Elevator pitch:
The card game is similar to M:TG, Yugioh, and Pokemon (only virtual). Users purchase packs of cards that have random cards. Cards have a rarity of 1-5, which are distributed like pyramid.
Current situation:
People get virtual currency by either using real money or via playing a lot. This virtual currency is mainly used to buy random cards. Having a player spend thousands of USD on virtual currency is not uncommon.
Problem: The users are understandably annoyed at two core issues with this model. First, there's no way for a casual player to spend $20 and make a decent deck because of the randomness involved. Second, players are a little annoyed at the cost per card (though still pay it).
Auction House/Solution:
In order to address the two core issues that the players have addressed, i decided to put an online trading house up for two months to see how things go. The idea is that players can put individual cards up anonymously and have other players use virtual currency to bid on them.
This will allow a new user to spend a small amount of money to get a decent deck to play around with and the big spenders to spend maybe $50 on an individual cards instead of $600 on random cards until they get the one they want.
Potential issues
The obvious issue is the possibility that this model doesn't generate income It's on a trial basis so if it doesn't work we can always turn it off.
The real issues we care about are explotations.
Possible exploit
New users get 300 gran - that's our virtual currency - for completing a tutorial. They can get other new introductory bonuses as well.
Our users would love to have an auction house, but it's the free stuff to newbies that concerns them with the auction house. See, the issue is this....
1) A player's main account puts a card worth 10G up for 290G on the auction house
2) A player makes an alt account, fishes the tutorial, then bids the 300G on the auction from their main account.
This essentially allows them to keep making new accounts and give the free starting gran to their main. In other words, users will be able to get virtual currency they didn't earn.
Idea for solution to exploit
The obvious solution to the exploit is to make two virtual currencies. One virtual currency is tied to grinding and new user gift (FightMoney). the other can only be purchased with USD (Gran). Users can purchase new cards with both currencies. Users can only auction cards using Gran which they can only get through USD.
Users can still get virtual cards with FM, sell them for fair market value, then use the gran they got from selling their cards to transfer to the main. This is bad, but the major difference here is that the gran in question had to have originated from actual cash and not the ether, plus the house would get a cut of every transaction.
Other issues with solution to exploit
The game's 7 years old. Reworking how two virtual currencies work could confuse the users.
FightMoney already exists but is almost worthless. This would give it a real value. That means we need to figure out what to do with the FM people have been saving up over 7 years.
Thoughts/feedback?
Make the in-game currency only for buying random card packs.
A knowledgeable nerd could make a reasonably formidable M:TG deck out of penny cards.
'Gifted' currency can only be used in transactions with the system -- that is, transactions that result in the currency being removed from circulation rather than being transferred to another player.
'Purchased' currency is any currency actually bought by a player. It can be used for both system transactions and player-to-player transactions.
Purchases from the system always deduct from 'gifted' currency first until its balance reaches zero, then from 'purchased' currency. Any cards purchased with the use of 'gifted' currency get marked soulbound so they can't be sold on an auction house, so as to avoid using the auction house to launder 'gifted' currency into 'purchased' currency. 'Gifted' currency simply isn't part of a player's balance for things like an auction house.
You could display this to your users by showing their balance when they're within the system shop as "200+300" to indicate 200 units of 'gifted' currency plus 300 units of 'purchased' currency (drop the "200+" section entirely when the user has a zero 'gifted' balance); and simply show it as "300" within the auction house.
You could possibly implement this with minimal disruption to the codebase by keeping the single currency balance as you have now; and just add a separate currency tally counter that increments in an equal amount when the user is given currency for free, and decrements in an equal amount down to a minimum of zero when the user purchases from the system. When in the auction house, treat the user's balance as their actual total balance minus the separate tally value.
Drysart fucked around with this message on 12-24-2012 at 01:13 AM.
Edit to add: a setup like this would let you be a little more liberal with promotional events, without fear of directly affecting the player economy -- things like "double cash" weekends, where you can stipulate the extra currency goes into the 'gifted' balance, where it only affects your profit margin with card sales, and not inflates the auction house unfairly on people who bought outside of such promotions.
quote:
Maradon! had this to say about Punky Brewster:
The WoTC model was that rare cards had more dramatic or exotic effects, or were key to certain elaborate strategies, but usually weren't outright better than their common counterparts (although they looked better).A knowledgeable nerd could make a reasonably formidable M:TG deck out of penny cards.
Depends on Format, you can possibley get away with deck of penny cards in Standard(And the draft format requires using commons and uncommons) but in Legacy, even Modern, certain cards just slaughter everything. Faceing a Cawblade deck is about as much fun as faceing a channel fireball deck. And some of the rares ar just outright broken Jace the Mind Sculptor Is a good example, banned while it was standerd and banned in modern formats I belive and still runs for 80-100 bucks.
Though to the orginal post, takeing a commision on
quote:
diadem said:
Drysart, I asked this in a few places, but your reply is the first solution I consider a good one. Thanks
Well to be fair I think Drysart is the only one here with game creation experience. 
