The Little Ideas
1) Saving more teams
This is less of a concern now we’ve got 18 teams, but it’s always good to have more. Back when we had 8 I found it very frustrating. I still have an album in my phone gallery called “Neo Monsters teams”.
a) Snapshot idea
This idea is to add these two buttons to the edit team screen…
- Save: Saves a snapshot of the current team into an album. You have to give it a name when doing this and it tags it with the current date.
- View Album: Shows you any snapshots saved. Here you can re-name them, copy the team layout (to paste into a slot) or paste a currently copied team to replace what is saved (also updates the date). The album would have a snapshot limit of something like 30 that could later be increased.
The main pro of this is it keeps our current active team slots clean. Rather than needing lots of team slots we can have a smaller number and everything else stored in an album. Also, perhaps the album can be coded to take up less space on our account than a team slot (if this is a limiting factor for why we can’t have 99 team slots).
Another pro is the album can be an easy place to organise if there are ways to sort the snapshots by name, date, etc. and we can scroll through them with a scroll bar.
b) More team slots with scroll bar
This one is simple. If there’s a scroll bar added instead of buttons to go through just three at a time then this could make it nice and easy to get to the team you want. If more team slots are added so we have, say, 30+ and a good scroll bar that works nicely then I’ll be happy.
2) Pity timers for egg hatching
There are three pity timers I want adding:
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(Mythic pity)
For mythics we get a pity timer that tracks all 10 packs bought, continuing to count from one egg festival to the next. If no mythics have been hatched in 19 consecutive packs then the 20th pack has egg no. 10 automatically upgraded into (one of) the featured mythic(s) in that egg festival.
Note: The chance of no mythics in 19 packs is roughly 15%. Here it’s guaranteed to grant the limited/featured mythic which may seem generous but it’s to ensure the game is giving them something good after the player has already been very unlucky. If abuse of this is a concern then simply make it a random mythic instead. -
(Legendary pity)
For legendaries we get a pity timer that tracks 10 packs bought only for the current egg festival. If no legendaries have been hatched in 5 consecutive packs then the 6th pack has egg no. 10 automatically upgraded into one of the featured legendaries. In festivals with 1.5x chance on legendaries the pity timer triggers after 4 consecutive packs with no legendaries.
Note: The chance of no legendaries in 5 packs is 13% and in 1.5x festivals the chance of none in 4 packs is 8%. -
(Limited pity)
For legendaries ONLY, we get a pity timer that tracks whether the legendaries we get are limited/featured or not as well as counting the number of legendaries in the previous pack of 10 eggs. This resets on each new egg festival. If 3 consecutive legendaries are not limited/featured AND there were 0-1 legendaries (no more than 2) in the previous 10 pack then the next legendary egg is automatically turned into a random featured legendary from that egg festival.
Note: Assuming 3 featured in the egg festival then the chance of 3 consecutive non-featured legendaries is 12.5%, but becomes considerably lower if there are 4+ featured legendaries in the egg.
These three pity timers work together to make the Gacha system properly reward people who are trying to roll for the featured monsters, as well as stopping anyone from being super unlucky with mythics. I believe it’s especially important to tackle unluckiness with mythics and reward those players with the featured mythic(s) because that will most likely affect the top spenders in the playerbase. Altogether, it may be a little overcomplicated but I think these will be the best way of tackling the niche cases where people get particularly unlucky. These don’t reward players with particular monsters they’re missing, only the ones which are being featured and people are expecting to get. Pity timers 2 and 3 do not combine to make anything too generous happen because pity timer 3 only triggers on getting legendaries and pity timer 2 grants a featured legendary, which resets pity timer 3.
3) Time extender (+ shorten-er) for PvP turns
From time to time we occasionally get a "bug" where a turn is skipped before the timer reaches 0 seconds (usually 3-5 seconds). This is most likely caused by desync between the player and the server. It's incredibly frustrating for players, even if the skip penalty isn't always that bad. Therefore, I suggest the following "fix"...
How about when we get a time-out like that instead of skipping the monster it gives us a message “click here to show you’re active” which appears for 5 seconds? Clicking that resets the timer to 10 seconds. Not clicking that button, or failure to take a turn in that 10 seconds afterwards puts the monster back as it normally does.
Also, it would be great to reintroduce the shortened turns as a penalty to people using lots of time on their turns in PvP. Like before, this will shorten the length of time you have for a turn to 25, 20, then 15 seconds if you are taking too close to the maximum time on too many turns in a match (increasing the time again if you begin taking turns quickly).
Lastly, it would be great to add the auto-surrender to anyone that fails to take any action with a monster for three turns in a row. This has seemed to be removed.
To summarise:
- Add a “time extender” to get 10 more seconds for a turn when the timer hits 0 seconds.
- Reduce the seconds allowed for a turn from 30 to 25/20/15 if someone is taking too long for each of their turns.
- Auto-surrender players if they fail to take an action with a monster for 3 turns in a row.
4) Gem sale promotions including 6* and 7* tickets
Simply as the title suggests, promotions offering 6* and 7* tickets as you buy gems would be very appealing to lots of players. At my time writing this, we're only getting promotions including rare ingredients which only appeals to the biggest spenders and the new players.
5) "Search by name" feature in the monsterdex
Simply at the title suggests, let us search for particular monsters in the monsterdex. We have some great filter options to find our own monsters in the list view but when you want to see monsters you don't own it can be difficult trawling through the monsterdex. Also, for newer players who don't know roughly when monsters were released they have no idea where to look in the monsterdex.
6) Mythic Colosseum as permanent content
Here’s how it would work:
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There are “Team XXX” for every mythic in the game. When a new mythic comes out a new team can be added (maybe slightly before sometimes to get hype?).
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The mythics are put into groups of 5, where you have to do 20 battles to unlock the next one.
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There are rewards for the first 50 battles you do for each team as well as the first complete of each difficulty. In total it gives something like 5-10 gems for each mythic.
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Battles also give you “colosseum points” which are lifetime points that give you rewards. These repeat every 10k and give you 1 gem, 1 rare gem, youth fruit, silver, 1 epic potion and 1 super epic potion each 10k.
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The matchmaking is against relatively current PvP teams that gets updated every few months.
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Ticket costs for the battles and hero exp are just like this event, colosseum points would be 50, 75 and 100 from the difficulties respectively.
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The mythic colosseum is not available until you reach, say, hero rank 80. This way the free gems should not affect early player spending and it will be something exciting for new players to aspire to unlocking that will let them play with all the mythics. Gems are gained at the cost of many tickets anyway.
So basically taking the same designs of this event but turning it into a place we can have fun playing with all the mythics and otherwise dump tickets to get some extra gems and rare gems at a very inefficient rate.