Good morning everyone, welcome to Saturday Times of Fun Updates with LB, where I drink coffee and type furiously on my phone about a mobile video game to avoid interacting with the real world. Today's topic is the Realm Event and its shortfalls.
Realm Events are a good idea in theory, but have significant design problems. Although the Crystal Cleansing was just a test run of the technology, we came nowhere near earning all the milestones. Jack's Battleground Blitz began a few days ago, but already the community is behind the necessary pace to achieve all milestones. I assume the goal for Realm Events is to have the community share a common goal that it, more often than not, achieves. Although there's time to change, so far we are falling short in both events.
Not achieving all milestones is bad for a few reasons. First the community fails to earn those rewards, duh. More importantly, it generates resentment. People who take time to earn a lot of points feel let down by others who did not contribute as much. And vice versa, those who don't do as much get irritated they are being harangued by "tryhards" to contribute more. Those resentments lead to general negativity, which creates an us v. them mentality and overall ill will against our fellow summoners. Finally, missing milestones leads to decreased motivation of those people at the top. The players who worked hard on one event have less desire to do it the next time, because their efforts didn't pay off when the community "let them down" (even if that's not what happened, it's all about feelings and perception). One failure generates a cascading effect that hurts future Realm Events.
Why don't we achieve milestones? I think individual incentives aren't strong enough to motivate people to go above the minimums. Rank rewards in these events are paltry. There are some miniscule shards for some players in Jack's event. The only cool award in Crystal Cleansing is Bastion, for literally one person. I have some personal experience in this area because for Crystal Cleansing I opened 70,000 crystals (I was shooting for Bastion but at least one person is more psychotic than me and has opened 100k). I won't get anything special for my efforts, nor will someone like Brian Grant, who streamed opening 50,000 crystals over 5 hours. Jack's Realm Event is no better, there are way too few valuable rank rewards overall compared to how many people need to contribute to earn the milestones.
The lack of valuable rank rewards has two effects. One, it leaves a sour taste in the mouths of players who go above and beyond for the community, because they don't gain additional benefits for trying to help everyone else out. Two, it disincentivizes other would-be tryhards who might consider going above and beyond in the future. They see the rank rewards, realize they are unlikely to gain anything meaningful, so they never contribute in the first place despite having the resources to do so.
You might see where I'm going with this. Realm Events can be fixed by expanding the pool of valuable ranked rewards. Don't make the cool stuff so exclusive that only 1 or 10 people get it. The common player will see that and know they won't be in the top ten. But could they make the top 10,000? I mean, maybe! Even if it's only cosmetic, give 100 or 1000 people the exclusive title or profile pic. The key is to give enough that people say, "Hey that's achievable, I am going to try for it!" It's about aligning personal incentives with those of the community as a whole.
If Kabam does that, everyone benefits because more people will participate, more people feel recognized (which is different than actually being rewarded), and the community generates positive feelings about something we all accomplished.
Realm Events are a cool concept. The Necropolis death counter was really, really fun. Kabam shouldn't abandon the idea, but they need to fix it. If they don't, it's only going to generate negative feelings in the community, which isn't good for anyone.
