Thoughts on Shop Systems?

Poll

How do you feel about shop systems?

Love 'em
6 (26.1%)
Depends...
16 (69.6%)
Hate 'em
1 (4.3%)

Total Members Voted: 23

Author Topic: Thoughts on Shop Systems?  (Read 1955 times)

I've seen a bit of polarization on the concept of shop systems (buying items or power-ups with score points), and figured it'd be good to gauge the general consensus.
  • Do you guys like shops?
  • What are the right and wrong ways to implement a shop system?
  • What are alternative ways to add longevity and a sense of progression to a gamemode?

Here are my thoughts.
  • It really depends.
  • Shop systems work really well Endless Zombies and even Deathrace cause you can compete with other players without any points. However other shop systems like Glass' Trench War devolve when a certain number of players have the good items, and new players simply can't beat them. There needs to be a way to have fun and get points without having to grind for X hours to get Y weapon just to be competitive. Furthermore, while I like a sense of progression, some gamemodes are simply more fun when you can just hop in and play.
  • Map variety, secret locations, game mechanics that require more mastery (think grapple-knife or rocket-sniper), score ranks that have no actual effect on gameplay.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2019, 09:25:51 PM by Platypi »

shop system for cosmetics: always good in every context

but now to get tricky, shop systems that affect gameplay:

round based gamemodes that can't be dragged out forever (ie capture based gamemodes like CTF or capture point)
this is the biggest failure point I've seen done in blockland over and over
 +Tiered weapons
  ->points MUST reset at the end of each round or after a set of rounds
  ->purchases MUST reset at the end of each round or after a set of rounds
If you use a tiered weapon system and points do not reset or the game can last forever you've just made the game fun for only the people who have joined 3 hours ago and have all the best weapons versuses a bunch of a new players with the worst weapons
In general anytime you have tiered purchases, everything needs to reset at some point to set everyone back to the same level

the only acceptable way to maintain purchases between rounds is if you are purchasing equal tiered classes/weapons, thus you are rewarding your players for playing for longer by allowing them to play in different ways, and giving them clear secondary and long term goals to work towards that are separate from the actual gameplay, I don't think I've ever seen this actually implemented in blockland but I've seen it implemented in free to play games

Love em, but also depends.
If I have to grind points like a full time job for something then it's not good
If it's a fair buy ex "400 for big rocket thing, each kill is 50 so you gatta kill 8 virtual humans" then it's balanced and good if you price it right
And if you can get a warehouse worth of items for a few pennies then you've probably have done something wrong

hate them if it's like deathrace's shop and stuff, I don't want to do 1000 rounds of grinding to get "le coolest item" or some stuff, if there are other ways instead of killing zombies endlessly then that's better

Shops in pvp are awful because they reward players artificially with arbitrary advantages for playing longer, rather than the reward of optimizing playstyle and learning mechanics and meta (tournaments for example). It's especily Bad in trench wars

Good: get 30 kills to buy a tank which gets rid of the 30 points and will not respawn, encouraging teamwork with the pipe wrench (trench wars' server)
bad: you played for 15 hours, you have now permanently unlocked the mininuke (glass' trench wars)

shops are bad since veterans with all the good weapons can just clap every loving new person's cheeks

in ezm they're fine tho, but with item saving on they can become a problem, especially with dropping items

Resetting is good.  Everyone should start on even ground at the beginning of the game.
There are better ways of acquiring new items or tools, such as drops from mobs, hidden items, crafting, or prizes.

I think shops are great for consumables and cosmetics.  But permanent unlocks...  It doesn't feel great to start with a pistol, while your buddy here has his shiny new Ion Cannon strapped to his back.  One of those, how long do I have to wait before I can start having fun, sort of feelings.

I used 1 time classes in my temple treasure gamemode that are cheap to get and offer some cooler / slightly better guns and that seemed to play decently


so like theres a few free classes that are fine to use on their own, but also a few paid ones to mix it up a little

Shops are also good for RPG’s and MMO’s if people stopped believing that cutting down trees = good gameplay

ive always hated it when i join a zombie server only to spawn with a really bland, boring, and rather weak pistol. Meanwhile other players are killing zombies by the dozen with super over the top weapons that cost a fortune, taking my kills because it takes me 4x as long to kill anything with the gun i have, so i can never rack up the points i need to catch up with them.

in theory shops shouldn't give you a huge advantage over everyone else, it should just offer more variety for different playstyles
unfortunately it's usually the case where you spawn with a tiny pistol when everyone else has machine guns and bazookas

a good example is how battlefield games handle higher level guns: they aren't significantly better than the lower level ones