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Coin controls

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 4:08 pm
by Guest
I quit Kapilands due to the ever escalating coin prices, and the fact that some players had captured the market and were holding it ransom. I had a 2 billion allod city that couldn't come close to producing enough cash flow for a premium account. I recently popped in to see what was happening, and if I could possibly play again, and coins were at a whopping 350 million each!!! Nearly double what they were when I quit.

Now I see idiots offering to buy them at a high price, just to sell them at a higher price. This is already a thin enough board as it is. These clowns will surely kill this game if allowed to continue. I don't know what the solution is, but there has to be one. Didn't we just watch people who "trade money" nearly destroy the real-world economy because it was unregulated?

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 4:27 pm
by Guest
A simple limit on how many coins per month you are allowed to sell other players would discourage hoarders while still allowing people to raise cash to start up and fund purchases etc.

I might suggest a 100 coin/month limit.

Assuming a price of 100 million a coin, that is worth 10 Bil, enough to buy a decent fully maximised building. That's is however not worth hoarding coins for since that cash can be used to generate better profit elsewhere.
Profiting from coins is all about how fast can you generate a rise in value for your investment. A transaction quantity cap will kill this practice.

2 Bil a month for a premium account is affordable for a regular player. Barely a week's market income for a player with 5-6 Bil worth of productive allod. This still leaves the door open for players to buy their own coins to keep growing faster.

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 10:31 am
by Guest
Another solution would be to use RL money to buy the coins that you need for the premium account.

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 11:14 am
by Guest
poor students... etc.... IK I used to be one.

Somebody has to pay the bills though. I do agree with OP that overinflation in those coin prices is unhealthy to the point of driving out players. Which means others (real money payers) who love having new players join will get bored and leave too.

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 3:57 pm
by Guest
You would have heart attack if your company was on realm 1 :D

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 5:17 pm
by Guest
True, I would be willing to sell coins to a lower price to someone who really cannot afford a premium account.

Still, I think inflation is inherent in the game as goods production increases much more slowly than the total mount of money.

If you can figure out german, you can check out this link:
http://forum.upjers.com/krde/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=44429

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 7:33 pm
by Guest
Another solution would be to use RL money to buy the coins that you need for the premium account
With all due respect, I find answers like that to be nothing more than juvenile flippancy. It offers no attempt at actually solving a problem. It just sounds "cutesy" on the surface. If it were that simple,and only about money, Upjers would have just made this a pay-to-play site, and gone out of business due to lack of interest.Everyone knows that the company needs a certain income to continue. It is sophomoric to repeatedly use that point as an argument in problem solving. It keeps everyone on square one all the time.

Having said that, I think it is only fair to also say that we, who cannot afford to continuously spend a lot of money on a browser game, are grateful to those who do. There is nothing for anyone if it doesn't happen somewhere. As Professor Nash (the real guy from A Beautiful Mind) proved, and received a Nobel Prize in Economics for, we are all in it together, and we all do best when we help each other!
So thanks to those of you who do.

However, it is not in anyone's best interest to create an environment that crosses the lines of balance. At some point, new players will never be able to afford to buy coins enough for premiums from sellers because of senseless inflationary actions. Advertising to buy them high (aimed at newbies, really) just to sell them higher is like the ridiculous speculating in RL markets that is ruining economies world-wide. It is inflation for the sake of inflation. And that can never serve any productive end for the whole.

Back when I used to go to Negril, Jamaica 3-4 times a year, I watched as the "street vendors," not understanding exchange rates, used to sell "JA" (Jamaican dollars) for more than the exchange rate, which was about 10-1 when I started going there. It was not illegal, at first. The only thing they knew is that $ US was worth something and JA wasn't, in their minds. They would try to out-hustle each other by offering more JA per dollar than the guy just below them on the hill. (apt metaphor, as it turned out) Over the course of a couple of years, I watched them so destroy the value of JA that it became illegal to sell outside of the Exchanges and Banks, and a massive public awareness campaign got launched on the radio and TV stations there. (which meant less music, dammit!) But it was just not enough to get people's bias for the $ US out of their heads. In only a couple of years, the exchange rate went from 10-1 to a whopping 35-1!!! Money was flowing into the country, but it was being given right back to the tourists, with interest(immediate inflation, actually), by the massive number of street venders all over the country. Amazing! And very sad. Everyone got poorer, but the already-poor got totally hammered!

So, when it comes to these kinds of issues, I have a particular viewpoint that makes it hard for me to accept a "buyer beware" kind of response. The problem affects too many people, and deserves better.

We may think it is OK for the Wealthy Only sign to hang on the Real World, but it should never hang in the game world! :P

Just sayin'...

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 10:46 pm
by Guest
Nyk, this server doesn't have the number of players needed to keep competition high enough to support the speculative coin hoarding. Speculative trading depends on someone making a loss as much as it does on someone making a buck.
With the near monopolisation of the coin market due to what I call 'village syndrome', we're where we are.

Re: Coin controls

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 2:14 pm
by Guest
I would love to at least see some sort of control put on what seem to be coin-flippers. If you're buying coins for your premium account, or to buy rep goods, or whatever, that seems fine to me. But if you're just buying them to resell them, that seems to go against the purpose of making the coins trade-able. The purpose being, it seems to me, to let those who can't afford RL money for the coins have the ability to procure them. This is one of the problems I had with most of the Facebook games I quit, because you couldn't do that, so despite having millions of whatever the local currency was, I couldn't get the cool stuff because I didn't feel spending real money on them was worth it.

I enjoy KR, and I know it's a much more niche game than, say, Farmville, so I don't mind purchasing a batch of coins every few months. I use what I need and sell of the rest, though I keep most of them in-guild, because the demand on this server far outweighs the supply.If I didn't think it would ruin my game play, I would buy more coins, sell them for ridiculous amounts of CTs, and just buy out the maxed-out buildings that I wanted, or contest medals, or whatever. But for me, that would ruin the fun of the game, and it would soon not seem worth spending the RL money on it, and I'd move on to something else.

One possible solution, without adding more controls to the game, might be to make coins cheaper for RL money. If I got twice as many coins for the same amount of RL money, I could support a lot more cities. Of course, this may not really solve the problem, because I'm still not willing to spend as much cash as some of the major coin-sellers seem to be. They'd just have more coins available while still driving the price up.

We could try things like boycotting the flippers and other tactics, but it's hard to boycott if there are only a small group of players that sell coins and are all using the same practices.