I’m going to start off by saying that I, for the most part, like the healing changes. Healing as it was didn’t make the game more fun, but it was a strong enough tactic that pretty much everyone had to rely on it to remain competitive. And that lead to very little variety in which characters people were playing.
But there has been a very legitimate complaint about the healing changes: it makes everyone more reliant on healthpacks, which hurts people who can only play once or twice a day a lot more than it does the people who play continuously throughout the day. The current recharge rate is one per 36 minutes, which stops when you reach 5 healthpacks. So someone who uses up all their healthpacks every 2-3 hours could get 40 of them in a day. If you play once every 8, 12, or 24 hours, you only get 15, 10, or 5 healthpacks per day respectively. [As a bit of an aside, the increased regeneration rates don’t help our infrequent players much at all either].
Just removing the healthpack cap isn’t a good solution from the developer’s point of view, so that won’t do. But what would happen if you remove the healthpack cap, but impose exponentially increasing refresh times? For instance, if healthpacks up to 5 refresh at the normal rate of one per 36 minutes, but each subsequent healthpack takes 33% longer than the previous one. Then someone who plays…
… every 3 hours still gets 40 healthpacks per day
… every 8 hours now gets 27 per day instead of 15
… every 12 hours gets 20 instead of 10
… every 8 hours gets 13 instead of 5
The incentive to log in frequently is still there. There’s still occasion for people to buy healthpacks via HP. And people who can’t play throughout the day are not so severely disadvantaged. Thoughts?