Asphalt 9 Dev Chat (November - Daily Events & Daily Tasks)

The November Dev Chat was the 3rd Dev-Chat and was done on November 6, 2020. it was centered in discussing changes and improvements to Daily Events & Daily Tasks appart of other extra stuff.
== Full #Dev-Talk-Answer ==
Chris718: Hi everyone, so before we kick off I just want to apologies for posting.
[Posts this video: "The Muppet Show Theme (Season Five)"]
it's an earworm that is now stuck in my head
Okay so for this session we wanted to talk to everyone a bit about the Daily Tasks and Daily events.
these are related areas that impact everyone from new players to veterans who have been around since day 1, so please stick with me as I'll cover the goals we want from these features and talk about what we want to look at going forward with them
Also thanks everyone who submitted a question, the team and I have gone through lots of them and will try to answer a bunch of them either directly or indirectly (i.e. summarise an answer). If your question is not answered don't worry we have seen it and may just not have a good answer at this point in time or think it is answered by another.
Myself and the team do appreciate everyone who gets involved with these sessions as why it may not seem like it everything is taken onboard and helps make the game better (sometimes slowly but it does help).
Okay, let's start with the easy part
==== Daily Tasks ====
the goal of daily tasks is to give everyone a clear and simple set of things to do each day (I know earth shattering right?).
it is a pretty simple goal which however can become very complex when you take into account someone who has just started the game and what they can do and know about the game and compare them say to a veteran with a maxed out garage who is all about competitive multiplayer.
The list for 1 isn't necessarily ideal for the other and the same with the rewards.
Now in A9 we have had the same set of fairly general daily tasks for a bit (and yes the rewards to). So we have been looking at it and thinking about how can we make this better. Specifically: -How do we make the tasks engaging and challenging for players at different stages -How do we keep the rewards worth while and rewarding?
What we have decided that we want to do for next year (The work on the next couple of updates is already underway so we try and design and schedule things a couple updates in advance to give us time to build, balance and test). is the following:
Firstly change what the actual tasks are, in my opinion the current ones are very generic and not that interesting as they are always the same and are not much of a challenge to complete them. I tend to do them everyday by accident as much as anything else.
So we will be looing at changing them up so that each day you get tasks for different areas of the game but within each area they can be different e.g. one day it might be finish in MP in 1st position and the next it could be finish a MP race (fake example).
as part of this we will also be looking at having a different number and "difficulty" of the tasks based upon your garage level in the game. So a new player wouldn't necessarily see a MP task as they have not "unlocked" that area of the game and instead might have more career ones and the veteran player might have more MP ones and less career.
by doing this we hope to add variety to the daily task and make them something that you actively try to complete
The 2nd part (and the part I'm sure many of you care about the most) is the rewards for doing them
what we want to do with the reward is have it as something that changes over time so that for many players it will become a way for them to unlock and max out (maxing out the stars of your cars will become more important next year with some cool new features) a set of cars that we think everyone should have
the other part of the rewards is that it will be a way for players who already have these cars at max stars to consistently gain tokens
So the 1st set of changes for daily tasks will hopefully make it something you all want to complete each day and will give you rewards that you can then use in other areas be it a new car or tokens.
Now because we are game developers and A9 is a live game we are not planning just to stop there with daily tasks. This is just the 1st round of changes we are looking at doing.
The second set of changes which would come after is to add a new layer to the daily tasks
We are looking at bringing in a calendar style daily reward mechanism. As I am sure you have seen in other games these work by rewarding you if you come back a set number of times (either in a row or in total depending on the game).
We have been looking at these sorts of mechanism and in general they work, they are not that exciting as you don't need to do anything and the rewards they give are generally kind of Meh
but what they do well is they let you see what you need to do to get something. So we have taken this idea and come up with a concept were you would be able to "tick off" boxes if you play each day and complete at least some of the daily task (no need to complete all and get the daily completion reward), and if you do this regularly enough (e.g. 7 days) you would then unlock a reward that you can choose.
rather than a fixed reward which might be something you don't want our idea is to give you a choice of reward from a small pool so while there is no guarantee it is the specific thing you want you would have some control over what it is (e.g. Pack, SC, Token might be a choice)
==== Daily Events ====
The whole goal around daily events is to allow people to collect and max out the common (in the sense of cars everyone should get so that they can be competitive in TLE).
So the current set we have play on a loop every week and have been the same since basically day 1
now A9 has a few more cars in it since it first launched so yeah it will seem to a lot of players as if the daily events are kind of boring as it is always the same and that we should have all new ones all the time
Now I don't totally disagree with this feeling and understand were it is coming from
however as with the daily tasks we also have to consider new players who are continually joining the game
our current daily events do a good job of helping them get these base cars for their garage
We have been looking at this issue and trying to find a solution that will allow us to make everyone happy (or just not be as unhappy)
and have a couple of things we are looking at trying. Firstly we can look at updating and modifying the cars in these events
we have a lot more cars now so we can change them around a bit while still keeping the daily events useful for new players and hopefully for mid to late garages giving them a chance to get rewards for cars that they have not maxed out and can't find BP for.
Secondly look at adding more of these events but gate them so that they don't show to new players but do show for late garage players. This will allow us to better tailor the rewards as well as act as a nice incentive for everyone to keep pushing their garage and collect cars.
And thirdly and in some ways more important (at least for me) we want to bring in new game modes for the daily event
so that even if we keep a reward exactly the same for the event on a Monday we could have it alternate between 2 different game types so at least every Monday doesn't play the same
so hopefully that gives everyone a bit of an idea of what we are planning to do. Please keep in mind it takes time to make these changes so they won't happen in the next week or even month but we are working to make them.
Alright let me now answer some of the questions that have been sent in or are in the discussion channel
A big one that seems to come up in 1 form or another is about getting access to old cars from previous seasons
As hopefully many of you (if not all) are aware each season we have a number of cars that you can get from playing in SE as well as exclusive cars for the season pass.
we think that after a bit of time has passed it would be good to let people be able to "go back" to win the car or finish starring it up (as I mentioned before maxing out a cars stars will tie in to stuff we have planned next year)
so starting the next update we will be having as a season pass exclusive (we are doing it this way as we are hacking it in) a couple of SE that will let you collect some cars from past seasons (I won't say which cars as I want to keep them as a surprise but they are both awesome).
this will only be available to SP holders for this round.
we will be extending this wider (i.e. outside of just SP holders) in future updates once we have the time to make the relevant UI changes that we need to do to support this.
and next year with some of the new modes we will be bringing in there will be even more opportunity to get BP for cars that you may have missed.
Alright another question that has come up is about having new daily events
I sort of mentioned it above but will repeat it here as I think it is worth repeating
We want to add new modes for the daily events not just ones we have in the game e.g. Money run as a daily event not just during a drive syndicate. But also totally new ones (we talked about them in a previous chat and have used the voting list to prioritise the ones we will work one first).
==== Question & Answers ====
As mentioned before we will be adding some new ones and changing them up. But we also want to keep the existing ones as these are the early cars for new players and once unlocked the aim is to move to the higher classes so that they can fill out their garages.
Question from @TRU™ SHI#1311: New cars in the rewards or garage packs This and similar questions came up a few times. We have been adding new cars at different garage levels and will continue to do so slowly overtime as new cars come in. Additionally we are looking at introducing new types of GACHA packs that allow you to target smaller groups of cars as well as work towards “guaranteed” GACHA results.
@definitely not MTMguy said "Show the rank of the cars used in ranked daily events." 100% agree, this is something we want to add back into the UI and I made sure it is our backlog (that's the giant list of stuff we plan to do and which we review every 2 weeks)
This was a good question from @Deleted User: Token heist in daily events. We are in the progress of adding in some token milestones and removing them from the leaderboards in the seasonal TLE’s we believe that this will give everyone a chance to earn more tokens and not just the top players. Additionally we are going to extend this to the regular TLE so open up even more areas for you to grind tokens.
@lifegame#1111 said "Make Daily Events a bit harder and give tokens as rewards." Something to be conscious of and which I sort of talked about above is we are trying to keep these events as approachable for as many players as possible so making them harder isn't necessarily what we want to do. Having said that there is no reason we cannot also look at more "hardcore" events that run on a biweekly or monthly cycle
@BelieveR: comment about "2 daily car loots 1 will unlock at the start (named basic car loot) and other after reaching garage level 12-13 (named advanced car loot) Because at this garage level most of the daily car loot cars got maxed. So after that we can collect trade coins from the basic one and new better car's from the advanced one" This touches on something I haven't really talked about but will mention briefly. We are looking at updating our onboarding and career path next year as part of this we want to make the daily car loots more integrated into career so some of this will becoming in. Additionally we are also looking at how can we make career mode still relevant even when you have things maxed out (and we have some things for that which I will talk about in a later session)
For @Younxs#9147: Add a Jackpot in credit heist. 
* Example: The jackpot can be like a car point when we KD: 
** Police car = 10.000 
** Racer car = 20.000 
** The more we KD car, more money we get 
This is basically how money run works in the drive syndicate and is something we are looking at bringing out of that mode into a more regular rotation.
Ok were getting towards the end of the time I actually have a question for you. firstly @Clauwudia don't ban me for going off topic
==== Off Topic: Multiplayer Change ====
We are looking at the next MP series and are thinking of making a change, and I want to get your thoughts on it (we will put a poll in #☑-dev-chat-vote at the end)
The idea for it is as follows: 
* We are going to remove the pack rewards from the league reward. 
* We are going to add this to the score reward (so now from score you can get 10 packs instead of 6) 
* To get the score reward all you need to do is race with each race giving you points towards it 
* Each time you reach a higher league the multiplier you will get for being in that league and racing is increased. 
So the higher your league the quicker you can get all of the rewards. Basically this is what we will call Rush 2.0 as all it requires you to do is play to rank up. So if all you care about is the reward just play, if you really care about the league you will still need to prove your skill and compete (and your reward will be getting the rewards quicker)
Respoding to: Chris718: "and I want to get your thoughts on it (we will put a poll in #☑-dev-chat-vote at the end)"
Clauwudia: @Chris781 I think I have anticipated a little bit.
Chris718: I just want to say thanks to everyone for joining in and listening (reading) my babble, these sessions really help the team as it let's us ask you questions and see responses to things we are saying and helps shape what our plans are for upcoming updates in both the short and long term, so please keep joining in and sending in questions.
We will have 1 more of these this year in December (hopefully unless everything goes truly pear shaped) and will work out what that topic will be soon.
thanks everyone and have a good weekend.
== #Dev-Chat-Vote ==
Mina:
===== 1st Vote =====
New MP series We are thinking of trying out a new variation on the MP changes, in particularly change how rewards work. The change we are considering is as follows. Moving the GACHA rewards from the league and placing them as part of the score milestone (So 2 packs per score milestone which means 10 packs instead of 6). This will make it easier to get the rewards as long as you play enough.
Importantly leagues still have value since when you move up in league the MP you will get for racing increases so higher league players will get the score rewards faster. Check out #🗣-dev-chat-discussions before voting! ^^ Thoughts?
[Most People liked this]
===== 2nd Vote =====
One final question for today. How did you like this DevChat? (1 - I do not like it at all, 5 - I love it)
[Most People Love It the Dev-Chat]
===== 3rd Vote =====
Last question (I promise) What topic would you like to discuss next? 
* Grand Prix 
* Career Mode 
* New Location + Types of races on tracks
[Most people voted on New Location + Type of Races]
Category:Asphalt 9 Dev Chats