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| Lavos | Nov 3 2009, 12:24 PM |
Remember the trophy I gave you when we broke up?
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A thought, while it's fresh in my head: In my experience, when applied to a marketplace, gold never really amounts to anything. What will happen in any forum gold economy is: someone who's good at something comes along offering that particular skill for dirt cheap or free. BAM, instant monopoly. The only way anyone can one-up that is to offer their skill for negative gold, which doesn't happen. I think the solution for gold is to have (better) individual rewards that the members can spend gold on. This will accomplish three things: 1, as mentioned earlier, members will have incentive to post more, because they have something cool to spend their gold on. 2, this will give gold more intrinsic value, making the monopoly situation above less likely. (It'll still probably happen, though.) 3, it'll function as a sink to directly remove gold from the economy. Basic economics tells us that this will increase the value of gold, thus boosting both the aforementioned benefits. The trick here, though, is not to make existing members buy back abilities that they currently have. Nor should we lock forum features that you get in most other forums just for signing up. I'm not saying that we should offer things like video games (I doubt any of us have the money for that) but if we're creative, we can think up things that nobody else has. Then we charge gold for these things. This would, in all likelihood, boost overall member activity. I think we all have those random ideas for threads that we don't start because we don't think they'd make a good thread. What we want is for those ideas to get out. Unless an idea is really, awfully stupid, a good discussion can appear out of almost any starting post. Sure, some threads will wither and die right away, but that doesn't matter as long as the good ideas are still coming through. (And you'd be getting gold for them anyway.) One more thing... If everyone's okay with it, I think it'd be in the best interest of the forum if, after implementing something like this, we wiped out all the gold and started with a clean slate. (The only problem is, I'm not sure how we'd do that without resetting everyone's postcount. We'd need a totally different gold code.) |
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8:05 AM Sep 9
