Log on Incentives: Levelling Gatherer/Harvester sidekicks.

Many games have a similar feature and it is always good value despite its familiarity.

SOTA is working hard on player recruitment and retention and has its own log in incentive scheme: the recent requirement to actually log in to get your rewards for example, so it is clearly a direction.

What I envisage for SOTA is something very very simple, at least initially:

- Players get 1 (either random or selected) gatherer buddy for free, a miner, woodsman, herbalist, hunter maybe on achieving level (80?)...

- Further Gatherer's can be purchased for Crowns (income for Port)

- Gatherer/Harvesters are sent out on a (24?) hour cycle and return with limited amounts of materials depending on their skill level.

- The Gatherer's skill level increases with the experience gained on each trip and as they level up they are able to gather more and different (rarer) materials.

- Elaborations of this over time could be that gatherers acquire skill points and access the same or similar (simplified) harvesting skill trees as players, or potions to enhance gathering in some way could be purchased for Crowns (income for Port).

As we all know such game devices always tempt you to log back in to obtain your harvests, gain the npc experience and send them out again. Often as a result you stay in the game, do other things and get sucked it.

Balancing this should be easy, its just a question of tweaking how much material the system allows you to gather. The interface could be extremely simple: A static screen with an image of a generic gatherer and a 'send' or 'receive' button and a level progress indicator bar would suffice initially.

 

Sounds like Garrisons...

xD

 

....and I don't hate it... let's just not go full blown facebook or however the WoW mechanic went off the rails

I think it's an interesting concept. I would want to be able to specialize the gatherer for specific items or harvesting something specific. If I don't pick up the items, they should definitely decay after 3-7 days I guess.

 

Lol I don’t/didn’t hate garrisons, but the Facebookness of it

 

I'd rather do my own harvesting/gathering -- but I'd be happy if this was one programmable option among other programmable options for NPC minions.

 

Can we use fertiliser yet? I will just let that question settle for a moment.

Also this is something that seems to work well in Black Desert Online, sorta.

 

That was my thought precisely, Black Desert Online has a great system for this that works nicely, it could potentially bring some revenue to Port!