Play To Win
Why Write This Article
Everyone games differently and we try our best not to belittle people that disagree with our style of play. As part of the onboarding process for players of different game systems, we are often asked the questions about donation systems, buying advancement, and transferring advancement from other games. We try our best to answer this questions each time and explain our reasonings why. We have been asked enough times that it seems necessary to have these thoughts in writing. We are not making this article to attack anyone for taking part in any of these systems, but are only explaining why we will not be including these items into our game.
Build Buying
Advancing your character in Crestfallen is directly tied to attendance to events. The game itself including the story, the jobs, battles, resource gathering, and interactions are the product that we are providing. The character advancement is based on this attendance and interaction.
Some games have included systems that allow players to purchase character advancement. Some of these way include the following.
- Buying levels, experience, or other forms of character advancement
- Buying items that increase survivability or mimics character advancement
- Buying out of required NPC time (Crestfallen does not currently have required NPC time)
- Buying events, but not attending and receiving character progression
- Buying one day events, plot submissions, or other ways to progress characters without actual interaction
Crestfallen currently does not include or allow any of these purchases.
Purchasing character advancement in these ways, in our opinion, will have a negative effect on the game as a whole. This artificial inflation causes plot to compensate (and often over compensate) for the drastic increase in player abilities. Additionally players may have increased skills in the game, but not have the needed abilities to make use of the skills within the game. This is often shown by players not remembering how many spells or effects they have, proper times when to use the effects, and an inferior understanding of the overall rules.
Some players view this as a way to catch up to other players. While this may be true in some circumstances, it more often than not solidifies players at the top of a game “food chain” ensuring those players stay on top. This has the increased “benefit” for the game of convincing more players to buy increases to their abilities and then forcing those at the top to continue to buy more. This cycle can cause a game to spiral out of control quickly.
Donation Systems
Donation systems are a way for Non-Profit games to gather the required items necessary to run a game without purchasing it on their own. It is very easy to make requests of players, offer rewards that cost the game nothing, and then gain the benefit. So, what is the problem?
Crestfallen LARP is not a Non-Profit Organization so we do not ask for donations. Instead, we build or buy the items we need outright. This means that our shack only has items that we want in it, which is a wonderful space saver. Additionally, we do not get the mass of donations of cheap after Halloween items to maximize points into a donation system, just to throw a majority away or not have them handled properly.
The main reason for not having a donation system is more similar to the build buying system mentioned above. Players who have money are more likely to have the disposable income and time to pay for build buying and donations at the same time. This maximizes the growth for these types of players making it more impossible for new or low level characters to catch up.
Character Transfer
Of all systems of progression, this is the least concerning. Often this is a one time event where a character from another game is transferred in and given character progression from its previous game into the new game.
This is a typical poaching technique used by games to steal players from one game to another OR as an incentive to have players try multiple different games.
The problem with this is that some players may feel less valued due to players from other games getting additional progression that they did not received.
Another problem with this is that players may get increased benefits traveling from game to game and never fully committing to one, never giving any game a fair chance.
Why Crestfallen
So given all of this, why play Crestfallen? We have designed the game so player feel useful at the very beginning and should never feel like a particular skill is necessary to start playing the “real game”. Being useful from the start helps to make sure that no one every feels the need to catch up.
Our staff is here to help players before, during, and after game to help with problems and promote community.
Our system is built so no one character can do everything on their own. While there are players who want to do everything on their own, this is more of a negative at a LARP. The goal is to play to lift both in and out of game, which is very hard to do playing solo.
We may eventually change our mind as a staff or a community regarding these things, but currently we feel avoiding these systems is better for our players and community.
Thanks for reading