Add Personal Incentive to Levelling Up Resource Buildings (Need Ideas)

[WarrenJames]

Normally I come up with a foolproof plan to fix such simple problems in the game, but even I'm at a loss with my awesome skill to make a proposed idea for this.
(lol, 'fooproof' and 'simple' my butt. My ego and skill really isn't that great.)

So, I'm asking for good ideas on how to give people a reason to level up thier gold mines and elixir collectors. At almost any league range at or past silver, just hitting the [Next] button often enough gives one the idea of what kind of problem we have. So many bases have low level resource buildings because it is better to either raid other people's higher level resource buildings, and having them low level prevents from being 'raid bait' when inactive for awhile. I've ran into so many useless bases with full mines and collectors that aren't worth my time to raid because the available loot is just not high enough, nor will it ever be in it's current state. Plus they will be a waste of time in base hunting since they rarely, if ever, attacked, and will show up often as you hit [Next], wasting your gold and time.

I personally proposed this idea, http://forum.supercell.net/showthrea...d-while-online where the resource buildings have thier loot collected and stored in the base's storage with a yet to be hammered out algorithm, to help make such bases hold more loot, and already good abandoned bases even better by holding more in storage than in just the resource buildings. Plus it would improve game play from doing tactless raids to more advanced attacks on bases, like how Supercell intended. But it doesn't address the actually issue itself.

Another idea was to to give achievements (gems and XP) to having 6 of each resource building all X level or higher. Unfortunately after many searches, I can't seem to find the right search keywords to rediscover the thread I thought I posted on about that. Spent way too much time on that, just for a link.

Anyway, that's all I have. I can't think of a good way to give players a personal reason to level up those things and make it feel like it is worth the time and attack risk. I'd be happy with lvl9 resource buildings if I had the choice, but currently have to level them up as Builder busy-work while waiting on my lab and TH to be lvl8.

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I'll add ideas here as they come, good and bad, so if this post gets huge, people shouldn't have to read the whole thing. Will try to be objective about the short comments for each ideas, which I try hard to be in general, but no guarantee. Only human.

[Zadgrub]

I agree with what you're saying, and have a couple of thoughts. First, your idea to add collector upgrade achievements is a good one, even if it's a minor gem reward, it's an easy incentive to get. Another idea I had would be adding a minimum collector level requirement before allowing a Town Hall upgrade. e.g., your collectors have to be lvl 10 before you can upgrade your TH to lvl 10, collectors must be lvl 9 before you can upgrade to TH 9, etc. Or something like that.

[NF2335]

And along with this, the resource building could have a higher capacity for each level. E.g. for a level 8 collector/mine could have a capacity of 75,000 rather than 50,000.
SuperCell could reduce their upgrade time or increase production rate, but I don't that would happen.

[WarrenJames]

Wish I could find the achievement idea thread, since it wasn't my idea. Have to admit, it seems like it should be very effective, easy to do, simple, and cheap to implement. Personally, seems like a cheap way to fix the issue, but it does fix it without needing to rebalance much, if any, stats or figures.

Making it a requirment for TH leveling up wouldn't be to popular. If added, that would add a new precedence to building planning since nothing else has required a person to level up anything to be a higher TH level. It might slow down TH rushing people, and make them nicer raid targets if and when they leave and abandon their base.

I kind of fail to see how adding extra capacity would help with having people make higher level resource buildings. If anything, they might keep them lower, since personally, I leveled up my stuff so it didn't require several checks a day to keep empty.Halfing mines and collectors that take 16+ hours to fill would be ideal, and would keep it at that level.

Reducing the upgrade time would help with upgrading incentive, since I wouldn't feel as put off by spending builder time for so little gain in production per hour. The last levels, from upgrading to 10, 11, and 12 take so long in comparison that to me it just seems absurd for gains you got from for a small fraction of the upgrade time on earlier levels.

Another option I guess is to incress the production rate, and in turn the capacity so time to fill up don't change too much. But I doubt that would be done in any significant way, since that could destablize the economy.

[NF2335]

I kind of fail to see how adding extra capacity would help with having people make higher level resource buildings. If anything, they might keep them lower, since personally, I leveled up my stuff so it didn't require several checks a day to keep empty.Halfing mines and collectors that take 16+ hours to fill would be ideal, and would keep it at that level.

The higher capacity wouldn't help increase incentive to level up resource building, but it would reduce the problem that low level resource building doesn't have enough to raid.
However another idea to increase incentive to upgrade collectors/mines is to change to loot penalty for each level. (These are rough estimates)
Level 1-5 (75% available to steal), Level 6 - 8 (70% available to steal), Level 9 - 10 (60% available to steal), and Level 11 - 12 (50% available to steal).
And when choosing to upgrade the collectors/mines, the description could say "Note: Upgrading your collectors reduces the percentage that can be stolen.

[dahimi]

Achievements with gem awards for upgrading them is absolutely the way to go here. No reason to get any more complicated than that.

It has also been suggested several times.

[WarrenJames]

Achievements with gem awards for upgrading them is absolutely the way to go here. No reason to get any more complicated than that.

It has also been suggested several times.

That seems to be the most likely idea to work.. or rather.. to get Supercell to use. I still say it is a low/cheap way of fixing the issue, getting 10-50 gems for leveling up all your resource buildings of the same type is more of a cheap bribe for those obsessed with free gems, as well as play on the psychological urge to just complete achievements. It doesn't improve the arguably unsound strategy of levelling up resource buildings more than one personally needs to have them; but as a whole, it would improve things for everyone, since more resources would be up for grabs, and fewer bases with sub-par resource buildings. There would be a spike in new upgrades, and then the abandoned bases with poor resource buildings would eventually phase out as they get removed or deleted, based on whatever SC's policy is on inactive accounts.

Not sure what to say at the moment about the incress of lootablity, and then reduction as you level it up. Will have to think about it and comment later.

Still entertaining other ideas on how best to solve this.

[WarrenJames]

With how well this thread seems to be going, don't think we'll be getting any more ideas.

The achievement suggestion is just hard to compete with.

[firestar123]

Nah I'm too lazy.

[WarrenJames]

Lazy or not, doesn't seem like this topic is heading anywhere.

Looks like the achievement idea maybe 'the winner', since no other idea seems able to beat it. Or rather, no one is willing to make a different idea, or argue too strongly against it.