New Feature Idea: Site Experience (Need Feedback)

Titles and awards icons are a good idea. The ability to edit your own title eventually.

I was thinking maybe having limited character slots, and the ability to unlock more as you gain levels, like I dunno, 4 or 5 to begin with. But then again, it's putting restrictions where none exist yet, so this might not fly too well with some people...

Now that I understand your idea of on-site hosting, this might work too...

A limited number of campaign slots you start with, with the ability to unlock more as you level up? But why would someone run more than 2 campaigns at a time?

The ability to view other players' character? (this one has always bugged me, or at least view the character of those who are running in the same game as you...)

Gain access to on-site avatars, either for your account or for your character?

What about adding a capability that would allow people to "thumb up" or "up vote" other users contributions? For example, let's say I make a brilliant post of some sort that people really love and they have the ability to "up vote" (once per contribution and anonymously). Every "up vote" is worth some small amount of XP.

How about instead of unlocking features at certain levels your XP earns you some sort of currency. Like one "dollar" per 100XP and then give a choice of things people can unlock with their currency. Say for $2 I can put some sort of cool thing about my avatar, but I'd much rather have some other thing that costs $4. I can skip the $2 thing and save up for the $4 thing. Currency spent is lost, XP earned is kept. You could even tip some of your currency to others.

BAH! I COMPLETELY FORGOT TO MENTION ONE OF MY BIG THINGS FOR THE XP SYSTEM! THANK YOU SZEMELY! (You may have been the person I discussed this with originally).

Spend XP on liking posts! I love the idea of liking someone's stuff, but I don't want it to be abused. My concept was basically a like or tip system. You can like someone's post, but it'll cost you, lets say 2xp. The person earns 1xp per like they get.

I do like the idea of rather than leveling, or maybe adjacent to, spending xp on stuff.

How about a "draw my own hero" tool on the site, sort of like what Hero Machine does? You can spend more XP to unlock more sets? Like you could start with basic fantasy set, basic modern set, and basic sci-fi set and then unlock more sets by spending XP?

That'd be an awesome idea. But I'm having enough trouble thinking of titles, let alone avatars! Anyone out there and artist who likes working for (a small, small bit of) publicity?

When you say "draw my own hero", do you mean an actual drawing tool? Because that's a big tool to develop :D

As someone who designs board games (and uses games in the classroom), I have some cautionary remarks:

You should reflect on what behaviour your XP system encourages. If creating a character is worth 1 XP, expect thousands of (not terribly well created) characters to appear. If posting is worth 1 XP, expect the off-topic subforms to explode with activity and forum games as users seek to increase their rank.

I also see you've anticipated some abuse, and have proposed limitations on things. However, gamification works best the easier it is to comprehend for users. The more conditionals on XP gain there are, the more difficult it is to comprehend (no one wants to read a 10 page document to learn how to level up, well maybe RPG gamers are an exception to that insight ;)).

Finally, the more "important" the system is, the more you can expect people to want to "win" and do whatever it takes to do so (for example, if there was a leader board expect more 'system gaming' behaviour than if there wasn't).

All of this is to say, decide what the ultimate *goal* of gamifying the forum is. Ensure that all efforts move towards that goal, and be sure to block of loose tendrils of abuse (because if a path exists, someone will, eventually, pursue it).

* * *

Real suggestion: The forum primarily needs 1) people running games and 2) people playing games and 3) existing games to succeed and continue for as long as possible. I would focus XP around those variables, with a lot of weight put onto 3. Consider this:

- 10 XP as soon as a game you GM is full of players and every player has posted at least once in the game forum
- 5 XP as soon as a game you joined as a player meets the condition specified above
- 1+X XP at the end of a week if every player (including the GM) has posted in the game forum within that week
X = number of times the 1 XP award has been given out for that game

This rewards players for using the site as intended. The best way to abuse it? Use the site as intended (well, actually, it's probably to get a single friend and create a dozen games with just them and post in all games 1/week with just a random throwaway post -- you could write a bot). Which is to say, it's hard (but on the other hand, accounting for all possible abusive strategies is impossible - what you want to do is make sure the path of least resistance to XP gain involves doing the activities you want people to do).

Great thoughts Candi! Its also why I'm trying to avoid rewards being substantial; I figure if the rewards are superfluous, then people won't try to game the system.

If people spam posts, then they'll get blocked; spamming is already against the rules. One of the reasons I didn't propose giving xp for making characters was to avoid character spam. Instead, it'd be on visits, so you can't control it. Sure, people could create multiple accounts, but I track IP addresses, and that's something people could do anyway.

I prefer to give XP for game landmarks rather than over a time period, simply because sometimes games slow down, sometimes they're faster, etc.

Great! How do you measure landmarks though (without requiring a thread naming convention -- in my games it's easy because I create threads for "Chapters" and finishing a chapter is a significant landmark!)

Sorry, you were proposing XP for posts per week; I'm proposing XP rewards when you hit a certain number of posts instead. By landmarks, I mean activity landmarks.

I was proposing a 'group activity' landmark. In any case, the difference between posts/week and total posts is a matter of granularity. If you get 100 XP for reaching 1000 posts, then that's pretty well the same as getting 0.1 XP per post (you just don't get your pile of XP until you finish the quest, versus getting it through ought the session).

If you want XP to be an economy spent on jazz (titles, flairs, icons, likes) then you probably want a more granular way to gain XP (since a good economy ebbs and flows).

Great point. I'll spend some time reconsidering this and we should start to come up with some specific rewards/tiers, since it seems we have a good starting point.

One cool reward idea from Board Game Geek is overtext (which is text that pops up when you hover your mouse over top of the persons avatar). It's completely superfluous, but a fun bit of customization. They also have "banners" which is a small (about 20px high, equal width of the avatar) image that goes above your avatar (and you can get overtext for both your avatar and your 'uber badge', which is what they call the banner). That's at least 3 "levels" worth of reward that don't require you to have any skills besides coding ;)

You could do the same with flairs or a bar of 3-5 icons below the user name (let users upload flairs to a board flair database, where a flair is a 30x30 px icon or something like that -- then users can spend XP to buy flairs and then put those below their avatar)... actually, what I'm basically saying is you could just 'borrow' the Geek Gold thing from Board Game Geek as a proven-to-work starting point ;)

Another user sent me a message, which gave me some interesting ideas.

Instead of giving straight xp for actions, what about achievements for activity, a la Steam? So When you make a character, you get an achievement. You get another one at 10 characters, 50, etc. Some achievements would be one shot (like characters created, posts, etc), others would be repeat (be in a game reaching 1000 posts).

From there, either achievements could earn rewards or earn xp that could be spent on rewards. It would promote activity, but would be easier to manage.

If achievements had icons, and you had customizable icon bars below avatars users could even wear as badges of pride icons for the achievements they have won that they are most proud of!

Not exactly a "drawing" tool, but more like a program with a lot of pre-drawn assets you can put together to make to create a character. Sort of what Hero Machine and Fabrica De Herois are already doing. Not sure how better I can explain the idea...

Yeah, I was also starting to wonder about how the XP system could lead to abuse and spamming and was about to post some suggestions, but Candi pretty much beat me to the point and his suggestions are really good.

I know you want to avoid granting XP after periods of time since games can speed up or slow down, but how about making it a month (30 days) instead of a week? This way, no matter how slowed down a game gets, you're pretty much guaranteed to see at least one post a month...

edit: Oh, I thought a bit more about szemely's idea of thumbs up and thumbs down, and I think you should just do thumbs up or likes to avoid "liking wars" and people being a jerk to one another, disliking other people's posts to prevent them from gaining XP...

Oh yah, no intention of introducing a downvote or dislike system. It's petty and not useful.

So this thought just occurred to me ... what if your profile is, itself, set up like a character sheet.

When you level up you can gain stats and skill points to customize yourself on various superfluous but fun skills, feats, abilities, etc.
This could later on make for some really fun games that could be run with peoples profiles as the character.
So say I join the site, i get a couple stat points to plug into my abilities. and probably a couple skill points to put in areas of interests...
you could either make this relevant to the games and such people play, or completely unrelated like it's own shebang.

If you're doing achievements for things, I'd say this profile character would be almost like making your own PC (and indeed it could be!)

I like that idea, though I'm having trouble seeing it fleshed out (in terms of skills/feats/etc).

Given all this discussion, I'm leaning away from site experience. It's been mentioned that XP systems could lead to people trying to game the system. Achievements on the other hand, are less likely to be gamed. The only thing I'd want to figure out is the "like" feature. I don't want to make it unlimited, as people will go around liking random posts. Maybe a daily limit to the number of posts you can like? Which you can boost via achievements? Or any other ideas?

You can easily fix anyone being able to game an exp system on the site if you put a daily exp cap, or weekly exp cap.
World of Warcraft does this with weekly guild dungeons/raids. only the first howevermany count for bonus exp/rewards. After you've done those they can't be earned till the next week. Pretty simple way to keep something like that from being abused.

Wouldn't the XP be awarded for your posts that are liked and not you liking posts? I fail to see how this would make people go in a like binge with the possible exception of a few people agreeing to like each other's posts. But if you make it so we can't game the site XP, then this should not be much of a problem...