How to properly add Player rewards, and Crew Objectives

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

How to Add Player Rewards into the Game and Community, while making Crew Objectives better at the same time.

Okay, so there have been many threads regarding good players rewards, and crew objectives. I have an idea on how to make both features good parts of the game, but first, I will explain what the current problems are with each subject, and how to fix them.

What could go wrong with Player Rewards:

It has always made sense to reward people who do the right thing, as it would discourage bad behavior and encourage good behavior, however this game is very open ended and no two rounds are even remotely alike, while this makes the game fun and unique, it makes it very difficult to decide on who to reward and for what. Some say people who do their jobs properly should get rewarded, or the person who goes out of his way to save another crew member or stop an antagonist, rewarding these kinds of action makes sense, but I feel that rewarding these actions will force the game to go a certain direction.

The other problem is what to reward people with. Giving exclusive bonuses to players may make sense, but if not used properly, people will only try to play a certain way, while treating any interruption to it as breaking the rules.

Ideas on Good Player Rewards without using Crew Objectives:

I have a few ideas on how to add player rewards, some of the ideas need to be explained after I discuss Crew Objectives so I will suggest the ideas that don't need them.

Revive Gibbed Five as a Private Server to host Special Events Once every two weeks, once a month, and once a year:

Before you read this please note that this is just an idea I am Suggesting, none of the admins as far as I know of have not suggested the idea so dont think i am announcing a new event or something

Here is the idea, over the course of a few weeks admins look over players who seem to be behaving well and have a good clean record, then the Admin would suggest that the player be invited to gibbed five for one of these events.

The events themselves would be different in scale, like the Weekly event having a Sandbox mode, or a team deathmatch mode. Maybe give players a chance to try out new features or items to bugtest and see if they would fit into the servers. The monthly event would entail inviting players who have followed the rules and conducted themselves properly over the course of the month would be invited. The event would entail more cooler stuff like a server wide expedition, temp admining for a shift, or a little teaser on new features that are being considered added.

Now the yearly event would be for the players who are always not shit, and are trusted not to leak information about what is said during the course of the event. The event itself would be kinda like a convention where new stuff is announced and features that are unknown to the other players, kinda like a State of the Station Address kinda thing.

What is wrong with Crew Objectives Currently:

Crew Objectives are a good idea to give players ideas on what they should do their shift, but they are the same objectives every shift, and they are also not dynamic to what occurs during the round.

For Example today I was a Roboticist who needed to have five medibots on station, during the shift QM ordered a bunch of medibots and put them on the escape shuttle, because they were not on the station when the shuttle left it considered that I failed the objective even though that is not the case.

Have a few starting objectives that rotate every shift, and add dynamic events that follow what occurs on station, like stop the blob in five minutes, or scan ten victims of people killed in a bomb blast.

How to add Crew Objectives together with player rewards, inspired by Exadv1's idea

At the end of the shift, people are rewarded points for each objective they complete, this includes crew objectives, dynamic crew objectives, and antagonist objectives. Players then use the points to unlock items they can use ingame. The players can then use to the Public market or something like a computer vendor to get their items, like Sombreros, Boots, Cats, and stuff like that. Admins could also reward players points if they feel in the mood, or take points away. Maybe even add a small casino into the game where you can gamble your points and items to get more points or different items(Like a Seedy Arcade that uses tickets?)

These are my suggestions on how these ideas can be implemented, feel free to add on to these ideas.

[Hard Boiled]

I want to buy a cat and name it! Thus, I like this idea a lot. I love it.

[Cogwerks]

IMO the only real good approach to Player Rewards is to just make all of the jobs more fun to actually do.
Also HoS is kind of a player reward already.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

Yeah I agree thats a good approach to it, this is just a different way to go at it.

[kyle2143]

Yeah, I agree with Cogwerks. Really the best way to incorporate player rewards is to make jobs more fun, from your suggestions, I think the only way to do that would be with crew objectives. But rewarding players with more objectives sounds strange, plus if you could make the objectives then they should be for everyone to begin with.

Also, HoS is a player reward and now that there is Mentorhelp, being a Mentor is also a reward. So now there are like double rewards since it's easier to be a mentor.

I sort of feel like the private/special event server will turn into an HoS server... Which I honestly wouldn't mind, but I have a feeling that 90% of the other people here wouldn't like it.

I gotta say, it sounds like if the suggestions are implemented then it would require a lot of additional work from admins. i.e. watching the "good players" in addition to policing the shitlords. And starting objectives that happen on the fly. What would happen if there were no admins on, then this sort of thing wouldn't really happen.

I think it would be funny to have special items given to certain players as a form of player rewards, but that sounds a lot like Hat Fortress 2 and wouldn't really do much to affect gameplay. Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing this implemented, I mean it could hardly hurt. Unless you really hate that sort of thing on principle. I don't mean to pick apart every little detail, but you know as well as I do that this sort of thing is suggested often and people are always hesitant to have player rewards in game.

I think it would be cool just to show what each medal is earned for. I mean, I've been playing for about 2 years I think and I still have no idea what those things are.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

In regards to the private server I was thinking it would like inviting good players in terms of their conduct not in regards to if they are mentors or HoSes, but yeah the monthly and yearly event were a litle over the top.

But I still like the whole concept of giving crew objectives point rewards so people can order certain items, Of course the items wouldn't be shift altering, just cool items that are not really seen unless spawned by admins(Engineer in a Box).

[Dachshundofdoom]

In regards to the private server I was thinking it would like inviting good players in terms of their conduct not in regards to if they are mentors or HoSes, but yeah the monthly and yearly event were a litle over the top.

But I still like the whole concept of giving crew objectives point rewards so people can order certain items, Of course the items wouldn't be shift altering, just cool items that are not really seen unless spawned by admins(Engineer in a Box).

...Engineer in a box is pretty damn shift altering, especially if it gets ordered by a traitor. But I know what you're talking about overall. It'd be sort of cool if you could create something like a ridable cat because you were a good player, but at the same time it opens up so many possibilities for abuse (spawn a ridable cat, use the fact that it's basically a segway to break out of the brig or knock down a traitor). Not to mention, cool shit only stays cool if it's rare. The saxophone is pretty cool, because there's only one. It was even cooler when there wasn't one on the station normally. If everyone who wasn't terrible could spawn the damn things, the sax would become common, and suddenly there's no real reason to fistfight over the thing or celebrate when the guy dressed like a clown-owl shows up at escape with one.

Player rewards have always been pointless in my eyes. I'm just not the kind of personality that usually goes out of the way to get an achievement or who obsesses over collecting 180 different hats. I'm playing because I like the game; I can come up with my own stuff to do if my job doesn't interest me.

[Cogwerks]

In regards to the private server I was thinking it would like inviting good players in terms of their conduct not in regards to if they are mentors or HoSes, but yeah the monthly and yearly event were a litle over the top.

this kinda already happens, guess who we usually approach when we need playtesters for new stuff:
good players

[Readster]

I think this is a neat idea but I don't think it'd work very well overall.

For example, I know you don't intend for the extra server to be a Mentors and HoS' thing, but when you think about it, who are the players the admins are going to most notice being consistantly good? The Mentors and HoS'. Why? Because they've already proven to be good players and have already been rewarded for it.
I don't mean to say that the admins don't pay attention to everyone else, but their job kind of requires them to focus more on the bad than the good, meaning picking consistantly good players for the yearly rewards is most likely going to come down to all the active Mentors and HoS' for the year and maybe 3-4 players who got their attention. (P.S these people would probably pass a Mentor aplication if they applied anyway)

So...Hmm...I'm not quite sure how I feel about this overall.

[Niars]

Good player rewards and events, tied into one thing I thought up yesterday.

We've all been in the situation where we're sitting in deadchat, realising the round is going to go on another 60 minutes because some staff assistant toolboxed us for our oxygen tank and the chef, being an irresponsible stain on society, has gibbed our corpses.

I think that there should be a new random event that allows dead players to rejoin the game, if only briefly. There are a few ways to achieve this and I'm sure the more than capable minds that lurk here will come up with more than I can, but some examples would be;

The Haunting - A peculiar solar flare boosts the strength of a ghost's ectoplasm, allowing them to interact with more than chairs! Cue a poltergeist rampage as station crew duck and weave their way through halls of hurled objects, gas tanks mysteriously switch on and light bulbs overload like a poorly contrived death scene from Final Destination. The Chapel would be a no-go zone, of course, and the Chaplain would be called upon to cleanse the station with a fully-automatic Bible and various religious battlecries.

Martian invasion - Telescience has done it again! Dead players are put into the bodies of martians who are pretty miffed that all their artifacts are being touched by grubby greysuit hands.

Ice moon away team, redux - The wendigos have 'extracted' information about the station from an expedition survivor, and have decided to group up and deal with the sky gods once and for all. Dead players take the place of the wendigo away team that somehow make it onto the station. Also maybe all the lights go out because this random event is directed by John Carpenter or something.


This could be something that could be used as a reward for 'good' players also. Perhaps their accounts could be flagged so that when (if) random events like this happen and they're dead, they get to do it/ get priority on doing it?

Mostly I was just thinking of things that the dead could do and it spilled from that.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

The more I think about the private server the more I think its elitist, I think I have a better idea regarding the points.

Let a crew use accumulated points from their account to pool with other players for special shifts,

Instead of a server that does this, let players who accumulate enough point over the course of a shift be able to start a player vote with other who contribute to the point total needed.The different shifts would be the ones that may or may not be in the rotation, like Gang, Revolution, Mixed, Spy, Nuke, and others. Of coruse this could only be done by players after a good portion of time so its not constantly used. This gives people a goal to strive for that does not interfere with a current shift.

[Cogwerks]

let's never ever ever bring back game mode voting
seriously

Game mode voting was fucking awful and usually ended with a bunch of people yelling and bitching all round because they didn't get what they wanted, or they suicide immediately, or they metagame like fuck because they know what the round type is. Any game type that isn't in the Secret rotation isn't in there because either a) it's not stable codewise enough to run without admin oversight or b) it's too much of a clusterfuck to let players pick it without some admins on, or c) it's something that is intentionally left as a special occasion and would get run into the goddamn ground right away otherwise.

[Cogwerks]

There's also a bigger question: what makes a good player?
Plenty of people who take their ingame jobs super seriously are also total dicks to other people. A lot of bad players are good at making a lot of robots or beakers of drugs or crates of wheat or whatever, but they contribute little substance and usually just cause a lot of problems if they don't get to lord over their dumb little domain for some reason.

If you want to be a good doctor, do it because it's fun. If it ISN'T fun, suggest ways to make it more fun. Same for any other job. Personally I would much rather focus on providing more ways to have fun than more rewards for doing boring shit.

Good players are good in ways that you can't track via code. Good players are people who really get into the storyline of a round and help to push it along in interesting fun ways instead of just seeking arbitrary points. The fun of doing that is already the biggest reward. We already do reward people like that too, they are usually the folks we pick for goofy admin nonsense, playtesting, private invitations to contribute to new content, etc. There's no need to formalize that with some kind of publicly viewable 'heh look how much the admins like me for my spaceman skills' stat tracker though. That just encourages people to be smug and horrible.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

I agree fully Cogwerks, I kinda thought my ideas would help reinforce that but it seems to rife for abuse to add any of these kinds of features.

[MEOW POW]

I think the best reward for being a good player is when other people risk their lives to rescue you when you're the one in trouble.

Like, when I'm a doctor the whole round, patrol and make sure Sec isn't abusing prisoners, and then I'm dying near open space or something and a dude I healed earlier is dragging me away to safety.

Or when I'm a good Roboticist, make plenty of borgs and people come to me to be borged, and actually don't pick brobot! That's always good. Then I'm being killed or someshit and the borgs immedately come to my aid when I talk over machine talk and plead to the borgs, it's really great and shows how appreciated you are for being good.