Player Dedication Rewards

I've decided that it's time to consider using a "Player Dedication Reward" of some sort, where players are rewarded for their dedication to the game. Let me know which options make the most sense below. I will give serious consideration to the top 3, so vote for your favorites!
Note: Player Ranks come from numbers of posts.

I like the Contact option. A 3/3 contact can be huge if you work it right.

Wreck: I agree, but with your rank, you would be walking around with 5 3/3 contacts. Do you even want to think about that many?

Looks like i voted for the majority yaay me!

Gala wrote:

Wreck: I agree, but with your rank, you would be walking around with 5 3/3 contacts. Do you even want to think about that many?

lol, not particularly.

Would these bonuses apply to all character builds or only one per build, or one time shots?

as much as i wish to participate and contribute to SRO, i think it prudent to hold off my vote until i gain enough experience (and ranks) in the game to know what to vote for

Wreck: That's a good question. I had been thinking that they would apply to every character build. But it's not a bad idea to up the bonus a bit, and have them be a 1-time shot bonus. I guess we'll have to have that be the next poll, huh?

G i don't think every character you build should have all the bonuses your rank warrants. But you should be able to upon reaching a rank get a bonus to your next character build or apply one to an old character. That said no one character can receive more then one bonus from the site and or rank. that way no on going games become unbalanced. Make sense?

I like the limit to one bonus per character per game. But like Gala said, we can hold off on all options until the next poll. Although alternative ideas would probably be good to post here so Gala can include those!

I agree; this discussion is helping me to formulate this idea into something workable. Keep it up!

As for one bonus, I think I agree, to some degree. The difference between a 400 BP character, and a 400 BP character +5% is nearly irrelevant. Most characters won't even notice the difference. It will give a slight variation to what a player can do with their points, but only slight. So stacking bonuses will be less unbalancing than you may think. That said, there are a lot of different ways that we can end up applying this idea, and stacking the bonuses is only one of them. Let's make sure that we air out our concerns!

Another possibility:
- Rank confers potential rewards
- EACH character may have ONE reward, chosen from the list that the player has available to her at the time of character creation.

Example:

Player is Meat
- 1 potential bonus
- New character chooses from the list, with only one choice.

Player is Team Leader
- 3 potential bonuses
- New character may be made with one of those three, player's choice.

How about the vote be a combination of all possibile stacks
I.e.

Option 1 is what Gala has now, subsequent options increase the number of stacked bonous by one until all bonuses which could be used per character are stacked, and the final option be GM's choice?

Additionally, we could have an option that says a player can only have a give bonus once, and only one active character at a time can use a given bonus.

Ie

I can have 4 bonuses all have to be different, and I can only have 4 active characters using a bonus at the same time. Additionally, each of those 4 characters has to have a different bonus.

Tos gets +5% bp
Wr3ck gets +10 bp
Ruh gets a 3/3 contact
Deadeye gets something bonus nu-yen

I see where you're going, but that's simply too difficult to keep track of, or to adjudicate. I need something simple enough that most GMs can look at the characters only pertaining to their games, and know whether the bonuses are applied appropriately or not. So, the bonuses can stack, or not. I haven't really thought of any other way to do it. But as it stands now, I can't see a way around offering the bonuses to every character, where the limitations are either 1 per character, from your list, or all from your list.
Keep in mind: +5% BP + 10 BP in most games will only amount to +30 BP, which is less than 10%. The difference is minimal enough that there is little in-game effect. Don't get too caught up in the numbers, pay some attention to the application, and you may notice that most of the bonuses in the list don't actually offer very much applicable difference to a character. However, they will make a significant difference in the feel of the character, as those BP bonuses will turn into increased opportunity for style in the characters.

If we're going to limit the bonuses to 1 bonus per character, I will likely end up increasing the bonuses. Also, another potential bonus would be at the really high levels, a character can now have TWO bonuses from the list (say at 2500 posts, or 5000 posts).

Heh, I like making things far more complicated than they have to be. Makes it more interesting. Plus, I have no current intention of being a GM, so I'd only have to worry about me!

I'm down with Extra bonuses for really high level posters. Of course, there aren't a lot of you guys that are even close.

Too true! I have 1300 posts (nearly) which puts me at 50% more posts than my nearest competitors (Kesslan in the high 800s, wngd_phantom in the low 900s). If I put +1 Bonus/character as the 2500 posts reward, I am only half way there. That would equate to nearly 2 years, straight, of 3-4 posts per day. That's quite a bit of dedication.

Yeah but post count isn't necessarily a good measure. People can just be excessively chatty in OOC yet hardly ever post IC. I've seen it before elsewhere, where people become OOC post whores when stuff like that gets put in.

Any other metric we can use instead?

And then there are those of us who want to post IC but cannot. Either because they have to wait for other players, or because the game itself stalls.

In my experience as far as BBoards go it's usually best left up to the judgment of the GM in question. I mean to me, yeah you can make a 100 IC posts but if their all one or two lines you wont get as much as if each one was a whole paragraph etc.

There's just too many factors involved to be honest. Not only that but post count can drop considerably if old threads you've posted in are removed.

Then get into a new game and post more lol! What its like a video game when you turn it off score is gone when you turn it one you get to put up a new score...

We can consider other metrics. At the moment, though, I don't think we have to worry too much about people just becoming excessively chatty. And with the bonuses that we are discussing, it wouldn't be worth their time. What other metrics can you all think of that the site keeps track of?

On the other hand, we can request a "Spam" flag for players that get annoying with excessive OOC posts.

I'm surprised that a karma system hasn't been implemented where users can simply "thumbs up" other users (or their posts) a certain amount of times a day. That way, only good users/posts will be rewarded, not the crummy two-line users or "Boxers or Briefs?" threads.

It would be fun to get rewards like this, but many players like to make their characters "balanced", believe it or not, and might not even use these bonuses. Other metagamers might welcome them with open arms, but "true" metagamers get more satisfaction from cramming as much as they can into 400 BP builds and having them demolish similarly-leveled characters, and that extra boost might be considered "cheating".

However, I think that the contact idea has potential. I think a cool method would be to have users post up their own contacts with full backstories and a generally broad usefulness, and with enough karma/posts, users could elect to add that contact to their characters with no BP cost. 3/3 is only 6 BP anyway, so it's not that game-breaking. If you want to keep some competition or incentive factor for it, users could rate contacts, and higher-rated contacts would require more karma/posts. Having the Meat members stuck with the crummy contacts with little backstory might turn them away from the incentive system, though, so maybe their should be a few "free" contacts available at any post level with decent fiction, preferably written by Admins or Mods, not to put you out or anything. Users who make good contacts could also earn karma for it, maybe based on ratings?

On the other side of the coin, if you have the carrot, some people may say that you have to have the stick. That is to say, if you have karma gains, you might also need karma losses. Flame posts, spam, etc. could all earn negative karma, either from fellow users (opening the can of worms of butthurts with a semblance of power), or from Admins/Mods (more power to ya!).

I have no idea how bbscript or whatever it is that the forums work with here works, so I don't know if anything of these things can even be realistically implemented. If they did though, cool!

Regardless, there is one bonus I don't agree with from the poll: +1 Native language. That's the sort of thing that is best left to character development; I don't want to create characters with three or four native languages 'cuz I can, and than have to stuff some fiction into it explaining why he or she knows that many languages from birth. "Uh, he watched four TVs with different language channels at the same time when he was a kid."

Yes, but everyone likes to see some form of character progression.

That said I'm not sure it's really all that necessary to see anything other than cash/gear/karma (Not necessarily in that order. Awakened characters are very karma heavy where as cybersams are very cash heavy etc)

As for +1 Native Language: My best friend speaks 5 languages natively. I'm not even joking. While the idea may seem ridiculous to most people, think about it in the context of the potential character. There are most definitely plenty of people out there who speak two native languages.

The contact idea definitely puts a whole new spin on this idea, and I like where you're headed with this. As for the scripting for giving people the bonuses, I am not entirely sure how I would implement it here, but I have a few ideas that may fit in nicely with the way the site is designed.
Also, it doesn't have to be based on number of posts. There are all sorts of things that I can base it on; simply that the two things that the site already keeps track of automatically are number of posts and time online. Anything else would have to be done manually, which is fine. I can tell people that "they won't qualify for the bonus until they've applied." or something of the sort.

Personally player dedication rewards should be something that is under the decision of individual GMs. If they want to give players perks for sticking with a game than they can just hand out some extra karma.

I understand wanting to get more new players to the site and to keep people from flaking or disappearing, but that can be accomplished with good high quality roleplaying, active games, and a good community. I dont really see the proposed system promoting any such thing. Though I am also a huge cynic so take from that what you will.

-edit- of course being the hypocrite I am, I voted for the extra build points because I am a power gamer.