Goofing around with the kong badges is not the solution for the problem, only a slight treatment for the symptomps. (aka. a moderate, one-time influx of players.)
I see several things that could be done:
1, The most trivial. Put a
flashing neon sign advertising the forum in-game. I know this sounds lame, but there is not a direct actual link for the forum in the game save one - when you click "redeem codes", the game tells you that you can win codes from tourneys, and the word 'tournaments' links to the PVP tourneys section.
Believe me, most players will never find this.
As far as I know game coding, a "go to forum" button next to "open chat" would take about 5 minutes to code.
2, Emphasize the point that the fun lies in PVP events!
(cause, really, the fun lies there.)Advertise PVP play to the average forumer. Lower the entry-level for most PVP events. (both in terms of card collection aka. no rare PVP events, and in time investment aka. short, quick, few days-timespan events. Waiting for months for a cool event to start after being dropped out of the previous one sucks. This could be averted if 2 or 3 cool events would be available per week.
So many PVP events might sound very hard to coordinate, but I think that actually these small events should be easy to manage. They should feature a simple ruleset, with a limited but interesting cardpool. They would be easy for both the organizers and the participiants since they would only need a few hours of time investment for 2-3 days.
A simple example, off the top of my head: 3 groups of elements:
,
,
The participians are set into 3 groups upon signing up. 1st day, playergroup 1 can use the elements from group1, pg2 uses the elements in g2 and pg3 uses g3. The players fight each other and they rotate the element groups for the following day. This ruleset:
- is simple enough to understand
- yet features enough room for creative deckbuilding
- is unbiased, since every player gets to use every element group.
The evens is 3 days long, at the end, the player with the most points wins. Participiants only need to contribute for 3 days and TOs only need to supervise for 3 days. If you drop out? No worries, you can try again in a few days in a different event.
Okay, this post took some wrong direction. I wanted to speak about general things and instead I divulged into the details. Back on track:
I want to see quick, 2-3 days long PVP events since they help to keep the pace up. They provide interesting stuff to do every few days. They are an incentive to check out what's going on regularly - an interesting PVP event could start any day. On the other hand, they don't force the player into weeks- or months-long commitment.
Implementing this would requre:
- quite a few initial ideas (atleast enough for for a month in advance, I guess)
- a few extra staff. I think, with roughly 2 events per week (simple events, so they should be organised by 1 or max 2 TOs), plus the backup TOs, the whole show could be run by ~8 people. I would be more than willing to run this if it gets done.
Time constraints. "Giving only one day for the duels to happen is very short time, he lives in the USA and I live in Asia, OMFG OMFG!!!" I don't think that this is a problem. If we give a ~16 hour time window for the duels to happen, then this should allow for 35-40 active players to do their duels, which is roughly the amount of players these events should feature.
