I don't think ta56636 was referring to Farmville-style mechanics or a pay-to-win system: what he meant is, a really successful single-player game rewards the player through a positive feedback loop. For example: in an RPG, success means your character keeps leveling up and gains access to more powerful things, allowing you to experience even more success.
Exactly. I was also probing whether it is possible to make a philosophical leap between different types of 'reward' loop behaviour.
Well feel free to outline somewhere exactly what you'd like to see in online Dominion. The Making Fun guys may well be interested.
How can I resist that? To quote a quote from my Facebook feed this morning "The absence of proper research, however, need not stop us ..." (ie. I know I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
That said: It's really tempting to look at what you should do now (e.g. delete adventure mode, remove game lobbies, etc. etc.)
However I think it's actually more interesting to think what would you want the final product to look like.
Off the top of my head I'd be aiming for something like:
Casual Play (including vs. AI, Friends and predetermined kingdoms)
Ranked Play
and maybe one other well crafted game mode
Crucially beyond that (and I look at the dominion community - and I see an absurd amount of programming talent per capita), and I'd be focusing very heavily on enabling user generated content (be it new game modes, new cards, tournament structures, complete game overhauls etc.) that then could be sold with the developer and the creator taking a cut each.
Within this I'd be looking at:
A total cost of around £10-£15 for paid content
An iPad/android version (mainly to finance the above)
Rotating 'free' cards (like league of legends free heroes) to enable a taste for all players beyond the base game
An exist strategy (one of the main reasons I haven't bought more than a couple of expansions in Goko, is that I simply don't trust that one day in the not too distant future it simply won't be there)
Pie in the sky: probably. But then we can all dream...