From my own personal playing experience i'ld say that a high percentage of players on this game love taking part in an ingame competition. There isnt many that'ld point blank refuse to join a costume contest in atlas as an example.
Now i personally love organising competitions and finding new, fun and interesting ways to get people together and have a good time. However last few months i have been thinking about just how hard it is to get peoples attention for a competition. At first i thought it was maybe the fact that costume contests [again as an example] happened nearly on a daily basis and people no longer shared the interest in them and so i conducted a little research into this.
My theory:
After just simply watching a few costume contests i saw numerous participants not saying how fun it is, but more about what the actual prize is. For a lot of the players [or at least the vocal ones] it has seemed that the fun had gone out of a costume contest and has turned into a mere lottery system of luck, not skill.
For competitions that had low level prizes in the realm of a few million [lets say 5 million to the winner for arguments sake], you'ld get only a small handfull of people turn up and get numerous broadcasts basically laughing off the prize fund as far too small to warrant players going there.
But however on the flip side, if the same person organised the same style of event but with 10x the prize fund, the amount of people that turns up increases greatly.
Has peoples greed taken over fun?:
Now when i first started, it was common place to have a single million as the prize as players would line up in awe at the sight of such a high prize fund. These days a single million would be met with nothing but laughter and possibly only a few low level characters turning up [however they would commonly not wait long].
So what has changed? Is it because that influence is so easy to come by these days that players no longer feel the need to try and win money in order to be rich or have fun? Is 100 million the new 1 million prize contests?
Present state:
If you look at the current competitions going on lately, you will see numerous competitions offering prizes in the region of between 500 million - 1 billion influence on quite a common basis to try and entice people to gain an interest in THEIR competition.
Even the competitions with not so much influence to give out has extra goodies within them, such as temp gold titles and costume pack codes.
Is this the right way to go though? Simply increasing the prize pot to keep people interested?
The future:
In my opinion people need to start steering away from this motion of having a huge prize fund and turning to smaller and more fun competitions.
Long gone are the days of people taking the initiative and inventing something new and exciting and steering towards safety rather than taking a risk in something unproven.
The way things are going now, i can see prizes being doubled as the minimum to get peoples attention [due to the constant increase in rate in influence] in roughly a years time, so the time of big prizes MUST come to an end to save the era of fun competitions.
Competition organisers MUST start organising something different and innovative in order to get people interested in having fun over prizes again.
Everybody knows that anything thats new is taking a risk, especially since it is your money your giving away you want a proven result. However if you look at it as not being a failure you could turn out to be the one person who made a lot of people happy by organising something so crazy and out of this world that people in that competition actually signed down for your next competition!
Now i know some people will ask why arent i doing this then? The answer is simple, me and a few players [EU side] are currently working on a few ideas to bring brand new and never seen before contests to our game. There is even talk of a few GLOBAL competitions to create a real sense of a global community [we have figured out how to make a "global competition" now and have a few ideas on the drawing board] and this is the kind of thing that i am talking about. We need something that will spark peoples interest again because at the moment competitions have become part of the background of the game [become background noise] in that we are now taking it for advantage.
Let us start a new era, an era in which we the players re-invent the concept of a Co* competition!
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
From my own personal playing experience i'ld say that a high percentage of players on this game love taking part in an ingame competition. There isnt many that'ld point blank refuse to join a costume contest in atlas as an example.
Now i personally love organising competitions and finding new, fun and interesting ways to get people together and have a good time. However last few months i have been thinking about just how hard it is to get peoples attention for a competition. At first i thought it was maybe the fact that costume contests [again as an example] happened nearly on a daily basis and people no longer shared the interest in them and so i conducted a little research into this.
My theory:
After just simply watching a few costume contests i saw numerous participants not saying how fun it is, but more about what the actual prize is. For a lot of the players [or at least the vocal ones] it has seemed that the fun had gone out of a costume contest and has turned into a mere lottery system of luck, not skill.
For competitions that had low level prizes in the realm of a few million [lets say 5 million to the winner for arguments sake], you'ld get only a small handfull of people turn up and get numerous broadcasts basically laughing off the prize fund as far too small to warrant players going there.
But however on the flip side, if the same person organised the same style of event but with 10x the prize fund, the amount of people that turns up increases greatly.
Has peoples greed taken over fun?:
Now when i first started, it was common place to have a single million as the prize as players would line up in awe at the sight of such a high prize fund. These days a single million would be met with nothing but laughter and possibly only a few low level characters turning up [however they would commonly not wait long].
So what has changed? Is it because that influence is so easy to come by these days that players no longer feel the need to try and win money in order to be rich or have fun? Is 100 million the new 1 million prize contests?
Present state:
If you look at the current competitions going on lately, you will see numerous competitions offering prizes in the region of between 500 million - 1 billion influence on quite a common basis to try and entice people to gain an interest in THEIR competition.
Even the competitions with not so much influence to give out has extra goodies within them, such as temp gold titles and costume pack codes.
Is this the right way to go though? Simply increasing the prize pot to keep people interested?
The future:
In my opinion people need to start steering away from this motion of having a huge prize fund and turning to smaller and more fun competitions.
Long gone are the days of people taking the initiative and inventing something new and exciting and steering towards safety rather than taking a risk in something unproven.
The way things are going now, i can see prizes being doubled as the minimum to get peoples attention [due to the constant increase in rate in influence] in roughly a years time, so the time of big prizes MUST come to an end to save the era of fun competitions.
Competition organisers MUST start organising something different and innovative in order to get people interested in having fun over prizes again.
Everybody knows that anything thats new is taking a risk, especially since it is your money your giving away you want a proven result. However if you look at it as not being a failure you could turn out to be the one person who made a lot of people happy by organising something so crazy and out of this world that people in that competition actually signed down for your next competition!
Now i know some people will ask why arent i doing this then? The answer is simple, me and a few players [EU side] are currently working on a few ideas to bring brand new and never seen before contests to our game. There is even talk of a few GLOBAL competitions to create a real sense of a global community [we have figured out how to make a "global competition" now and have a few ideas on the drawing board] and this is the kind of thing that i am talking about. We need something that will spark peoples interest again because at the moment competitions have become part of the background of the game [become background noise] in that we are now taking it for advantage.
Let us start a new era, an era in which we the players re-invent the concept of a Co* competition!
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!