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Keep things interesting between big new announcements. With UO you are constantly fighting boredom. UO came out in 1997 and many players have been playing off and on since then. That means you have done everything many times. The only new things are new custom coded addons that take lots of time to make. So you have to find other ways to keep the players from getting bored and leaving. Here are a few examples and ideas we could use. Because you have to keep the game from getting stale at all cost. There are to many other games for people to play.
1. Automated daily special events.
A. One hour two or three times a day where you can win special prizes every time you get a kill or a win etc. These do not have to be big prizes. If the prizes are two big or to common you ruin the game economy.
B. Special story events. You drop into game and are told you are being sent to capture a base for example.If you win that game you get 4x experience and money. They have a these randomly inserted during each day. With a limit of say 3.
C. Weekly top player skins. The top players in each weight class get a special in game mech skin or decal. This changes every week.
D. Weekly honors. For example most Spider kills of the week
E. Random games that affect the game story. This can be done before community warefare. And relates to game fiction.
2. Special Events
A. Collect and win events. The way this works is you get a chance to win small items randomly in the game. When you get a complete set you can trade them in for a limited number of bigger prizes.
B. Tournaments like we have already had but more often.
C. Faction vs faction events. The easy way to do this with the current game is the count kills of people in each faction. For example how many Kurita killed how many Liao etc. This will be promoted on website and be part of game fiction.
D. Have game GMs that can run special events at any time. Have them from all time zones.
3. Have a path to get every item without paying real money. This would involve a huge grind but would be possible. For example in many free UO servers you have something like MC. But you can trade game earned credits for it. If the exchange rate is set correctly this does not hurt game income. But it gives a chance for people with less money to get the top items in the game.
Prizes and game economy. - You need to be able to handle lots of prizes and rewards without being breaking the economy. There are several ways to do this.
A. Win tickets for a chance at a prize instead of prizes directly. Because of using tickets you can have really nice prizes. You can have a weekly event. Each say kill or win or something gives you a random chance to win a game ticket. Each ticket has a uniq code so the more tickets you have the higher your chance of winning. At the end of the week you win the announced prize of the week. Anything from premium colors to mech patterns to hero mechs. You also have bigger special events with more buildup where you can win big prizes like clan packs or packages of hero mechs.
B. Have more unique items so that you have more items to sale and give away. More cockpit items, more custom colors, more mech patterns etc ec.
When the new UI comes out and community warefare there will be many many more options for special events.
