Offline mechanics

These offline-based bonus systems have a number of problems. First off, they encourage the player to spend a bunch of time offline before actually playing the game. And secondly, they mess up the balance of the game if there is a long wait between updates. Either old players will be overpowered from accumulated points, or new players will hit a wall because they didn’t have to wait for the update.

6 Likes

The collectors tree’s offline mechanics is heavily inspired by the offline mechanics in matter dimensions, which I happen to really enjoy. I think I prefer having more control over how offline time is used and spent, and I like the integration with increasing the cap and stuff using offline time as well.

I feel like it works well in there particularly well because everything is already really slow so the offline bonus won’t actually be enough to encourage you to minmax it before starting the game.

Also eventually you can start accruing the offline time resource even while online, so after that point you may as well progress in the game.

I’d be interested in hearing how many players actually tried to build up large amounts of offline time before playing the actual game, because above all I imagine most players want to play the game more than they want to get a minor speed boost by minmaxing offline time first.

5 Likes

Offline mechanics are interesting. I think it needs to not mess with progression which makes it quite difficult.

In other words, it can speed up eras, but should not skip eras.

The main reason why I disable it in my games is that I balance around 60 second afks, and often times getting a 1 hour afk skips you past multiple upgrades. Obviously, you can leave the game open, but thats not what I want to occur.

What is everyone’s view on this?

5 Likes