What are planets actually for?
Posted: 17 Oct 2011, 09:49
This is what I have found regarding what Planets are for (which we can summerised in a few points, see below)Some expenses
-Transaction 10 planets for the buyer, but 3 for free per day and per title. Since the transaction are now without taxes, it is done to avoid too many transactions for our master servers.
-Solo 10 planets per official try, but 5 for free per day for a title. Again, it is done to reduce the load of the master servers and also to add a competitive feeling to the official try.
-Host Instead of making the host ranked only by number of players, we will create various level of hosting: 0, 10, 100, 1000 and maybe more planets per day. Server will then be sorted: 1/difficiculty 2/host rank 3/number of players. You can still host at 0 per day, no trouble about that. The goal is to enable a host that want to be more known and maybe offer other services than quantity of players to be able to be better ranked in the servers list. Or if a server wants more attention for some days, he can simply spend some planets to acquire it.
-Manialink around 100 planets per month to keep manialink booking of name, to avoid players booking too many. One will be given by title. There are now new rules about Manialink names to enable more availability. We still have to work on a sub-domain name system to make this rule more easy.
-Advertising ManiaPub will probably evolve with time. It is a key system to rule the visibility of other players creation, activity etc. More space should be available, like making an advertisement for a manialink about plug ins in the editor or a manialink that sells cars in the vehicule selection menu.
- Solo Official tries
- Server hosting
- Advertising
- Manialinks
Now that we have our list of what planets can be used for lets go into them a little more at a personal level, because I feel planets are going to end up to be just like coppers, nearly useless per the vast majority of players on TM:
- Solo official tries. +1 for personal level. There are already many people who have criticised about the 5min rule wait so no need to go into it again. I think its acceptbale to have to pay, maybe not each round but at least this gives a purpose to the planets in solo game, so I would back this up, for the most part.
- Server hosting. -1 for personal level. This of it in this way, out of the 60k players TM Canyon has, how many of those will host a server? How many of those will want to contribute to support another server in progress? I think people who were to donate would usually know the community of the server/clan. So again, at a personal level maybe 1000? 2000 players would be affected and have a little more of a purpose of the planets? Hmm... 3-4% of players that is. Sorry for the 96%
- Advertising. -1 for personal level again. Its a similar story to the one above. Look at it like this... who wants to advertise? I think server hosters and competition organisors, so that will be even fewer players looking to advertise, and thats no to mention where the advertisement happens, because I see very little advertisment when I go on TM Canyon these days.
- Manialinks. I don't even know if most of the players use or even know what they are, forget about spending planets of them...
I want to build on this. I want the community to build on this. To have a big purpose for planets would make the game more addictive, and have more of a direction and aim to try and achieve, rather than it JUST being a racing game. That's what it is ultimately, but there are lots of little hooks that can be thought of to try and keep more and more players in the game.
We need a better use for planets please!