Have your players ever groaned when they got a notification they had a bunch of unclaimed rewards? Mine have. That’s not a good sign.

Legends of Runeterra had this problem. The game wanted to be generous, so it gave out so many free rewards that opening them became an annoyance. Riot Games gives devs free currency each year to give away to fans. Until Path of Champions came out, it was always a struggle to find people that wanted the premium coins in LoR. All the fans I’d find already had everything they wanted.

This made it very hard to add new content. You can’t do a double-rewards weekend when no one needs any rewards. I’d think about tournament modes where you could buy-in and try to rack up wins for cool prizes, then realize we really had nothing we could award at quantity that’d matter to our players.

Huge Trap: We often want to be “generous” with rewards, and give out so many they lose their meaning. New Dungeonmasters in TTRPGs make this mistake all the time; handing out “rare” magic items like candy until they don’t feel special anymore. Many devs also want to avoid “p2w” accusations, so they tend to limit how much in-game utility the rewards have.

Rewards need to feel rewarding. If they don’t, if players don’t value and desire them, why are they even here?

This is why it’s worth studying behavioral economics and other areas that explore how and why humans perceive Value. The more valuable you can make something, the better it feels as a free reward and the more players will gladly pay for it.

Here’s an example: When I was playing Diablo 3, I naturally stuck to a single character; because I’d invested a lot of time into it already. I wanted to try out all the characters, but the opportunity cost vs progressing my “main” felt steep. What I wanted was an incentive to get all characters to max level (60). Could be very low scope too – Get a Crusader to 60? All your future characters get bonus damage reduction. One buff per class.

I would have maxed every class, no question and maybe discovered I liked some classes even more than the few I ended up maxing. It would have made even more sense at launch, when smart loot systems didn’t exist yet and you tended to get more loot for other classes. Suddenly those would have value for you outside of auctioning. Combine with some more occassional, scaling, class-specific challenges in end-game too, so I always have a reason to get more gear.

This is the foundation of my most-used-pattern in system design: “Go Wide to Go Tall”.

You MUST make sure players are allowed to focus on their favorites, not forced to spread their gameplay equally among characters and playstyles they don’t enjoy as much.

However, nail this “Go Wide to Go Tall” formula, and you can often 3x your game’s relevant gameplay for each player – for nearly 0 scope. In the process all that gameplay will feel more rewarding too; as all those goals support eachother.