Hi all, I had a cool idea I was wanting to post here as a suggestion and possibly workshop this a bit. Would love feedback. The idea that we are no longer getting trophies on PlayStation is a bummer, especially since I use this as a guide to check out all the cool things that Dovetail has put into a route or a loco and a check mark when I have seen everything cool in the game. Hopefully this is something they can bring back into the game. However I think this brings up an interesting opportunity to expand the mastery rewards system in the game. My biggest gripe with this system has always been, if I play 1-2 hours on the route, I have achieved everything and now I have "Mastered" the route. For me this this always seemed something bothered me because to me Mastered means I am awesome and I have achieved everything that I could. It also bothered me that there was only 1-2 levels for Mastery and felt like there should be more. By bringing the trophy achievements could be the answer to add more levels. Typically there have been about 10 trophies for each route and 5 for each add on. So maybe split these trophies into 2-3 levels for each route which expands the Mastery levels up to about 5 and then create 1-2 for a loco-add on. Another route is leave mastery rewards alone as they are now but have a level 0 with the trophies built in. I need to sit down and go through a route example to show how this may break down on a particular route. Then Dovetail can continue doing cool things with the mastery rewards but have at least another. For example, maybe for getting all of the mastery rewards, they can bring that idea of a livery mastery reward in where a particular train on the route is designed with something cool. I was thinking a train painted like a donkey could be particular interesting as one thing since one of the companies like putting donkeys into the routes. I am looking at Ubisoft and how they do achievements for rewards as my example of this. Idk I want to play with this a bit more but I really do feel like this is a route that would benefit the game and dampen the disappointment that trophies are no longer part of the game and on top of that expand out the mastery rewards like we want to. It adds that benefit of DTG giving us a route to say hey go check this out or hey did you try this yet that Trophies on the playstation already do for me and allows us to bring cool things into the route. Thoughts on how this could work better than what is in my head at the moment?
Mastery has always been a bit of a shambles. For most of TSW2020, nothing registered, now we're in TSW2 and finally seeing things ticked off, it's impossible to activate any of the prizes on PS5. Anything involving Dovetail Live seems to be flaky at best. I'm all for extra rewards, but in my opinion, none of what they've done should be replacing the trophies, which are a core part of the Playstation gaming experience.
If done right then this could certainly replace how I use the PS trophy system to guide my gameplay. I like platinum trophies but have little interest in my gamer score overall. I agree that currently Mastery is way too easy. It shouod to take into account all aspects of playing a route, not just a few actives/ services. The accidental offer of additional Liverys a potential solution. This would be an amazing top reward for mastering a route to a similar level as completing all trophies currently. I realise there would be a cost to this for DGT but perhaps the rewards could span multiple DLC's, with you needing to own several to be eligible for the reward. That way people who spend more get more rewards and it might encourage some to buy DLC they might otherwise overlook. Many would still not be interested so might not be worth the investment bit certainly with looking into as a replacement for me.
