I suggest that you clone something with how many Korean games handle revives: if the player is below a certain number, then give that player a few free revives.
For Spiral Knights, 3 is a good number. If the player has below 3 sparks at midnight, set the player's Spark count to be 3.
If you do not agree, here is my reasoning.
That actually isn't a bad idea. With the old mist system, we had about 3 revives per mist charge in tier 3, granted we had an elevator pass. Having a consumable "spark" amount allows us to not feel bad giving away our "mist" sparks to other players either, as we'll get them back.
This would also be the incentive to log in every day that mist used to have. If you run out of sparks today then wait until tomorrow and have your mist sparks be back. Or we could have our mist sparks become active every 8 hours. This could play back into the "mist energy" that exists, but isn't stable enough for anything other than powering up mist sparks, and make the energetic knight go nuts again.
A possible "nerf" to these sparks is that they wouldn't cause the energy explosion that the other sparks cause, or maybe they don't inflict stun. It could be an ER without a timer on it.
If we had this change, we could even ditch the emergency revive altogether.
@Fangel
Funny thing, I thought of this before checking back at this thread.
Yes, you're right. What if we even called these "Emergency Sparks" and we could see how many a player had, as it is now. They would still behave as I've said, so that players with 3 or more Sparks wouldn't receive any.
Basically, they would work with these rules, which would apply at each interval, either a set time or every, meh, 8 hours like Fangel said:
As Fangel said, Emergency Sparks could get a different treatment, to give the player a reason to treasure real Sparks of Life. They could be missing their stunning explosion and full HP restoration ability.
The main thing is that, even though Emergency Revive seems like a good idea in theory, it just seems to give you an extra layer of health. Maybe that's the intention, but it just...doesn't feel so great. I know for some, it's awesome. But, me personally, I just don't take dieing with a E-Rev particularly worrying or painful. Maybe it causes me to be more careful, but it's not like dieing with the Mist System.
There goes trying to keep my bias out of it. *Head desks*
The emergency revive is to balance out the removal of health sharing. It takes pressure off the team while still giving you health back and punishes you if you can't make an active effort to help the team.
However, it also took out a large aspect of teamwork in the process. A good solution, I think, would be to either have the mist sparks come back every 8 hours to a max of 3 and scale down as you gain more "crystal" sparks (the normal ones. If you have 50 sparks of life you cease to get mist sparks, but at 20 you'll still have 1 or 2 crutch sparks), or make "mist sparks" only available to be used on teammates. If you can't use a spark on yourself then you won't feel like you're losing anything by giving the mist spark away. This also makes teamplay much more effective if everyone has a few mist sparks to throw around.
And I like the idea of them only filling the red bars. Alternatively they could fill you up to half of your max health, so that emergency revive is still a large factor to play around.
I like the idea of the game just giving them to you better than making them a new thing. If we have emergency revives and emergency mist sparks and spark emergencys then it starts getting messy and complicated, and we really don't need that. But slipping the player a few extra sparks at midnight would be perfect.
@Fehzor
In my sleepy state, my reasoning is impaired. But, yes, I guess simplicity is probably better. Now that I think about it, Elsword doesn't have anything fancy. They just say "Here, take a few Revive Stones. Have enough? Fine then."
Speaking of Elsword, since I don't die often in that game, it works great. At first, it was a little harsh, but I could always comeback the next day...
@Autofire Nor do I, but in Elsword 9 times out of 10 you won't die, but if you do, it's a real kick in the groin, in Raid Bosses it's even worse if you loose all of your resurrections because they are capable of doing that in one run which makes it challenging, since you won't get any items that they drop which are very good items that
A: Affect your stats drastically(In a good way)
B: Can be sold to make millions, if not reach the maximum amount, 2billion
With Fehzor on this one. Having these "mist sparks", regular explosive sparks, and E-revives is a bit too much. It's spoon feeding the player like a mario game at that point.
Something's gotta give if these mist sparks get implemented.
Well it wouldn't effect the player so drastically Blazz. Only the bottom half of the community, the ones that are constantly at zero sparks of life, would benefit from it and even then not by much. It would really help them to get on their feet and not just die all of the time. I don't think the feature would even have to be advertised- sort of like how it used to be that going to the next floor with under 3-4 hearts would heal you to however many. Just give out free sparks to the bottom percent in some way. Maybe even just make them as rewards for the prestige missions or something.
I would suggest an alternative and implement a daily login reward mail - each day you log in, you receive 1 free bound Spark of Life and a chance to win other supply depot consumables (such as a small amount (3-10?) of fire crystals appropriate to your current rank).
This would reward players who log on frequently and encourage people to keep coming back or risk losing out on daily rewards.
@Momo
That could work, yes. But I'm still not sure...meh, why not?
Well, I hope that the devs have received word of this. It would be good if something could change.
@Momofuku, we might just get freaking Radiants that way. O_O
@Momofuku
Something to look forward to :O
Unfortunately my idea is not a very original one and taken from a different game I am currently playing :/ But the Daily Objectives/Rewards do a good job making me come back to play (especially when there is an in-game currency that is solely obtained from these daily objectives, further making me log in to make sure I don't feel like I'm missing out!)
Spiral Knights used to have the same effect when it was on the Mist Energy system -- I'd feel compelled to log in so I don't "waste" my free 100 mist by not spending it.
...
Now I log in every 2-3 days.
I agree with this entirely, actually. I haven't run into problems with sparks, but it seems way too common for players to do so. Some method of rewarding sparks akin to this would really benefit those players.