Daily Rewards

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ Suggestions & Feedback
1

I have two suggestions to fix the problem that I and many others have for your daily rewards, the first is a quick-fix retaining the current format and the second would be a complete re-design based on my understanding of the goals of such a system.

Quick Fix
The big problem with this scheme is that the very best reward is at the very end of the month, which means a single missed day in a month and it’s gone. I’ll just assume based on no evidence that you’ve figured out a scheme whereby non-31-day months also have this reward, but if not then that’s even worse. So the quick fix is to simply move the very best reward slightly earlier so that a few missed days are no sweat and nobody needs to feel pressured to keep logging just to hit that fat pack. Here’s an example (abbreviated R for Runes, C for Crystals, P for Packs, and FP for Fat Pack):

Current
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
FP

Proposed
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRP
RRCRFP
RRCRP
P

Something like this would mean that there are still good incentives for hitting every day in a month but nobody needs to be stressed about missing a day or two.

Replacement System

I assume the main goals of a daily reward are the following (in rough priority order):

  1. Make people excited about coming back to the game
  2. To not give away so much good stuff that purchases are pointless
  3. Help people feel like they are progressing
  4. Help set a baseline level of progress to compare purchases to
  5. Help differentiate dedicated players from casual ones

To achieve this, I would establish three tiers of daily rewards. Each day you log in, you get a random reward from a tier that is determined by how many consecutive days you’ve logged in leading up to today:

Tier 1 (you get a random reward from this tier if you’ve logged in for 10+ consecutive days):
30 crystals (20% chance), a pack (20% chance), 325 runes (60% chance)
Tier 2 (3+ consecutive days):
20 crystals, a 3-card pack, 250 runes (same chances as above)
Tier 3 (2 or fewer consecutive days):
10 crystals, a card (eh?), 100 runes (same chances as above)

So as an example someone logging in for the first time and then never missing a day would get T3, T3, T2, T2, T2, T2, T2, T2, T2, T1, T1, T1…

I set the Tier 1 rewards at the steady-state average for the current scheme (using clumsy mental math), so in theory someone who never misses a day would get roughly the same income as they currently do, but missing a day puts you a bit behind that curve without being horribly punishing. If you want larger, rarer prizes for the sake of exciting quantities you could always add a low-probability high-value version of any of the above, like an 18% chance at 30 crystals and a 2% chance at 300. I’m not a huge fan of that approach, but big random rewards have a solid basis in operant conditioning.

If people are really in love with the fat-pack reward (guilty), I would lean towards adding something like “every 30 days of earning a tier-1 reward you instead get a fat pack”. This has the interesting consequence that someone who misses a single day every month would only be getting 20 tier-1 rewards per month and would get 8 fat packs a year instead of 12. Someone who missed a day every two weeks would get roughly two fat packs a year…

I really hope you fix or replace the current system, since the current approach is pretty demoralizing and I think you want players to be excited about your game.

2

Neat idea, but as it stands, I like the current system. Sure, we were screwed out of being able to get the fat pack first month, but I already knew it was going to happen, as did my friends who play, and anyone with logic would have known when it said, “Come back every day this month for rewards”, it meant we weren’t going to get the fat pack for december.

Also, we don’t know if months with less than 31 days are going to feature a fat pack or not.

But what people are failing to notice is this:

In a 31 day month, we get 180 gold, 6 single packs, and a fat pack. Broken down, that’s 360 gold worth of single packs, and a 200 gold fat pack. Look at the prices in the store.

That’s over $25 worth of gold we are getting for doing nothing more than logging into the game and collecting the daily reward. Thats not including the thousands of free runes. Perhaps you haven’t played MPQ and seen how stingy they are with Hero Coins. This is very generous!

And if you don’t have 2 minutes in your day to sit on the toilet, bust out your phone, and collect your daily reward while you finish your business, realize that you are still getting $20 worth of product for free by hitting day 28.

Now I will say this. Shame on the devs for not replying to early forum posts asking if this was the case, and shame on them for releasing a game right before they knew they were going on a 2 week vacation. But, this reward system is a hell of a lot better than MPQ and we will be lucky if they don’t nerf it and give us more runes and less gold. People will complain about anything. Truth is, we really couldn’t ask for more from what we are being given.

3

I agree that the current reward scheme is generous, I just think it’s unfun. I don’t want to spend a month logging in to avoid losing a great reward (and the devs shouldn’t want that either), I want to log in because I’m excited to get new stuff and to play the game. And I don’t want a camping trip or a stolen phone to result in in-game losses. Right now the cost of missing a day is high enough that I just checked out of the game emotionally, which is not what the devs want.