How to fix donations
Right now the donations page is a mess. It looks like people are sorted in random order and some people never even go there to look.
I propose that there be a new metric, say, number of donations made in the last month (different from the existing lifetime/daily donation metrics). Rank all guild members by this metric. If you wanna be advanced, maybe you can have a donation "score" where a purple piece counts for A points, a blue piece counts for B points, a green piece counts for C points, and a gray piece counts for D points. Whatever.
So when you go to the donations page and look at what your guildies are requesting, the guildies will be sorted by their monthly donation number/score. So the more you donate, the closer you'll be to the top of the list (so people won't need to scroll as much to get to your request). Just like tourneys, any exact ties are broken by whoever reached that number first.
Not only that, there will be announcements in the in-game guild chat. The top 20% of donors (in a full guild, the top 10 people) will get 4 automatic announcements: once each at 24h, 18h, 12h, and 6h. Each announcement will say what is being requested and a special hyperlink (sort of like the player profile hyperlinks on people's usernames) that when clicked will bring you directly to the donation screen. The 20-40% of donors will get 3 announcements: 24h, 16h, 8h. The 40-60% of donors will get 2: 24h, 12h. The 60-80% of donors will get 1: 24h. The bottom 20% will get no announcements.
In order to make room for these announcements and limit spam, other progression announcements will have to be minimized, if not erased entirely. For example, maybe only announce 7* character and ship promotions. Raise the gear announcement threshold from gear VII to gear X. Do not announce unlocks anymore, and so on.
This kind of system really encourages donations and provides *positive* incentivizes to donate to your fellow guildies.
Note 1: A raw number may not be the best way to rank guild members. Some kind of weighted score may be better. What would also be interesting is a give/take ratio. Regardless, the idea is to generate a natural karma equilibrium. Those who give a lot without receiving much in return will be ranked higher and thus find their requests met quicker. Those who take a lot without giving away much will find it harder and harder to keep taking.
Note 2: Individual players should be given the option in the settings menu to turn off their own announcements if they wish. However, players should not be allowed to turn off seeing others' announcements.
I propose that there be a new metric, say, number of donations made in the last month (different from the existing lifetime/daily donation metrics). Rank all guild members by this metric. If you wanna be advanced, maybe you can have a donation "score" where a purple piece counts for A points, a blue piece counts for B points, a green piece counts for C points, and a gray piece counts for D points. Whatever.
So when you go to the donations page and look at what your guildies are requesting, the guildies will be sorted by their monthly donation number/score. So the more you donate, the closer you'll be to the top of the list (so people won't need to scroll as much to get to your request). Just like tourneys, any exact ties are broken by whoever reached that number first.
Not only that, there will be announcements in the in-game guild chat. The top 20% of donors (in a full guild, the top 10 people) will get 4 automatic announcements: once each at 24h, 18h, 12h, and 6h. Each announcement will say what is being requested and a special hyperlink (sort of like the player profile hyperlinks on people's usernames) that when clicked will bring you directly to the donation screen. The 20-40% of donors will get 3 announcements: 24h, 16h, 8h. The 40-60% of donors will get 2: 24h, 12h. The 60-80% of donors will get 1: 24h. The bottom 20% will get no announcements.
In order to make room for these announcements and limit spam, other progression announcements will have to be minimized, if not erased entirely. For example, maybe only announce 7* character and ship promotions. Raise the gear announcement threshold from gear VII to gear X. Do not announce unlocks anymore, and so on.
This kind of system really encourages donations and provides *positive* incentivizes to donate to your fellow guildies.
Note 1: A raw number may not be the best way to rank guild members. Some kind of weighted score may be better. What would also be interesting is a give/take ratio. Regardless, the idea is to generate a natural karma equilibrium. Those who give a lot without receiving much in return will be ranked higher and thus find their requests met quicker. Those who take a lot without giving away much will find it harder and harder to keep taking.
Note 2: Individual players should be given the option in the settings menu to turn off their own announcements if they wish. However, players should not be allowed to turn off seeing others' announcements.
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Replies
I donate when I can (particularly as I do the challenges every day, and buy gear shipments whenever I can, which means I end up with a lot of gear I probably won't need), but sometimes I forget to check the screen
However, this proposal doesn't address the single biggest problem gear donation has: everybody asking for the same things that everyone needs a million of. This results in nobody donating because they either don't have any of what's being requested or if they do, donating would delay their own progress. There are two solutions I can think of that should help alleviate this:
+100 Dude! Great idea! I like donating to my guildies but I'd rather donate to the ones that are donating first.
No rewards needed, it's a self rewarding system.
They are in order based on time remaining for the donation. And you are forced to go there when you request, but still all good points.
However I don't think the devs would ever implement a system that let's us buy gear for credits even if it's for others, for the same reason they keep drop rates so low on stun cuffs and such (bottlenecks and grinds cause people to spend).
I disagree. Donation mechanics will ensure that the bottlenecks stay as they are. You can still only make one request per day and the maximum number of pieces you get from each request is still limited by the quality of the gear. Farming stun cuffs exclusively through donations will still take at least five days, same as now. All this is doing is increasing the likelihood of the donation requests being filled. One has to assume that when EA put these limits in place, they were OK with the theoretical scenario where every request was being fulfilled, even though the expectation is that not all of would in practice. Still, if they decide this is too powerful, they can always tweak the donation limits to compensate.
The cost of each gear piece can also be a somewhat limiting factor. Most people would agree that 75k credits, for example, isn't a whole lot by itself but when you have 49 guildmates asking for gear, it adds up fast. Kinda like powering up mods. Most F2P would only be able to afford a handful of donations per day without sacrificing something else. And of course, we really don't care how much P2W can do because they're paying money to do it.