Why can't I get a discount coupon?!

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I have enough points for it but the option is not available... it says I do not have enough points

(which is not true)!

Are there any rules concerning the 50% discount coupons that I don't know? Any

restrictions?

[Indigo]

The price has been advanced to

10000 points !
I just saw it in the Shop menue!

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

The price has

been advanced to 10000 points !
I just saw it in the Shop menue!

Ok, thank you.
I think that's fair!

[DAdams91982]

Dammit.. I was saving so

long for that... and I was going to get it when I got back from Iraq... oh well.


Adams

[Bruce]

I really didn't want to raise the

price on the discount coupons, but things got so out of control, I didn't know what else to do. Some guys have

amassed hundreds of thousands of points. There are guys on the forum with enough points to buy 40-50 discount

coupons at the old rate.

The problem however is/was the way the arcade was set up. Thru a loophole in the

system, it was possible to amass huge amounts of points by beating your own score at a certain game over and over,

each time playing until you just barely beat your previous score and then quitting and playing again. Everytime the

jackpot was one it reset to 500 points.

It seems to me that 5000 points is a fair price for folks whe have

earned their points posting useful threads and replies. I just didn't get in and fix the arcade problem quick

enough. Also there was a problem with the banking system. To be specific, I accidentally set the interest rate at

365X what I had intended!!!!! So, that caused a problem too.

Now, what to do? Some options:
1. Revamp

the scoring system so you can't win all that many points in the arcade and make it more for fun. I tried to do

this, but it needs some work and there are already fortunes amassed in the arcade and banking goof.
2. Create a

limit on what you can make in the arcade. Make it lucrative, but when you hit the ceiling, you are out of the

arcade. This would give others a chance. At the moment a handful of folks are dominating the arcade and nobody

else can enjoy the place.
3. Put the price of the coupons back down to 5000 and put a max on the number of

points you can have.
4. Have a one time "wealth tax" lopping off the huge excess points amassed by a

few.

Any thoughts on the subject?

B

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

Honestly, I think you did

well by raising the price of the discount coupons. In fact, it's funny that some days ago I was thinking about

sending you an honest PM explaining that you really should raise the price of those coupons, because it was so easy

to get enough points to buy a coupon (and I'm sure that's not very good for LS).

Just an example, 3 or 4 weeks

ago I had enough points to buy 6 discount coupons and I am sure several members could buy a lot more than that! But

I didn't do anything special to have so many points... I just put them in the bank... (it's nice that you have

fixed it)

[bjf]

Honestly, the arcade stuff is silly.

People want to play for fun, fine. But I'd take the cost of playing in the arcade out, and only offer a small

reward for all-time high scores.

Contributors to our collective phero-knowledge need to be rewarded, the rest

is just entertainment.

[Pancho1188]

Any thoughts on

the subject?

B

Yes, make your final decision before I repost my recommended L-S forum newbie

suggestions!


I would have to be a good example of 'normal' usage to get to 5,000 points. I've

been here since it started...but have only accumulated enough for maybe 2 or 3 coupons...and I post a lot...



Obviously, my lack of points can be attributed to:

1. Never playing in the arcade
2. Never starting new

threads (only posting on other people's)
3. Never getting many responses when I do start a new thread

There

are obviously the folks that accumulate mass points from the arcade and folks (like DST) that could accumulate mass

points without ever posting ever again because they started many of the longest and most popular posts on the

forum.

That all said, you could raise the point value of Pheromone Forum posts vs. other posts (is this

possible? Maybe this is already being done!)
+ More good discussion...coupon for people who talk about -mones


- More irrelevant posts in the -mone forum; point hoarding

That said, Bruce, you have the right to do whatever

you want with the system. I hope you find a delicate balance that satisfies all parties.

The point max sounds

like a good idea (use 'em or lose 'em), but what about the max in the bank vs. max on hand? I'm sure you could

figure that out. Getting rid of the arcade points would be good (both cost and prize) as you don't have to

contribute to the forum to get them. However, it prevents people from posting useless stuff and gives them a way to

get points if they have nothing to say. You'd have to make the decision whether you want the coupon to benefit all

people or just the ones who contribute to the forum.

"A lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous..."



Good luck with all that...

[hotrocks5]

I really didn't

want to raise the price on the discount coupons, but things got so out of control, I didn't know what else to do.

Some guys have amassed hundreds of thousands of points. There are guys on the forum with enough points to buy 40-50

discount coupons at the old rate.

The problem however is/was the way the arcade was set up. Thru a loophole

in the system, it was possible to amass huge amounts of points by beating your own score at a certain game over and

over, each time playing until you just barely beat your previous score and then quitting and playing again.

Everytime the jackpot was one it reset to 500 points.

It seems to me that 5000 points is a fair price for

folks whe have earned their points posting useful threads and replies. I just didn't get in and fix the arcade

problem quick enough. Also there was a problem with the banking system. To be specific, I accidentally set the

interest rate at 365X what I had intended!!!!! So, that caused a problem too.

Now, what to do? Some

options:
1. Revamp the scoring system so you can't win all that many points in the arcade and make it more for

fun. I tried to do this, but it needs some work and there are already fortunes amassed in the arcade and banking

goof.
2. Create a limit on what you can make in the arcade. Make it lucrative, but when you hit the ceiling,

you are out of the arcade. This would give others a chance. At the moment a handful of folks are dominating the

arcade and nobody else can enjoy the place.
3. Put the price of the coupons back down to 5000 and put a max on

the number of points you can have.
4. Have a one time "wealth tax" lopping off the huge excess points amassed by

a few.

Any thoughts on the subject?

B

I think it's fair to raise the price of the

coupons, but I don't really like any of the options presented. I like the fact that you can earn points from the

arcade, because that's how I amassed my fortune! Plus, letting me earn points through the arcade stops me from

wanting to make useless posts on the forum, which I reallly do not want to do. If you took away points from the

arcade, you would see a great deal of repetitiveness in the forum, more so than there already is now, which would

lower the quality of the forum. Creating a limit on the points you can make or have, and taxing people seems a

little harsh to me.

However, I understand the concern about users (like me!!) making too many points. So

one thing I would do in your situation Bruce, if possible, is to make it so that if a user gets the #1 ranking in an

arcade game, he/she can no longer earn points on that game until their high score is beaten. They can keep playing

the game, but they would not make points until they are beaten by someone else. I think that's fair and would be

effective. I don't know if that's possible to do, but that would be a good way to control the amount of points

given out. That way, the same person cannot just keep beating their own score to load up on points.

[CptKipling]

Honestly, the arcade

stuff is silly. People want to play for fun, fine. But I'd take the cost of playing in the arcade out, and only

offer a small reward for all-time high scores.

Contributors to our collective phero-knowledge need to be

rewarded, the rest is just entertainment.

What bjf said.

The arcade is just for fun, the whole point

of the forum is to encourage discussion about pheromones; sharing of ideas, knowledge etc. If people feel like

consistantly making stupid post to amass points, ban them.

I was going to post something about the points issue

anyway, and also about the rep system.

[belgareth]

It might be fair to raise the

points for the discount coupons if it was easier to earn points with real contributions. Earning points for playing?

That makes no sense to me at all. I sympathize with those who have made an honest effort to write good posts and all

the sudden and without warning, the goal of a discount coupon just got moved further away.

Silly posts just to

make points is easy to deal with, we do it on an almost daily basis anyway. Delete the post and warn the member. Too

many warnings and they get banned.

[lifetransform]

geez...the discount coupon

is 10,000pts now??

[Bruce]

Thanks for all the feedback. I

already made some major changes to the arcade point system with Webby's help. I like Hotrocks idea though I think

it might be hard to implement the programming. Actually, points asside, it is discouraging to see the same name

occupying the first 3 pages of high scores in your favorite game. I would like to introduce a friendly "rule" (ie:

not programmed into the system) that once you make a jackpot in a game, that you simply *stop playing that game* for

some set period of time. Let's say 10 days. I set the scores to flush out every 5 days. So that will give others

a chance to have some fun too. Then after the 10 days are over, you can play the game as many times as it takes to

win some points again (I think that includes second place too, doesn't it?). Then you have to walk away from the

game again.

As it is now, the 500 points a whack gambit is gone, but personally, I would like to see some

fresh names at the top of the high scores. We started the "auto pruning" (regular deletion of top scores at a set

number of days), but that just made it worse as the usual high scorers spend hours playing all the games day after

day, so l would like to hereby start the 10 day "get a life" program for arcade addicts. Furthermore, I think it

might be a good idea to do away with the arcade pass system and delete all the passes. That would mean that in

order to use the arcade, you have to perform some sort of service to the forum. eg: posting useful material. Side

note on Hotrock's post: dude... posting meaningless threads/posts is not an option. They make a lot of work for

the moderators and it can get ugly sometimes as Bel pointed out.

On the good news side though, I have been

thinking about starting a payroll system of some sort where forum members could earn large numbers of points

relatively quickly by "working" for the forum or Love Scent somehow. EG: working on the newsletter, moderating the

forum, or running the PheroLibrary like Capt K does.

Last but not least, an option would be to keep the

coupon relatively easy to attain, but reduce the amount of the discount from 50% to say 35%. Then I could say to

myself "Well, just about anyone who makes him/herself useful around here can get whatever they want whenever they

want at 35% off". That seems pretty reasonable considering the great service that regular forum contributors make

to Love Scent. It's just that the 50% we have now is too hefty for that sort of thing. It was intended to be a

relatively hard to reach treat, that regular posters might hit a couple times a year. Then all of a sudden

somebody posts "Hey what happened to my 200,000 points man!?! WTF?" Bzzzzz red alert red alert....

B

[Pancho1188]

I'll be applying for the

moderator position tomorrow. (Yeah, Pancho the Moderator...I could see people loving that idea..."Hey, who

corrected my spelling in my post?!?!?")

As for perception of the "50% off coupon"...

I think the following

post, Bruce, may have made the coupon a prize for the arcade rather than reward for good posts:

You

should now be able to "buy" discount coupons (50% off on orders up to $100.) in the forum "store". This system will

supercede my previous plan of giving discount coupons as prizes to winners in the arcade. As you probably know, you

can win large numbers of points in the arcade, which can now be used to buy these coupons. The differences are that

this is all automated and you can use points regardless of where you get them.

If you would like to make

it easy to regulate the number of coupons, you may just want to give points strictly for posting. Otherwise,

you'll have the division of points because you get many more points from the arcade than from forum posts. One way

to fix this would be to have two types of points (arcade vs. forum) and make the arcade point coupon 200,000 and the

forum point coupon 5,000...but that might be really complicated for the web master. I don't even know if

that's possible...probably not. The other thought would be to remove points for the arcade but award high scorers

with discount coupons once per week or something.

Ugh...my head is starting to spin thinking of all of the

options...but I see the main problem being that points are much easier to accumulate from the arcade than the forum.

If you could fix this discrepency, all would be fixed. Honestly, how many people have 200,000 points because

they're interesting posters?

[CptKipling]

I think that should be no

points at all for the Arcade, but resetting the scores every week is is a good idea and keeps it fun.

On

the good news side though, I have been thinking about starting a payroll system of some sort where forum members

could earn large numbers of points relatively quickly by "working" for the forum or Love Scent somehow. EG: working

on the newsletter, moderating the forum, or running the PheroLibrary like Capt K does.

I am very much in

favour of this. Myself, the mods and others helping LS would have worked very much harder to get our points than

people who won them in the arcade or by post whoring, work that actually contributed to Love-Scent aswell. It's a

bit of a kick in the nuts to see loads of people more or less getting something for nothing, when you have put the

time and effort in.

[top_dawwgs]

well heres a thought. Would

it be possible to have like a 25 percent discount for 5000 and 50 percent(the max discount) for the 10,000

points??

[nitro]

Tough issue!

I only learned of

this point reward system a couple of days ago by chance, and I immediately thought it was a fantastic idea to keep

this forum alive and abuzz.

Needless to say, I am disappointed to see the 50% discount moved from 5,000 to

10,000 points, but reading this thread, I am shocked to learn of the small fortunes amassed by the arcade experts

and how easy it is/was to do so (relatively speaking), and can fully understand why Bruce had to bump it up to

10,000 points, if only as an interim measure.

But those who earnestly have abided honestly to the system of

contributing to the forum should not be made to suffer for someone else's abuses either. It hurts too many at the

expense of so few, and erodes confidence in the system. One thing that could, IMHO, help hugely in preventing

knee-jerk reactions is to provide advance warning or notice of any change to the point system.

I too do not

believe in easy points by simply "post whoring". I think it should be remembered, however, that this is a public

forum, and people should be encouraged to contribute as much as they can, and if the best way to do this is to award

points, great. After all, the basic premise is still that people want to earn points so they can use it to buy more

products. If people start getting flippant and post garbage in an attempt to artificially inflate their points, let

the rules of the forum take care of that. Perhaps penalties in the form of point deductions could be one form of

discouragement to such abusive practices, in addition to a ban. Posters who try "too hard" also get flamed, and

this helps as a form of self-regulation too.

nitro

[Pancho1188]

Posters who try

"too hard" also get flamed, and this helps as a form of self-regulation too.

Someone mentioned me?





Seriously, though, you have good points. Just remember that the moderators work hard to keep posts where

they should be, and to 'let the rules of the forum take care of it' means to risk putting too much pressure on the

mods if it gets out of hand.

[DrSmellThis]

All I have to say is that I

prefer a system that is fair for everyone and hope affected individuals would be OK with that. Points are absolutely

no big deal, and easy to come by if you participate normally in a positive manner. Most everyone gets more points

than they can possibly use. Why does anyone much care?

[CptKipling]

Points equal discounts.



They are also the way I am supposed to be "paid" for running the Pherolibrary.

I like the idea of being able

to buy different levels of discount (25%, 50% etc.). Maybe a development of this, which would only be fair on LS if

the points situation gets sorted out, could be a "free shipping on any order" token, and/or a 50% off $150 worth of

products - all suitably priced of course. It should really take a long time to achieve the discount tokens.

[belgareth]

It should

really take a long time to achieve the discount tokens.

That depends. You are putting a lot of effort into

the phero library and deserve something for the effort. Other members put a lot of time and effort into some well

done and informative posts and should be rewarded for their efforts. The guy who starts 6 threads , all asking the

same or similar question doesn't deserve any points for it. Especially when the question has been answered a dozen

times recently and they were just too lazy to bother searching for it.

[CptKipling]

Your right, effort is more

important.

Thanks.