Event Coins. Better methods of distributing?

Suggestions
1

How the events were done in Tower always felt odd to me, for the most part I’ve been hoping the coin system was kind of a place holder for the time being but years later it’s still here. I’m posting this in suggestions but it’s more of a discussion because I wanna know how others feel about this system and how it can be improved.

Currently during the Halloween, Holiday and Anniversary event, playing any activity that rewards units will also give you a coin to spend in their respective shops. However there’s a small delay between each coin drop. This system works as it encourages players to play the game more during the event. But here’s a few personal nitpicks.

  • Only some parts of Tower Unite reward these coins. Condo decorating, theater watching or just plain socializing, the main draw of this game doesn’t provide seasonal incentives.

  • The coin drops are time sensitive. As much as I wanna goof off and do things in tower, there’s a consent thought of in my head to just play a minigame, anything it doesn’t matter because I can get a coin in this very moment. You’re not participating in an activity because you want too, but because you feel like you need too.

  • Burn out. Since these coins are only obtained by activities you feel pressured to marathon games just to keep obtaining these coins. This system should incentivize players to keep playing but I feel like it’s causing the inverse by quickly burning players out.

  • The time between events. Halloween into Holiday is only a one month gap. Players farming the Halloween event big time are most likely more than burnt out to even participate in the Holiday event. Meanwhile the opposite of this problem is also an issue where there’s a big gap between Holiday into Anniversary and Anniversary into Halloween. Basically two major seasonal events so close and then basically nothing for the rest of the year. OBVIOUSLY Halloween and Holiday being so close isn’t your fault but felt it was worth pointing out with burn out being something to consider. Meanwhile it may be worth it to sprinkle more annual events throughout the year like maybe a carnival attraction or theme in the summer, something in-between Holiday and Anniversary, etc.

  • Unmotivating to play outside of events. With a system that encourages you to play during the events, why should you bother playing Tower when there isn’t an event going on? This is the double edge sword of this system because I do wanna play this game when I want to. But there’s always the thought of wait till there’s an event, you’ll get rewards by playing then! This thought process is something I feel this game should avoid at all costs.

  • And lastly, the pricing. You only get 1 coin at a time, meanwhile seasonal store items can go up into the double digits, and there’s a lot of them. As a completionist it’s only natural to wanna buy one of everything but there’s just a lot of items and that catalogue will only get bigger and bigger over time. And that’s just considering you only buy each item once. I’m sure there’s a lot of condo fanatics who are annoyed having to farm coins just to buy a certain prop more than once. This constant need of coins obviously encourages players to play the game more but then all of the issues I’ve listed start to stink in more and more.

So what do we do about this? Well this could go into any direction really. I don’t have a definitive perfect system but I think it’s important to consider all these negatives when creating these seasonal events.

Giving coins just by simply being in the game and not being afk is a start because it means you can do more in the game and you don’t feel pressured to play something because there’s a timed reward. Yes players with autoclickers could cheese the whole event but honestly, who cares? If that’s how those players want to enjoy the event then let them.

Providing seasonal dailies / weeklies with big batches of coins could help as well. You can even do what GTA does with its dallies and makes the multiplayer modes the same for everyone. So if you feel players aren’t playing Virus or Little Crusaders enough you can make goals for those games for that day.

I’d love to hear what others think of the current system though, or if there’s any ideas on improvements because I’m genuinely curious.

2

I definitely agree the current system is not really working, it feels lopsided and ambiguous.

3

Would be pretty nice if you earned coins with EXP gained on a timer (Plaza, Condo, Casino etc). I spend a majority of my time doing stuff in my condo so I tend to miss out on a lot of the holiday-exclusive items.

5 Likes
4

I’d have to agree, spending time in the plaza and playing an arcade machine every 6 minutes is beyond loathing.

5

Daily Awards is something we’ve been planning for awhile. It’s something I really wanna tackle this year, earlier than later.

This year we also plan to share the entire calendar of events for the entire year, including many new holiday events that involve different parts of the game. For example, Valentine’s Day will have a Valentines Day sale on furniture and Valentine items.

The main issue that’s really been effecting these events is that we are often working on a bigger project, and then the events push everything back.

Last year (2022) was probably the worst on our development team in many years. We sat down and discussed plans to improve it this year.

We had the Dark Voyage release, which was a huge amount of work for Halloween 2022. Because of that ride, we didn’t have a lot of time to touch any other aspect of the Halloween Events. Then right around the corner, Winter Holidays came up and because of the ride, we just ran out of time to do what we wanted to do for this Winter Holiday. We got about 95% done with the new Unannounced Condo Feature, which was due to be released on Winter.

Unfortunately, we ran into unrelated build issues with our code, our Plaza light build, and our server hardware. It took us a week and half to recover and figure out the build issues, come up with a temporarily solution for the Plaza light build, and try to buy expensive hardware to avoid this in the future. These issues led to us having to work all the way until Christmas Eve, something that we haven’t done in previous years (nor something I’d ever want our team to experience again).

The point being, a lot of the reason these events are the way they are is because they put a huge strain on development and push back every other feature.

Looking forward, we don’t have another Dark Voyage to release this year and the Unannounced Condo Feature will be released this month. This will probably make this year’s events a lot easier to organize and free up time to fix issues with the coins.

As for Daily Awards/Tasks, we need to create new fun unlockables for these awards. I understand that we can give Units and Tickets for awards, but I think it would be more fun and exciting if you could unlock:

  • Unique items
  • Player scoreboard effects (such as custom backgrounds)
  • Temporary double EXP/Units/Tickets
  • Player Sprays (artwork by us)
  • Collectable Cards
  • Chat Emotes
  • Floating Chat Designs
  • Capes
  • Trails

The tasks would include all the Game Worlds, such as getting a HIO for the day, or fishing up 5 fish. We’d also need to incorporate Condos this time around and that one is difficult to figure out. Doing it based on EXP would be okay, I suppose.

Anyways, sorry for rambling on and on, but there’s been a lot of ideas and plans we’ve been cooking up and working towards. I hope this year we’ll be able to implement these into the game as it’ll certainly help. And I also hope this year we can improve on the holiday events and coin system. Another technical issue with coins right now is that we rely completely on Steam API calls for the coins which limits our designs (for example we can only give you 1 coin every X minutes). If we move the coins to our backend (AGC), then we can design a better system. This is something on our immediate tasks to do.

16 Likes
6

I appreciate the lengthy reply even if nothing concrete was announced. Just knowing this issue is on the teams mind is reassuring.

This is a little off topic but I’ve always been confused about something regarding this. I actively follow the trello and weekly dev updates and year after year it feels like any development done for these events is in production during the same month of the event. Is this actually the case? And if so why not prepare these events months in advance?

7

Development for the events begin several months before, but with Dark Voyage, it took several months to complete it. It was unfortunately underestimated on how long it would take us. And we ran into several unknown bugs as well. Plus, with our small team, it’s still a challenge to juggle everything. Casino Phase 2 put a big strain on development.

Items for holiday events usually are made up until the very last moment as well, mainly because the passion of the team wanting to get every item in as they can. Usually this works out okay, but this year we hit a bunch of road blocks and that caused several issues.

This year, we’ve discussed changes to the development structure around holiday events and getting the items for the holiday events done even more in advance.

I am very happy we got Dark Voyage out. We’ve been trying to get it ready each Halloween on previous years.

5 Likes
8

Feel like it’s necessary to bump this again because well… nothing’s changed. If anything, things have gotten worse.

Coin distribution is either bugged or noticeably nerfed and made more grindy. And with more and more items being added to the seasonal store with hefty price tags, it makes the idea of “humoring” a “Buy all halloween items!” achievement absolutely insane.

If you farm for 5 hours straight with no breaks, you’ll make roughly around 300 coins. Which doesn’t even cover a quarter of the stores items. (Which is also growing every year.)

Like I said in the original post. Grind handled poorly causes boredom and resentment of said grindy game. And since these grinds are locked during certain parts of the year, it just encourages players to just play Tower Unite during these parts of the year. It’s really weird to structure your MASSIVELY MULTIPLE GAME like this.

I’ll get moods where I’d wanna play this and then think. “Eh, the halloween event is a month or two away, I play again when that happens.”

1 Like
9

Each year we reduce the amount of coins needed for the previous year items. We did a 30% reduction of coins needed for 2023 items.

The timer used to be 6 minutes and was reduced to 5 minutes this year. We also added coins to other drops.

As for the achievement, I don’t think it shouldn’t exist anymore.

We are still working on getting the Daily Awards system out.

2 Likes
10

I had no idea previous year items were ever reduced in price?? I don’t recall that ever being mentioned.

The coin drops seem broken right now if that’s the case. Visually I’m getting multiple coins every activity interaction. But in reality I only get like 1 or 2 coins after playing for 20 something minutes. Making the grind unbearable right now.

11

I’ll be working on a fix after the weekend break, but yes, this is because Steam API changed unexpectedly and it we rely on it to tell us if a player was given a coin and if they can get another, but that is broken now.

4 Likes
12

I believe I proposed this for Halloween 2022 or 2023 as a way to make it easier for newcomers to gather items they want. The year after an item is introduced, we’ll lower the price to approximately 66% of its original price (with some rounding).

I think we announced this the year it started, but haven’t re-announced it since… so it’s easy to not see it happening.

2 Likes