Rest system

Lately I was again thinking about how I can make my game attractive to those players who already have jobs and thus can't treat an online game like one.

To get some mental input on this I asked this question on gamedev.stackexchange.com. I was actually pretty surprised to get an answer from someone like Josh Petrie, a Guild Wars 2 developer. But the other people who answered and commented also had some interesting points.

I decided that the first thing I will do to level the playing fields will be a rest system. After a lot of number crunching in LibreOffice Calc, I came up with a rest system which works like this:

For every minute - online or offline - your character gets a "Luck" point (60 per hour, 1440 per day, 10080 per week). Your character has a luck bonus which is equal to log10(luck)-1.

All gains of skill EXP and SP are multiplied with your current luck bonus. The chance to get rare drops is also increased: Whenever you kill a monster, you roll ceil(luck_bonus) times for each drop. One successful roll is enough to make it drop. When multiple people kill a monster, the best luck bonus of all participants is used.

Every minute where at least one event occurs which uses the luck bonus, the luck points are reduced by 1% (that means your luck will never fall below 100, so your luck bonus will never be below 1).

So when you go to sleep at 10pm and continue the next evening at 8pm (after 22 hours) you will have 1300 luck points, which means that you will get a x2.1 multiplier for a while. After your 120 minute session, you will have about 400 luck points left, so your bonus will have dimished a bit to x1.6. These 400 points will roll over to the next day, where you will have a multiplier of 2.3.

Let's compare that to an unemployed power gamer, who will play 8 hour session, interrupted by 16 hours of rest. He will have 960 luck points the next morning, which is still a bonus of 1.98, not notably worse than yours. But after four hours, his luck bonus will be depleted and his exp rate won't get far above x1. It won't be above 2 the next day either.

Variables for balancing:

• Increase the percentual luck reduction to make the multiplier go down faster
• Increase the luck gain per minute to increase the exp multiplier after shorter rests
• Reduce the base of the logarithm to increase the exp multiplier after longer rests