Engagement Incentives

I have noticed a big decline in the amount of engagement on posts on both the discord and forums recently. Forums now has 1,010 members, yet it’s only the same small group of people sharing their opinion and ideas. There is clearly a way of tracking engagement on forums as we can earn badges for it. I would suggest lemons for engagement, for example, 5 lemons at 100 marked engagements, or 1 lemon every 25. This will definitely motivate people to engage more. I understand there would be concern for cheating the system, however if these milestones were set at sensible periods, staff should have plenty of time to intercept and remove false or worthless comments on posts, keeping all things in line with the new post rules.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be lemons, it could be:

-1 random key per 5 engagements

-1 guaranteed legendary every 50/75/100

-A one time monthly key for your first 100/250/500

-1 cosmetic key every 50

*To keep the keys on the game mode you want, they could go into an area, maybe /claims within the chosen mode and you can remove them from your global storage.

*For creative would also suggest a random key gives 1 cosmetic key, a guaranteed legendary gives 3 and the one time monthly could give 5. I’m not sure if that would be possible alongside my suggested collection system, so maybe it could just work like voting, whichever you are logged on to or nextlog on to you get it.

-A Free crate tag for the top 10 engages per month

-A individual tag for that months top 10 soon one else can have it (something people would actually want though)

I could be mistaken, but was there not also a forums tag that I now can not see? This is of course aimed at Forums to drive traffic there rather than here.

while i’d love for forums and suggestions to be more active i don’t think these incentives are very realistic.

imo it should never be a reward at x milestone system just because it is so easy to just farm posts and reactions (coming from top poster, and someone who adds reactions to heaps of messages). i feel like it would also encourage people to just say whatever within suggestions posts without any actual care for what was said and result in a lot of random “agreed!”/“disagree!” responses that may not necessarily be true thoughts on the subject, since people just want to hit their milestones.

i also think staff are in no position to determine what actually is someone giving an honest opinion in a suggestion compared to someone just saying they agree/disagree for the sake of making a post, same goes for any reactions (upvotes/downvotes) which are also a form of engagement.

i think the better idea is the x reward for top posters to make forums active, but i still think that has all the negative aspects i mentioned previously and doesn’t actually help with suggestion discussion. afaik there’s no separation in leaderboards between the forums categories (off topic, suggestions), and even if they add it you still ran into these issues.

if the goal is to make forums as a whole more active then i think this is a cool idea to include in game rewards for leaderboards. but i do think it then hinders actual discussion on suggestions as a result. im sure some people would be genuine, but it is inevitable people will just say whatever for the engagement if they want the reward.

and even then it is also just insanely easy to get a friend and just go back and forth in a forums game for hours to up your posts for the leaderboard, and as that is genuine engagement on the forums for the game posted it’s not like you can disqualify it. and if you limit the leaderboard to just suggestions then it would only exacerbate the issues and make genuine discussion harder as i’ve said.

for suggestions specifically i think the lack of engagement is more just from the fact we rarely see a lot come out as a result of them. i know we’ve gone on about it a lot but people have just given up hope which has definitely led to this decline in suggestion activity. if this improved then i fully believe people would want to be more active in them again.

at least in my opinion id much rather see people who genuinely care about making and responding to suggestions being active again, as opposed to trying to encourage everyone to just be active through rewards when they don’t actually care otherwise

while incentives would be nice, like Zac said.. it could possibly encourage people to leave nothing of substance and possibly just pure gibberish as comments and even posts themselves. how i see it, if someone wants to interact on forums and discord, they'll interact whether there are incentives or not. personally, i think it's better if we see people who actually want to interact regardless of possible rewards making posts and responding to posts, even if it means its a small portion of people or the same few people every time.