TYLER Projects | the blog

Here is the DAU (daily active users) chart for Battle Stations (original English version) for 2009 taken from Facebook.
Since we switched to BS2 there’s been a huge drop in DAU. A further drop in  MAU after we introduced a new crew system to comply with new FB rules. Compared to the same period in 2008 the dip seems to be a seasonal effect though I’m not willing to assume that was the only reason for the fall in MAU/DAU.

The new FB rules are a joke: there are still many apps using forced invites to gate content, providing benefits for having 501 friends playing the game. This is going to be annoying but it looks like we’re going to have a new crew system again very soon.

Battle Stations was featured on gamasutra a few days ago in an article about ” Zynga and the End of the Beginning”.

I thought it was quite an interesting read about why Zynga could perform better than other similar apps and about whether they could still sustain its huge fanbase.

Battle Stations was featured in the article too! !

“On the other hand, applications that don’t spread but retain well tend to be boutique games like Battle Stations,”

Good to hear that we have good retention and a loyal following! ( thanks to all of you!)

But we’re not spreading so we’ve got to really focus in  increasing our user base growth!! We can work together and grow to be a worldwide hit!! =)

The article : http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TadhgKelly/20091218/3665/Zynga_and_the_End_of_the_Beginning.php

Ps : Don’t forget to invite your friends to take part in our special New Year event : Santa Vs Mechakaiju because the winning team gets more FREE APs and Gold and remember to attack at least 10 times during the weekend to get your special monster item!

Santa Vs Mechakaiju

**Have a happy new year!!**—–from all of us here =)

There was a lot of player frustration with the new crew system.

I have some observations about the complaints:

• Most of the complaints are from players level 45 – 80 non-Ocho
• Some astute players pointed out that offering rewards for referrals might be a violation of the FB rule against encouraging multis
• Many players misunderstood the system and thought they absolutely HAD to pay the 1,000,000 gold to hire someone even if they referred the player
• There was concern about the possibility that your crew might leave (even after we increased the leaving period to 90 days)
• +2 AP regen is viewed as a penalty (the loss of the +2) for not having enough crew instead of a bonus (+2 over base 5 AP/hr) for hiring sufficient crew.

IMO the argument that this was a move to force players to Ocho has no merit:

• There hasn’t been any option to purchase robot crew in the Ocho shop since last week.
• The average number of friends a FB user has is 164 and the median is 132. 3 crew is 1.8% of that.
• Many players argued that they’d already asked most of their interested friends to play. 1) If they were referred by you, they’d be in your crew. 2) BS has changed quite a lot now that it’s BS2.0. We’ve spent a huge effort to make the game friendlier and easy to learn for beginners. Try again before insisting that you won’t be able to get even 1 friend to try it out now.

Anyway, here’s the plan:

1. To dispel any remaining association between crew and friends, we will remove the option to hire friends as crew
2. All your friends playing BS will be in your crew but crew will not be used as the benchmark for giving out the +2 AP regen
3. “Squad” will be renamed “Crew” (again) and you’ll be able to assign friends to the 4 main crew roles we have on the main page
4. Quests do not require a certain number of crew.
5. In the future, quests may require specific crew (must have/be a pirate of level 10+ to do this quest) < idea contributed by Morten Løvaas
6. Instead, you will need 1 fuel generator to get +1AP regen, 2 more generators to get +2 AP regen
7. You can do a referral instead of paying the generator’s cost

You’ll be able to build a fuel generator for:

• 500K gold (10 Ochos value)
• 2 Plasma rocks (10 Ocho value)
• 100 Ore (14.3 Ocho value)

Yes, that’s more before but it’s permanent and it’s about the same as what we were planning to charge for robot crew (30 Ochos). Those crew you hired so far, you get to keep as generators (and no, generators can’t be sold).

New players who purchase Ocho will get +1 AP regen and 3 fuel generators (+2).  Existing players who purchased Ochos will not have their AP regen affected (we’ll give you 3 generators). Ocho players who hired crew will get a refund. Non-Ocho players who hired crew will have their crew converted into generators.

Ok so what about referring encouraging multis? For starters, the fact you can build the generators will reduce the need to badger a friend into accepting your crew request and hence reduce the “encouragement” to create a multi. There’s still incentive to create a multi for those who all of the following:

• don’t want to pay the cost
  
• don’t want to make a referral
  
• don’t want to buy Ocho

We’ve made a decision that the way we will not “encourage” these people is to actively seek them out and ban them. Furthermore we may do periodic checks on the referrals to see if the players are still active. If they are inactive and have a low PV score we may remove them.

For those of you who insist that this is still encouraging multis, you are also insisting we remove the +2 AP regen for non-Ocho players. I have argued with the board about this ad nauseum, there are no 2 ways about it; either we have the option to refer for +2 OR non-Ochoers have their AP regen slashed to +5 per hour.

I got this idea from the trap cards in the Zendikar set (I don’t play MtG anymore but some of us at the office do): Skills could be triggered when certain preset conditions are met.

For example:

• Opponent attacks with at least 4 cannons
• opponent speed > 1000
• your HP less than 50%

The trigger conditions would have to be unlocked by performing certain tasks or by level. We’ll probably have to restrict certain skills to certain activation conditions for balance. Might also need a skill points system to ensure that skills won’t trigger all the time (e.g. HP less than 50% = activate Battle Repair + use multi to attack = auto repair?)

This won’t be an easy system to code….

There are currently three main schools of thought to designing an immersive story for a game.

The first follows the Half Life approach, last seen in Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2. Place the player into a specific individual within the game, give him a clear cut goal, and rail him through a rollercoaster plot. Surround him with sound and fury, leaving him little time to ponder anything else. Immersion arises from the cinematic presentation of action and gameplay, but the story unfolds in a linear progression. Done well, the player seeks to finish the story, to see how the plot unfolds, to experience the game as they might normally experience a movie, just with more interactivity. Great stories can be told through this method, but they’re rarely suitable for a more multi-player experience.

Battle Stations is thus incapable of this, just yet.*

The second is the Choice and Consequence approach, as evidenced by Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and The Witcher. The player becomes an active agent in the story’s progression, rather than the guy who’s ordered to shoot things. The player is presented with a choice that will affect the outcome of the story. Players become invested in their choices, and the characters they play. Play the power-hungry mage and sacrifice all who come into your path, or play the paragon of virtue, spreading compassionate ass-kicking to all corners of the galaxy. It’s the player’s choice to make. The outcome of the story is thus determined by the player’s actions, not a linear progression of plot, sandwiched between stretches of gameplay.

Several players have remarked that they would like to see this in Battle Stations Quest system, yet these are incredibly complex to design, and often overwhelming to more casual players.

The third is the emergent narrative, Civilization, Warhammer, Fallout 3 etc. Design the world, litter it with details of a living, breathing ecosystem, like audiotapes, lost logs, pedestrians you can mug, cars to steal. It’s the backbone of a well-designed sandbox game such as Grand Theft Auto, (before they railroad you down the linear plot). The writers and designers create a world and all its ancillary information so players can make up their own stories, and go on their own adventures, discover the worlds little secrets.

This is what we’re trying to do, more or less.

Some of the real story that derives from Battle Stations comes from the players themselves, who their captains are, what sort of feud is going on between the clans, which famous captain is flying high in the skies of Sios this week. We want to build on that. Obviously, a static quest system will not be the best way to involve players in the game world. That’s why we have a Renaissance.

We’ll be launching Battle Stations: Renaissance sometime alongside Chapter 1 of the quest updates. Renaissance is essentially a wiki format for all things Battle Stations, including Siosian history, Prominent player characters, personal character stories, etc. One of the main features is for fan contribution, whether in terms of fan fiction, or creating a short story we can fold into our flexible quest system. The idea is that if there’s a particular bit of story there, something we can spin several quests out of, we’ll look at being to produce it with what resources we have in-house, and you’ll see it in the quests sooner or later.

We’re trying to build a world for you guys to play in here, but where others can visit.

We’re going to remove the 24 hour cooldown system and replace it with a clan war (rez) token system:

Token system:

• Clans can salvage their fort as long as they have a token. Let’s call them rez tokens (rez = Resurrect, a Tron reference)
• Each clan will get a rez token everyday so you don’t have to rez exactly after 24 hours just to maximize your clan warring (< that’s definitely an improvement)
• You can’t keep more than 1 rez token, spend it or lose it when the next one comes in
• If your fort was just sunk you have to wait 30 mins before you can use a token to rez
• On weekends clans will get tokens every 5 hours (current system has a 5 hour cooldown on weekends)
• Weekend auto-rez will remain

“Scheduled” CW system (this may come in later or not at all):

• Every clan must pick a preferred time slot (1 hour)
• You can change the timeslot once a week
• When you rez your clan fort you will also rez any other clan if it’s their preferred timeslot (though only 15 minutes later and the clan will get a notification).
• if a clan has already been rezzed once through this method it will not be rezzed; 24 hour cooldown

I’ll make updates to this post if we decide to change anything.

It’s a proposal I put forth to the Tyler Senate. More details as soon as we trash this out (if we keep doling out +1s we might need to revise Ocho package prices = moar rebates??!).

We may also award another +1 AP regen for something else depending on our objectives (*update: I just had the idea that everyone gets +1 if BS has more than 1M MAU. that’s not against FB rules. ). If so that would make the AP regeneration rate 1 every 4.6 minutes on weekends and every 6 minutes on weekdays.

There are some major changes to the Facebook policy governing apps coming Dec 16th.

“Don’t undermine the integrity of the social graph by encouraging the creation of fake accounts or inauthentic friend connections. For example, don’t gate content or provide rewards based on the number of a user’s friends who also use your application. (DPP V.2)”

To comply with the new FB rules, we have the following plan:

• All your crew will be removed on Dec 15th
• Only people who joined using your referral link will remain
• Crew != friends. Crew don’t have to be your friends (for compliance with Facebook rules)
• If refer you someone they will join your crew and vice-versa. You cannot be in more than 1 player’s crew
• “Main crew” renamed “Squad”. Your squad mates can be any of your friends but won’t count as crew unless they were referred
• Everyone who bought robot crew will get a refund and their robot crew removed (this may happen after the 16th)
• You can hire any player as crew for 1 million gold as long as they accept and are not already in someone else’s crew
• Crew usage will be drastically reduced:

1. Crew requirements for quests have been temporarily reduced to 0
2. 1 referral to get +1 regen, 2 more referrals to get the next +1AP regen
3. Referrals will only count as successful once the player has chosen their first Tier job class (level 11) and passed a PV check
4. New robot crew will cost 30 Ochos each

Ocho players (players who have purchased Ocho) will not have their crew AP regen bonus affected (will receive 3 robot crew members once their old robot crew has been removed and you have received your refund)

I understand that it does take quite long to level up at the higher levels so I’ll be making the following proposals to the Tyler “senate”:

- Improved returns from exploring
- New quests which cost even more AP but give higher XP per AP
- CW token system: CW anytime you want as long as you have tokens (bought using WPs maybe)
- Scheduled CW: discussed before
- Spread level curve over 300 levels: This means some top players will break the lvl200 barrier immediately. Levels above 300 only get reduced stat pts per level.
- Alternative means of getting stronger other than leveling: grinding for “skill points” used to increase the activation % chance for skills.

- minor AP regeneration upon level up (yeah this is from Mafia Empire and it’s really for the lower levels)

The underlying approach to BSv2.0 storytelling technique is that every player is his or her own captain in the world of Sios.

The concept works like this. Quests are designed such to be that they are jobs, missions and tasks that any mercenary captain in the world of Sios would normally be hired to do. You have a ship, you run cargo, escort merchants, maybe do a bit of patrol, aid the Knights in raiding bandits, explore new lands, etc. None of the players are given control of a specific character like the way we did in Mafia Empire, or the way other RPGs do it. You’re not a Grey Warden, nor are you a Spectre, Cloud Strife or Luke Skywalker. You’re not that special. If everyone was special, then no one really is. You are whoever you want to be, as long as whoever you want to be captains an airship and wants to fly around Sios. Why are you playing Battle Stations if otherwise?

But there’s a story going on in the world of Sios, and it’s going to happen whether the player participates in it or not.

The trick is that we’re building a world, not simply telling a story. There are going to be a multitude of plots going on, a few conspiracies being conspired, politicians realpoliticking, bandits banditing, nations on the brink of war. When a player first enters Sios, after the initial Tutorial area, he’ll be presented with a number of options for quests. They’re what could be expected of an Airship captain just getting started in life. As he progresses, he might get in touch with certain contacts, certain individuals who have need of mercenary aid. If the player helps that guy, he gets drawn in further into the ongoing stories. If he simply pursues the routine of merchant running, patrolling and bandit raiding, well…. more power to him. That’s the basics of your choice for now. You can certainly level to 100 delivering pies to the border guards, but you’re not really gaining a lot of experience are you?

So the quest system works like this. Each port is divided in several districts. You can freely travel between the districts without AP. The idea is that within a nation, all the trade routes are so easily mapped out that it’s mostly inconsequential flying around. (Also, gameplay wise, it’s less annoying to keep sucking your APs). Those district icons at the top of the Quest page, yeah, you don’t need to unlock them. Fly there, see what quests there are, do them if you like. Fly elsewhere if you get bored, or find a better paying job. That’s the life of a captain.

Quests all still have random outcomes. This means that just because you’re escorting a merchant through a peace trade province, it isn’t going to be plain sailing. Bandits might attack, the merchant might stiff you on payment, you’ll run into a thunderstorm. If you go squid hunting, you’ll occasionally get lucky and capture the squid without the need for battle, or you might run into something much worse than a simply flying squid. Who knows? Only you do when you go on the quests. Things happen, that’s life in the world of Sios.

Other quests get unlocked as you master others. You might, as a captain attract enough attention that some people think you’ll be useful for certain jobs. You certainly won’t be the only one. These jobs might appear once a day, they might always be available or they might appear only once. If you don’t do them, they’re gone. Maybe they’ll return, maybe they won’t. Who knows. Well, we do, but that entirely depends on our ability to design and code those quests in as much as we can during the course of the week. If opportunity knocks on your ship, you should take it. That’s the life of a mercenary.

The world is there for you to explore. Go on, explore, and eventually you discover things about Sios that will end up being a story in itself.

The comic ties directly into that. There’s an actual character driven story there. It takes place in Sios, and where the protagonists of the comic end up, players will have a chance of visiting themselves. Or even the other way around. Players do a quest that will have its repercussions in the comic down the line. Players who make a name for themselves in the clan wars, in the island bases, in the bounty hunts might appear in the comic (as their captain counterpart). Players might even have a chance to run into the protagonist in the game, based on some random encounters, or in their explorations. We don’t actually know. The possibility is coded in, but the random outcome generator doesn’t mean you will actually see them. But the comic, that’s where the story takes place. The game is where the players can poke around the world and discover the hidden stories that motivate, intersect and create the world around them.

Of course, this is all theory. It remains to be seen if we can pull it off.

Next Up: Instance Runs, Boss Hunts, and the Renaissance.