@artch Although you've created the Seasonal world as a competition, I believe it has the potential to be so much more. It's an excellent sandbox to test out new and innovative things, and give you full liberty to try some really creative explorations outside of the realm of regular screeps gameplay.

As far as new player goals are concerned, I think seasonal is a wonderful format to get people started in a friendlier and safer environment without totally messing up the core gameplay of regular screeps.

Alternatively, you could potentially create an entirely separate fully co-op MMO world, but this is a significantly larger undertaking.

@artch said in Season #2 concept:

We have to only stick to ideas that imply that only a few people get significant reward.

As far as paying for season in general, I'd caution leaning too heavily towards the feast-or-famine reward model, as it strongly disincentivizes participation from all those but the most elite, which isn't good for the long term health of the game.

For a global co-op season, I think you might be underestimating the willingness to pay for access keys to a fun and interesting coding challenge as its own intrinsic reward, again, particularly among new players. Doing a marketing push on coding school platforms could potentially do really well.

I'd also suggest that limited edition cosmetics are always an enticing reward. Giving limited rewards as CPU tokens could additionally go a really long way towards converting non-paying players into lifetime subscribers. $10 in access keys as an entry fee, $3.50 in CPU tokens as a reward, plus a limited edition non-transferrable cosmetic. Choosing to scale the reward up or down based on time to goal completion is entirely optional, but a fun incentive to put up for players.

In terms of this season, I'll give my separate take on how I think these mechanics could be tweaked to support a form of global co-op. I know it's not feasible to implement in such a short time, but thought I'd just share a potential design.

1. Each sector has a unique symbol, and all rooms in that sector randomly spawn resource containers of that symbol. (For example, a 6x6 world like the current season would have 36 unique symbols)
2. At each highway intersection lies a collection monolith. This monolith must receive X of every symbol type to be finished.
3. Once all monoliths are finished, the season is complete and all players receive rewards based on how many ticks it took to win. There is a leaderboard for who contributed the most, but it is purely for prestige and bragging rights.
4. Optionally, terminals are entirely disabled.

This is a relatively simple take on the idea, but could be starting point for significantly more depth in the future. Further ideas might be:

1. The perimeter rooms of every sector begin with a permanent level 1 stronghold (until destroyed).
2. All source keeper rooms begin with a permanent level 3 stronghold.
3. Omega symbols spawn within the centermost room, which permanently has a level 5 stronghold (until destroyed). Omega symbols are just like other symbols in that every monolith requires some amount of it in order to be completed. Unlike other symbols, they do not spawn in a given sector, and instead spawn in every sector, but only in this most strongly guarded room.
4. Highway monoliths begin spawning invaders as they near completion. Unlike normal rooms, these invaders spawn from the center monolith and move outwards.
5. Highway monoliths spawn a stronghold on top of them as they near completion.
6. Regular room invaders drop a small amount of random symbols when killed.

And to go really pie in the sky:

1. Players are individually given quests. Upon completion, a non-decaying symbol container from a foreign sector spawns in their room, with varying types and quantities of rewards based on the difficulty of the quest.
   • Quest examples:
     • Deposit your starting symbol into a specific highway monolith 40+ rooms away from your starting spawn
     • Take down a level 5 stronghold
     • Get your entire starting sector reserved at once (by you or other players)
     • Build and launch a nuke against a special target
     • A special key spawns in your starting room. Take the key to a factory and unpackage it to trigger an onslaught of XX massively boosted invaders that you must survive. You must kill all of them before they destroy the factory.
2. Occasionally, a special room is designated as a boss lair. The center of the room is a 40x40 box of unbreakable walls. In order to enter it, 4 creeps from separate players must stand on 4 separate pedestals. Once this happens, all four creeps are renewed to full lifetime, teleported into the center, and a number of waves of invaders gradually increasing in power are spawned. For every wave defeated, larger and larger score containers are spawned outside of the unbreakable walls for other creeps to pick up.

It's great to see that the devs are open to exploring more co-op mechanics, but I fear that this may be a step in the wrong direction.

From a design goal perspective, I believe a couple of things would be good for the game's long term prospects:

1. New players feel comfortable joining, learning, exploring, and improving their code in a safe environment.
2. New players can spend time working solely on code and not interacting with other humans until they feel ready.

Comparing Screeps to a traditional MMO like WoW or similar, new players often experience social interactions in three distinct stages:

1. Solo gameplay through tutorials and individual quests
2. Co-op gameplay through multiplayer quests
3. PvP gameplay

PvP gameplay often attracts the most hardcore players and is where much of the fame, glory, and best rewards lie. At the same time, PvP gameplay is not for everyone, nor does it need to be.

The reason I say this iteration on seasonal may be a step in the wrong direction is due to the added element of required social interactions with other players, meaning diplomacy, deal making, backstabbing, and more. Screeps is primarily a game for programmers, by programmers, and I believe that these forced social elements will further deter new players from joining the game.

This isn't to say that this Machiavellian gameplay isn't interesting or exciting. In fact, for some players, it may be some of the most satisfying and engaging type of gameplay. However, this type of audience is already (somewhat) being served by the vanilla Screeps experience. The audience that's severely being underserved right now is the set of players who want to learn how to program in a fun and nonconfrontational way through gameplay. This audience has the potential of being extraordinarily large, and the popularity of pseudo-programming experiences within Roblox and Minecraft hints at how large the market could be.

In the long run, I'd love to see Screeps move in a direction to serve this audience. For example:

1. Building out visual scripting tools like Scratch or Unreal Engine's blueprints to greatly lower the barrier to entry, where players can gradually transition into "real" programming by directly editing code later on.
2. Creating a robust set of solo goals to achieve in a safe environment with no hostile player interaction.
3. Introducing friendly player interaction in the form of cooperative goals.

These are lofty goals, and certainly there's not a ton of time to develop massively different mechanics for Season. To that end, I'd advocate for targeting a goal for an explicit global co-op season some time in the distant future, with no hostile player interaction and a robust set of game mechanics to support it. After that, it might make sense to have a rotation of PvP seasons with some global co-op seasons in between.

This is all a lot of long term feedback, but I hope it helps inform future seasons, and the direction of Screeps as a whole.

Co-op mechanics please!

Example:

Epic map with 4 powerful artifacts at the corners of the world. Each guarded by powerful enemies that require timed teamwork to take down. Once slain, you must pull the artifacts towards the center of the map one tile at a time, gaining 5000 fatigue per pull. The artifact attracts invaders periodically. Season ends when the community wins by assembling the artifacts.

Everyone shares in the prizes, which go up the faster the community wins.

There's a leaderboard of who's contributed most to the overall goal, but it's just for bragging rights.

Example Mechanic:

Various tasks can contribute to the overall goal with varying degrees of difficulty. Easy tasks would be something like collecting a resource and dropping it somewhere. Harder tasks could be collecting raw materials, then assembling them in a factory or a lab before bringing them somewhere. Even harder than that could be tasks to take out NPC strongholds. Higher tier tasks would give the player more overall contribution points for the leaderboard.

Overall, one of my main goals with something like this is to come up with a system that will be friendly to new players, so that they want to start playing and continue playing, as opposed to getting wiped out 6 times in Season and quitting entirely. Worst case scenario I see is if people start looking at Season like it's something that's only worth doing if you're a "top player".

So now that people are declining to generate pixels because they don't want to code around the empty bucket case, can we increase the reward to match the previous CPU/pixel generation rate for the people who are willing to code for it?