Holiday events feature prominently in the frameworks of many
Free-to-Play games. With holiday sales
generating a substantial portion of the overall sales, and holidays
demonstrably visible on major release schedules, it's not a shock. But all too often, it's haphazard. Neverwinter
is an excellent example of this: Neverwinter's
holiday event adds a new area to the game, wherein minigames are the sole
currency. Activities in this area
require daily commitments that occupy the space that the game normally takes up
in its players' lives: instead of running quests or completing dungeons,
players are fishing, or fighting monsters on ice, or racing down snow covered
slopes. All fun activities, all great
wastes of time, easily on par with Neverwinter
itself, but all existing in parallel with Neverwinter
itself, taking players away from the game they've been playing until this
point. The end result is a holiday event
that actually disrupts, rather than encourages, play of a title. Sure, maybe players will come out the other
side with a sweet Frost Mimic hireling, but they'll have spent nearly two weeks
playing a version of your game separate from the game itself; one twenty-sixth
of their game time for a year, sucked into a black hole of non-parallel
progress.
Then there are lesser offenders, who tweak their game
slightly in order to encourage play. PAYDAY 2 did just this, adding a cute
little new heist about leading a drunk Santa Claus around while collecting bags
of booty. Cute, and well suited to the
game itself, sure, but the way the mission structure works in PAYDAY 2 means that selecting the
Christmas event heist requires moving away from gameplay you know and love
already, making that first game a theoretical threat (will I like this new
fucked up game type centered around a drunk Santa?) and follow-up games a step
removed from normal play cycles. If you
and your buddies want to pull some Santa heists, you need to give up running
those breezy Mallcrashers or tense Shadow Raids. There's nothing wrong with it - it's just
another kind of mission to enjoy, and it doesn't commit the cardinal sin that Neverwinter does, the sin of making your
game into two separate games that your player base is now split between - but
it's so insignificant that, in a sense, it barely changes play. To those interested few, it can totally
reshape the game, sure, but for most players these events are just additional
options. How many players tried Safe
House: Nightmare once, and then left it to its own devices, and how many played
it intensively, until they knocked that shit the fuck out on Overkill? These holiday events find their audience,
there's no question, but they're not going to get new seats into butts, or get
butts that have given up on sitting to give sitting another try.
Enter Mechwarrior:
Online. Their holiday event was the
latest in a stream of superlative dropkicks to my free time that they've been
meting out masterfully over the last few months, a set of progress-increasing
incentives that give players cool shit for playing their game the way they
like, and encouraging them to try new things with it as well.
MWO did this in a
simple way: they gave players who performed adequately a chance at getting a random
goodie. It could've been a nearly worthless
part for your mech, or it could be a limited time cosmetic item, or it could be
expensive shit that usually costs money, or it could be Premium Time, which
encourages you to play their game even more.
MWO sets the bar for this low
enough that you can have a bad game and still get a prize, as long as you did
your job pretty well. If you royally
shit the bed, or drop a few minutes into the game, no goodies for you, but play
well at the game type you want, and you'll get something extra. Brilliant!
At the same time, they added caps to rewards for each game
type. That means that players have to
move out of their comfort zone if they want to earn dope shit over the
holidays, shifting away from playing just one type of game, and potentially
experimenting with the new Invasion game type (which is strangely wonderful
even in its nascent execution). Players
were brought in the door to play more MWO,
gently encouraged to diversify their gameplay experiences, and incentivized to
play more than usual and, potentially, spend more than usual; MWO's currency system has some steep
thresholds, and doling out currency a bit at a time is a great way to trick
players who would never spend hard earned real-world money on in-game shit to
dip their toes into the waters of microtransaction lake. Players are more engaged, more rewarded, and
try new things in-game using both their new resources, and the new systems
they're being gently nudged into trying.
All of this hinges, of course, on a conceit that not
everyone agrees with: that holidays aren't about spending time with your
family, that holidays are about playing video games alone for extended periods
of time. I think we all know that people
who disagree with this contention are, in fact, philistines, unworthy of even
the basest regard or compassion.
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