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Closed Reward Member Activity With Points/Credits

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Wes

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Bearing in mind some of the challenges Star Army faces:
  • A lot of the forum activity has moved to Discord, which, while I love Discord, Discord doesn't belong to us and visitors to the site can't see what's going on in there.
  • Need people to post RPs instead of lurking or spending their time arguing in OOC
  • Members should be rewarded for what they're doing now, not how long they've been around
  • We want people to participate in existing factions, but we want a way for new factions to grow organically too
This suggestion is to install some add-on (e.g. DragonByte Credits) that rewards members with credits for doing the stuff Star Army needs:
  • Participating on the forum
  • Posting in RP threads especially
  • Factions that need help (e.g. Nepleslia) can have bonus points
  • Providing the best answer to Q&A threads
  • Providing the best answer to Worldbuilding Wednesday
  • Helping out with the wiki
  • Anything positive that helps the community overall
What could points be used for: Setting limits on stuff we want to allow, but don't want to just freely give out all the time like
  • creating a new playable faction (basically there should be activity to be able to make one)
  • creating new playable species
  • art commissions paid for by the site
Basically when a new player joins and wants to create some new faction, this would change our answer from "no" to "yes, you can earn that by being active."
 
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I think it could work, but what determines what factions need help and how much activity is considered "active"?
 
It seems like the current reaction system rewards members for posting well enough. The members with the highest reaction scores attained that mostly through constant and regular roleplay with what amounts to handfuls of post likes for OOC content thrown in.

Still, I do see the value in having "credits" to spend on unlocking things like species creation because it gives a hard metric by which to gauge somebody's experience and immersion in the SARPiverse. Saying somebody needs 3,000 Kikyo Coins to make a new species would be better than saying they need to be an "active member" for three months to make a species.

One minor concern based exclusively on what Wes said in his opening post about contributions vs tenure is that I'd assume existing posts on roleplay forums would be credited, leaving long-term members with a ton of whatever new currency would be implemented. And moreover, players who lean more toward JP participation (especially new members who join minor non-Yamatai non-Nepleslian factions that do a lot of JPing) would often be left out of getting "rewarded" for their RP — part of the reason why we'd always try to break up JPs for multiple players to post on plots I've been involved with.

Based on the vote count it looks like this'll be implemented. Just a few things above to consider above when carrying it out.
 
It's not like that Black Mirror episode where you need a certain number of points to be considered active or you get sent to the fat camp. The idea is people can keep doing what's fun for them and everyone will build up points just for being regulars and can go at their own pace. People who are more active in the community will just earn points faster so they can unlock more rewards earlier.

My challenge is to make rewards available that are worth something. I guess prices are yet to be determined for the stuff you can buy but I guess I can set them by like "how much am I willing to pay for X number of posts?" for the art. I could put stuff in the shop like Star Army patches. For new factions it could be something like "this amount of points is roughly equal to one post a day for 3 months" but groups of players could pool points to speed up the process (a good playable faction is one with multiple people invested in it anyway).

The JP thing is worth consideration and we can solve it by:
  • Players could just rotate the posters to spread it out over time
  • The player who got the points for a large meaty post could share them by gifting
  • Mods could manually pass out points for JPs on request with point vouchers
  • Breaking JPs into chunks and all the participants post a piece
 
I think the big draw for that is going to be the art commissions. I know I'm bad at getting commissions done for myself. Regardless of the structure of the points system, I think we do need to make sure we have enough to cover it. We are as Wes said, basically paying for people to come play here. That said, I am in favor of this as long as we carefully think through what we are incentivizing. To me, what makes the most sense is word count. I think that assuming for a moment a commission is ~$50. 100k words in RP is probably worth that. But I don't have Wes's perspective about site finances or exactly how prolific we are.

I think the best option for things that cost money is that it's an 'as available' basis. If there is $200 of commissions we can do, then there are only $200 available. If that runs out, then it's out of stock until we have the money for them.

One of the things we will want to encourage is spending points on things that don't really cost us that much money. Creating a new species/faction is a good example. I think we should have more things like that. We do want to have things that people can spend their Kikyo Coins on.
 
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I'm going to play the devil's advocate and bring up what I always bring up whenever this question arises (As it has many times over the past few years) and that's "What's to stop someone from farming out short and/or low effort posts/wiki articles to gain e-dosh?"

How can you keep people from gaming the system without also introducing an element of "Well I decide who gets the points and when and that's the end of it."
 
I've been on RP sites that gave you points/currency when you finished threads, based on things like word count and other factors.

I don't mind admitting that I gamed the hell out of it along with some other people who were essentialsly my accomplices. We would plan out multi-thread plots, figure out ways to have more things to write about, and post multiple times per day, often in excess of 2-3k words per post, all to get that sweet sweet currency.

The interesting thing is that it DID make us really active participants. We were excited to pull in new players and show them the ropes (currency bonus, new RP partner, etc), RP activity was very high, etc. I eventually burned out for various reasons, but I was certainly motivated until then.

The rewards were varied- more power for your character (narrative power, mostly- that didn't really have stats or anything), special races, in character followers, higher positions in the factions, etc.

We are currently pretty loose with all of that and I don't think it's a bad thing. I'm not sure how I feel about people 'buying' factions/etc- is that a healthy way to expand the setting? I see Wes' point that it's good for the site to have activity.

I'm also concerned about the maintenance of this system. Who does it fall on to make sure points are tallied up and distributed? Who makes sure that the posts aren't low effort lorem ipsum blocks? How do we make sure that Wes' wallet can handle the influx of everyone going for commissions (I'm just cheap enough to zero in on that as a goal!)?

While I have my reservations, I do like the idea. I up voted the suggestion. I think that we need to think very critically about what behaviors we want to encourage/discourage and the cost of those decisions while implementing this.
 
I'm not broadly traveled in the RP sphere, are there good examples of what other places have done so we don't have to figure everything out from scratch?
 
For fairness (and to make it less work), I plan to make this mostly automated. Posts that have more meat (e.g. word count) would get more points to discourage spam. The forum is small enough that staff can easily see when people are spamming it up with lorem text and make them knock it off. Staff will be able to also give out vouchers as prizes for special events (e.g. the SARP trivia nights I'm working on).
I'm not broadly traveled in the RP sphere, are there good examples of what other places have done so we don't have to figure everything out from scratch?
I would love to see some of these too if anyone has examples. My plan is to start with just a few things and kind of grow stuff organically.

We could basically start as a trial and see how we like it and if it helps boost activity.
 
So while I was looking for something else the other day, I stumbled across what are called 'ARPGs' where the A stands for Art rather than Action. The specific one I came across is called Anathema. However, I'm given to understand that there are a lot of others out there. I'm planning on doing some exploration of this ARPG space to see what is there.

The vast majority of them seem to run on the concept of a 'closed species' [We shouldn't call it 'closed species' I'm using this term because it's what is used in what I'm finding] to which you can purchase upgrades (often points for their point-based build) with points that are earned by creating art or writing about the closed species. What I think this means is that we could create a trial with a 'closed species' (perhaps new Neko type?) and see how people react to it.

This would require creating a 'bank' for the upgrade points and then keeping track of it. For the trial, I think we could keep track manually. I like the idea of

After considering some more I think what might fit us better is a sort of 'tournament of champions' simi-open RP where we use anouther game's RP system and we buy points in that using what we get from RP (I'd say RP involving that character anywhere on the site). We would use our already existing characters.

Edit: For anyone curious, I'm diving into https://tokotna.com/ as an interesting Art-RPG
 
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So I've been reading various ones and I think I've come up with an idea that would fit with Yamatai and our setting overall. Shadowboxes.
Basically a shadowbox is a box of items collected over a military career. In it, they can put ribbons, rank insignia, and other stuff. What I'm thinking are mostly varients and rare things. Although building a mindy using Kiyko Coins would be cool. I think we would probably want to somehow lock the shadowbox so it couldn't be edited without permission. Becase ICly their just a box of memories, they don't have to reflect the character's current status. Ex. even though in RP they have the rank of Joto hei, their shadowbox could still have a nito hei rank in it. And potentially vise sersa, having a Shosho rank in It after reverting to their permanent rank of Taisa. A shadowbox would follow a character, not a player. We could probably also use it to encourage art as well.

There are some details to work out. However, I feel doing something like this could see a big return on our investment. Especially over the long haul as we add more and more things to shadowboxes. (Like custom mindies perhaps?)
 
I like the idea of putting prestige stuff in a place that keeps it special. Maybe something similar for personal items and locations that aren't available to the entire RP? IE, if you want a custom sword or gun.
 
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Right, I was thinking that for our purposes, anything that's not available to everyone would be kept in the Shadowbox. For example, let's say that Wes raffles off "Uesu's old jeep" then that would also go in the shadowbox. The jeep itself would likely have a wikipage that would be linked to from the shadowbox. What I'm thinking is that there is a shadowbox namespace with "X's Shadowbox" being the name of each page that would then be linked to from their profile. At the bottom of the page would be a list of the approvals for the items in the shadowbox.
 
So, if I understand it, a Shadowbox is basically an inventory for players and not their characters?

What would people be “buying”, except for exclusive items (kind of a waste of effort to write wiki articles that can only be used by one person IMO ), since it’s worded that a Shadowbox is used to store things your characters already have or had?
 
>So, if I understand it, a Shadowbox is basically an inventory for players and not their characters?

Actually the exact opposite, it's for characters. Ex. It's Sacre's Battle of Gimmergold ribbon. Not Soban's.

>What would people be “buying”, except for exclusive items?

Non-exclusive items? Rank, Ribbons, Mindy parts, whatever else we can come up with to reward players for doing stuff. Rewards don't have to be exclusive to a single person. Cool looking variants on weapons.

It really depends on the thing. For example, I expect something like a Nito hei rank pin to be pretty easy and everyone can get one. The Taisho one would probably be one of the most difficult things to get.

For example, one thing might be a trophy that is won in a game of some sort, but the game happens ever year so everyone can get one eventually.

You joined after the battle of Glimmergold but you want the ribbon? 2500+ words on what happened to your character during the battle.
 
I think Soban's idea is less of 'buying things' and more 'collecting things'. Am I right on that, Soban?

My addition was for 'buying' exclusive/rare stuff, but those don't have to be new articles every time. Ideally it's more like a set of things that can only be gained through the system, like custom kits, customization options that aren't normally allowed, etc. The ideal would be 'cool options that don't effect the game' but it definitely needs thought put into it
 
It looks like this suggestion isn't super popular, perhaps due to people worrying about it turning Star Army into some sort of game (it wouldn't).

At the core of this is that people should be rewarded for participation in some sort of fair and automated way, and I don't see why people would downvote that. But there's a lot of ideas about the things that points could be used for and I think it has created uncertainty resulting in the suggestion losing popularity (from 5 to 2).
 
If people like the core idea, maybe we move forward with that and then carefully approach how the points themselves would be used?
 
I think I'm going to think about my shadowbox idea and present it as a separate thing. I'm deliberately avoiding more gamey aspects as we have been moving away from a simulationist perspective over the time I've been here.
 
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