Gift system

[icewolf34]

Not sure if Demongod is saying that you can ONLY gift cards that you have 4+ copies of, or what "some other way to exchange your cards" means. Some way besides a trading system...? In the former case, probably true that few people will really take the time to make alts which accumulate enough dupes to feed their main account, but I also don't see how that helps free/normal-spending players unless you plan to beg big spenders for their scraps.

If you can just gift cards in general (no restriction to 4+ copies), then yeah that's exactly as vulnerable to multiple-account exploiting as a trading system. Maybe it does make Alteil feel more safe about the legal issues, but I agree that those sound a lot like fig-leaf when compared to the multi-account exploiting. It's not even clear how to draw the line about exploiting, by the way. Say InigoNoPay wins a 5* in the lottery that will complete a playset for InigoMontoya; seems like you should allow that 'gift' but not allow icewolf35-45 to gift daily lottery pulls to icewolf33.

I think that http://www.alteil.com/forum/index.php?f=50&t=3985&rb_v=viewtopic (bronze box) is probably a proposal they are more likely to accept.

[animefreak99]

Gift system ( I sugguest this ) i recall where i got this idea from now lol... i got this from atlantica online... the gift system was pretty simple u can't gift someone til your lvl 20 (i think it was lvl 20) the main idea was u can't actually chose who gets the gift!! it was random. totally random..... which solved the abuse of the system.. xp was given to how much the item costed, in this case the amount of stars the card is valued at...

edit; i remeber trying to abuse this the first time i say it thinking i could gift a certain person... i made a +10 shield... thinking i could gift my self i selected my self and them clicked gift.... then *poof* off it went right to a random person

[animefreak99]

having remebered where i got the idea from, i recalled something they did to prevent abuse of it... they made the gift system random. instead of a person that u could select it was a completly random person. xp gain by 50% of how much the item was worth. for example if the item was worth 1million, u can get 500k xp, but the catch was u won't be able to get 500k xp because the amount of xp u can get from the gift system was capped at your lvl times 100. so if your lvl 10 the max xp u can get from this would be 1000. (this of course was an example..)

[Kitsune9]

For those who have not read Logress' post, I will now attempt to encpsulate the points from it that any gifting or trading system would have to address (please correct me where I'm wrong):

1: Working out a system on what can be gifted or traded: what should be the limits?
2: Once the limits are worked out, it would have to be built and tested: so don't look for anything to be implemented tomorrow or in 6 months, we're talking all new code here.
3: Should a trading/gifting system be prioritzed over their other projects, like new game features?
4: Ther system also has to be designed so as not to run afoul of New York's laws regarding trading online property.

That said, here is a possibly constructive thought:

1: You can't trade/gift cards, but you can trade/gift Gran.
2: You are limited to some reasonable amount (as defined by the Devs) that you can receive. Anywhere from 15G/day (compares to Mirage Master) to 150G per week (a booster a week) or whatever. When you try to gift someone who is at their cap, you just receive a message explaining that that person is already at their limit, try again next (time period). No matter how many accounts you had, a single account would not be able to gain more than the set cap/time period. RMT players would only be able to sell the cap in Gran per week (to a single account), so it would still be better to buy Gran from Alteil, even if the RMT prices were lower (and they would be, since making alts and Recycling all the cards is free).

[Demongod]

The gifting system is simply so that there are no legal issues. Gifting is a one-way transaction, no scamming or gambling involved. Just "I want to give up something from my account so that another can have it."

One account gains, the other loses.

As for preventing abuse, just make sure that whenever someone presses Play Game=>Account, it closes all other Alteil clients on that computer.

If you say "abuse with two computers", well, if someone is willing to jump through that many hoops just to get some Alteil cards instead of paying, well, you probably weren't going to make any money from him anyway.

Remember: making concessions to free players costs nothing. If they weren't going to pay anyway, you can put all the gold boxes and other enticements to pay into the game. It won't change a thing, and may very well alienate other free players.

The only thing you don't want to do is discourage paying. Now for people like lucky and Inigo and Logress and whoever else that have families and jobs and such, I think they have better things to do with their time than to spend it trying to jump through hoops.

[MTCosta]

There are tons of games out there that let you swap stuff between accounts. Kingdom of Loathing, for example, you can easily set up an alt account and farm an amount of in-game money equal to $1 every day, and transfer that money to your main account. Yet almost no one does this and it's not a big problem at all and KoL is incredibly profitable. Alt abuse is a much smaller problem than people think!

[Ginnazoh]

I think gifting does not solve the gambling issue.

Say we have an account called "BetMaster" this account holds all the bets of a gambling draw. Say we're betting on a match between Demongod vs Mavel...with odds of say 1:100, where for every gran you bet on Demongod, you would win 100 gran if he actually wins.

Then the "BetMaster" can collect all the bet gran, be it in forms of cards (so recycle value) or actual gran. Then after the match is over, he can gift the winner of the bet the gran or cards. Do not forget, most people who would participate in this type of system would be people who have spent money to get the gran or extra cards...so efficiently, this is gambling.

Btw multicomputers for alteil is not that hard. no installation needed, no downloads needed, all you need is a working explorer and flash (which most people have).

I think the issue with alteil is you can make more than a dollar a day with MM farming. Say it takes 2 minutes to log in, MM for 10, lotto pull, send card and log out. In an hour you can do this 30 times. Now I don't have the numbers on this but I'm willing to guess if you do it 30 times you should be at least able to get 1 3* or a number of 2*s. either way, the value in gran of the total of these cards would be more than a dollar even if they were all 1*s and this is only for an hour. So if you were indeed bored and set aside 2 hrs to play alteil, and had to pick not playing or losing because of incomplete deck, or mutli account MM gran farming...I think most people would MM gran farm since it takes 2 mins to get a card. I wouldn't mind seeing this in work actually as it will help me get cards a lot faster and complete the playsets of those elusive falkow ladies (mystere, diondora, etc.)...but this is a very broken system. Even if you put a limit of level 20 to trade, a gowen starter can easily get up to level 20 within a week (example: SuriIsFree...i think suri started this account right when set 6 starter came out and he was level 25 yesterday)

[MTCosta]

And then you get caught and banned from the game. Mountain out of a molehill, etc. (also the $1 was just an example, if you had 2 hours in KoL you could make hundreds. And then get banned)

All of the problems people have brought up are non-issues in other games. Is New York really that different?

[DDrgn]

Is trading even allowed in the Japanese version of Alteil? Or can the Japanese Alteil team even approve any sort of trading in our version? If the Japanese team doesn't approve, then I don't think trading will ever see the light of day in Alteil.

If the "legal issues" are that bad that the GM's really want to avoid it, then there isn't anything people can do about it. It's their decision.

Free players will always have to be "enticed" into paying. The Beginner pack was around for a short time to try and get some non-payers to make an initial small investment. No way to get that by saving MM Gran(unless you played for 30 Gran?). Free players will always have the smaller card pool to work with. Trading doesn't seem like it would convince any free player to pay-up at all.

Can't everyone, paying or free, just enjoy the game for what it is!?

[Demongod]

Is trading even allowed in the Japanese version of Alteil? Or can the Japanese Alteil team even approve any sort of trading in our version? If the Japanese team doesn't approve, then I don't think trading will ever see the light of day in Alteil.

If the "legal issues" are that bad that the GM's really want to avoid it, then there isn't anything people can do about it. It's their decision.

Free players will always have to be "enticed" into paying. The Beginner pack was around for a short time to try and get some non-payers to make an initial small sunk cost. No way to get that by saving MM Gran(unless you played for 30 Gran?). Free players will always have the smaller card pool to work with. Trading doesn't seem like it would convince any free player to pay-up at all.

Can't everyone, paying or free, just enjoy the game for what it is!?

Getting walloped over and over by cards you can't have access to the counters to is not fun. It is not enjoyable. Especially when you lose a TB to a deck that counters yours, and the TB was for the counter to that deck!

And then you realize that the starter files are deliberately made sub-par. The whole thing feels like a "WE WANT YOUR MONEY!" scheme going strong.

Step 1: Sucker in with advertising and word of mouth.
Step 2: Addict via quick level ups and cards at every level.
Step 3: Scale back card obtainment rates and winning abilities via paid vets for whom free players lack the counters for.
Step 4: Receive free player/new player complaints.
Step 5: Tell them they're wrong and shoot them down. If anyone protests too much, shoot him no matter his message (me being the case in point)
Step 6: Retain a few players plunging over the cliff with sunk cost fallacies who buy cards to try and compete (they won't be able to until they spend upwards of 3 figures)
Step 7: Repeat the above process, hoping that the amount retained in step 6 was enough to justify the costs of the above 5 steps.
Step 8: PROFIT.

That's all there is to it.

I am really desperately hoping someone will tell me I'm wrong with this one and actively prove me wrong.