First of all, hi, this is my first post here. I'm an active member of the .org board and we've just had a great suggestion there, and we need your support. Here is the original thread.
Now, onto the topic... Daily bonuses, the basic idea is that, like in other GF games, you get a daily bonus for logging in. The bonus would be nothing that could actually affect the game, it would be here simply to motivate him to stay (more on the positive psychological effects later). The bonus would scale according to the number of the player's points, it could be 1 small cargo for a person with, say, 5k points, or 10 battleships for a person with a few million points. It could be anything - defense on a planet, ships, resources, anything except DM, that is. Once a week, you would get a "mystery box", as the OP called it. This would simply be a bigger reward.
Why?
Well, according to the Skinner Box theory, any random reward, no matter how small, will keep someone motivated. This means that people will leave less! It could would greatly reduce the repetitiveness of the game as well. Please watch this for more detailed info: penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box.
What do you think? So far, the only cons we found were that some people like to keep their fleet perfectly balanced, so getting a few ships would unbalance it. In my opinion, this makes no sense, because you still have all your previous ships. I see a solution to this anyway: give the players an option to accept or decline the reward
Now, onto the topic... Daily bonuses, the basic idea is that, like in other GF games, you get a daily bonus for logging in. The bonus would be nothing that could actually affect the game, it would be here simply to motivate him to stay (more on the positive psychological effects later). The bonus would scale according to the number of the player's points, it could be 1 small cargo for a person with, say, 5k points, or 10 battleships for a person with a few million points. It could be anything - defense on a planet, ships, resources, anything except DM, that is. Once a week, you would get a "mystery box", as the OP called it. This would simply be a bigger reward.
Why?
Well, according to the Skinner Box theory, any random reward, no matter how small, will keep someone motivated. This means that people will leave less! It could would greatly reduce the repetitiveness of the game as well. Please watch this for more detailed info: penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box.
What do you think? So far, the only cons we found were that some people like to keep their fleet perfectly balanced, so getting a few ships would unbalance it. In my opinion, this makes no sense, because you still have all your previous ships. I see a solution to this anyway: give the players an option to accept or decline the reward
