Something that annoys me is the wiping of favour and achievements every epoch. The balance reasons are justified and all, but there are problems. When you make players earn their content in the form of favour items you tend to stack the system toward people who play more often. In most cases this balances out because there is an upper cap. There are only so many favour items, and regardless of how much time you spend per week everyone will eventually get everything. When you introduce a reset mechanic to the mix you overbalance the system toward "hardcore" players. "Casual" players may not have enough time to get and enjoy every favour item before the reset comes and wipes away all of their hard earned progress.

So I had an idea on how to change this system to make it a bit more permanent. This has various effects, as follows:

Achievements:

1. Achievements in progress are no longer reset every epoch.
2. Achievements that are completed at the time of a reset are wiped back to 0% progress. However you keep 10% of any favour that achievement was worth. This stacks up to 5 times for a max of 50% retained favor.
   
3. Achievements "wiped" in this manner can be re-earned for the full favour bonus. This caps at 100%, you would never be able to earn a 150% bonus.
   
4. The "tourist" achievement needs to display maps you still need to win on. Especially once we get more.

Favour items:

1. All favor items are wiped after every epoch.
2. If you end an epoch while owning every favor item on a page, you get to pick 1 free favor item from that page after the reset. There is no limit to how many times you can do this. Eventually you could get every favor item for "free".
3. If you only manage to obtain half of the items on a page you still get a "coupon" for half off any item on that page. These coupons merge so if you have 2 it turns into a free item.
4. This is separate per page. So common favor items are separate from general items and from assassin items.

Thought this does seem like everyone would end up with bucketloads of favor, keep in mind that we will probably have more things to spend it on in the future.

Now the reasoning is simple. Instead of forcing players to re-earn content every reset you give them a bit of a break. This way every player retains a bit of the effort he sunk into the game previously. Rather than begin every epoch with a cold start you get to immediatly pick up your favourite items and off you go.

For a player like me who only has enough time to play sporadically (on multiplayer at least) this would greatly increase my enthusiasm for the game.

Thoughts?