Countdown Timers: A Discussion
PvZH employs a number of countdown timers dictating when new quests are available, when the ticket boost has refreshed, and how long purchasable items remain purchasable. Countdown timers are inherently neither evil nor benign, but they must be applied thoughtfully to achieve their purpose without causing undue stress on the player base. Though the following thoughts are intended to be impartial and based on both personal experience and reading forum posts, I freely admit that there is also an undercurrent of persuasive argument for change.
The case for countdown timers
EA/Pop Cap has given us PvZH not as some pro bono work or out of the goodness of their hearts – they are a business interested in making money, your money. The more often your users interact with your product, the more likely they are to make a purchase. (Hopefully they’ve spent money because they like it, but there can be other reasons such as meeting an individually mandated obligation to support something enjoyed. Regardless, it’s money.)
Countdown timers instill a sense of urgency and give players a reason to open your app a number of times each day. The timers can be informational and indicate when new upcoming content arrives (generating excitement) or how long current content remains available (generating urgency). They can dole out resources in scheduled increments instead of all at once; awarding steady drips of the goods keeps people engaged longer than giving them everything immediately at once. At the very least, the app goes from being solely a static interaction to having nonuser controlled, dynamically changing features.
The case against countdown timers
Depending on what’s being counted down, there are certain effects to consider. Counting down to new content that will be available forever is tantamount to movie and book release dates. Counting down with regards to limited availability is also similarly natural… movies at the cinema, Monopoly and McRib at McDonald’s, pumpkin spice “enhanced” foodstuffs, and everything seasonal is all about limited availability… everyone is fairly accustomed to change and the temporariness of things.
On the other hand, countdown timers that relate to optimized or necessary play prey upon addictive behaviors and may engender resentment when users feel forced to interact with your app at inappropriate or non-optimal times. The sunk cost fallacy can come into play here when a user has invested X amount of time and believes that they will have wasted it if they don’t commit to investing a further Y amount of time to finish whatever was started.
Nevertheless, whether for good or ill, countdown timers define a certain measure of rigidity and force players to play on someone else’s schedule.
Improving the quest countdown timer
For those individuals whose devices do not support the option to watch ads for gems, quests are the only way to earn free gems in the game. The countdown for a new quest is three hours with at most three quests queued for completing. As such, optimal play is dependent upon not allowing three quests to queue; doing so means that a player will not be able to complete eight quests for the day (maximum/optimal amount). Optimal play also dictates that a user having zero quests queued must complete at least one quest within nine hours of completing the eldest completed quest – that’s nine-ish hours vs sleep, work and school schedules. Another issue is that some quests are completed quickly (“play 3 beans”? done and dusted by turn 3) while others take longer (“do 300 damage to heroes”). Quests can be swapped out for another random quest, but the alternate may be no better or worse than the initial offering.
The three-hour timer with queue stacking is sensible as it allows those who are able to play often engage with the game every three hours while also not penalizing those who can’t play within the given window.
The slightest change that would help would be to increase the maximum queue count to four as that would yield about a twelve-hour window to complete all quests available in a day. This is not an arbitrary request as it is based on the aforementioned sleep, work and school schedules, all presumed to be 8-10 hours for most people.
Another tweak would be to give most quest cards an alternative yet corresponding “or” so that players feel that they have more control and could more likely combo a quest with playing while the ticket boost is ready. Examples would be “Play 3 beans | or | Play 3 imps”, “Win a game as a smarty plant hero | or | Win a game as a brainy zombie hero”, and “Do 30 damage to zombie heroes | or | Do 30 damage to plant heroes”. The “Do 300 damage to heroes” is nonpartisan, so it wouldn’t have an “or” component. This could even lead the way to “and” quests worth more gems, but the “or” suggestion doesn’t change up how many gems can be distributed at maximum in a day.
Improving the ticket boost countdown timer
This is the timer that needs either the most or least amount of change as earning event cards for tickets is still a fairly new gaming experience. The ticket boost countdown timer is four hours from the last time you won a round using a hero who is either a x5 or x10 ticket booster, the event lasts for seven days, and there is no queue for ticket boosts. Therefore, optimal play is six wins in a day @ 150 tickets per win for 900 tickets in a day. Presuming that EA/Pop Cap has settled on each event card costing 1200 tickets and you’re limited to winning four event cards, you don’t need to actually win six games every day, but you will need to win, on average, four or five x10 boosted games per day (one must average three days with four wins and four days with five wins to get 4800 tickets over the course of a week). An alternative is to grind wins since 10 wins is also 150 tickets. Please not thought that at five minutes per game that’s about an hour’s time.
Without the queueing of ticket boosts, the aforementioned sleep, work and school schedules compound the problem. (Admittedly, this is of course only an issue for individuals who are unable to play during work/school, and I’m presuming that no individuals are capable of playing while sleeping.) Wake up (6:00), play, and go to work/school. Come home (15:00) and play. Four hours after winning (19:10), play. Four hours after winning (23:30), play. That’s four wins in this hypothetical day, and that last win means that you’ll be getting less than eight hours of sleep. And we’re presuming 10 minute games. And we need four days with five wins, so this schedule doesn’t work if we’ve got work/school for five of the seven days. The other two days we could win six games, though then we’re really saying good-bye to sleep. And it sucks that you have to go to your friend’s birthday party.
And whose schedule are we playing on anyway and why? Gotta catch ‘em all.
This is a fixable situation, but EA/Pop Cap might not want to. If folks are spending gems on refreshing the boost timer (which I have, and then was rather annoyed when I didn’t win a match within the 30 minutes I had) and also directly on event cards, then why would they want to change? One word: Burnout. When you are inflexible with other people’s lives and demand too much*, they’ll come to resent you, and that ain’t good for your bottom line.
To add a touch of flexibility, I would add two more boost jars. The jars fill at four-hour intervals and are otherwise functionally similar to how completing quests work. This would give people just under twelve hours to optimally play (in case you have to miss a full day or two). If not two boost jars, at least one more would be beneficial as our hypothetical person up above would be able to get four or five wins in a regular day without sacrificing sleep. EA/Pop Cap could also sell additional boost jars if they wanted to cash in on this upgrade.
*The asterisk
A common counterargument is that no one is making anyone play this game; it’s the player choosing to play. That’s true. Consider though, a good game, one that makes money, is also addictive, which makes it hard to say no to, especially for certain individuals. Some people can gamble and walk away after losing their allotted cash; some people empty out their bank account via the casino’s handy ATM (sadly that included the month’s rent/mortgage). It’s also happened that a person sat at an internet café and died because they wouldn’t take the necessary breaks. Despite what classic economic theory would like us to believe, most of us exhibit irrational behavior quite often.
