Voting and Cosmetic Overhaul Suggestions
Suggestion
I've been thinking a while on how I would improve vote crates and cosmetics, since it gets brought up a lot. I came up with a few ideas, which I know won't be popular with everyone, and I wanted to share them to see what people think. I figured a good starting point would be to collect the complaints I saw the most often, and these seem to be the top ones (in question form):
Voting:
1. "Why do I always get cosmetic crates?"
2. "Why don't the percentages match with what I win?"
3. "Why can't I claim all of my vote rewards at once?"
4. "Why did we get rid of command crates? They are great for new players?"
5. "Why does it take so long to open crates? Can't I just open them all at once?"
6. "Why can't I exchange cosmetic crate keys for gems anymore? This is basically just a key that gives me even more cosmetic crates I don't want"
Cosmetics:
1. "Why are we capped at 1k mystery dust now?"
2. "Why does it have to announce when someone won cosmetics on a server?"
Misc., but related:
1. "What are these minigame coins? What are the minigame cosmetics?"
2. "Why isn't there a way for new players to teleport to their friends?"
I know that some of the questions may seem obvious, and for sure Mac will take issue with the one about percentages of vote crates, but I'm just talking about what I see the most often.
Taking all of those into account I started thinking about what would address most of the problems, and this is what I came up with:
Voting:
I think with the new website and vote streaks and information being moved into it, eventually, revamping the entire vote system would be a perfect opportunity. The best way to do this, in my mind, is a point redemption system. Essentially as you vote you get points for each vote which can be redeemed in a point store. I don't want to get into how many points get you what, or how many points you get from voting, or any of the specifics- I just want to outline a system. The points would all be handled online- no vote rewards command needed. The only notice you would get in game is when something is redeemed or when a vote has been registered on the site. A quick workflow:
Vote (into) Vote Points Received (into) Vote Points spent in store (into) Reward delivered.
This is really powerful because it allows the rewards to be anything that RGA can put into the website. This could be gems, temporary commands, spawner crate keys, claim blocks, whatever. And if something changed, for example spawners (into) Spawners 2.0, it could be swapped out quickly on the website versus having to completely redo the voting thing for every new server. The idea being that you build up points to buy the things you want, and never get the things you don't want. You pick which server to receive the things (If needed.) This solves a few of the questions from above:
1. Why do I always get cosmetic crates?
-You would never get them if you never bought them
2. "Why don't the percentages match with what I win?"
-Percentages disappear. You know you can afford x after gaining y number of points.
3. "Why can't I claim all of my vote rewards at once?"
-Since the points would be managed on the website, you wouldn't have to redeem anything on servers anymore.
4. "Why did we get rid of command crates? They are great for new players?"
-Temporary commands could be brought back with this. Imagine new players being able to buy a week of fly after voting for a few days. Or they could choose to save and buy the full command or gems or whatever they really wanted.
5. "Why does it take so long to open crates? Can't I just open them all at once?"
-A solution would need to be created for supply and mega crates, but other than that the entire voting UI could be retired in game.
6. "Why can't I exchange cosmetic crate keys for gems anymore? This is basically just a key that gives me even more cosmetic crates I don't want"
-With this, those points could be exchanged for gems.
Misc. 2. "Why isn't there a way for new players to teleport to their friends?"
-A reward could be added that allows them to teleport for an hour.
If you wanted to keep some sort of randomness involved, a bonus for voting on all 5 sites could be a random number of generated vote points, with a possibility of winning a random "vote reward" on the website. Not necessary, but just thought Id mention it.
Cosmetics:
I think the ability to open cosmetic crates should be removed from the SMP servers and left only to the hubs. This will eliminate the question around the crate spam on servers, while also ensuring that the system isnt abused on those servers to cause server crashes. Furthermore, you could remove the incentive for creating your own mystery crates if combined with the voting system suggested above. For example, if you added rewards to the voting site that were specific collections of cosmetics. Do you really want that Villager blacksmithing pet? Imagine being able to just spend some vote points on a "Villager Pets Cosmetic Bundle" and having all of the villagers. If that was all you wanted, you could have spent months opening cosmetic crates trying to get it. As a player with most of the cosmetics- My entire reason for opening cosmetics goes away if I can just ensure I can get the ones Im missing. The 1k mystery dust cap matters less if you can just get the cosmetics you want and dont need to craft 1000s of crates to get them.
I think you could also eliminate some of this by replacing the minigame coins with cosmetic sets from new versions, but I would also like to see those become new website rewards instead. This would swap what should have been minigame cosmetics to just regular cosmetics, which I think is a fair trade.
