Making Limited Opportunity

[CygnusX]

I've been working on my game for the past several months, and I've hit a snag...

My design goal was to create a BBG that was quasi-time independent.  That is, you could go on vacation, attend to real life, etc, without risking major losses to your account.

To satisfy this design goal, I created a game with zero losses.  Ie, you can win gold from your opponent, but it cost your opponent nothing.  Your gold gains are 100% in proportion to the enemies score, and nothing else.

My problem is, this feature has had an unexpected side effect.  Because combat gains are based on the enemy's score, and because there is not limited opportunity.... there has become no sense of urgency to attack.  Players are logging in to check their status, but not attacking because they feel that waiting is the better option.

Perhaps it is because of my small player base.  Perhaps when I have 20 or so competitive players, things will pick up.  But in the mean time, I want to develop a plan B.... so I bring my issue to the community.  The goal is to add a condition to the game that tilts the scales in favor of attacking vs. waiting.  Thoughts?

[Harkins]

What's the reward for attacking? Is it visible to other players? Something as simple as a high score board could motivate people to try to out-do each other.

And even if players don't lose something when they lose an attack, a public notice that they lost it might motivate them to avoid looking bad. That is, if they don't use the same force for attacking that they do for defending - if that's the case, no one would want to attack and make it more likely that someone else will get to post a win message about them.

[CygnusX]

I only have attack strength, not offense/defense.  There is already a high score board.

My current thought is to add achievements that produce some sort of income.  That is, if you fail to attack, you don't reach said achievement/artifact/etc, which would result in failing to obtain income.  This way, I still have a situation where the player doesn't directly lose funds, but there would exist opportunity losses.

[codestryke]

Achievements is a good idea and could work.  I would warn against trying to push your ideas about how you see the game though. It's your idea and it's your ball but it's not your game. You are making a game for people to play and pushing to early could take the game in a direction where your current player base may not want to go.

Some times it just takes time or the right amount of influx of people. When I added PvP hacking to Cypher no one used it for the first couple rounds which irked the hell out of me because of the time I invested in coding that section. Eventually as the players go more familiar with the other aspects of the game they branched out into the hacking aspect of it and it finally took off.

[Chris]

You have more serious problems than "waiting". If there is no stealing gold/resources it means the gain is flat. And if the gain is flat what is the difference whom you attack (except for selecting the weakest target which you can find out and remember quickly)? And if the selection of target is so trivial why not remove the whole PvP combat and replace it with "give me some gold/resources in proportion to my army power in exchange for 1 turn" button?

If you can solve this you will most likely solve the waiting too.

[CygnusX]

Gold gains are in proportion to your opponents score.  Thus, attacking someone higher up is more beneficial than attacking down for an easy win. 

[Chris]

Gold gains are in proportion to your opponents score.  Thus, attacking someone higher up is more beneficial than attacking down for an easy win. 

Exactly. So you could just make a list of NPCs with various score range and proportional power and scrap the whole PvP.

The system is not working because you don't have variable "gold at hand" that could be stolen. It does not matter when you attack, the outcome is identical. It does not matter whom you attack (as long as the target is within your desired score & power range), the outcome is identical.