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I appreciate the consideration to keep it open source. I agree that Ultima was probably one of the largest bottlenecks in trying to play the game. It became all about buying and selling as the entire game for newer players, while when I was watching during the spreadsheet days it seemed much more open ended.
Agreed. As anyone who has ever had admin access in CK can attest to, it was very disheartening to see that there was no "gamemaster" console or anything like that
For example, probably the most developed module was the "health game," and all that was was a single admin page where the values were changed manually on a per item basis. Even for something like that, some degree of automation should be possible. Quote
Also, doing some research about haanamaaria would reveal there there was a much longer engagement than a night of singing going on, so I'm not sure what that examples supposed to prove?
On the Google Doc spreadsheets, across both E1 and B1 she has about $400k in depo payments. I was in CK 2016 onward and read most of the thread posts before then before buying into the game and never saw mention of her.
Risto may have mentioned that she gave him money to "invest" in the game (recall, also, that he pretty much said this about everyone "new" around the 2017 days). Again, if Risto was the proxy for all these people, they need to take up any issues with him.
Anyway, just using her as an example of someone who was not in CK that long (if at all) and would be a net outflow of funds that would do nothing to help grow the game. I am sure we could all agree that there are many others users who contributed more to CK that didn't get anything out of the depos at all and are not on those lists.
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Overall I agree that a fork is the only path forward for this. Maybe we should take account of the percentage of the Risto controlled accounts amount compared to the rest of the assets in the game? Any good numbers exist on this yet? Either way - maybe an auction of some sort with like 95% of the proceeds going proportionally to the old players that are on the sheet as being owed and 5% going to the new development is a reasonable idea, so long as the past generosity of the players is remembered knowing that with most of these people all you really need is a good idea and the balls to ask for a few dollars to get something off the ground.
Risto-related accounts are around 50% of in-game currency (just going to call this M from now on to save typing). Again, we will not be recognizing the depo-related items. That is only for about 20-25 unique people, and there are far more that lost big in XMR and/or opportunity costs terms who are not on that list. Many of those same users are (or were at one time) major holders of M and game items. If they sold for pennies on the dollar post Risto exit, that was their choice.
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Firstly, negative M balances pay interest, and if you check the changelog you can see lots of accounts are currently being slowly eaten away by this 'inactivity tax', and this has been part of the Game rules for a while now, and it's a good mechanism to reduce the negative effects of inactive accounts over time, plus it adds realism to game play.
On the new Agora, negative balances won't be allowed; at least as has been done in the past with CK (as mainly, it was a way for hackers to abuse the system).
However, yes an "inactivity tax" may be imposed (partly to see which accounts are inactive). Currently, we are considering a "Player House" and "Investment House" breakdown. An Investment House would not have health, NPCs, and if it had property, it may only be able to engage in one pool (say rents) versus some of the higher activity ones (shops, lab, office, etc.).
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Also, have we rehashed any discussions about how this in game currency isn't a security yet? Because as long as there is an expectation of profits, it would seem like a security is being distributed and traded internally.
We are talking solely about in-game currency M. M will not have quasi-stock properties (like dividends). There may be things like voting power/delegation and the like, but we will leave these open for now based on pending game design considerations.
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And if the chars are inactive, better for us, it means it's more scarce and therefore more valuable.
There is a balance for this. As Gaben and I outlined above, many players beyond Risto accounts will probably be inactive (at say 10%-20% of total M supply cap). That is reasonable. But adding Risto's 50% of the game makes the distribution look terrible.
I know you are on the E1 and B1 depo sheets, but you and everyone else will be far better served by the game just progressing/developing than worrying about those amounts (which were made when Risto was in a poor mental state, so would a reasonable person looking on this scenario in hindsight even allow full recovery of those amounts anyway?).
Also, this very topic (Risto depos) made it where pretty much nothing happened during all of 2017 after Risto left. The current team now has the domain, source code, and complete database of the game. Some lines have to be drawn in the sand to move forward, and the removal of all this depo stuff is one of them.
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Everyone - please offer thoughts on game design in particular. Syksy has done a great job starting the discussion.