Dev Diary #9
Preamble.
With the restructuring of the progression rate, MP & GP rewards will be adjusted as well as the addition of a few features to help make it a bit smoother. Not everything laid out below will be implemented, since they may not work well. Think of them as beta features that may not get added.
Post Rewards.
Gain per post will be lowered to 10 MP / 20 GP from 20/40 respectively. The mastery/equipment upgrades will be reduced a bit as well to match, but not by half. The goal of this reduction is so we can add in more lucrative rewards elsewhere and lessen power-leveling through post spamming (see the first week of TS2 opening). There is a problem with this that I'll get into later.
Weekly Commissions.
Imagine dailies in gacha games. Here, it's once a week. This is a thread where you post and get package of MP/GP you'd get if you were RPing throughout the week. The numbers are tentative currently. You may redeem this reward on two different characters whether they are your main or alt. If you only have a single character, there's a 150% version, which is worse than redeeming it on two different characters, but it's free.
The goal of these Weekly Commissions is to help out people with busier lives, but want to keep up with TS. It's an even better deal for people with alts that may not get consistent RP opportunities.
Weekly Commissions will be quest mini-games where you roll to see how well you do at that commission, but there is no stipulation outside of posting in the thread once a week.
Mastery Commissions.
Imagine when you've capped out your masteries and expertise and your MP are just sitting there. Well, say no more. There will occasionally be commissions or events where you can trade your MP for GP. MP is an abstraction of skills gained over time, so it's basically trading time for gold. These events may be based on the ongoing event.
Expertise Commissions.
Expertise Commissions can earn you a set amount of gold per week based your rank (you do not trade your MP for these). Like mastery commissions, they may revolve around an ongoing event or is just whatever. Specific expertise(s) will get better reward, which gets cycled through every now and then.
Official Challenge Rewards.
With the lower per-post reward, we'll compensate by increasing the rate of challenges and events. Details on this are still murky since numbers must be ran and logistic must be laid out. We'll likely increase gain per post in event and will award a lump-sum for those who remain in an event until the end of it.
The one downside of de-emphasizing per-post reward and increasing challenge rewards is that it may pressure folks into joining events for the sake of earning rewards, whereas a higher per-post rewards let people advance at their post pace and not be pressured into joining events if they don't want to.
This isn't inherently a bad thing, since we have weeklies, but the additional pressure may not be worth it. I'm going to toy around with the ideas some more.
DM Challenges.
This would make DM challenges more desirable. The only downside is that it runs on the honor system. There may be a thread where DMs will post their completion status for occasional audits. As always, people who cheat or exploit the system on TS are dealt with very harshly (full resetting every character on their account or just perma ban) and if there are dubious DM behaviors, they'd get barred from DMing. I'm not entirely sure if this could work without some efforts from the staff, so it's highly tentative for the moment.
The other option is something much less taxing like unregulated custom items.
Outro.
As usual, if you have feedback or ideas, let me know. Thanks for checking in!
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