Spiral Knights - "Thank you"-tokens: How about a direct encouragement to reduce CE prices?

"Thank you"-tokens: How about a direct encouragement to reduce CE prices?

8 respuestas [Último envío]

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 02:09

Kazujaxyz

Bought the recent Humble Bundle a few days ago, and that brought me to a very vague idea(dunno wether it's already suggested tho, the search bar is the most stupid thing about this forum software)...

So yeah, people who know about the Humble Bundle or buy it regularly know that there's also the system about the average price: If you pay more than the average, you gain a game extra that is kept from low-payers.
My suggestion was something similar. In fact, it's the reverse of this system: Sell energy at lower prices than average on the market to get extra stuff.

More details on how this would work:
Imagine you are one of those P2Pers(if you aren't already) and buy yourself an energy pack because you're short of crownage. In the normal case you sell it at the highest possible price because hey: It's your money, you want to get all out of it. So yeah, you go to energy depot, offer your energy for a high price, wait a few seconds because F2P doesn't get far without it, and get your crowns. Congratulations, you just got the max profit out of your money and likely incidentally increased the CE-price. You jerk.
NOW imagine we are in the same scenario as before, but this time there's a new feature right beneath this scary wall full of numbers about energy-offers: It's a "Thank you"-counter/token counter. You increase the counter for each person you sell energy at a price below average. Aw... now ain't that sweet? The guys you sell your cheap energy to automatically help you back by giving you heartwarming tokens confirming your friendliness. You only get tokens when you sell your energy about 99% of the average. Doesn't sound like a lot, but given the fact that the prices hover close to the 5th digit already...
Also, you only get one token per sell, no exceptions. It's not the point to concentrate your happiness on a single person that gets the energy for 1 cr so you swim in energy. Because this happiness is called greed, because you abuse the system. This is for those who have much energy and want to spread their true happiness everywhere, by making people happy that buy energy cheaper. Like a less annoying and more [super awesome] version of the carebears, ya know?
So, after selling all your stuff cheaper than normally, you sure want to have something in exchange. Because you know, "Thank you"s are all nice and you're happy about it, but you want to spend them. Well, besides the fact that you should value "Thank you"s a bit more, you should see 2 different prizeboxes to choose right under your counter. The power of friendship will help you to get these items!!! Seriously though. You can buy these 2 items with the Thank yous you've gotten while selling your energy.
They are prize lockboxes. Or rather, "Thank you"-boxes. Their design is incredibly cheesy as well: Either a single heart or a bigger, two-colored heart(think of the bigger Tier 3 hearts but with a different color scheme) with small hearts all over the place. The "Thank you"(3 tokens) is a pretty ordinary prize box that can contain quite a few rare items(more common than in other prize boxes, but very rare nonetheless to remain the value of them). The "Big Thank you"(15 tokens) however is special in that not only having even higher drop rates for rare items(again, rare enough to remain the current value), but having a rare chance to drop its own, special costume/acessory set. How do they look like? They are gold. Pure gold, with some exceptions here and there. And not just yellow, either. The texture reflects light more, to show it's more metal-y than a yellow painted cloak. Happiness and friendship are more valueable than money, see what I did there?

So, time to stop doing the Love Freak. While usual promotions just encourage buying CE so there can be more on the market, this suggestion focuses on tying a rock on the baloon that's the CE prizes: Either go for full profit, or get free prize boxes with slightly increased chance for rare stuff and its own version of incredibly rare stuff. The prize would slowly fall because people love getting free prize boxes., and with each new "Thank you", the prize for energy goes down a bit more. I guess we'll meet a point where the CE price stays then, because demand for crowns and demand for boxes balance each other there.
As usual, criticism, as long as constructive, is welcome, especially about the pizes of the boxes(I'm pretty sure it needs some rebalancing).

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 10:33

Little-Juances

Have 2 accounts open. Create a specific silly buy offer no one would accept (1cr? lol), then match and sell it with the other.
Yay free tokens.

There is a chance someoen else will try to do the same so you'll have to pick an arbitray number, be quick and cross your fingers, but it'll work.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 11:03

Darkbrady

Other than that, I ilke the

Other than that, I ilke the intention at least; thinking of a way to entice people to share the love, rather than force and fearmonger them into doing so. Broken by the fact that greedy people would abuse this, ofc, but that's just Humans for you.

Despicable things.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 11:37

Kazujaxyz

Hm... forgot to think about that one.

Maybe make it so you can only get a thank you from one person every day? I think that may counter alternate accounts, as you could only get one token at a time per alternate. Some other caps, like a max token per day-cap could stop this some more. Token-farming would not be completely stopped, but at least tricky and inconvenient as hell. That and the fact that they are going to lose quite a bit energy when they're not fast enough might do the trick.
Also, the tokens and rewards should be untradable. Just in case. After all, it's a thank you to you, not for the guy that gives you the most bucks for it in the acution house.

So, if we add the rule "You can only receive one Thank you from a specific person in a given amount of time", alternates should be a bit more impractical to abuse the system. Let's say we also add a MAX-cap for how much Thank you you can receive per day, just to be sure someone doesn't try it with multiple accounts anyway. Usual honest sellers shouldn't put a fat giant block of CE-offers, anyway(you can also sell your CE over two days, Mister CE-Prize-wall spammer). Let's say we turn the "given time" for the first rule into 2 days. It should be very unlikely that one person buys more than one pack energy from a specific other person unless he's buying it in masses at one time. This can be fixed by the people themself by only selling a few CE at a time, which they are likely to do anyway unless they are wanting to completely turn their pure crystal energy into loads of crowns.
Hope this is going to work. If so, I can add it to the first post and cover the loophole. If not, then please tell me what else might be wrong/that the actions here aren't sufficient. I'll do my best somehow finding a workaround for that(because criticism is meant to enhance on the work).

Other than that, thanks Darkbrady for liking it despite the glaring flaw, thanks Lil Juances for pointing the flaw out, and thanks to everyone for actually posting in here: I actually expected the idea to die sad and alone.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 13:43

Kive

Idea might not be perfect, but I fully support directly attacking the problem instead of indirect tatics OOO used.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 14:40

Dmatter

@ little-juances if you sell

@ little-juances if you sell ce under the highest bid, the person with the highest bid and had waited the longest gets it (person selling sells the same price, but the person buying gets cheaper). that is not an exploit. @op great idea, but a little too ptp based. oh well. +.5

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 14:52

Sweet-Hope

maybe the flaw i see its get

maybe the flaw i see its get tokens from players and limited by a certain amount of time until the next trade.

someone who is clever enought can jump that limit of "you cannot get token from the same player until the last trade with them were 2 days ago" capping the token limits wouldnt be a good idea because the costumer cant get enought of the stuff they want.

prolly limit it with Ip check so players with alts cant abuse this sistem would be ok. accounts with the same IP wouldnt be able to get tokens.

also could work get tokens from every player you trade with them, but dont get tokens from the same players. remember every day players joins to this game.

maybe its not perfect but at least youre giving another way to attack the CE prices without lowering crafting costs or removing energy system. thats why i see good your idea. encouraging to Buy Ce to support Devs its a good idea and giving cosmetic stuff to players who support. maybe you can rework more your idea to have something that could works.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 15:09

Darkbrady

The problem with capping the

The problem with capping the limit of boxes ones receives is that it inherently caps the intended effect of reducing the price. Instead of slowly bringing the price down and down, it'll just bring it down a bit as everyone uses it, but allow it to maintain/raise again as everyone stops to wait for the cap limit to refresh. You'd want people doing it absolutely much as possible to create the desired effect, and that overuse is where the problem occurs. Not easy to fix.

Mar, 11/13/2012 - 22:15

Kazujaxyz

Alrighty then.

Capping stuff doesn't seem like the right way it seems. Gotta admit, was kind of a stupid idea to begin with. However, given that most of the time a person only buys single energy packs, the other rule, that you can't get more than one token from a person each day, would actually work. If it causes too many token-losses, we could still make it so that you can receive more than one token from each person per day, it would just still be capped.
I have no idea wether the IP check would work reliably, tho. Cheaters already know and frequently abuse the practice of changing one owns IP to get benefits of some sort.

So... the goal is hindering greedy morons from abusing the power of friendship while hindering the honest players as little as possible. The one-person-cap already does a good job, but what if someone wants to repeat the process with multiple alternate accounts? Do you have any idea?

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"Thank you"-tokens: How about a direct encouragement to reduce CE prices?