Strongholds: decorations, hook allotment, and more suggestions!

[Mournblood]

Bioware,

 

It occurs to me that there's a LOT more you could be doing with Strongholds that would both benefit you (financially) and enrich the player experience. Since I haven't seen this discussed in any of your recent Q&A appearances, I thought it overdue to bring these suggestions to your attention.

 

Hook Allotment

Many of the current strongholds are underutilized. There are far more hooks available than the limit allows, such as Dromund Kaas where we're limited to 350. Without altering any of the existing coding you have in place for the achievements, you can add increased hook allotment as an upgrade option to current strongholds. You can charge in game credits or Cartel coins for this feature, and offer it in 25 hook increments. This will allow players with larger decoration inventories to more fully customize and decorate their current stronghold, and gives you a very attractive micro-transaction option. I obviously can't do a business analysis because I don't work for you, but I'm fairly positive the ROI on the development effort would more than pay for itself.

 

Additional Room

Give players an upgrade option to add a 10th room (or an 8th in the case of Tatooine). Again, you could charge credits or Cartel coins. This might take more development effort since it would involve changing the architecture slightly to accommodate the extra room, but I'm betting a LOT of players would purchase this upgrade if it were available. Using Dromund Kaas as an example again, you could add elevators in the central hub of the second floor that take you to a rooftop access where you could have your starship parked. There are of course other ways to do this, but that particular example seems like it would take less development effort.

 

New Decorations

My wife and I both play this game together, and she's constantly pointing out to me all the cool item graphics throughout the game that are not currently available as stronghold decorations. You have literally thousands of already created decorations that you could begin offering players. Bundle them in packs and offer them for Cartel coins, or add them to faction vendors, but there's a wealth of decorations in your game that are already coded and simply need to be made available to the players. As if I need to say it, you'd have another lucrative micro-transaction here.

 

Stronghold contests

You should hold a stronghold contest, by server, where players can enter their favorite stronghold for consideration. You could require a minimum stronghold prestige rating to enter to filter out the undecorated or sparsely decorated ones. Once all the qualified contestants have entered, your staff would then tour each of the strongholds to judge them based on whatever criteria you'd like, such as aesthetics, function, theme, and so on. The winner of each server could get a unique decoration and/or a unique stronghold title. This contest would promote your stronghold feature of the game as well as help drive sales for various decoration related micro-transactions. It would be a great opportunity to introduce new decorations and/or new stronghold features at the same time.

 

I realize your focus right now is on developing other aspects of the game, in particular the PvE story content, but I also feel it would be development dollars very well spent to pursue one or all of the suggestions I've made here.

 

Thanks for your time.

[pehwraah]

New Decorations

My wife and I both play this game together, and she's constantly pointing out to me all the cool item graphics throughout the game that are not currently available as stronghold decorations. You have literally thousands of already created decorations that you could begin offering players. Bundle them in packs and offer them for Cartel coins, or add them to faction vendors, but there's a wealth of decorations in your game that are already coded and simply need to be made available to the players. As if I need to say it, you'd have another lucrative micro-transaction here.

 

Ive already posted this exact same thing. Bioware, make the planet objects available as decorations! Though not only through Packs, some of us prefer playing for rewards rather than buying them.

 

Regarding your hook allotment idea: What I would like is being able to MOVE and ROTATE the hooks. Kinda like how you do with decors in the confines of each hook.