Board Thread:LOC General Discussion/@comment-108.35.154.66-20130911165857/@comment-71.189.228.215-20131231042938

Just some ideas that I wanted to bounce around on how to "fix" iOS LOC economy.....

Personally, I think banning the cloning methods and banning accounts as a very poor and very short-term way to deal with the problem. There will always be loop holes, and there will always be people creating new accounts on jail-breaked devices. To really fix the clone problem, LOC will needed to implement an id system similar to their cards. But they really don't have a way to add this id system to all of these already existing pp/ed clones on the market. Plus that only stop the problem from getting worst, it still doesn't fix the problem that already existed from past clonings.

Here is an idea that we bounced around amongst our guildmates :

1. Create a new pp/ed type, with id system implemented. Let's call this NeoPP (or NeoED as appropriate) for now.

2. Implement a special no-event period of say 5 to 10 days, where all of the LOC players have a chance to exchange their existing pp to NeoPP, at whatever ratio that makes sense to control inflation (ie, 100 pp = 1 NeoPP).

3.  There's a limit of 1000 pp/ed that can be exchange into NeoPP per day, for this special convertion duration. This is the key feature of this idea. There is still a maximum of 9999 NeoPP that any player can hold.

4.  Any pp/ed that remains unexchanged after the special exchange period will be automatically converted/exchanged into bound-NeoPP. All bound-pp/ed will also be convert into bound-NeoPP as well.

5. During this exchange period, any refused-trades currently sitting on people's account will have a count-down that ends at the end of the exchange period. Refused-trades that aren't cleared will automatically be "cleared" by the system. The returned cards/items/coins will be credited to the Present List. PP sitting in the Present List will be auto-exchanged to NeoPP when they get pulled from the Present List. If NeoPP sitting in the item list has already hit the 9999 limit, then they will be exchanged into bound-NeoPP instead.

5. After the special exchange period, all events going forward will only reward NeoPP/NeoED. Old pp/ed essentially will be discountinued.

Hopefully this get to kill two problems with one stone:

1. This remove non-ID-tagged currency (pp/ed) from the circulation, and add ID-tagged-controlled currency fairly seamlessly. ID-tagged currency is much harder to clone. In fact, currently the game will suspend any account immediately if it detects cards with duplicated ID, so this should fit well into LOC's current policing system.

2.  This allows the rich players to keep their "wealth", while at the same time creates an incentive for bound-NeoPP to flow (or "trickle-down") into the middle-lower class players. How so you ask? Because the expected behavior is:

a. Since you can only exchange 1000 pp per day, there's a maximum of how much cloned pp you can really keep. The rest gets converted into bound-NeoPP. bound-NeoPP is just as useful for gameplay purpose, but bound-NeoPP is removed from trading and from the currency supply.

b. If the rich players do not want to lose their extra pp into bound-form, they can also instead start buying up cards to reduce their pp-holding during the exchange period. However, it is very unlikely that the rich players are gonna be able to trade amongst themselves. This is because all of them all have same the hoarding pp problem and all of them are gonna be looking to get rid of their pp. So the only players that they can buy from is from the Middle to Lower class players. This creates a demand for the currency to "trickle-down" into the hands of middle/lower class, who would be more than happy to take the extra pp since they got room to exchange them into the tradeable NeoPP form. In addition, since middle-lower players probably don't have pwr17~18 cards, this creates a soft demands for pwr14~16 cards that middle-lower players typically have, and boost their price.

After the exchange period, the expect landscape is that the rich players kept their "weath", but mostly in cards forms. The middle-lower players got better deals than before for selling their pwr14~16 cards, and got a lot more NeoPP in their pockets now. NeoPP gets more evenly distributed amongst the players, but at the same time there's no "socialist" feeling about the whole situation. Rich players can sell their newly acquired pwr14~16 back into the market, but the demands will be lower since the newly rich middle-lower players are more likely to be looking for an upgrade.

Anyway, just bouncing an idea around.....