Page 2 of 2

Re: How to encourage Team Contests...

PostPosted: 30 Jan 2009, 11:57
by Seven Shikami
Just to be clear... which of these concepts are you talking about?

1. Your captain's hat retaining overall catches-to-date stats for your team, for showoff purposes
2. An organized league of teams and ladders and tourneys?

#2 really should come from the community... the 7Seas dev team's busy enough just keeping the game afloat and rich with new content. #1 I could do something about.

Re: How to encourage Team Contests...

PostPosted: 30 Jan 2009, 14:40
by Nya Raymaker
think "teaming under one captain" is a good start... i..e the hat recording and relaying the XP the people team fishing under one hat/captain and giving an additional boasting option to that captain...

wow does that sentence make sense? I hope you get what I mean lol...

Re: How to encourage Team Contests...

PostPosted: 30 Jan 2009, 21:36
by Seven Shikami
Okeydoke. After talking with folks in-world, we came up with a totally different solution which may be better even than the hat.

For Team Fishing Contests, you start a team / join a team via the Contest Board itself. It wrangles teams, no crates, boats, or even hats required.

There are 12 team slots open (possibly 10 depending on performance issues). First person to claim a slot is the Captain of the team -- they can set the team Open Join (anyone can click the board and join the team) or Invite Only. They also can Kick people out of teams who are uncooperative.

Whenever a non-captain goes AFK for 2 minutes, or if a slot simply has no human player, an NPC steps in to fish similar to how was described before -- fishing alongside the captain, at a slight point penalty (no SURs). That way, if someone disconnects or simply walks away from the game, shortly after they get auto-NPC'd until they return and resume fishing. If the CAPTAIN goes AFK, nothing happens. (Otherwise we'd potentially end up with a team of 3 NPCs, which is silly.) If a captain quits the team, the team simply disbands. Captaining is a big responsibility!

Other possible options -- owner/admin settings to control who can claim a captain's role, anybody who clicks or only invited people.

The practical upshot of all this?
* Support for "enough" fishers (30-36) for a very large contest
* Simple to start a team or join a team without having to wear anything
* System automatically copes with disconnecting /AFK players
* Built right into the contest board -- no extra rezzing and no extra prims required
* Better plug-in support

The disadvantages?
* Since teams are wrangled by the board itself, you lack the 'identity' factor of wearing a hat that may track your stats from game to game (but we can still encourage people to wear uniforms, form leagues, etc)
* Team Motorboats are rendered less useful since they don't count as a team in this new approach; the price will likely be discounted or new features will be added to them to retain their appeal over Personal Motorboats

Re: How to encourage Team Contests...

PostPosted: 31 Jan 2009, 18:03
by Atashi Toshihiko
As long as the new contest boards have some 'hooks' that we can plug into re. capturing and tracking stats then that's cool for me - whether it's a hat or the contest board, I'm happy if I can monitor numbers! :D

-Atashi