It used to be cool that the castle required a baddy KC to enter and actually gave a great sense of accomplishment when you finally were able to access the area. Pushing for a time unlock based area is silly in the regard that it just encourages people to AFK with no purpose, and destroy their device battery.

A lot of value and direction could be added to the game simply by adding entry requirements to certain shops and areas. For example you can't enter a particular clothes shop until you catch X amount of bugs and sell them to the shop keeper there as some kind of favour quest. Same could be done for a more exclusive farming area where the player is required to scavenge certain ingredients from all over the map with particularly low spawn rates(which might increase based on number of bushes cut or something, or even awarded after a certain amount of bushes have been cut, or loot dived for) thus implicitly enforcing some kind of time requirement whilst giving purpose, and most importantly.. a sense of accomplishment!


Off the top of my head, here's a list of things that could be used as entry requirements(some varying in ease of implementation of course..):
-hats owned
-baddies killed
-bugs caught
-diving loot obtained
-castle contracts complete
-holes dug(?)
-bushes broken
-items burnt
-unique npcs spoken with
-bombs exploded
-arrows shot
-archery games won(in excess of X points)
-crab chance games won(with a prize in excess of a certain value)

You get the point

I feel like the circus event ticket thing could be used fairly effectively, as well.

How hard is it to build a rewards room for stats (pk,spar,bk) If you played era you will know

itll never happen :/