How about a Pet, released on a Wednesday, whose sole purpose is to collect tributes at regular intervals?
Upgrades could be based on the time intervals in which the pet would collect tributes. For example…
Level 5 : Auto collect tributes every 6 hours
Level 10 : Auto collect tributes every 4 hours
Level 15 : Auto collect tributes every 2 hours
Level 20 : Auto collect tributes every hour
This would be a major gem sink, now that you rarely get more than 1 pet from a rescue event. Or, offer this for real life money the next day - enough copies to ascend the pet to mythic.
A one-time pet gem-sink would not at all mitigate the loss in revenue the devs would experience if they made it so that people got a guaranteed tribute every moment it was available. It would pretty easily be 250 gems a day for people, and probably close to 100 gems more than people tend to get more every day (I mean, just think: 10ish gems for 8 hours of sleep is 80, and I think that’s a pretty conservative estimate).
So I really don’t think this will happen—tribute bots are ban-able for just this very reason, and I doubt devs would hand us our own handy-dandy, dev-sanctioned tribute bot.
I mean, I’d like it. It’s definitely in favor of the player.
Agreed too, that this may not happen at all. This pet could be like the Steam Pet or Android Pet. It could be given for a purchase instead of a pet event. I’d pay money for that, for sure.
May be, they could program how the pet would behave in collecting the tributes. Just saying. For example, whenever there’s an active session (player is playing) and a tribute is collected, it is a full haul. But when a pet is collecting it, make it a fraction that diminishes every next hour. Say, the pet collects 90% of tributes the first time it collects passively. Within the next hour if there is no active session, let the pet collect only 80% of the tributes next time. Let this keep diminishing until the player creates an active session.
These numbers and percentages are only suggestive, they could always be made very small. Could start with 50% - minus 10% every hour of non-active session - stop collecting tributes if there’s no login in 6 hours.
they could just inflate the value of gems to compensate. Its a pretty simple fix. Or make the pet less efficient than the player. OR make it unable to collect gems when offline.
If anything like this was ever implemented, it would probably amount to a “pet rental” where the Gems you’d pay for the pet would far outshine anything you’d get from the respective tributes. The suggestion where you wouldn’t get Gems at all from collecting tributes this way is another possibility.
Tributes are going to be nerfed, and nerfed hard, at some point. They’re “free” resources, and we’ve seen how the devs/publisher hate those.
Maybe we’ll get “tribute sigils” that allow us to collect tribute X times a day, or maybe we’ll have to buy a subscription service to activate tributes. Make no mistake, a nerf is coming eventually…it’s just a matter of how they’re going to go about it.
Honestly I think the devs/publisher are actually very aware of the effect this will have on the playerbase and that’s the only reason it hasn’t happened yet. Things will absolutely “go nuclear” when it happens. They need to protect their bottom line.
Oh wait, they’re going to be adding “optional ads” into the game…hmm…
It’d still have a minor benefit. There are many times I get caught up in multiple battles in a row (mainly delves) so I don’t return to the map screen for a while. Later on I realize that I had a tribute waiting to collected.
If the pet cost a boatload of gems, I wouldn’t bother though.
EDIT: I don’t see this version of the pet as likely either, since someone could just leave their game open all the time so they’re almost always online.
The idea of the pet, mainly though, is to collect tributes when there’s no active session. Means, the game needn’t be open. Like we collect game codes without opening the game. Just a tribute collecting trigger from outside the game app.
