Event Design Insights & Valentine's Event Changes
Thank you all for your feedback and for sharing your thoughts about the second year we are celebrating Valentine Day. As you are showing a great interest in this topic, we think it's a good opportunity to provide some insights into our design thinking again!
Christmas Spirit
To begin, we want to highlight that our goal is that every event feels unique and has its individual focus. For example, the Winter Event should reflect the Christmas spirit and splendour. Thus, it is designed to be experienced as tranquil, generous and glamorous. It should feel like a gift in several ways. This includes the Calendar, the XP boost, a building as a reward for completing a quest chain, not demanding to grind adventures for presents and high explorer loots. The focus is on easy to fulfill but rewarding tasks. This makes the event more accessible for all players.
On the one hand, this allows everybody to get a lot of rewards while spending precious holiday time with their friends and families. On the other hand, this makes the event easier compared to others and consequently not challenging enough for a part of our community. Despite this, we do not want to change certain aspects of the event - such as no presents in adventure loots - to keep the overall experience and feel of the event intact.
Middle Ground
In comparison to the Winter Event, other events are designed to be more challenging and demanding. One way to achieve this is to increase the difficulty of the event without excluding anyone by increasing the amount and quality of possible rewards. This way all players will be challenged and will have goals until the very last day of the event. This also sometimes means that not all items can be crossed off from everyone's event wish list. We always try to find a middle ground for all players and player types, without sacrificing the overall intended experience of an event. One example of this was the 3x XP bonus we added to the Winter Event. This change did not interfere with the design intention but made it more exciting for players who want to spend more time in the game.
Effort for Love
This leads us now to the Valentine's Event and this year's changes.
Our vision for the Valentine's Event is in many ways a contrast to the Winter Event. The event is meant to be shorter, demanding a variety of skills and a higher effort in many ways. Just like how it feels when a Settler wants to win the heart of the special Settler in their life.
As we increased the event duration by 4 days and added the Calendar to this year's event that we know you like a lot, we also made other changes to preserve the events feeling and experience.
This means it won't be easy, but even more rewarding. In this event we want the rewards to be extraordinary, extravagant and exclusive. Just like the gift you want to give or get for Valentine Day.
The Chocolatier and Love Tree are powerful new additions and are priced accordingly. We want the Valentine Buildings to be remarkably rare, special and unique. If these and other rewards are spread too wide, they would lose their uniqueness and with it some of their value.
Teamwork is Key
Furthermore, the Valentine's Event focus is on interactions with other players. This not only means multiplayer and coop adventures. It also means buffing each other. Coming up with a collective strategy to gain the most flowers. It is about diplomacy and finally trading. If all these options are used great results can be achieved. Explorer loots do not fit into this vision, as they do not require any interaction with others. Therefore, we decreased the amount of Flowers they bring home from treasure searches, especially for longer searches.
With increased efforts and keen thinking, a lot can be accomplished – and we are sure you will seize the opportunities we added over the past months and that we add with this event and find out how to maximize your gains. We encourage you to share and discuss your strategies with your fellow Settlers.
A few Handy Hints
Don't forget to use the Valentine Buff to boost your flower refill and resource gains. Think about using the increased rewards for trading with others. Be aware that only players that have the Valentine Buff active get increased rewards. The Buff does not count for friends invited to adventures automatically. Don't forget that your flower farms keep producing during the removal phase! Help each other to achieve your goals. The strongest teams will be able to get the best results.
We hope this sheds some light on our thinking, design, and decisions. Nevertheless, we await your feedback about the event to keep improving it as we always do.
Thank you all for reading. Happy Settling and best of luck during the Valentine's Event everyone!
