So. Relatively large suggestion here. Seasons. Same concept as Diablo 3, same concept as Path of Exile's challenge leagues, same concept as Guild Wars quarterly seasons. Plenty of MMOs do this already and it's a wonderful way to keep the game fresh while giving the dev team a functioning test server with actual player activity on it.

What it is: DIFFERENT NEW SERVER START with level 0 characters, nothing from live goes to this server. Everyone's on the same playing field. Lasts 2-3 months and then resets after a month or two break.

Why: Tons of benefits. What the new player experience would be like for everyone. Evens the playing field, removes legacy gear such as 12 modded bindo bugs, removes every hoard of tier 1-3 commods from endgame teams. Equality. Promotes healthy competition. A working leaderboard in a seasonal server would allow us to fight for who's the best at actually playing the game. Not just warring because we're bored. SS also now has the opportunity to promote itself as a competitive MMO, and capture a whole new potential audience of more hardcore players.

WHY THO: REWARDS. Simple shit to start. Skins, little icons by our names, base holoprojectors, a fucking leaderboard with names on it that makes sense? Character slots on the eternal server, maybe a month P2P for the top player? WHO THE FUCK KNOWS MAN ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN


Other thoughts: Game's activity always seems to drop about a month into the universe. Once everyone's done with reset hype and got their galaxies setup, and done some runs with teamies who are active again, they drop out. Eternal game runs itself in the background. If these events are scheduled properly, say a month or two into a new uni, every time, it would help fix the bleeding when it comes to inactivity and give everyone new fun shit to do while the eternal server does it's normal thing.

For SS I would suggest longer seasons, as I don't see anyone hitting t22 within 3 months.

There's really nothing to put pressure and challenge on players (eg, stuff that make people stop afking) about mid universe if you don't have any active wars going on.

People settle into a routine, get bored almost immediately, and go afk. We all can see the activity drop with our eyes closed.

Im game for this!

Guild Wars have PvP only characters.. Insta Max level and able to immediately compete. Might be nice to have that rather than a start fresh at 0. Since levels are really just determined by how much efficiency and time go into your leveling.

Anyway, I like it.

/SR/Signed.

We can do other competitions besides just pure level. There are a lot of things that are already tracked by the server, missions, mining, trading score, ownership score, hell, even Micron top times are tracked for the universe.

I want this to be a multifaceted competition. Any type of player will be able to compete in whatever it is they are particularly skilled at.

Micron - Red and Green tracks need to be done. Have no fucking clue why they haven't been.

Industry scores that are tracked basically state slaves are the most efficient and any players who beat them have literally no life.

Missions need to based on difficulty. Doing a 1000 "Turn in 5 Pirate Crests" also speak of no life and unfair to people with a life.

SS doesn't have a hard capped max level, unlike Guild Wars and WoW.

I'm not trying to thunderstorm on your parade, but I'm looking at this from an outsider's POV. Who the hell would do that? Rewards for grinding the fastest?

Literally everyone who plays Diablo 3 or Path of Exile race to see who can grind the fastest. Lol.

It works in Path of Exile because you actually get to keep the stuff that you find, it goes back with you to the main game.

PoE's high level items can be found near the start of the game, if you're super super lucky. That would be like finding 1b cash as a level 1 in SS. But that means it's actually worth participating in the short runs. Plus a decent player can get quite far in 1-3 months and it's really still worth doing.

I think the concept would work in SS if you actually kept the stuff that you find. It still would mean that really high level players would almost never do it, but early to mid players might do it for the novelty and be happy with the number of aug conds that they find heh.

Something special would need to be done in SS for it to actually be worth it for people. Some pretty good rewards, unique ones for each of these 'seasonal' unis. Not sure if the people writing the code would spend the time to arrange all of this.

@Baby Spanch
Well, yeah, but at least there's some kind of difficulty. I'm just seeing what SS would do and it's looking to me like "Press C every second for 3 hours to complete one mission" type of deal. Making That into a competition would be pretty bad since even the most grind happy players in this game readily accept it as retarded.

Unfortuntaly I don't think the SS playerbase is large enough to make this work. All the games you listed have substantially more players than SS does and thus they wont notice the decrease in activity on the main server as much.

Also, people that play MMOs like progress and if that progress gets wiped every 1-3 months... well, lets just say I wouldn't bother with it at all. I feel like people would do it once or twice and then never log onto that server ever again.

I was thinking more like the middle month of each uni would have a seasonal server go up with various competitions. I don't think you would want an alt server running 100% of the time, as that would split the player base too much.

we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun
but the joy didnt last cos the smok ran too fast...
we had...

The idea is awesome as it was spark a great new load of activity. They simply need some sort of competition or events mid-uni that are not reliant on Holidays that allow a different variety of players to get gear/money/something to look forward to. I also really think they should re-work termites and perhaps look into some gal invasions or something. Like a distant portal opens and some unique AI come swarming through.

Only non-repeatable missions count towards player mission score.

Anyway, interesting idea but I'm not the biggest fan of it, why not just look into adding stuff during a universe that encourages people to stick around? Termites aren't a very good fix (though should be fixed, and I think they will be eventually this year), all you need is one player on your team to kill them, and it doesn't even matter if you use ada kits because if they can kill ada kits, that's a bit stupid, but they can't. Little competitions like Bobbo's Improcerus event was pretty cool but the rewards are kind of meh to be honest (one month sub vouchers would be a great reward and not require him to create holoprojectors a year later), maybe some bigger, better and more announced events could help?