Update Campaign 2 and beyond

Hey all, with Campaign 2/3 contest coming to a close we have been throwing around some ideas for future campaigns. But before we jump into that we wanted to thank everyone that took the time to submit tracks and even those who may not have submitted but contribute through track feedback as well, so thank you! We also plan on sending out some "swag bags" for this contest so if you participated stay tuned.

Running contests for both Campaign 1 and now this one for 2/3 we have definitely learned a few things and have some new ideas on how campaigns could evolve that we wanted to get feedback on.

Campaign 1 currently has 10 tracks and serves as an intro for a new player so progression and easing players into difficulty is really important with this one. We have identified that we may be ramping up difficulty too quickly between tracks 4-7 and may need to add in 1 or 2 "easier" tracks at some point to tackle some frustration by new players we are seeing.

Campaign 2/3 was intended to ramp up progression from beginner-intermediate with some "difficult" for new players tracks. We have been testing out and reviewing submissions. With the tracks submitted and thinking through the long term management of campaigns as well as players requests to have featured tracks we are considering pushing out all 15-20 tracks into Campaign 2 and changing the format of future campaign contests but in order to do that we really need your feedback / input on how you think it would work.

The idea is to define genres of tracks that will be used to hold on-going open campaigns. So for example, say one of the genres we want to move forward with is "Fantasy" we would release a campaign named "Fantasy" once we have say at a minimum 2 suitable "Fantasy" tracks the campaign would be released with an open call for "Fantasy" tracks, once that campaign has say 15-20 tracks we could open up a "Fantasy II" campaign for future tracks and so on. We would expect future campaigns to naturally be a mix of easy/intermediate/difficult tracks with no specific order of progression (that is what the player learned in campaign 1+2).

If you are on board with the idea of holding those types of on-going campaign contests would love to hear your opinions on what would make good themes/categories for types/name of campaigns. Here are some ideas that have been floated around that are a mix of both track themes and types of tracks that may not fit a specific theme:

• Action
• Fantasy
• Sci-Fi
• Western
• Mountains/Downhill
• Trials
• Freeride / Dirt jumping

Anyways, if you have any feedback on potential issues or concerns would love to hear it!

 

Keeping the campaigns going from easy to hard seems cooler to me than random. For themes I think that themes like Western are better than themes like downhill and freeride because you have a lot more freedom in design.

 

Yeah I think that the way it is right now is really great. I'm guessing that the difficulty thing is a problem because some tracks submitted turn out to be too hard or too easy and you don't have that problem if you do it with themes instead of difficulty. You could always switch tracks from campaign to camaign to make that work better. If a track for campaign 3 is too hard you can switch it with one in campaign 4 for example

 

Originally we were planning to go plan campaigns easy to difficult but the current mix of tracks in 2 have ramped up difficulty pretty quickly and would be tough to fill out future campaigns. What we would like to do with future campaigns is still have them lock sequentially but have each campaign track individually progress in difficulty. Plan to see those really challenging tracks in a campaign but not 10 of 10 of them, would say a nice mix.

We are looking for themes / categories that could cover pretty much all types of Free Rider tracks, like for tracks like this http://www.freeriderhd.com/t/7726-dh-with-logos would be suited for downhill or freeride.

The open campaigns would give the most freedom to authors either targeting a genre or type of track.

 

For Action was thinking tracks like this one: http://www.freeriderhd.com/t/3201-cops but I guess it could fall under other categories

We would have to do some significant rework to have them unlock that way and not sequentially. We do want to put an option to "skip" maybe for coins or something so that players that can't beat a track aren't blocked from future campaigns.

What would be a good type / category for all those tracks that have dirt jumps?

 

Awesome! We hope to get some better swag bags going out as the community grows!

I get what you are saying and think we can still mix in those difficult tracks in the themed campaigns and have them still unlock in the same progression. Just some tracks a pro will burn through but others will be more difficult. Having in an option to skip would allow players to move forward but always having those medal-less difficult tracks nagging at them to beat it.

 

Definitely, if you don't feel comfortable giving us your address completely understand we can thank you / show our appreciation with words instead!

With tracks submitted if felt like Campaign 3 was going to be a really really challenging campaign and for new players would basically be a show stopper. Watching some new players trying to get through some tracks currently in campaign 2 has been very painful, we almost lost a couple computer monitors

We could still ramp progression within the campaign itself.

 

Could be, or maybe jumps?

 

I to liked the idea of having campaigns continue to progress from easy to more difficult in a linear progression, but after putting together Campaign 1+2 we definitely learned a lot and the difficulty/problems associated with that, the main issue is that the majority of players will hit a wall and either halt all progression or more likely just quit all together.

There is also the issue of holding contests and asking authors to create an intermediate to difficult track, those meanings are very different depending on experience of player. What may work best for the game is to select themes / types of tracks that authors are already enjoy creating and those tracks that players enjoy playing. Contests are open, but there would only be max 20 tracks per campaign. Open contests with varying themes would hopefully increase overall participation.

We can measure/estimate the difficulty of a track based on the completion rate, based on play I think that having campaigns with all difficult tracks is going to be far to frustrating and not a good experience. What may be best for the game, is to keep the current unlock strategy and have future campaigns have a healthy mix of easy/intermediate/difficult where the range of difficulty increases in the later campaigns. This would allow players to still progress and if they can't complete those tracks they may have the option to skip with coins, but at least there would be no real wall because they should be able to hit a track that they can beat and go back to those difficult tracks at a later time.

So I think we can meet the needs of players looking for progression of difficulty while still mixing in varying levels of difficulty within the campaigns themselves, does that make sense?