Progression is an aspect fundamental to any game, it's the process of advancing toward a goal, designed to keep the player engaged and committed to advancing in the game. Usually progression is accompanied by rewards and unlocking new content.
CubeCraft's current progression system has not been updated in a while, this is disallowing the server from getting new frequent players, and retaining old ones.
Context
Now, it's important to understand that typically progression as understood in Game Design, refers to the process of reaching an ultimate goal within a video game. In the case of CubeCraft, there is no ultimate goal (also known as winning condition) beyond playing and winning individual matches of games, getting achievements, and finishing challenges. There's no ultimate goal simply because you can just continue to win more and more games infinitely, and you'll never reach an end.
So now you might ask yourself, if there's no ultimate goal, how can there be progression? Well, games that work this way have already figured it out, you can keep your players motivated if you continuously impose a series of tasks/goals that they need to complete to "advance". Usually what this advancement means is reaching a higher level, perhaps a higher ranking, and in unison with this advancement, the player is rewarded with countless cosmetics and loot. Loot in particular, turns the player's appearance into a part of the game, and players love to be able to express themselves with how they look online!
So we need a leveling system that in parallel feeds the player with cosmetic loot? Sounds like CubeCraft already has all of that! What an unnecessary thread!
No, because you may have systems in place, but you need mechanisms so that your progression system is exciting enough for players to want to log into your game with consistency and work their way toward certain rewards. The way the current progression system in CubeCraft's two servers works is very insufficient in this regard, something that to me should be a much bigger priority for the network, has not seen any significant changes in years. (Oh and you don’t get loot in Bedrock, everything is locked away behind a paywall!)
As of now, the current progression system in CubeCraft works this way:
Playing Incentives
- Daily Challenges: Complete a series of tasks to complete an Easy, Medium, and Hard level daily Challenge. The tasks range from 3-5, and include things like winning in specific game modes, getting X amount of kills, breaking X amount of Lucky Blocks, etc.
- Achievements: Complete a specific task, sometimes they can be obtained in a single game, sometimes you have to play dozens to thousands of games to gain these achievements. They are sorted into three categories:
- General Achievements: Specific tasks like killing someone using a pickaxe in SkyWars.
- Progressive Achievements: Cumulative tasks that require you to get an x amount of overall kills or wins, usually in the hundreds or thousands.
- Kit Achievements: Win a game of said gamemode using a specific kit.
- Server Voting: Vote for CubeCraft in specific Minecraft server listings and earn EXP and personal experience modifiers. Maintain your daily voting streak to access exclusive loot rewards!
- Leaderboards: Be among the 200 players with the most wins in a specific gamemode, your name and player head is displayed in a Leaderboard menu.
Currencies
- There are two currencies that serve as an "indicator" of your progression in the server:
- EXP: obtained by playing games, winning games, doing challenges and getting achievements.
- Points: obtained by playing games, winning games, doing challenges, getting achievements, and saying GG.
- As you gain EXP your in-game level increases, which can be seen on the top of your hotbar, when players hover over your name in chat, and in your side bar in the main lobby.
- Points can be exchanged for kits in specific gamemodes, and for abilities in SkyWars.
Loot
- Loot is everything that is found in the cosmetic menu in the main lobby, there are many types of loot, like special hats, trails, shield designs, cages, and more.
- Cubelets: Obtained by completing certain achievements, daily challenges, and sometimes by chance, they are a sort of “loot box” that once opened give you a random single reward. Cubelets can be found in three different rarities, rarer cubelets have higher chances of giving you rarer loot:
- Cubelets
- Super Cubelets
- Uber Cubelets
If you receive an item you already had, you receive an amount of “Loot Points” proportional to the object’s rarity, Loot Points can then be converted into more Cubelets.
- Votelets: Obtained by voting for CubeCraft in specific Minecraft server listings.
Playing Incentives
- Leaderboards: Be among the 50 players with the most wins in a specific gamemode, your name and player head is displayed in a Leaderboard menu.
Currencies
- EXP: obtained by playing games, winning games, doing challenges and getting achievements.
- VIP EXP: Can only be obtained by buying items from the CubeCraft store. Each VIP level has a series of rewards ranging from loot, to access to exclusive game modes.
Loot
- Loot is everything that is found in the cosmetic menu in the main lobby, there are many types of loot, like cages, egg/chest/generator/flag/etc skins, kill/win effects, shoes, username prefixes, etc. As far as I know, only a few limited username prefixes are available for free, every other piece of loot must be purchased.
Data & Analysis
The reason why I wanted to break down each network’s Progression System, was to serve as a comparative exercise, and to classify each in the three important concepts that I want to suggest improvements for in this thread: playing incentives, currencies & loot.
First, here is a graphical comparison of the progression system features between CubeCraft Java & Bedrock:
There are a few important takeaways from this comparison:
- CubeCraft Bedrock has no “active” playing incentives, only leaderboards which are passive in the sense that they require a lot of grinding to get to, whereas “active” incentives like achievements and challenges keep things new and interesting.
- CubeCraft Java does not have an elaborate loyalty system like Bedrock does with VIP Experience and lacks purchasable Loot. (other than the loot that comes with Ranks)
- CubeCraft Bedrock lacks free loot.
Other important takeaways that are not evident in this comparison:
- CubeCraft Bedrock only recognizes the top 50 players per gamemode whilst CubeCraft Java recognizes the top 200.
- Server Voting is difficult and nearly impossible to implement in Bedrock because redirecting users to third party websites in Bedrock is complicated, and even more so for console and mobile players.
Overall, it seems like there are features that both versions of CubeCraft could beneficially borrow from each other. But perhaps, porting them over could be a good opportunity to overhaul them.
Proposals
Here is a series of changes I would make to certain Progression System Features and how I believe they should be implemented in each network:
- BEDROCK:
- Add achievements to CubeCraft Bedrock.
- BEDROCK & JAVA:
- Add more progressive achievements to shorten the gaps between “Win 1,000 Games of X” and “Win 10,000 Games of X” very few players ever actually reach 10,000 wins, maybe add a 2,000 & 5,000 achievement.
- Turn all Skyblock main quests into achievements.
- Give personal level multipliers for hard achievements.
- Give a network-level multiplier for 10,000 wins achievements or their kill/egg breaking/etc equivalent.
- BEDROCK:
- Add daily challenges to CubeCraft Bedrock.
- Add gamemode specific daily challenges accessible via an NPC in said gamemode’s lobby, featuring a series of daily, and weekly challenges. (As done by Hypixel)
- Incorporate a storytelling aspect to daily challenges, perhaps change the word “challenges” to “quests” and introduce a Quest Master character that can be found in all lobbies through which you can access daily quests, weekly quests, gamemode specific quests and or a “random quest” that has lower rewards. (As done by The Hive)
- BEDROCK & JAVA:
- Add a new daily challenge difficulty called “Impossible” with 5-7 more complicated tasks.
- Include more kit-specific challenges outside of Battle Arena/FFA, like “get 3 kills using the Wolf kit in Solo SkyWars”.
- Add more extensive “weekly” challenges like “win 10 games of BlockWars CTF”. (As done by Hypixel)
- Implement a challenge streak reward path like server voting in Java, that unlocks rewards like the username prefix “Questmaster”, and personal and server wide experience multipliers.
- Include Parkour in daily challenges like “complete 3 easy parkour levels”
- JAVA:
- Include daily voting in daily challenges:
- Easy: “Vote for CubeCraft in at least 1 Server List”
- Normal: “Vote for CubeCraft in at least 3 Server Lists”
- Hard: “Vote for CubeCraft in all server lists”
- BEDROCK:
- Increase the amount of players per leaderboard to 200.
- Add a series of podiums for the top 5 players of each gamemode in their respective lobbies. (This was MASSIVELY popular in Java)
- BEDROCK & JAVA:
- Show your position in the leaderboard even if you’re not in the top 200. (Motivation for those seeking to reach a leaderboard)
- Implement global leaderboards & podiums in the main lobby for the top 5 players in each of these criteria:
- Highest EXP level.
- Most achievements completed.
- Most daily challenges completed.
- Give leaderboard-specific loot for reaching the #200, #50, #5, and #1 spots.
- BEDROCK & JAVA:
- Implement gamemode-specific EXP levels, essentially, all EXP that you gain in for example, SkyWars, goes to your global level, but also toward your SkyWars level. This level would be displayed next to your username when you’re in a SkyWars lobby.
This feature is especially necessary for Java granted that levels are not an accurate representation of skill/time played anymore since many players gained dozens of levels using server-wide experience multipliers. Multipliers would NOT count toward gamemode-specific EXP levels.
The Loot situation seems to be very intentional and important in CubeCraft Bedrock. The fact that there’s zero free loot probably means that it’s an important monetization method for the server, and I cannot reasonably ask anyone to change their monetization strategy if it’s working. I would instead encourage the possibility of porting purchasable loot back into Java, since Bundles used to be a thing there, using custom 3D models would be pretty cool and something that is not common to see in the Java server market. But I really cannot propose any of these ideas with much certainty, for I am mostly unaware of how these monetization strategies play out.
That’s all for now! Do let me know what you think about these ideas, this thread had a pretty big scope so I apologize if I overlooked any important details, I tried my best to keep all of CubeCraft’s current systems in mind. Moreover, I am not so fixated on the very specific things that I proposed, and more so in the idea of understanding that progression and engagement are hugely important, and there’s a lot of places for improvement for CubeCraft, and there's a lot of already existing mechanics that can be ported over!
