The price has been advanced to
10000 points !
I just saw it in the Shop menue!
The price has been advanced to
10000 points !
I just saw it in the Shop menue!
Ok, thank you.Originally Posted by Indigo
I think that's fair!
Dammit.. I was saving so
long for that... and I was going to get it when I got back from Iraq... oh well.
Adams
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
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
- Buddha
Yoga in Eugene
Fair Trade crafts from Peru
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)
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.
Yes, make your final decision before I repost my recommended L-S forum newbieOriginally Posted by Bruce
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...
I think it's fair to raise the price of theOriginally Posted by Bruce
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.
What bjf said.Originally Posted by bjf
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.
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.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
geez...the discount coupon
is 10,000pts now??
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
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
- Buddha
Yoga in Eugene
Fair Trade crafts from Peru
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:
If you would like to makeYou
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.
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?
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.
I am very much inOn
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.
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.
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??
top_dawwgs
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
Someone mentioned me?Originally Posted by nitro
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.
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?
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
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.
That depends. You are putting a lot of effort intoOriginally Posted by CptKipling
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.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
Your right, effort is more
important.
Thanks.
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