Suggestion: End-of-season random draw to attract players to races

This is an idea I just came up with. It is not necessarily thought through. We have a season ladder and end-of-season rewards. We also have random draw rewards. Why not combine these?!
Apologies in advance if this has already been suggested!

The suggestion is a random draw at the end of the season for, e.g., a couple of good alternate art unique items or goodie bags of currency (of different sizes perhaps). The prizes do not necessarily have to be Kaom's Heart but at least somewhat attractive to most players; more attractive than most prizes are at the moment.

Example: You have five types of prizes, A, B, C, D, E and 10 of each. A total of 50 end-of-season random draw prizes.

If you by the end of the season have accumulated 25 points or more, you get one ticket for item A. If you reach 50 points or more, you also get a ticket for the random draw for item B. If you reach 75 points, you also get a ticket for item C. And so on: 100 and 125 points grant tickets for items D and E respectively.

Pros:

- Attrative/useful prizes. Practically everyone should want them.

- The lowest threshold is low enough so that everyone has a chance at a good prize.

- The amount of points needed for a ticket for the "next" prize is the same for each prize tier, in the example above, 25 points. There is therefore no real benefit in making multiple accounts. You can earn 25 more points on another account and get another ticket for item A, or you can earn the 25 points on your current account and get a ticket for item B (which should be more attractive than A, obviously). The tickets per points rate stays the same.

- No one should ever have more than one ticket for any item type (under the assumption above). Therefore, even though the top players of the season ladder have a higher chance of winning "something", their chance of grabbing an item A does not increase (assuming they would rather want item B than A). Therefore, the casual player should not worry about how many points the top players have, only how many points he/she has him/herself (and how many players have the same amount or more).

- There is always a "next goal" to strive for. And due to the constant (rather low) gap between prize tiers, it should never feel impossible to reach the next tier, except of course when the season is about to end.

- The prize quality should make earning points attractive to everyone. However, the uncertainty factor (no guaranteed win) should make sure it does not feel like a grind.

- Since it is a once per season draw, the risk of flooding the market is low.

Cons:

- Since the point gaps between the tiers remains the same, the highest tier will not be as high as the current fixed prize tiers. This means that the top players of the ladder with several hundre points will not be able to gain any more tickets unless they play from a second account. However, I believe that the players in question would rather fight for a top spot on the season ladder than splitting their points across several accounts to gain more tickets for items that they probably can live without.


As usual with race prizes, it might be a tough job to balance the rewards such that they are sufficiently attractive to most players without making anyone feel that they are forced to participate in races. Since the suggestion is an once-per-season draw, the amount of items/rewards can easily be kept low enough to not influence the market in any significant way.

All numbers are of course just examples I came up with when writing this post. The number of prizes and/or the number of each prize might need to be way higher or lower.

Edit: Addition: One could also consider to make it so that no one can win more than one item overall in the random draw. This would increase the number of winners but remove the (small) chance of real jackpot. Alternatively, a limit of 2 or 3 prizes.

Thanks for reading!
/The Insane
Last edited by Hassefar60 on May 8, 2013, 11:56:49 AM

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