In our upcoming game players will have the option to partake in voyages, they will receive a map and on that map are clues to buried treasure, we have already built the system for voyages but one of our dev’s insisted on crews, but we are stumped on how to implement crews without conflicting with voyages.
Our first thought was to pay every crew mate for the treasure when sold, but I personally see this leading to major exploits. We then discussed allowing the captain to divide pay as they see fit, but again this could lead to major exploits of wealthy players giving money away for free.
We are needing to move past this part of development quickly as it is only a minor feature compared to other things that need finished but the other things also rely on this feature so it’s preventing us from skipping this and coming back to it later.
It really depends on what your game is, how valuable your currency is, and how bad it would be if a player was able to gift money to another player or increase the amount of money earned from a single voyage.
Chances are, it’s not a big deal if you can boost a friend - even in a progression heavy game like a simulator, where piggybacking a late-game voyage could skip dozens of hours of grinding, this doesn’t seem to discourage players. There are plenty of simulators where late game players trade away useless “junk” pets for their tier that allow new players to skip the first half of the game, I don’t see this being particularly different.
While it might devalue the effort players put in, it won’t devalue the efforts of anyone who actually cares (the endgame players), because no one voyage will boost you to the levels of the people competing for leaderboard spots.
Implementing social features is a good idea, and I’d highly recommend it.
Just be aware that (if this is a simulator), all successful simulators are played as primarily singleplayer experiences to help players get playing quickly, so don’t force players to find groups for anything.
Great advice. It’s not a simulator, the game us heavily inspired by Sea of Thieves so that should give you an idea of gameplay.
And player’s won’t be forced to find groups or “Crews” in order to progress, if you have a crew or playing solo your progression will likely keep the same pace.
I think we have decided to just allow voyages to be a single player activity, and implement other activities that all crew members can benefit from, this way the game offers ways to earn money for solo and group players.
Have the captain select their crew, a choice between 5 members or 10 members. If 5 has been chosen each member will receive 20% whereas if 10 is selected each will receive 10%.
Pentalize those that don’t contribute throughout the voyage, validate activity on automated stats rather than manual review. I.e Player 1 only collected one chest whereas the remaining crew members obtained 5+ chests. Player1’s earnings would be deducted by 5% or however much of a deduction the captain selected for their voyage.