My Dragon Tactics Pitch

Dear Dreamworks/Jumpstart:

I'd like to suggest one of the following new features for School of Dragons. Either of them would, I believe, not only give many players a kind of second life in the game, but would give the game itself a second life, drawing a whole new demographic of players -- one that's likely to have more spending money, by the way -- who would continue pursuing the game well beyond the point at which they exhausted all the quests and other mini games.

Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, once claimed that he could turn any game, even rock-paper-scissors, into a craze by setting up a ladder system. His idea was that, no matter how simple the game was, the existence of a ranking system would create a metagame that would be more compelling and addicting than the game itself. Now, there's a UDT ladder in School of Dragons already, but it's too limited. If you want to see anything beyond a thin slice of maxed-out players, you have to look at just the past week or day.

What you want is something more like the chess servers: a permanent ladder system based primarily on skill, with no possible max and no time window, that a player can spend a lifetime climbing without ever reaching the top. And you want a legitimate metagame that is won not by sheer volume but through variety and ingenuity.

The best existing School of Dragons mini-game for such a ladder is Dragon Tactics. But before I describe my two ideas for DT variations, I want to list the advantages that both of them share:

• Both will produce more challenging DT games than the current mini-game where the hardest of all the levels is still trivially beatable by moderately strong players and dragons.
  
• Both will still provide suitable competitive challenges for weaker players.
  
• After their initial implementation, neither will require any future development effort beyond tweaks and bug fixes, unlike the current system for maintaining ongoing engagement, Events and Expansions, which require a massive amount of development effort to prepare and debug. Once the initial work is done to set up the system, it will run itself, carrying you into an endless future.
  
• Either could be monetized in various ways. First of all, they would naturally increase engagement with all the other parts of the game, as players strove to obtain better dragons and level them up, and that might be more than enough. But you could also simply make it a members-only feature. Or maybe the mini-game itself could be open to anybody, but only members could get on the ranking ladder.

And now, my two ideas:

The Obvious One

Player vs. player DT is probably the most commonly requested new feature, but for the purpose of truly creating that second life for the game and its players, it can't just involve casual pairings like Dragon Racing or Fireball Frenzy. It's got to emulate the chess servers with the following features:

• A true Elo-like rating system.
• Safeguards against poor sportsmanship: time limits on turns and a loss for disconnects.
• A way to prioritize pairing players closer in rating. 

You might also borrow a feature from Magic: The Gathering:

• Contests between players could be best-out-of-three, with players allowed to switch out one of their dragons before each new game, thus creating yet another strategic level. (This could be part of the monetization model: only these matches could count for the ladder, and only members or those who pay some other extra price could play them. For the rest, there could still be casual single games, Dragon Racing or Fireball Frenzy style, that don't count for the ladder.)

Do all this and PvP DT becomes more than a fun new feature of the game; it becomes almost a second, new game in itself, though still intertwined inseparably with the base game. 

The New Idea

My other idea is something I call "Infinite Dragon Tactics." The idea is DT levels that get harder and harder with no upper limit, with a ranking system based on how far you've gotten.

Here's how I see it working:

1. The levels are not individually created like the existing ones are, where developers design each level's map, rules, and enemy population. Instead, the levels are generated algorithmically. The server simply varies the assortment, strength, number, behavior, and positions of the enemy units in accordance with the desired level. No new NPCs need to be created; existing character and dragon types are simply reused. 
   
2. Every time a player starts a new game, they can request any level up to one past the highest level they've beaten so far. For example, for their very first game, they can only play at level 1, but once they beat level 1, they can request either 1 or 2, and after they beat level 2, they can request 1, 2, or 3, and so on. (Just like DT right now.)
   
3. The ranking system is based first on the highest level you've beaten, and then on how many times you've beaten it. So a player can progress up the ladder either by racking up more wins at their current highest level or by moving on to the next.

Re monetization: in addition to the generic suggestions above, this particular variant could also be monetized by requiring membership or other extra payments in order to advance past a certain level.

Some Tweaks

These are my two basic ideas, but here are some additional suggestions for making them work ideally:

• Some skills might need to be nerfed, particularly in PvP DT. (Defend and Stun come to mind. But the way to really determine this is through playtesting.)
  
• In Infinite DT, enemy NPCs should either start off alert or automatically wake up very quickly or have very long attention ranges. (Perhaps some or all of these could be yet another product of the algorithm that generates the increasing difficulty levels.) The most unsatisfying part of DT currently is that it's too easy to just pick off the enemy NPCs one by one.
• There could be multiple ladders based on player level, so newer players with weaker characters and dragons can still compete for the top rungs of a ladder.
  

I hope you'll consider implementing one of these ideas. Either would add a truly competitive and challenging component to School of Dragons without in any way compromising the great game that it already is.