second set the next day. Overall I think making two donation sets is bad because it adds a large amount of workload to an already busy schedule. Our last class revamp was 18 months ago for example.
Another potentially controversial opinion I have is that the format of the community set last year was an overall negative. Mermazon took a lot of time to make (it seemed from the player side at least) and was a pretty funky set. I think part of that comes from items being released the day after the threshold was hit. Delaying these by a week, or perhaps two, or perhaps all the way until the end of the donation contest, might mean a more coherent set is released. But, that's actually not my ideal situation. My ideal would be having community rewards being something that takes relatively little dev time to implement. One big fancy player suggested set is complicated enough, but adding a second set on top is more workload, that again I think could be lightened. My proposal for an alternative, less dev time intensive, but still rewarding for players community goal is described below.
Quite simply, instead of making brand new items, return old items and make them accessible to everyone, just like Mermazon is to all players. I know there's been a lot of promises about rare items this and no returns on items that, but being so real, it's 2024. How many people are gonna be mad if an eleswapped conjure shadow spell comes out, or an eleswapped cometfall recolor is rereleased. Or not even eleswapped, just give the old ones a rare tag in the character page. All in all, what I'm trying to say is, the pros of saving dev hours returning old items, making new players happy returning old items, and the fun of returning old well loved items, greatly outweigh the cons of returning old items.
As for more details, I think the easiest way to do that would be to start an item clone thread, like the one LK started a while back to ease up dev time for new releases. This thread could be limited to rare items, or just have items of any kind (new or old) that people want cloned or eleswapped and given as community rewards. Limit each player to three suggestions, pick the most popular one of every item category, and call it a day. People would be able to vote, more players would have a chance to actually influence what items are given out from the donation contest (unlike the donation set, where it's a popularity contest and if you don't like it you've got next to no chance, or so I currently believe). So to summarize, instead of making a brand new set, I think devs should have players open up about what older items they'd like to see return or have elemental clones of, and add those in as threshold rewards instead, thus saving dev time, giving more players agency in the donation contest, and still motivating players to donate more.
Finally, let's say hypothetically, the art for the community set is already done. I think that's awesome and I love the AQ artists, but I don't think the art being done should necessarily force the coders into making a set out of it immediately. Depending on the situation, could it be totally possible to release the set later in the year (as frostvale items potentially? Or GGBs? Or the summer quest saga?) and not pump all the dev hours into the donation contest. If that's impossible though, then of course a lot of my suggestions would be out the window.
These are my opinions, I'd love to see discussion, and I wonder what ideas other players agree and disagree with. Let's have a polite discussion everybody!
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