Motion for addition of donations

Suggestions
1

PLAINTIFF: OuTSMoKE, Flashback Condos
RESPONDENT: PixelTail Games

MOTION FOR ADDITION OF DONATIONS

This is one you’ve heard before, but I would like to present my case to the staff for a system in which players can donate units to other players. I will overview the reasoning why, as well as touch on some safe guards that could be put in place.

I: PROPOSAL

A system allowing players to donate units to another player. While eventually other transaction types based on item interactions would be cool in the future, this basic function would be more than helpful.

II: REASONING

II-A: Player Group Imbalance

There are typically 2 types of players in Tower Unite:

  • A: Players who spend most/all of their time in the Plaza & Game Worlds.
  • B: Players who spend most/all of their time building Condos.

Group A plays the “Game” half of Tower Unite. They have fun with their friends playing mini golf & ball race, gambling, playing boardwalk games & fishing. Their interactions with the Condo aspect of the game are minimal, and consist mostly of visiting other players’ community condos.

Group B plays the “Simulation” half of Tower Unite. They enjoy spending their time in the game creating new condos. The Plaza & Game Worlds are basically an after-thought outside of holiday events or a new big update.

The problem is that the half of the game you play makes a BIG difference to your experience. Everything Group A does in the game makes them money, while everything Group B does in the game costs them money. The outcome is Group A with a ton of money they never spend on anything, and Group B constantly broke.

Group A is the larger group of the two, a majority of people play Tower in Group A, so allowing them the ability to donate to Group B could allow the “wealth” to even out a bit.

II-B: Inconvenience factor

I started out in Group A, and became Group B with the arrival of the LibRetro update, so I have experience with both sides of this. While saying “It’s an inconvenience to have to go grind money” sounds petty at face value, it’s a fact. I had a ton of Units before LibRetro, and now that I mainly play Condos, I’ve been broke since.

As a personal example of this I spent 2 hours last night playing solo Bingo games to try and inch my account up for more Arcade machines for a new condo build. In between I was doing buried treasure in hopes of finding Gems, Chests, Slots & Catsacks to sell for cash. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that’s 2 hours that could have been spent on Condo building or decorating for our upcoming Halloween event (which I also don’t have enough cash to buy the amount of stuff I need for it). Dedicated condos will help this to an extent, but I’d still rather be working on something than grinding.

II-C: Supporting Community Condos

While obviously this is the interest of my Arcade & Theater condos, there’s plenty of other player condos that could benefit from this program. Plenty of other players like Fenrir, GoopGoop, BabyInAPipe, Kirbyrocket & Studio Mercy (to name a few) spend countless hours in condos that are specifically made for everyone else to come and enjoy, while not earning a single unit outside maybe a contest happening that hopefully fits a condo they have or want to actually build.

III: SAFEGUARDS

As is, from the very little coding experience I have, I know that a simple donate system would be easy to implement, but just having it be the Wild West might not go so good, so sadly, here’s some extra coding work that would probably need to be in place.

  • As much as I’d love no limit, obviously an “Up to X amount every X minutes” would be a wise choice. I dunno how much… 1,000 an hour? 10k a day? by the week?
  • I also think this function should be locked behind a milestone, such as needing to max out experience in both Plaza & maybe another Game World or 2 before you’re allowed the ability to donate. This would combat against exploits.
  • A little more advanced, but perhaps once you’ve unlocked the ability, the setting for it can be turned off normally, but to re-enable donating you’d need a pin you set up. Cuts down on the "my brother did it"s.

IV: COMPROMISE?

In the event that this is dismissed, or postponed indefinitely, I have a secondary offering: A Donation box condo item. It would be able to be set by owner to whatever amount (within range allowed by you). When used, takes that amount from person and sends to Host’s account. Would have a coold own on it to prevent abuse, of course.

MOTION SUMMARY CONCLUDED

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Even if there is a limit to payment, this could still very quickly make most condos devolve into a “paid” experience; a result I feel isn’t in the spirit of the game.

1 Like
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Other members of the team would have to way in, but I’m still very hesitant on the idea of allowing units to be transferred amongst players freely. Below are simply my own thoughts, so take that for what it is.

Yes, there are ways people can transfer units if they’re determined enough, regardless of the fact it’s against our rules.

But, creating an officially sanctioned way of unit transfer brings up various issues.

The way our game currently operates, with users not able to transfer items nor units, people’s progress is pretty locked to their own progression. The actions of a cheater, macroer, afker, for the most part don’t affect others progress, they only ruin it for themselves. We don’t have a player economy, so players end up being pretty well insulated from these events.

I worry about the sudden ability to assign a real world value to units, paving the way for people to farm and sell units for money, easily. Sure, again, you can argue this is possible now, but like I mentioned, it’s against the rules, and somewhat of a pain in the ass.

The ability to transfer units freely also leads to the inevitable situation of Unit inflation, with ultra rich players getting bored of the game and freely distributing their units uniformly, which potentially would require changing prices of items and making that early game for newer players harder.

9 Likes
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I’m still very much highly up for an system like this, despite what developers might say. It does come with a lot of problems but I think the potential benefits would outweigh those. On that note though, I can’t agree with reason II-B you brought up and neither can I agree with the third point you make in safeguards proposals. For II-B, Tower’s grinding is actually on the enjoyable side, at least for folks like myself, so I don’t think that this is an valid reason for this system. And finally, for third proposed safeguard: The idea you are putting out, I can sort of see where you are coming from with this but honestly, I don’t think that it’s needed. Either way, still big hopes that developers reconsider trading or donations in one way or another and if not, the game needs proper unit/currency sinks outside of buying various things - The current ways of spending your units that aren’t reliant on buying things aren’t really super effective and you will eventually always end up with more units/currency than you know what to do with.

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This topic comes out periodically throughout Tower Unite, and I cannot agree with it more. A donation box, a tip jar, whatever you want to call it; it’s helpful to have for those that want to say thank you to the host and have zero use for units outside of gambling.

As implied by the above, I’d like to see something like a Tip Jar or Donation Box. This has been suggested before in both this thread and this other thread, and I think even just hard capping it to the current most expensive furniture item’s sell-price of 25,000 Units (from selling either the Shrine or the Snow Cabin) every 48 hours is good enough.

Touching on the subject of units being assigned a real-world value, this already something that is happening right now. While adding a tip jar would ultimately make it easier to do exactly what’s already being done (probably by adding client modifications to bypass any kind of tipping limit, I feel like it’s already something that’s happening as is and is too difficult to even keep track of unless you’re internally logging on some kind of console that states, “Hey this player received a tip of <x> Units from their Tip Jar!” Even more annoyingly, it’s harder to report current “black market” like behavior because of the anonymity of the people behind it.

Overall, though, I do think there’s more outweighing positives than negatives in terms of tipping players for their work in condos.

2 Likes
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Individual grind is a good thing. I don’t think players should be allowed to freely give as much money as they want away. As others have mentioned before in the Discord as well, cheaters could easily ruin the player economy and experience with that. I don’t think that virtual capitalism in a tiny community is a good thing.

About 90% of my time spent on TU is in my condo, and the other 10% is grinding for money or tickets to buy condo items.
Do I think it’s inconvenient? Yes. But I don’t think it’s worth risking, and ultimately, you are playing a game that revolves mainly around its arcade style game modes.

I feel like there can be a middle ground. I like and Kirby’s suggestion and your compromise at the bottom of the post. A donation button in some form or another would be a great addition, but there should definitely some limits in place.

2 Likes