[Suggestion] A Contest to Improve Community Involvement and Potentially Start a Cheap Marketing Campaign

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Ballto21, May 27, 2018.

  1. Ballto21

    Three of the largest problems this game has consistently had was new player retentionm community involvement and marketing.

    Planetside 2 has survived for years on a shoestring budget and it appears now this budget is getting better.

    I would suggest the following:

    A contest for players to design a new things to be added to the game.

    The contest will be to add a new weapon for each class, a new ES vehicle for all factions, a new ES vehicle gun, and a new ES aircraft.

    The rules would be the following:

    1) Submissions must be explained clearly as to their role in the battlefield and have well developed concept art as well as at least a mostly completed 3D model fitting into the Planetside aesthetic.

    2) The designs themselves may include statistics - such as damage and accuracy models - but those statistics will be at the sole discretion of Daybreak Games to implement either as suggested or altered for balance purposes. The art or design of the item/vehicle itself is purely the designers, and cannot be changed by Daybreak.

    3) Up to three infantry weapons (one for each faction) and one vehicle, one aircraft, or vehicle gun may be submitted per person.

    4) Winners will be decided by the popularity of their designs in the community. A webpage would be created either on the Planetside 2 official website or with a unique contest URL linked on all official Planetside 2 websites and social media accounts, as well as promoted in game. Daybreak Games will hold a livestream and explain the submissions at the end of the contest and allow the community to vote.

    4) There will be one winner for each category (infantry weapon, ground vehicle, ground vehicle weapon, air vehicle) per faction.

    Some manner of prize will be awarded for the winner(s), what this would be I obviously can't say. The easiest and likely cheapest for the company would be DBC or free memberships, although a cash or physical prize (keyboards, mice, etc) would be possible.

    While it's obvious not everyone who would want to submit something will be able to due to the artistic skill required, a sizable chunk of the community will be able to. People will also talk about it to their friends, possibly giving the incentive to attract new players.

    The benefit of such a contest to Daybreak will be the obvious addition of content for players to enjoy, but also it would save them bigly on the cost of designs. The community will be doing work for significantly cheaper than it costs to pay your designers (whatever they're paid).

    Even those who don't win could still have their designs looked at by the designers working for daybreak and possibly implemented with proper credits at a later date.

    From a marketing aspect, promotional materials for the contest can be made rather cheaply with in-game footage and possibly designs of the more popular submissions included in promotional materials. After the winner(s) are determined, a new trailer campaign could be made cheaply featuring these new weapons and vehicles using in-game footage and potentially an animation team. I would not recommend a studio such as Blur (the guys who made the Planetside 2 cinematic trailer) due to their cost.
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  2. DarkStarAnubis

    It is not a bad idea, however to use a 3D tool (even the simplest ones) requires a fairly good amount of skills and experiences: 3D models of weapons must "on top" adhere to in-game requirements related to the player skeleton in terms of placements of the hands (the non-guard hand changes position depending whether a grip is available or not) and the reload animation must be taken in account in the model (e.g. the Tomoe, revolvers, drum vs. magazines etc), how to eject cases and so on.

    Aside from the pure 3D part, there is on top the basic palette of colors, the camo layer and all must fit the poly-count allocated for weapons.

    All of this to say that probably only an handful of people compared to the existing player base could participate to this.
  3. Ballto21


    the concept art would cover the colour scheme.

    even if its just a grey unfinished design, that should be acceptable. the daybreak design team could brush up the colour scheme using the concept art as a blueprint and have it set to the animations as required.

    regardless of if its a grey basic model or not, it will cut back on daybreaks design costs.

    in addition, the difficulty of using 3d tools well will be something which limits the amount of submissions so they do not get flooded with potentially thousands of ideas.
  4. Ballto21

    i should add that by rule 4, i mean there will be one winning submission. if somebody happened to get more popular support for two submissions in two categories they will get two wins
  5. DarkStarAnubis

    Not sure it would cut the costs very much then if the starting point is a Grayscale 3D:

    The attach points for the hands have to be encoded
    The reload/cases eject animations have to be added (to the weapon and to the skeleton)
    The parameters for the weapon have to be defined. I do not know if you have seen the pletora of attributes which can be downloaded via the API but it is an insane amount
    Testing and tinkering with the weapon to make it fitting with the existing (and very complex) ecosystem of weapons would also require a lot of time. It is the part in which DBG does not excel for sure...
    Colors and effects to be added
    Sounds to be added
    ...

    It could work only if DBG could share with the community the set of design/development tools used internally (or at least some of those) : usually it is a mix of off-the-shelf/open-source/home-made things.

    In that way they would receive semi-complete models, easier/faster to test and integrate.
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  6. Ballto21

    possibly, i dont know very much about graphics design in 2d or 3d myself to really ave a say in that aspect.

    however, it is obvious that any pre-made assets is time saved. if something more than greyscale would be needed to make an impact the criteria can be changed obviously
  7. FateJH

    Honestly, we don't need more weapons at this point.
  8. Skraggz


    Could always reskin the ones we have... Kinda like how I wish they would add faction variant Sundy, Harasser, Lib, Gal, Lightening, and flash.... It's not like the community even provided free concept art....
  9. Ballto21

    what we need is more developer interaction with the community, community support, retention of players, and money.

    the weapons and vehicle contest would just be a reasonably cheap vehicle to get us closer to that point.

    people would also spend quite a decent sum of money on cosmetics, new weapons, etc to get the new goodies, which gives cash to the devs. players would be interested in being able to have something added into the game, creating support and hype. devs will be involved in the process via streaming and ideally update streams weekly after a winner is announced sharing the changes the made to the weapons stats and the animations.

    ultimately it would be good for the entire game
  10. FateJH

    The Roadmap didn't fail because no one was interested in it. The Roadmap failed because voting was relatively meaningless. The developers performed work on features regardless of how interested the playerbase was in that particular sub-project, someone's pet project. The idea you present is not a bad idea; but, the sentiment is not supported by evidence from previous interactions with our developers. All of Wrel's platitudes on Reddit fail to change the reality that we're backseat drivers.
  11. Ballto21


    I would be the last person to say that SOE/Daybreak has made good decisions when it comes to community relations and marketing.

    However, just because they have historically been bad doesn't mean they can't improve.

    Dangle money in front of them (they desperately need it) and with Wrel (for all his faults, he is better at community relations than most of the previous daybreak staff) they may be willing to follow through on something new.

    The goal here is to add as much content that players would like and will pay real money for for the least cost to Daybreak. They could even make the weapons for the vehicles/infantry more expensive in terms of certs to encourage people spending real money on the guns, something most players usually just do for NS weapons.