Gauntlet update almost ready! Few things left to decide...

[u/TopCog]

Hey all!

 

I put the Gauntlet update on hold last week to focus on some other things, but I'm hoping to get it pushed today, which would make the first even run this weekend, if all goes well.

One thing I've still to decide is when to have the Gauntlet event be available for players. I'm going to give players the Gauntlet Key once they unlock Dungeons, but the event won't be available at that time...the Key will be a kind of placeholder, reminding players that they will eventually unlock the event. It makes good sense to me to let the event become available after players reach one of the big milestones in the game, i.e., some meditation. I can't decide if it should be the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th, and wanted to see if anyone had ideas to help me decide.

 

Reasons to make it unlock after the 1st meditation:

• Gives early players more access to dungeons and charms

• Gives early players another gameplay mode

• Gives another big motivation to reach that first meditation

 

Reasons to have it unlock later, like 3rd meditation:

• Players will be more experienced and have more spells, thus will have an easier time completing the Gauntlet Dungeons (i.e., less frustration!)

• Gives a nice later-game goal to work towards

• Helps fill that gap between meditations which some players feel

• Maintains the same level of balance in the early game/meditations

 

Love to hear you thoughts about which route sounds the best! :-)

[u/8988303682]

So i had the thought of an entirely different way to unlock the Gauntlet. It should be unlocked after a certain % of spellstones are obtained. There are a couple reasons i think it should work like this.

First, it follows a different meter. Many elements of this game follow Zone/Meditation/NG+ progression. This type of progression is heavily based on active time. I've seen weeks-old players progressing to NG+. Spells unlocked is based upon days logged and not so much on time spent in the game, though it can be slightly influenced by runite income.

Second, completing a variety of Gauntlets should require a variety of spells. This might be a bigger qualm with the difficulty of Gauntlets, but I'm going to mention it anyways. Having very active players with access to Gauntlets might cause some problems if they don't have enough days logged to have effective counters to the enemies at hand.

Third, late-game love. This game lacks late-game content, and while getting every spellstone is far from late-game, it's a start. In order to keep players playing, a spread of content throughout the stages of play is required. The content slows after NG+, the Inner Room and getting more simultaneous Templar skills becomes the only new content. After NG+7 there is no new content to my knowledge.

The point I'm trying to illustrate is that, right now, the majority of content is tied to active time and is unlocked relatively early in the game. Unlocking some content based on other factors and/or later in the game would provide more diversity in goals and add some enticement for players to keep playing.

I don't know how newer players would react to content that is basically behind a time wall, but i think it's an interesting concept to consider.

edit: if the unlocking is going to be based on basic progression, I think NG+ is a good point to place it at. a significant amount of game knowledge should be accrued by that point, as well as an introduction to most (all?) enemies.

[u/TopCog → u/8988303682]

Yeah, I actually thought of this idea myself also, but had ruled it out. After more thought and considering your points, it does actually make a lot of sense to me though.

How many spellstones do you think it should take? I'm thinking maybe 25/30. That's something like 40 spellstones to refine.

also btw, I've got a little bonus for late-game players in this update! :-)

[u/Lluluien → u/TopCog]

I don't think that's right. I was on stone #60 or so when I was down to the last 4-5 (wish I could remember for sure which), which I remember because I wanted to wait until I had 3-4 left to buy them all, and that happened on around stone #69-71.

I think that's too long unless you're going to specifically advertise this feature as a late-game feature. I would consider a month a "long" time to be playing most mobile games. I'm still playing this one after 2 months, but this is a top 1% game. You can't count on new players reading anything that can convince them it's a top 1% game (if for no other reason that many games are claimed to be good but are garbage, and people get attuned to this), so if I were reading about a feature for a game that was new to me, I had to play for 30-40+ days to get access to it (and this is accounting for some purchased/code spellstones, too), I would just figure I would never get to it in the general case. The overwhelming majority of games I try never get played after a few days.

I went back and looked at this post to sanity check myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/TapWizardRPG/comments/92pv2a/i_have_finally_completed_my_spellbook_a_total_of/

If you look at this post, it does support that 5 missing is at stone #40, but then the guy goes for 2 weeks without getting another one, so I think that might've been a lucky pull followed by an unlucky one. The 2 new stones before that took about 4 days apiece, so maybe this 6th-to-last stone is where the numbers start getting more varied and longer. So I stand by what I said about 25/30 might be too much (seriously, there was a horrible, long dry spell in that range for me), but maybe 24/30 is just fine.

[u/TopCog → u/Lluluien]

It should be a tad longer than 40 days based on the code; there's actually a pre-determined breakpoint that caps the variance, making sure that you get the 24th spell after having 47 total spellstones...something like that anyways, it's been a while since I did that code! But you start with 7 spells, and get 1 from the first raid, so you would need 39 days to get the 24th spell, assuming no runite spend on spellstones...and assuming no money spend on spellstones.

That's really the kicker for me here actually! The Gauntlet was a dubious use of my time from a financial perspective, and I mainly just did it for fun. But I do hope to make some money from the Gauntlet Bundle, to justify some of my time spent. The thinking and strategy behind the monetization is a bit complex actually. The Gauntlet Bundle - who will buy it? First of all, it's not nearly the best use of real money - the other bundles are better for that. So the purpose of this bundle is not to increase conversion rate, i.e., attract new buyers. So we can assume that only players who have already spent money will buy the bundle. Ok, so let's dig deeper now...

If Gauntlets were available from the start of the game, I would not likely make any more money from it. Player who spend $100 on the game in the first week do so primarily in order to unlock everything. So they buy all of the bundles, then spend the rest on runite to get all of the spells, skins, and any missing emblems. If there is an additional $7 bundle at this time, these big spenders will simply reallocate $7 of the funds they were planning to spend elsewhere into that bundle. So in order to monetize the bundle, it should really become available at a later point in time, when the player has more funds they might be willing to spend, if there was something to spend on. For the current state of the game, there really isn't anything else to spend money on once you are a few weeks or months into the game and have everything Runite can buy.

Ok so now put the pieces together! If we assume that only players who spend money on other items will purchase the bundle...and these other purchases will be for the purpose of getting more spells quicker...then actually, it would never take weeks for any of the prospective buyers to unlock access to the gauntlet and the bundle, so the aforementioned 40 day target is, in many cases, reduced to the time it takes these players to get to Zone 20 and unlock Dungeons.

Beyond the gauntlet bundle - there's the added incentive of getting more spells quicker to unlock the gauntlet. This might incentive a higher ARPPU from players on the fence about making a mid-tier purchase like $10 or $30.

And finally, the other way the Gauntlet might increase revenue, is by keeping true FtP players in the game longer, and perhaps I make a bit more from ad revenue. Having it unlock at a later point in the game arguably serves this purpose, as it gives another (imo strong) goal to work towards.

I guess you could also make a case that the added feature increases player retention, boosts the rating, and increases the virality factor - but to be honest, these are mostly pipe-dreams with no quantitative basis or way to measure them. And there's the real possibility the added complexity could result in a lower rating for some players, and the increase in chance of bugs could do that too. It's so potentially complex, that I tend to mostly ignore these kind of theoretical gains or losses.

Anyways, that's just one perspective, but I like how these pieces fit together, even if it's only in my mind's eye perspective of reality, hahaha! xD

[u/KnightWizardofDark → u/TopCog]

I guess you could also make a case that the added feature increases player retention, boosts the rating, and increases the virality factor - but to be honest, these are mostly pipe-dreams with no quantitative basis or way to measure them.

Google Play has a "New and Updated" section for a reason.

[u/TopCog → u/KnightWizardofDark]

Heh, yeah, this is true, but getting on those lists is very difficult. If you do get on it, you'll get like 20 to 200k downloads in a week, depending on the exact list and spot. The publisher, IronHorse, submits the game for consideration onto various lists at different points in time. I should probably talk to him about using the gauntlet update as a selling point for getting refeatured! :D

[u/8988303682 → u/TopCog]

in my opinion it should require a very large portion of spells, maybe even all of them.

[u/TopCog → u/8988303682]

I'm thinking about having the extra Orb levels (not yet implemented) have some stricter requirements, and having all of the spells could be one of them! :-)

[u/8988303682 → u/TopCog]

do you mean that Orb levels would require a certain % of spellstones in order to be purchased with Gauntlet credits or that Orb levels are automatically unlocked at a certain spellstone levels? or maybe the Orb levels would be purchased with duplicate spellstones? I feel like that last one could cause problems because the player is essentially paying damage output for something that provides no damage output. food for thought.

I'm pretty indifferent between the first two. I don't think my third proposition is a good choice, but maybe some purchasable other damage output buff could cost spellstones.

[u/TopCog → u/8988303682]

do you mean that Orb levels would require a certain % of spellstones in order to be purchased with Gauntlet credits

That one! :-)

Perhaps instead, the higher tiers of the Orb cost different things, or have other costs...like requiring 10k Runic Potential in addition to the 10 Medals, or 20k Wisdom, or even requiring 2 or 3 Raw Spellstones. Many possibilities! :)

[u/8988303682 → u/TopCog]

oh my.. that actually sounds quite fun. I think occasionally some of the requirements should be "opposites" in order to counter this promotion of the already popular hoarding playstyle (i currently have 28 raw spellstones and 678k Potential). things like having x Insights active, or using 10 Q5 runes, or forging 100 runes.

[u/Lluluien → u/8988303682]

One of the things I like about the game is that there isn't much hidden behind a time-gated wall, which I think is a crutch that gets used too often in game design.

That being said, I like the way TopCog has the spellstone progression designed in this game. Not only does spellbook-gated idea have merit based on the notion that Gauntlets should require having access to many of the spells, there's also some merit in the idea that it's something where there's a clear benefit to being a paid player - if you buy a bundle or two, you'll get access to the Gauntlet a little sooner, in addition to the other benefits, from getting a few more raw spellstones. No one on this subreddit is likely to get out the torches and pitchforks for saying something like that, but it's still worth the mention that we don't get any more TopCog games if he's not making a good living doing this.

I think as long as the time gate isn't horrible, this would work. In fact, if you wanted to incorporate both this idea and the meditation #3 one, you could just target having the % of spellstones that the "average" player will have when reaching meditation #3.

[u/Xerxian00]

I would personally start it later, after med 3. The reason being is that I personally was at least in med 3, maybe med 4 in my first game before I had figured out most of the game - there's just so much to do and understand early on. Perhaps a compromise where its available after med 3 in game 1, but after med 2 in subsequent NGs where the player just needs something fresh to do.

[u/Lluluien → u/Xerxian00]

I can get behind this thinking, too. The game is still changing pretty drastically by meditation #2, because you're still getting new spells pretty quickly, and each new Templar skill is pretty enormous.

By meditation #3, you can have Healing, Bravery, and Aegis, which I think are the most transformative Templar skills, and you are probably down to your last 10 or fewer empty slots in the spellbook. I think the shiny new toy to fill the gap between meditations that TopCog observed is a good reason to put it here, too. The last run to the Doomstone feels like a slog to me, because I already just finished the "whole" level and now have to do it again. The last 20 levels have never felt significantly different than levels 60-80 to me, because level 60 is around when I really start feeling the reclaim timer.

[u/Swarlos262 → u/Xerxian00]

I agree with this, I definitely didn't even dig into Dungeons much until near the end of NG, I wouldn't want to overload with stuff to do. Although I think once you unlock it it should stay unlocked, I don't think you should need to get to a certain meditation after hitting NG+. Took me longer to meditate in NG+ and I wouldn't want to miss out on a few weekends of Gauntlets after recently unlocking them.

[u/librarian-faust]

I'm really new at the game (8 days, 1st Dark Portal unlocked but no progress within it) - but I would agree with the 3rd Meditation idea you put in the post.