Good job, Duolingo… your fun event went over so well your volunteer community managers over on the subreddit are having to cut out complaints (while allowing multiple posts of people posting about how they only had to spend 2k gems to win back 5k gems).
Thinking back to yesterday’s post where I ranted a bit about it and how awful gacha based “fun” actually is, I was thinking of a few suggestions to perhaps fix it if you don’t want to turn the whole thing into a pointless misery-fest.
Keep in mind Suggestion 0 is always this: never use gacha.
No One Can Use Gems to Get Pieces
Absolutely most important.
Easy enough. Some countries (and maybe some people) can’t use gems to buy pieces — and therefore get gems back — so make it where no one can.
I cannot stress this enough: no one buys pieces with gems.
Too many people online seem to be forgiving the game because they can cash out and get everything. Everyone should suffer equally if you want honest feedback because gacha players lie about being free to play and nothing wrecks a gacha fan base like FOMO. Make it so everyone is free to play and the truth shall set us all free.
No Gem Prize
Likewise, absolutely no gem prize at the end. Maybe, if you insist, give people 200 bonus gems a day for unlocking all that day’s nodes. At the end, people end up with 5k gems even if they don’t get all of the suits.
In fact…
Add in Too Many Suits
There needs to be more suits than any one can win even if they are absolute God-Tier in their luck. No one can collect them all. Everyone will have gaps.
As it stands, Duolingo has incentivized people — in most countries — to spend gems and wear the same two or three top tier suits which negates any reason to have those top tier suits. Hell, I imagine most players will have discarded wearing the suits in a week or two and it is basically just way for some people to game the system for a few free gems.
If you have it so that there are 10+ suits and people can only likely get 6+ then it means someone might miss the unicorn but get the Hawaiian Shirt and that is way better.
Duolingo Needs a Better Dupe System
Duolingo’s biggest sin after the allowing some people the chance to spend gems to make gems was the duplicate system.
Rather than getting five pieces to unlock a new piece which is probably a low tier piece that you will just get the next day and then it goes into the dupe pile itself you should…
either (a) Allow people to cash in dupes at a later date to give them some control over it,
or (b) [preferred] allow people to spend dupes directly on the suits with lower tier suits being something like 20-30 dupes while the upper tier suits maybe costing 50-60. This way folks eventually get the one or two suits they want.
Suit Pool That Returns
If you are going to emulate better and more profitable gacha, steal a core mechanic: you have more styles/suits/characters than anyone could win or ever need and most of them return in subsequent iterations.
This means the unicorn, etc, will be next time probably at a lower tier.