Discussion - Dev Diary: Designing Day Jobs Feature

Holy crap. Awesome. o_o My badge hunter within is just itching to get these. And the temporary powers and costume pieces sound very nice, too.

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My questions to the developers are the following:

1. Why 24 hour blocks of time instead of 8 (ie a "normal" workday)?
   Follow up question: Why didn't you cap it at a max 8 hours of off-line time per 24 hours or real time? This would allow people to play their characters, yet get the awards at the same time as everyone else.
   
2. Why the fudge 30 days? Given that an in game day is 30 minutes, that means if you have to spend 720 hours off-line your character has "worked" 1,440 [edit] days (thanks Arcanville for pointing this typo out)[/edit] to get a single badge. I'm a fan of "nice round numbers", but yikes.
   
   Related question: What is 720 hours compared to "average life to 50"? I'm quite sure you have that metric by now for comparison. If not, why not?
   
3. Double XP does a level 50 how much good?
   
4. Why not cap being on patrol at another 8 hours per diem? This combined with the day jobs capped lets players play a total of 8 hours without interfering with the reward.
   
5. Exactly how many of these jobs are there?
   
6. How many day jobs do you expect players to be able to get?

I see some problems if they are left as-is. And not just from the hard-core badgers.

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1) I'm assuming that the new costume piceces are not tied to day job badges, since the article doesn't mention them. I my opinion, it would make no sense to do it otherwise and would add nothing to the game.

2) I don't think day jobs should be specific to either side. There is plenty of scope in comicbook land for evil police or heroic smugglers.

3) Rested XP? Meh, not really sold on it. There needs to be a way to opt out of it for those that don't want to outlevel content.

In general, I don't really see day jobs as presented adding anything of value to the game, concept wise. Before, if someone wanted to, they could log off in a hospital and pretend their character was working as a janitor there. Now, the game will tell them they are a doctor. *shrug*

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Always remember, we were Heroes.

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With day job outfits, will there be another costume slot for our civilian attire?

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I had a very interesting discussion about this just now. At first look, I thought that the complaints about this were kind of silly, but I did get given one good point. If possible, it would be nice for people who are logged in and just *in* the job locations to get progress towards the badges. For example, if you spend an hour talking in Pocket D, you get an hour towards the badge. After all, you are "clubbing".

Clearly, the tech can *recognize* if you're in those locations and logged in, per the description of the in-game "power buff". So it seems likely the tech for that would exist. And it would allow people who spend time just RPing or hanging out the opportunity to make progress towards their day jobs. Obviously we don't want this to happen in areas where you can grind, but it makes sense in areas with no enemies.

I wonder if this could be examined by the Devs as a possibility to make some of the detractors happy?

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30 days for a badge logged out, that seems a wee big excessive. 60 days to get an accolade and 1 year logged out at LEAST to earn all the badges.

Congrats on killing badging for me. I am still working on the pillbox badges now i have to log out to earn those for a year, how is my badge toon supposed to get played?

Shorten the time needed to earn the badge at least make it like 5 days of logged out that way i can actually earn some of this stuff the costume options with them for the toons I PLAY

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The time is not consecutive. You don't have to kill all 1000 Rikti Monkeys in one session, you don't have to leave the character in the Hospital, unplayed, for 30 days. Play for 4 hours, log out in the hospital until the next day. If you start at roughly the same time, you have just earned 20 of those 720 hours in one day. Make sure you log out in the same kind of place, and when you play the next day, you will have earned another 20 hours. Average four hours a day on a single character, and it will take 36 days to earn the badge, and you still got to play that character for 144 of those hours (or six full days).

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Huh. It never said you have to be logged out for 24 hours, it just said you have to log out in a certain place each day.

Am I to assume that if I log out in 3 or 4 places per day then I would be working towards all 3 or 4 badges at the same time?

If so, I don't forsee the big problem with these taking so long.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.


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Excellent! Best news about I13 so far! (Not a slight on I13, theres lots of great stuff in there. Just I was worried that the days of adding to the costume creator just for the sake of it, rather than for unlockables or booster packs was going the way of the the dodo. I am amazingly glad to be wrong)

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Always remember, we were Heroes.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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I am rather curious as to find out how you are going to reliably test that in beta. Are we going to be waiting for a couple months, because you can test the day job effects rather easily, but we'll be waiting at least 2 months if you want to beta test all those accolades-- assuming you just don't hand out the accolades to the beta testers to test...

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If you are level 50, do you get double Infamy instead of xp?

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I just had a thought. Are we talking 30 days of in-game time or 30 days of actual real life time?

Also, assuming we play a character for 2 hours, then log off in a particular spot, and come back the next day at the same (initial) time, does that count as a full day of time or as 22 hours?

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Huh. It never said you have to be logged out for 24 hours, it just said you have to log out in a certain place each day.

Am I to assume that if I log out in 3 or 4 places per day then I would be working towards all 3 or 4 badges at the same time?

If so, I don't forsee the big problem with these taking so long.

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Time in the article is stated as non-consecutive. So I imagine there's probably some hidden or visible progress bar, just like any other badge. That would mean you don't have to concentrate at any specific location and fear loosing progress if you don't park there again before logging, as far as I can guess. That sort of thing wouldn't be good for sudden DCs or a rush logout anyhow.

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Jeez that was allot of Doom.

Okay people think about this, Now when you spend 8 hours sleeping instead of playing CoX, you gain FREE rewards on your toons, just for subscribing really. How can this be a bad thing?

System looks great Dev's. Though I imagine the bonus for "patroling" does not double your influence at level 50....

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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I'm not sure what could happen during beta that would be relevant. During the entire beta program none of us is going to earn even one of these things, maybe one on the outside, unless the rate is arbitrarily sped up on test, which seems to defeat the purpose of testing the earning rate.

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Oh, one possible suggestion:

To get away from the stigma fo being rewarded for not playing, what about if time spent playing other characters counted more? I mean, if you log out and stop playing it takes 24 hrs to get a day job benefit, but every hour of that 24 that you are playing another of your characters advances that 24hr clock by 2hrs?

Not sure if thats clear, but the idea is that actually actively alting accrues bonuses faster than simply not playing the game at all.

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Always remember, we were Heroes.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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How long is this beta going to be?

I mean really why would you need to test if we like the 30 day thing or not? Are you testing to see if it works or what?

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nice, i think folks got the wrong idea about the length of time being logged out but it'll all be straightened out. I like how my altitis will be worth some nifty badges atleast

So to summarize my take on all of this, We get free stuff for being logged out like normal. You don't have to do it consecutively, it will add up from all your normal log-out positions.... It sounds pretty awesome, thanks devs.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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How long is this beta going to be?

I mean really why would you need to test if we like the 30 day thing or not? Are you testing to see if it works or what?

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Good point, how are we to test the earning of these badges and the accolades if we are testing with the current numbers?

Beta testing normally last about a month maybe a month and a hald max. So we wouldn't even get to test any of the accolades at all. Unless of course you lower the numbers or say beta will last more than 2 months.

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Cool idea, and I am looking forward to working on these badges. However, I feel I have agree with the "30 days is too long" crowd. I don't understand why making it non-consecutive somehow makes it better. If you wanted to get all of these badges on one character in a year, you would only be able to play that character for 5 days during the year.

30 days is too long. I could see 15 as being a bit more reasonable.

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I see some problems if they are left as-is. And not just from the hard-core badgers.

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Exempting badging, the purpose seems to be to make the day jobs take long enough to get that it is *deliberately* not possible to get them all quickly, so a normal player has to prioritize what day job to get (and then what day job to get next, and so forth). If it was possible to just get them all relatively quickly, that would eliminate practically any thought put into acquiring them.

Now, because they tied badges to the system, they bring in a completely different set of competing criteria that it now is a sizable barrier to badge completists (and I'm one of them in large measure). In my opinion, that was an error. They really need to prioritize revamping the "badge" system to account for "indefinite progress badges" (i.e. empath), account-wide badges (i.e. veteran badges), awards not ordinarily achievable by most players (i.e. Bug Hunter), and now things like this (mere placeholders for other things, and not things intended to be actively collected in and of themselves).

Unless they do expect people to actively collect them, and they expect people to spend a year collecting them. Which is not absurdly long, but probably right at the edge of reasonableness. And that constrains the amount of such badges that can be added: you can't keep adding badges indefinitely that each take one month minimum to earn, with no possibility of increased rate, because at some point you push the ability for them to be collected and earned beyond the tolerance point for collectors. It starts to become overly negative reinforcement, which is a bad gameplay situation.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

[/ QUOTE ]

Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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Are you sure you didn't put on another extra zero by mistake?

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SadysCHICK ALL the Badges! (I can get. 1396)
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Congrats on killing badging for me. I am still working on the pillbox badges now i have to log out to earn those for a year, how is my badge toon supposed to get played?


Consider the possibility that you actually aren't supposed to have every badge in the game on one character.

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I believe this is meant for more casual gamers, and not those who can crunch out 50 levels in less than 50 days.

I, for one, think this is a pretty cool idea. I want to see more of the new costume options though.

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I'm a casual player and think it's a bad idea...10 days imo sounds like a better deal.

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Here's a question.... Is this retroactive? Say for example I have a character on Test I haven't logged into for over 30 days and he was in the Pocket D. When I log in do I automatically get Clubber? Or does everyone's "clock" get reset when the issue goes live?

The reason I ask because this seems to look at 2 things: Where you logged out and how much time since you last logged in. The only thing I can't see it keeping track of is time spent previously in various areas on the Map.

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Congrats on killing badging for me. I am still working on the pillbox badges now i have to log out to earn those for a year, how is my badge toon supposed to get played?


Consider the possibility that you actually aren't supposed to have every badge in the game on one character.

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Consider this, if my main toon is my fav toon i would like to play him so earning any one of these badges is going to take a long long long time.

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