Let's talk about posting rewards
 

Hey guys!

Lately, I've been thinking about the posting patterns of Trisphee, and what it looks like to a newbie.

Namely, we rarely get people posting new threads, so it kind of looks like doing that is discouraged (which it most certainly isn't!).

So! I got to thinking about ways to encourage people to post more, make more threads, and generally have a wider variety of things to peruse.

I talked with the Staff some about several ideas, and now I wanna see what everyone would like to see on this topic.



So!


My idea is to give additional posting rewards to users, once a day (telling them they get these rewards, of course). The exact numbers of what earns the rewards would need to be decided still, of course, but the gist is:

You get a reward for posting in a number of different threads in a day.

You get another reward for having a number of different users post in your thread, with a minimum post length (so, no thread of just "bump").


For the created-thread rewards, there'd be a cap on how much you can get from a given thread, so if you happen to make a thread that's existed as long as, say, Jibber-Jabber, you wouldn't keep reaping the rewards. There would also be, I think, a limit to how many different threads will give you rewards at once.



Another idea put forth, that could also work, is to have a super-low chance item grant (actually, a collection of items that are, at present SOOPER SEEKRET) on posting, so the only way to earn them would be to post a lot.



What kinds of rewards are we talking about for adding things? Aurum is a possibility, of course, but we don't want to have too much of that handed out. Makes a bit of a Gaia problem if you do.

We have a few additional minigame type things in the works, to go along with the Crane Game. Once those are ready, an idea is to make them all use the Pandora Tokens that Crane Game currently uses, and instead of just giving you 3 a day, make those be the additional posting rewards.


My question to you, wonderful users of Trisphee, is what would you like to see in regards to posting rewards? And general activity, of course.

I'm not a fan of any additional posting bonuses.

Now additional bonuses for running a successful thread like having a bunch of posts means you get one of those super special bonuses you have plan.

Thread creation is important for sure .

My reasoning behind providing the bonus both to threads and posts is that if it's only threads, there's less incentive to post in other people's threads. (Other than the obvious of being interested in their discussions, which is not, I suppose, a bad thing in itself.)

I am not sure if that would resolve it or not. Though it may be interesting enough for people (new ones, or old ones who left/only stay during the holidays) to stick around more. It likely won't have an effect on those already posting here.

I think, in my infinite unwisdom, that maybe if some sort of newbie tutorial was discussed and implemented, that a "Hello I am a new user" thread should be a requirement as part of the tutorial process.

I like the idea of maybe a set of random item sets being made for threads, although not publishing the chances or amount required, that way it's not encouraged to make tons of meaningless threads.

I think the big issue is they see the sea of threads in each section and get a little discouraged, especially with some of them having such long inactivity dates. If we could somehow, maybe, make some of those go away or do some reorganizing to give the appearance that we are busy... We do have a lot of threads posted in daily, but they're so spread out we have the appearance of being dead when we're actually not.

We're fairly nice people, except for maybe like, Galla, who we all know is dead on the inside and looks for any chance to feast on users. Aside from that everyone is of the welcoming bunch. I think maybe a referral system that rewards those who stick around with some decent items, as well as the person who brought them here. Pyramid scheme tactics!

Actually removing dates would be a good idea salone and allow me to add to that. So instead of posts saying the exact date, why not change them to words like

"Recently, Not Too Long Ago, A While Ago, Sometime Ago, and Ancient Times."

So Instead of seeing: "Posted 11/15/2015 12am." It would say "Posted Recently."

Keep ancient as a title for something like a year or two old post.

Figure out the times, but just don't let users know the time differences between the words. Admins/Mods can read them as the proper time if they wanted to.

A part of me also wants to remove the see who's online part as well. Seeing that no one is on can quickly have someone leave instead of posting once or twice. What's important is that someone attempts to post even once. But this idea I'm not too sure on, depends on everyone else.

But I still don't think just for posting should there be additional awards, thread making yes. But like you said that might encourage people to only care about their threads. But wouldn't that also mean they have to attract other people as well? Running charities, market threads, art shops, and so on.

The only thing close to additional awards I can agree with is a reward system for posting at least once (or five, whichever) daily (with a considerable amount of word length) and that's it. With rewards getting higher to a max of a week, but every day you long in after that continues to give you the max week bonus as long you log in and post once a day. What the rewards can be? Dunno. Aurum, random commons, maybe a RIG that gives out multiple commons, extremely small chance for like 10 runes (only when you have a 7 day bonus going on)? Maybe a chance for a reward system exclusive RIG with it's own prize pool as well that has a chance to appear after like day 3+ ( Odds slightly increase each day maxing out at 7+) A RIG behind a RIG, but that's mostly just to prevent too many people getting the RIG too fast, you want it to be stretched out a bit. (You might even add items to those RIG's as well.)

Oh and Pyramid scheme tactics? That's.. Sort of hard to accomplish. People can easily make mules and say they had referral them, then post with both accounts to redeem any exclusive/extravagant reward. The only thing I can think of is to have it so if someone invites someone they get like 5% or less of the aurum that person makes when posting on Trisphee if they inserted that persons name when joined, short term that is a nice motivation, but long term someone could had been successful and invited like 1,000 people to the site and be making way too much aurum inflating the system (granted we have a ton of aurum sinks with the shops, and more could always be made.) And getting 1,000 new players for one account would be impressive on it's own right, and probably deserves that aurum for bringing in that many people. <-- Only way I see a referral system working.
I have also suggested in a past to bring back referral contests and you could pull a Scrimshaw and provide a exclusive reward to anyone who participates and gets at least 1 person to join Trisphee with at least 10-15 posts. (You can check to see if it's a mule as well.) This way it's more micro-mangable manageable to snuff up users who are lying for the exclusive award during the contest time period then it would be to have it open ended and people could be abusing this at anytime of day.

But still I don't think additional posting rewards would be good in the long run. Maybe, and I mean just maybe have a charge meter, and once a person types a considerable amount and have that charge reach 100% they get some sort of time bonus (like 5-10 minutes0, like they have more luck in games, maybe a small aurum boost, when the wonder trade is completely up, they have a chance at getting a uncommon for a common, or rare for a uncommon. But that's pretty stretching it, and some things would have to be monitored and so on.

I can keep coming up with ideas, but other then the refer ideas and date posted. I really don't like bringing up ideas based on a system like this. :/ I'll keep thinking about it though.


edit: While my head and note card drawer of ideas for Trisphee is open other ideas:

A avatar contest system based on thumbs up and thumbs downs only, people entering the contest can only thumb up other submissions or ignore them, but cannot thumbs down. Winning avatars featured on front page.

Announcement icon, and on front page a list of recent announcements.

Storing other avatars into a save system (this was brought up before) so you can have multiple avatars/outfits saved. It costs 10 runes for additional avatar saves, but give people a starting number of 2-3 save spots.

Featured Threads on Home Page

Game where you can save any image as your pet (so like take Trisphee items, save a single image of those animals, and dispense them randomly. So think like most egg clicking games/signatures, but it's more straight forward, no evolutions, ect.), clicking on it to feed it and take care of it, and when maxed out you pet can be converted into prizes then resets to 0 clicks.

Oh look an old idea that can be re-purpose into a posting rewards, give random stat points for doing daily Trisphee tasks. +1 Str for posting 100 times or something. Then use those points and establish some sort of game that uses them. It could also be +1 to Posting or things not necessary the generic stat system. These could also be used for events, or even just roleplaying purposes with event forum based games based on them. (So like dungeons and dragons, with like Salone the dungeon master or something.) A lot of potential.

... I'll wait until I gets a reply on what's already written before coming up with more chizz.

New User tutorials are definitely in the development plan, although there's a few things to do first. :)

Well, some reorganizing of the forums is in the process. Was delayed a bit to let the Halloween event go through.

Bonuses for referred people activity had occurred to me (including things like...get a bonus 10% of runes bought by your referred people, up to a certain amount), but I'm not really convinced that type of thing is actually helpful.



Hmm...I don't like the idea of entirely removing last post time, but obscuring it behind things like "Posted Recently" (then hover that to see the actual time, or something) is not a terrible idea. Entirely doable, too.

If I removed Who's Online, I would prefer to replace it with "Today's active users," which would show people from the past 24 hours. It's nice to see a list of online/active people, and according to vBulletin, we do have about 40 users who at least log in each day.

It is difficult figuring out the best way to approach these things... That's why I want to be very public about the decisions and the process of arriving at it. I'm no sage of activity improvement. Rewards for threads are the main thing I want to do, post rewards, well, it seems like a good thing to go along with it, but I could do without it for a while, see how it goes.

Yeah, referral contests are a bit iffy.

Charge meter? Interesting idea.

Hmm, an interesting list of ideas. I am already planning on having an avatar save system (with some enhancements on top of your suggestion, in fact). We'll see about the other ones.

I like this idea in it's entirety. +1

Other ideas:

- Reviving the Board Games thread, the problem in the past was that with regular aurum rewards the forum became abused for quick aurum farming, but it did keep everyone active.
You could allow posts in the forum to dispense tickets (1 ticket per post)that can be exchanged in a games corner shop. (Tickets can also be dispensed in current and future games but would yield more tickets than a typical forum post.)
And if there was a daily charge meter you could use that 100% charge to allow more tickets to be dispensed at a fixed rate.

- Gift Giving Option so Users don't have to accept a trade for a gift. (Can add mystery gift with message that will be PM'd to users.)

- The ability to share pictures in a gallery for threads, dumping images individual boxes when making a thread/post to show a bunch of smaller condensed images that can pop out in a frame at full size when clicked on in a scroll-able library.

So like:
[<- Scroll] [Pic] [Pic] [Pic] [Pic] [Scroll ->]

- Daily Tasks. Get a reward or rewards of some kind when fulfilling daily requirements.
So a list like:
Post 10 times in the forums today
Play Crane Game
Save your avatar/Change it
Buy something from the shops with aurum.
Donate 5 items
Trade someone 1-3 times
Post on someone's profile
ect.

- Accounts can be made by linking to your Facebook account. Or current accounts can be made by linking to Facebook. Also can be done with Google+, Twitter, and so on.

- Ability to poke users:
Could be called tickle, rasberry, whatever. Just go on their profile and press the Poke/whatever button. The other user just gets a small notification on their profile/homepage that they've been poked and by who did the poking.

- Ability to makes polls for thread.

- Number/dice generator for posts

- Trophies award to users during events. So if you won a avatar contest during the Halloween event for example you can a gold trophy, these trophies are displayed in your profiles, and can also be shared in your signatures. When you hover over a trophy it will say the title "Halloween 2015 Contest Winner 1st Place"

Sei helpfully reminded me (in much more polite terms) that I was being a dick, and forgot that we'd agreed to delay the forum rearranging until after Halloween...So expect the forums to look more streamlined in organization very soon! :O

Well, a COD trade with no cost is effectively the same as a gift, but I agree we do need an explicit "give gift" option.


Not a bad idea.


This I like. :) I was cruising around other avatar sites recently to see how they do various things, and one of them (I wanna say Solia?) has "quests" for things like "post x times." It's not a bad idea. Daily tasks or challenges or something sound like a nice variation on the theme.

I'm not a big fan of account linking like that. I avoid doing it as much as possible, and if it's the only option for a site, I'm less likely to make an account. That said, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to doing it.

Why?

Polls are a thing you can do already.

Hmm, yeah, that could be useful.

That could be cool. :) Would need a bit of groundwork in code and art, but wouldn't be too bad.

It means someone is trying to get your attention. It's virtually meaningless and it's for fun purposes only.

WAIT WHA? Since when!?

Polls have been a feature of vBulletin (that's the software that powers the forums) since 2001 or so. Trisphee's been around since 2010. :P

>.> they can get out of hand quickly... A friend of mine on another site and I have a poke war going that's come to about 600 pokes back and forth between the two of us...

Well, naturally, if we were giving items at low probability, we'd tell you what they are, some of them, anyway.

Items already exist for this general purpose, but I don't wish to say what they are, in case we use them elsewhere. :P

Thread rewards: I'm fine with giving some nominal (nothing valuable) rewards for creating threads, but I also don't want to put rewards in for successful threads. That sounds like a good way to reward users who happen to be first to the punch on a topic that's guaranteed to be popular, and to make users who can't think of a good topic idea (let's face it, not everyone who can participate in a conversation can necessarily think of a subject for a new one) feel left out.

Game tokens: Back in the day we'd discussed a non-disappearing game token. Your Pandora tokens would get used first (and refill to 3 as now) and when you're out then you'd automatically use the other type.

N-Day Active rewards: I agree with the suggestion that users get rewards for posting over time instead of just in bursts. Maybe if you post at least once a week you get to retain some special status.

Saved Avatars: The code is already in the system for it and it's worked for years. The complicated part is putting a UI on it that doesn't cause confusion.

Who's Online: I agree with 24-hour-active users instead of currently-active users.

Board Games: Why board games? What's wrong with Forum Games?

Gifts: There's already a "send items immediately" function in the trade system. I absolutely DO NOT want a way for items to appear directly in someone's inventory. Way too much room for error.

Picture gallery: I don't want to support uploads to Trisphee, but I guess I would be OK with a gallery-like bbcode function.

Daily challenges: I like this idea. Let's talk more about it.

Linking to other sites' accounts: A good idea in theory, but messy in practice.

RNG for posts: Useful, should do this.

Trophies: Agreed, good idea, but needs some art.

I'll take your word on everything else that I didn't quote and agree with it entirely. The ideas are all half thought out and outcomes half thought out as well.

I mean Forum Board Games, or just Forum games in general lol.

Sort of what I meant.

Not much to talk about. You log in, a list of tasks are available. Once all tasks completed you get a fairly nice reward. Aurum, Maybe a item that can be worn or just sold for Aurum in case of duplicates, older items, RIG, common bundles. -shrugs-

I would say that for the thread creation and posting in your own thread things make it a chance to get an item from the prize set or whatever it is. Reason being is that I for instance will see a lot of threads already made for certain topics and then can't figure out what topic I want to make, and thus after making a certain amount and not reaching those goals I just tend not to bother. At least if its a percent chance people are going to be more likely to try if they don't post new threads as much.

I wouldn't mind seeing new items in the Anka Token shop... There's not really anything now that I have a mighty NEED/WANT for.

all be honest i like the idea of the grants and some of the other ideas people have already put out there ovo

Maybe we should just trick members by telling them they signed over their souls in the new NDA and they can't get it back until they make 10,000 posts?

xD How about that for a reward?

I'd rather not accidentally take possession of some variety of demonic entity, thanks. :P

new anka items, or, posting super old non-donation items in the anka shop would be cool, like a user-voted poll of what item(in a recolor) they would like to have rotate in monthly in the shop, of course make it a little pricier (500-1000 tokens?) so that it is still hard to get but not impossible and so that both people who have the originals and people who could never get the originals have something to look forward to

and if it is done carefully it could be something that takes quite a while to catch up on. i know i would post more enthusiastic if something cool like the companion items in coral were a possibility<3<3 (and that would totally cover the first three months there with only an evening spent on each to recolor them)

even better, if you have anyone wanting to learn how to recolor this sort of thing would be perfect for cutting teeth on. all the items are already finished and you have many options ranging from easy to advanced<3<3

The only problem with putting things in the token shop is that earning Anka tokens, at some point, reaches a cap. I've been sitting at ~4500 tokens for years just because it's so difficult for me to get new, non-event achievements.

how hard would it be to make some of the posting goals reset? there is also the option of making repeat goals that tie to events (like making a 50 or 100 post goal during an event or in an event thread?)

I can see that easily being easy to implement. But why?

If you're referring to Anka Token items:

Adding more Tokens is pointless, most people already have a bunch for very little effort. You're better adding more items to the token shop that have multiple poses that would require buying the item more then once.

I actually want to see older some of the Older Event Items in the anka shop. (Not all of them.) Think the magical jackets we got for Taskal Wars, Evolving items we had (one of the evolving items still haven't evolved yet and it's been like 2-3 years. Perhaps one event we have a contest and we can submit our own ideas of what to add to the evolving item. Keep it like 5-10 different poses and call it a day.)

Now if your talking about getting aurum for posting goals being met:

Why should we have that if we already have Anka Tokens? This is why I made the suggestion of daily tasks instead.

Correct me if you meant something else entirely. xD


Older non-donation items(or Donation Items in general) the staff don't have the original files for any more. HOWEVER.
DUN DUN DUN.

It's possible to play with blending options in Photoshop and get amazing color changes for older items if we just use the base .png files.
Quick 1 minute example:
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...psuvilkhur.jpg

They virtually take no time whatsoever, but only problems is that a item might not match a certain Trisphee color exactly, but considering the large amount of colors and hues Trisphee has I don't think it would be a problem.
You could do this with monthlies as well.
1 minute example:
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...ps4e0taqn2.jpg

Not to mention we could just throw gradients on older items as well:
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...psuewbpu7p.jpg

I'm not joking when I say this takes less then a minute, and once you figure out the blending/color choice used it wouldn't be hard to implement this to the rest of the poses.
(Layer styles for the win!) And because the .png file is in it's original avatar position, and I believe trisphee items are changed to .png files to be uploaded to Trisphee anyways )Coda/Toho correct me if I'm wrong.) This could just be a very time efficient way to dump a bunch of items into the site.

This is however a very cheap tactic/way to make recolors, and it COOOULD work out. The only problem is getting a specific color like coral, but you can easily get very dang close to the color if you spend time working at it. (But I wouldn't be holding you breathe out for it though.)

Now I don't so much agree to release flat out recolors for Donation Items (especially considering Toho apparently has plans for re-releasing them, and there being plans for recolor packs for yearlies.) But for event items, yeah sure. Ton of room to do stuff in that department with the items I'm sure nobody has files for anymore.

But here's a question. Would anyone else would want crazy cheaply made recolors of older DI items we don't have the files for? (Or for worst case scenario just 1 pose being recolored and given away/sold separately from the rest?) They could just be thrown into a RIG, event reward for participation or something.

Again. A EXTREMELY cheap way to make recolors. But the items still look good, people would still use them, and it would be extremely easy to dump theses items into the system.

my concern is never on it being made in a different way, hell i am a-ok with it as long as it looks ok. my concerns lay with just making things available to an audience who will not otherwise get the item without fucking up the value of the original (which is why i would not ever want originals reposted, if there are only 14 of an item in the entirety of the active site so be it but a recolor is not bad at all, the item is available to newbies and oldies alike and the original is still just as rare)

my question on reset goals is for people like lucid who might not ever get another goal in the timeframe of new token releases

Then wouldn't the solution be to add more achievements?

Now with the Forum now condensed some achievements have to be tweaked/edit to begin with.
I don't know how long it takes to add achievements in the first place. But I can see this becoming a little tedious after a while.

But around to your point, thinking about it, if there was a Anka Token cap. I can see the system reseting every year. This would renew interest every year to post for a little bit, and new Token Shop items could be planned for release coincide of achievement's renewal as well.

Then it would/could be a good idea to add more expensive Anka Token items in the shop at that point.

But I'm not sure on this, I feel the currency output might get a little too high, and people would easily buy out the items in the shop as well. So perhaps tokens get refreshed every year as well? (Which sort of stinks if you're a little short on tokens for that one item you want, or if there aren't any token items in the shop whatsoever that you want.) Granted the item thing could be remedied with my cheap recolor idea/more items added constantly in general. And the token part can be slightly fixed if it rounds up to the nearest 100 if you're above 51, and if you're under 49 you're rounded up to 50. Considering most items in the shop cost in the 25, 50, 100 area anyways.

I dunno. Just my thoughts.

Resetting needs to be balanced by something like a cap or tokens being refreshed. (But would require the shop to be constantly updated.)

Or new achievements added for rewards for every 100/1,000 posts or so would become redundant.

Leaving them as is would just make it hard to obtain tokens long term and people might become hesitant to spend them.

Thoughts?

i will say now, you NEVER ever reset currency, that makes people very angry and they leave. it has never once worked out that i have seen in 9 years of avatar sites and i highly doubt trisphee would be the lucky outlier

yes, that is what i suggested before you questioned why i would want that though a reset would be more practical so that people are not jumping through ridiculous hoops, this also would be good for on/off style achievements that can only be gotten at specific times

worse comes to worse tokens could be exchanged for runes, like 1000 tokens for a single rune, then people have a long-term goal to reach where they have an option of payout over items and since it would take a looooooot of tokens to reach the 20 runes for a monthly it'd be a sink for quite a while

Reset currency was just a spur of thought (well everything I said was just me thinking through a bunch of thoughts), but yeah I can see people getting angry over it.

20 runes for 5,000 tokens would be bad, staff would need to note if people are avoiding the token shop items and so they can just buy runes instead, and if the output of tokens in general isn't balanced enough to keep runes from being constantly bought, runes would be devalued (like if new achievements we're constantly added on top of them being refreshed yearly.) Not to mention mules being made to earn runes and so on.

Keeping it the way it is now and just let anka token achievements be granted every event once your initial post achievements are done is the most balanced/efficient/easiest way. You can still make up to 2 mules to make tokens from. Items and priced fairly and nicely to begin with. The only upkeep are events in general/contest reward output for them. We don't want over abundance of tokens, we don't want currency to reset, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want a cap with expensive items priced that amount.

I don't like any idea revolve around changing this. Resetting the achievements just makes this more of a 2nd currency but a slightly more limited one at that.

-shrugs- I don't know what would be the best move.

where did you get 5000 tokens? no, this is 20,000 tokens for 20 runes XD

Lucid said it caps at 4,500, so I was just saying 5000.

Still even with 20,000 tokens the same problems are still there. People avoiding buying items in favor for runes. / A chance of abuse and rune becoming devalued.

It has a cap? *Has 6799 Anka tolkens*

that is not the cap at all, i have 10997 tokens and i have bought every item in the shop bar two(and i was not abusing mules either, my mule has it's own tokens and token items)


dude, if /you/ can figure out how to abuse those numbers go ahead. you seem to be under the mistaken illusion that tokens are pouring out of the site like water from the niagra. people might not buy all of the token items but that is good because it means people wanting to spend au can spend it on token items OR single runes. it is pretty solid to keep them so limited, most people can get about 10 runes easily enough over a few months of posting which spaces out anka item consumption though most people would want to get some of the items regardless just to have them including collectors of items


it's not great but it give people who own all the items an outlet and gives people who would not buy the token items anyway another option for those tokens AND best of all it encourages posting which is the entire point of this thread



oh, and there are two new token items XD

Well considering that you have 10k anka tokens and all the items, why does the rates need to be increased/runes be added to for a token dump then?
If the runes cost too much it wouldn't encourage posting, and if they cost too little they create too many other problems.

I think a little birdy just wants runes xD.

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/...ocobo_baby.jpg
CHEEP CHEEP.

because some people have gotten all the tokens they can get, as the third biggest poster in site history i can say there are a lot but for people who have not posted several hundred times in each forum some are just out of the question. people who do not rp or watch tv or play videogames will not be able to get those tokens without spamming and they should be allowed to get new items too, people who have gotten all of the posted milestones and want to keep posting are not butted up against a wall if there are new goals to be met and can keep spending

at 1000 tokens per rune they are within reason. true it will be incredibly hard to get a full 20 but that is what commerce is for


pffft i bought ten bucks worth just a few days ago and i already ran out of stuff to buy X''D i have plenty of runes hahahaha. what i want is for more people to post

you are basically saying 'why put more stock on a store shelf if there are other things people can buy instead?' in principal it can be argued that it is cost efficient to deplete stock but not everyone will go buy dried oysters just because the butter is sold out, do you understand me?

Wait, so we're talking about turning tokens into runes, and not making the token shop into the shop associated with things like thread-making?

*Misunderstood/is confused on the way the conversation has went*

oh, sorry XD basically i am trying to come up with ideas on how to give people more reasons to try for posting goals as well as give people who have already met those goals a reason to /keep/ posting

my thought is that a combination of offering recolors(easy on the staff) and runes(the most valuable commodity on the site) might work. illusion is trying to poke holes in these offerings and i am trying to build up my reasons for them XD nothing big, dont mind us