Dear Travian: Legends Players! We come back to you with your latest feedback topics on Daily Rewards and possible changes or improvements. We hope our answers to your feedback will tickle your interest and satisfy you. As always, do not hesitate to get back to us for more clarifications or details.
This is the second discussion on the topic within a Travian Loop project, first one was done via some selected community, and results of which you can see here: Travian Loop: Daily Quests and Rewards ~ Part I
Let’s now look into international feedback.
➡️ – Players’ feedback
⬅️ – Game Centre Answer
Removing some options
We received numerous feedback and suggestions to remove/replace some options (tasks or rewards) from the daily rewards system. Let’s look into those suggestions one by one.
➡️ Removing gain/spend gold tasks.
⬅️ A topic that came up in a recent past, which we addressed as follows: It is true that the game proposes advantages for using gold. Trying to conceal this fact wouldn’t be fair as it isn’t true. However, what is important to note here and what we take pride in, is that we can say aloud that there are advantages to using gold, because these advantages are designed to never ensure winning to those who benefit from them.
➡️ Removing some other tasks, such as:
- Complete an adventure
- Win an auction
- Raid Natar or oasis
⬅️ We can understand that some of these tasks may irritate certain players – at least at a certain point in game. However, we do feel that we need these among the others to ensure a certain level of activity and achievable goals for all kinds of users. Removing these tasks, or some of them, would most likely turn out to make daily challenges easier than they should. Challenge should remain fair, but should not walk away from the « challenge » aspect of itself 😉
Adding some options
Another block of suggestions and feedback was about adding new options to the daily quest system – either different rewards or tasks.
➡️ Adding small Gold rewards.
⬅️ We are not against the idea per se. Industry standards are giving premium currency for daily tasks on a regular basis. Fortunately we’re not a “regular game”, otherwise we would be way more pay-to-win and offer way more progress for gold for troops etc. We need to maintain what makes the game so unique and adjusting monetization – even with “just” introducing a new gold source is a big topic.
➡️ Adding more variety to the tasks.
There are more categories that we may consider to add, like:
- Deff/off points earning. – Sending resources to allies.
- Reducing loyalty (chiefing) (to a non ally player).
- Building destruction with catapults (to a non ally player).
⬅️ While this sounds interesting, it can be extremely tedious to put together. One solution we may have and would like you to consider, would be to introduce more objectives than needed to get to the full number of points needed to unlock a reward. This way, you could choose which tasks you want to fulfill and keep variety as you please.
➡️ Add new rewards, such as: troops and building upgrades of player’s choosing.
⬅️ Here we would need you to help us understand: are we talking of new « objectives » as goals, or new « rewards » per se, in the 25/50/75/100 unlocked objectives?
Increasing the level of rewards for more than 4 levels.
⬅️ We consider that we would probably reach an exponential increase which would most likely lead to some unbalance. We are more comfortable with the approach of « shorter cycles » for objectives refresh based on server speed, which we will detail a bit further below.
Making General changes
➡️ We received numerous suggestions and general feedback about reward increase based on server stage, account development, speed of the gameworld etc.
Most common feedback was that with the progression of the gameworld and account development daily quests become less “interesting” to get achieved since rewards for those tasks are not motivating enough.
100 points rewards do not make big impact on an account after a while. Also, once you have a certain number of villages, you might need to contribute 120k resources to the alliance bonuses to receive for example 4x 4000 resources or 1 x20 000. Same feedback is about 75 points task – 5 tablets of law or 5 cages become less interesting.
There were different ideas about how to address that. For example, introduce some sort of a scale system in daily quests, get the next level tasks and rewards when Tier 2 and Tier 3 equipment appears in the game. It would make daily quests more attractive at later stages.
A lot of players also agreed that the daily rewards should be adjusted according to the speed of the gameworld.
⬅️ In general we believe that altering the quests by matching them with the account level/growth will open the door to high-end optimal strategies leading to the quest fulfilment by tampering with the requirements. The discrepancies between accounts and the different quests proposed in function, would be creating a gap between players more than it would cater to individual accounts.
In regard to server « phase » it also gets tricky as not every player is on the same level at the same time, and this would also create unwanted discrepancies. The scale system is an interesting topic, and the way it works with the current level of rewards is also something we believe to be positive: these rewards were intended to be based on « spikes », (e.g. the second being of a greater potential than the third). This is a way to keep the entirety of the steps balanced and « challenging ». Increasing rewards with each step could end up making the next step an easier objective, and we need to be careful to not disrupt the flow of the challenge.
Miscellaneous
➡️ The 50 points rewards are more valuable than the 75 points rewards, please improve them.
⬅️ Addressed just above 😉
➡️ Speed servers should be able to have more reset for rewards. 2 times a day for x2, x3 and x5, 3 times a day for x10, maybe introduce hourly tasks instead of daily. This would give more reward for hard effort players and those who have their account covered 24/7.
⬅️ This is the direction that we want to take, as not only it is something we could deliver faster, but also it wouldn’t risk any unbalance by introducing unforeseen mechanics. This way, we would propose a daily reward system that really matches your environment and that would, for example, « reset » 3x a day on a x10 server – just an example.
New ideas and other changes
Players would like a free extra reward – e.g. I build a building to level 10, I’ll get a normal reward for that + one more level of the building as an extra free reward; or players could collect points and every 500 points there would be an extra reward.
This is unfortunately not possible – to some a free building might be wasted on a level 10 cranny, while others save it up for a level 20 treasury. If the “free reward” would also include “no build time”, it’s even worse – suddenly a instant residence could be an option. We know, that wasn’t within the suggestion, but we need to make sure that things we want to commit implementing into our beloved game don’t harm it.
➡️ Consider auto-complete missions that are blocked due to external factors (ie. no natars at the start of the server), such as what is done during truces.
➡️ You should still get the highest reward when you collect 100 points, but the available daily tasks should give you more points than that (125 maybe) to let players decide what task to do in accordance with their playing style. (So total possible points 125, but maximum reward of 100 points)
⬅️ For the two points above, we prefer to allow « over-achieving » than to reduce or remove certain tasks, even at a certain time only. For example, we could consider a pool of tasks worth 150 points. But you would unlock the last level with 100 – being free to pick which tasks to do to get to 100. We could also add more variety in proposing an increased reward for tasks that you never do 😉
➡️ Maybe random rewards for each player? Would add some challenges for the start.
⬅️ When the daily quests first released they featured random rewards for different players, which generated a huge luck based factor for early game. The community wanted to remove this randomness, and we followed up on it… and we’re not going back.
Proposal for redesign
➡️ One of the things we would like to mention separately, was quite detailed suggestion about daily quests redesign to some longer mission:
- You have a reward track with the rewards at the end. You basically must do daily tasks to earn points & you receive rewards only at the end of the track. For instance, let’s say you make a reward track for 500 points & you can only gather 100 points daily, you would do the missions & gather points. You would need to complete all the daily missions for 5 consecutive days to receive the reward. Ofc the rewards have to be much more appealing.
- You could complete it in 7 days or whatever, doing the missions partially.
- This would encourage players to do the missions & gather points, without the instant gratification that we have now.
- And you could decrease the number of daily missions to 5 but increase the loop with new missions and add some hardcore for extra points like ”catch 10 elephants” or ”conquer a natar village” or ”make X deff/off points”, ”level up your hero”, ”sim 50 pop today.
- The missions would be different daily, ofc they would rotate, but they wouldn’t do it themselves. The player would need to take some concrete actions to complete the missions.
- And you could make 2 check points on the track, you could receive a small reward at 200 points, or work your way up to 500 for a better reward or make it up to 1000 points for an extra-large reward containing all the rewards from the previous checkpoints plus something exclusive => 2% recruiting bonus for 24h / permanent 0.5% extra off/deff power (which could add up or limit it for 2 times reward per player & then remove it from the player rewards pool).
⬅️ The weekly approach is not something we’re against, but it implies a much larger scope of rework. And we mean it, much larger. We would be looking at fully new and different feature, but we could envision pairing it with a battle-pass system, which would allow you to either unlock higher tiered rewards or compensate unlocking rewards you missed a way or another.
