I had some share of Gacha games, among others my main go to game Dota 2 also has a little bit of Gacha in it (cosmetically but the gameplay itself is not). I like Gacha games, I use it to train myself about spending money. I have the principal that the scarcity of the world is not of time nor money nor energy but of mutual solutions, therefore solutions are unlimited we just have to give thanks to our sources of solutions more. So in terms of Gacha games or games in general I don't mind spending money on them for the adventures, knowledge, trainings, and enjoyments I got out of them.
What I wanted to see in Gacha games are seasonal resources. Meaning the kind of materials or currency that could be converted to pets, items, or even characters per season, and at the end of the season it would reverted back into their currency form. So temporary seasonal items.
The purpose is to enhance the duration and the excitements of people playing the gacha or the roll. People got a type of excitement out of rolling for items, and instead of just providing those from real money or from grinding, having a reset feature would really boosts the availability of the excitement in the game. Furthermore, the more you play, the more these resources were accumulated in your inventories, but you'd have different luck at different seasons. So when players were out of luck, they would still be looking forward for what comes next since they were not out of luck permanently.
The concerns with this feature might be that full exploration of the game faster would saturate players' desire to play faster, maybe... but I don't think that it is worse than the saturation that came out of monotonous grinding experienced by people who were invested highly in the game.
There is another suggestion that might also address this problem, which is access to another game from the same company. So your progress in a game could be translated to head starts in a new game from the same company. But of course your entire progress of the previous game would be reduced in exchange.
This would make sure that players would keep playing within the same umbrella.
Another thing that could be featured is an integrated market for resources. Similar to the steam market, if gacha games were to have an integrated market, there would be more reasons to keep on playing the games.
Another suggestion for the PvP is that allow for in battle improvements of the character, like specific in battle specializations, transformations, accumulations of in battle currencies that could be used for the transformations or in battle items (like Dota 2)... that would make the Gacha games engaging even for players who are not interested/no longer interested in the lores or the raid bosses.
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Update:
I thought of another idea of stamina system, where characters have a stamina bar that depletes when used for quests or battles. Let's say for example the stamina bar was 100/100 per character, it replenished a point every 3-5 minutes, most battle costs about 10 points, below 30 points the character would be exhausted and needed to wait until the stamina reached 70 until he/she could be used for battle again.
So if you use the seasonal resources to roll, the game could made it available for you all the in game contents, not just specific seasonal contents. It would be beneficial for the players and the game because of the stamina bar system. As long as the seasonal items/characters could be labelled as so they could be dematerialized without having to be disassembled again. The seasonal items/characters labels mean that they couldn't be altered/combined with regular items/characters.
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If I were to start a gacha game:
I would make all items and characters temporary, which means they all would be converted back to resources at the end of the season. And if you wanted to keep something permanently, you'd have to get a lock which is a paid content / a real money feature.
As far as I could think of, this could be a pleasant money grabber game for the players, in a way that if the game had a guest star, my players supposedly were to be motivated to pay extra twice; once at the beginning of the season, for buying some extra resources to increase the chance of getting the character, then secondly near the end of the season when players who fell in love with the character/item decided to keep it long term.
This setup should also enable the game to be flexible about tweaking the characters' stats, because every season most players would be rolling, and even though they might get old characters/items, they could still expect to experience something new and interesting because of the seasonal tweaks. In case of the locked characters they would be unnerfable, they could only experience seasonal buffs but not seasonal nerfs. There might be a need for permanent stats updates but it should be rare.
After some point in time, a lot of players would've gotten most of the characters locked, and the sense of adventure from the game would be reduced... this is when the pvp feature would be focused more upon. A friendly PvP game is free, but a ranked PvP must use resources if you lose. (The PvP application might be a separate one but the memory of the players' lineups and progresses would be from the same database).
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Celebrity Knights:
A game with a playstyle of turn based strategy like my favorite games Vandal Hearts, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Brigandine. The characters in this game participate in a turn based battle against monsters, demons, and other enemies of the kingdom. But other than resources, knights also gain popularity points.
At home, they have this production house that they could upgrade. There they will automatically generates different kinds of resources by Streaming and making Vidoes/Movies. They could also take on freelance jobs such as accounting and video editing but these generates fixed income that won't scale with popularity, most of the time. The higher their popularity the more resources they would generate. So kind of an idle game too.
I personally find it a waste for anyone to find this kind of battle repetitive. This kind of strategy battles are great, and should be treasured, such as those in Tactics, Brigandine, Wesnoth... therefore in order to farm, characters should engage in different kinds of minigames, such as RPG type of battles, or Simple card games, from each different kinds of resources could be amassed. These minigames have auto-battles and the main strategy battles won't have auto battles.
Players would be ranked based on their achievements in PvE, PvP, upon which significant bonus popularity points could be acquired.
From each character's profile, there would be a link to an exclusive website of the behind the scenes of the characters. If you have spent more on the particular character you could have access to more contents as some of what you've spent goes to the artists and those artists are the administrators of the page. If the artist streams in real life, there might be a chance to be a member too if you bought items related to the character. The more popular a character is, that exclusive page should be richer in contents, so players would encourage other people to play the game and fanboying on the characters they liked most. Eventually the more you play the game, the more you know about and grew emotionally attached to more characters.
Personally I dislike double characters in a session of battles. That's why I appreciate Dota 2 so much, because the same character could not have a double within a session of dota. So in PvP, PvE I would want to figure out how to prevent double characters from being played in a battle (in the same team and in the opposing team). So if you were to play cooperative battle, it is required to bring back up people beforehand since not all of them would participate in the battles as often as intended.
Update: Another thing that I want to put in is the feature where players could spend their resources for story campaigns. I've said that the battle style of vandal hearts, tactics, brigandine is too wasteful to be found as repetitive, therefore if players bought/spent resources to experience some of them then that should prevented the gameplay from being found as cheap. Players who already found themselves not elated with the experience would spend their resources on other things, and those that had bought the campaigns would appreciate them more because it's their choice to buy them. From my perspective if the game was planned right I should be able to find the incentive to add on more unique intricacies, stories, rewards and challenges for the campaigns (based on the players' past spending).
Update 2: I think it is fine to have items or campaigns that are inaccessible to some players. So if I had a branching storyline, players who found helmet of the light after killing the fire dragon could access the dark dungeon campaign next but never the water cave dungeon. Those that found the amulet of the blue goddess would never going to be able to access the dark dungeon, instead they could access the water cave.
Some players had the access to some items and characters, but they would also had other inaccessible items and characters. Maybe not the characters actually but characters' costumes. So in valkyrie anatomia there was this feature of costumes that the characters could put on to change their appearances. So in this game this costume would have their own stats and levels, characters that put on the costume would look different and their stats would also be adjusted to the development of the costume.
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Statbet, is a feature where you could reduce and disable your characters' skills and stats for greater rewards at the end of the battle.
The higher the bet the higher the reward, even small creeps could provide great advantages for you at the end of the battle
Charbet, is a feature to bet your characters. They can't be used for the battle, and at the end seasonal rewards would be awarded based on the characters charbetted.
Losses may or may not mean permanent losses to the stats/items/characters. For seasonal unbought characters, players might lost them and would need to pull them again. For bought characters their stamina for the day were depleted.
Seasonal characters' levels and stats are permanent for the players, even after they lost them. When the players managed to get them again in gacha or at the next season, they retained their progress respectively to the player
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A lot of people talk trash on Gacha games that they are pay to win. I don't think paying to win is a bad thing to a spectrum, as long as the difference in experience weren't too great. So I think locked contents are interesting. Some dungeons were to be made available only for those who have spent certain amounts of hours into the game, some for those who have spent certain amounts of money, some for those who already had certain amounts of characters and items, some for those who have had certain amount of magnitude of strength minimum.
I would also make rooms of communities, or different multiplayer sections exclusive for such kinds of players.
There are 2 considerations that I could think of that supports this idea:
1. a. More rewards for those who have contributed more, b. More ambitions for those who were new
2. Gacha games change as time goes by, therefore what were exposed for new players of the past would had been no longer the same for new players of the later. These limitations method would compartementalize the shape of the game the way it was envisioned at the beginning, while at the same time kept the paths of evolution for those who were still hungry for more.
I'd speculate that having a game that manifests differently for different players would make a gender of its own efficiently.
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It would be nice to have a game that only allows people limited time to play per day. The energy system in Gacha games are ok but I would have a game that actually have a countdown and lock the game after the countdown ends.
Advantages:
1. Players would be making decision on what they considered the most valuable for them for the day.
2. Purchasable items became more valuable.
3. Favor the psychology of dopamine management, maximizing value for the long run as well as the health of the mind.
4. Each players could have bragging rights in the way he/she excelled, being unique in their own way.
5. More time for content creation and community building in social medias for the game and more time for other things in life for the players.
5b. More favor in the eyes of parents
Nowadays there's such thing as the "Meta" way of playing a game. Because of the limited time, the game would want multiple kinds of "Metas". Having multiple ways players could be satisfied I hope, could make sure the sustainability of the game's player base.
Collaboration with other games could also be a good idea. If games could reward each other's players based on their achievements in another, they could tap in "gamers" as a whole instead of having only a limited player base.
NFTs might came in mind when talking about relationships between games. Indeed the role of NFTs would be more permeative if the idea materialized. If through NFTs players could reach and reward each other better, then games weren't only be for the sake of entertainment but also strategic for other circuits of mutual solutions.
On the other hand it would be more important than ever then, to draw the line between work and fun. We still want to have the therapeutic nature of gaming. A network that plays many different games inherently has means to disentangle such convolution. But if I were to invest in one game I would want a game that firstly, realized it's potential the best way, and then had in its tailwind different ways to enhance the players' quality of life as a whole.
In the end, games are profound because they are fun ways of exploring the conceptual reality.
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Gacha games might be good too if they would limit the time a player could have some quests/battles opened, so for example card games are available throughout the day but the grid strategy only opened for an hour. All the more if the game is only opened for 2 hours for example, it would make the game even more challenging and potentially the talk of the school, or something like that.
Another feature could be deactivating one quest to activate another. This is useful to keep the same farming rewards with new experiences for long time players. Sometimes the game could be tedious but if we focuses / limit a player's possible rewards like this they could move on from a feature to another without leaving a sense of "obligation to grind".
