Players opting for passive chance-based incentive

In my game players get content in sets called regions. New regions are unlocked by using a certain amount of gold. Gold is earned through minigames. This problem relates to these gold-earning minigames.

Most of the testers will try every minigame enough to get a feel for it, but ultimately end up grinding the fishing minigame where you place traps and wait for a random fish of some gold value. I asked two of them why they were doing this instead of the other minigames, and they had a couple different answers.

  1. I want a chance at getting the new region
    (Context: Itā€™s possible to ā€˜hit the jackpotā€™. The expected value of the fishing minigame is skewed towards the top. Some testers have gotten these jackpots early, allowing them to progress faster than others)
  2. Itā€™s more passive than the other minigames

This fishing minigame is well liked among the testers and I think itā€™s a great fit for the game, however, the existing incentive structure is leading most of the other minigames to get neglected in the long run. So Iā€™m posting this to see if you guys have encountered anything like this before, and if you have any ideas on how to remedy the situation.

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Personally I feel that your fishing minigame is somewhat the ā€œmetaā€ because of the abilities it has [potential to beat RNG, passive overall] and to fix the situation weā€™ll need more depth inside other minigames and either improve the gold gains in a way that people would be worthwhile doing it and/or add some unique gain that you canā€™t get from fishing.

For example, letā€™s say you have a minigame in which you are in a shooting range. I think a good incentive would be to add a boss everytime you reach a certain amount of kills and the boss drops gold but also a chance to drop another item [letā€™s say a Golden Revolver] and that item can either be sold to an NPC or used to kill for more gold.

Basically make it so fishing remains good but you can also do jobs that arenā€™t that passive and still make more from another job that you put time into. I compare it with Bloxburg jobs - what you put in is what you get back.

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Iā€™m not sure that this is something that needs to be remedied. If you have a system that players are finding engaging, even if itā€™s not what you may have suspected, I would call that a success. Perhaps a daily reward for completing 3 different minigames or something would entice players to branch out a little more?

[Easy and requiring little effort] != ā€œEngagingā€

I always like to say (and I really should make this its own thread sometime), just because people have gotten good at a mechanic, feature, or task within a game, that does not automatically make it a good one. Doing something like an award for playing different games wonā€™t solve the problem that players will just go back to fishing once theyā€™re done.

But yeah, OP will have to ā€œbalanceā€ the gold gains with the other minigames.