Mississippians Community Event

Ukuli wrote:

Unlockable culture?

So you've came up with, designed, and implemented a playable culture, but won't actually release it into the game unless the community as a whole accomplishes an arbitrary amount of in-game activity?

Your game is already failing because of completely nonsensical design ideas that were seemingly implemented just to deviate from the norm, and now you're spending developer time on content that might not even be playable.

If you have an idea for a piece of content that would make the game better, be it a culture, building, or a new game-mechanic altogether, do not hold it, but patch it into the game right away!

Get a grip.

This development philosophy has always made me scratch my head.  My assumption is that they'll eventually release all of this content in one form or another, but in the meantime they're just sitting on finished content without giving the players a chance to use it (or a chance for Amplitude to make money off of their work - for example, they already spent the money to make the Wang Zhenyi persona but they currently aren't earning any money from that development expense by releasing it as a promotional tool or as a paid DLC).  Granted, this is not a new concept for Amplitude (they have done similar things for ES2 in particular), but before the release of Humankind these types of events were relatively uncommon.  As I have said before, it seems like a better idea is to add permanent achievements to the game and have this challenge content be unlockable as a reward for completing the achievements.

According to steamdb, there are always more than 1000 concurrent players, the peak for today is at 1500. Let‘s assume that there are 1250 players playing on average at all times. I estimate that each player unlocks a builder star every 10 minutes, so that‘s 6*1250 stars per hour, and 180‘000 per day. I admit that the 1 star per 10 minute could be off, it depends heavily on how many people play blitz or endless speed, and how fast the players take their turn. I may be a tad too optimistic, and it’s more like 4 per hour. So, I don‘t think the 2M stars are far out of reach, but maybe they aren‘t a goal that is automatically achieved. 

Octavion wrote:

To everyone who is skeptical about how doable this is, the community already has 63k stars on the event. It would take about 135k/day to ensure the 2M stars. We're already half way to that figure for today.

Also, it's incredibly easy to cheese this one. Remember, using influence to build resource extractors and harbors in territories counts toward stars. Merchant cultures help reduce the influence cost, as well. Go wide, go merchant, and use that influence!

For the Lunar New Year Event, we were on tracks until the first week-end, then it drastically dropped. The next week-end was double-star earned, but it wasn't even enough to gain what was required daily to reach the goal.

And it was easier to cheese every stars (reload a turn where you gain 3-5 stars - same with launch a game for the Amplifeid event, launch and don't play) than only builder ones.

I'm one of these players for who a single game takes dozens of hours, so... no more than 18 stars from me this time.

SpikedWallMan wrote:

Octavion wrote:

To everyone who is skeptical about how doable this is, the community already has 63k stars on the event. It would take about 135k/day to ensure the 2M stars. We're already half way to that figure for today.

Yes, but keep in mind that the collection rate will not be uniform and that we're in the middle of peak hours.  User counts also vary depending on the day of the week.  Not saying that we definitely won't make it, but it's hard to arrive at a stars/hour rate for these events.

Octavion wrote:

Also, it's incredibly easy to cheese this one. Remember, using influence to build resource extractors and harbors in territories counts toward stars. Merchant cultures help reduce the influence cost, as well. Go wide, go merchant, and use that influence!

Which sort of highlights how much of a grind these timed events tend to be.

Plus, these events aren't even working, their intended role is mostly to keep player retention, well just now, the steam charts show that ES2 has more active players than Humankind, to go from having 55k players at launch to being beaten by a game that's 6 years old that's made by the same company is not a good sign, meaning that something needs to change.