Updated:
A new gold curve has been implemented in zOMG.
For a long time zOMG has been giving out too much gold; we've made several tries at adjusting it, but there were still some issues. The main feedback from the community was that new content was the key thing they wanted -- so how can we do that while getting the economy more into balance? (There are other issues of fairness: for example, there are people that are buying the zOMG items to show their support, but they aren't getting very much tangible benefit from it).
So, what we're going to do is this:
* we have 4 people working on an entirely new area for zOMG. This is a substantial investment in zOMG, based on community feedback.
* we've simplified and upped the curve for donators and AutoCash subscribers. Every day you can earn up to 160k in zOMG without any effects, and then the gold scaling goes down to 20%.
* for people that are not donators or AC subscribers, the new scaling kicks in at 10k.
However, some people do not have access to cash -- so we're offering a zOMG gold potion in the cash shop that will confer the donator gold-earning levels for 3 days. So, you can spend some gold, drink the potion, and for the next 72 hours you'll have the benefit of the gold curve.
This allows social players to play zOMG with their friends, confers some benefits on people that buy zOMG items, and allows people without cash the chance to earn gold at the same rate as others.
So, an entire new area is kind of a big investment. How can we know if it's successful? It's obvious that zOMG items / powerups / rings / whatnot are important, but there are other things we'll be looking at:
- total traffic in zOMG. Right now zOMG is behind Towns and Rallies in popularity; we're hoping that with a new area that it will be the most popular flash game on Gaia.
- number of new registrations driven as a result of zOMG. If you refer a friend, or get them interested in the game, try to make sure that they register through /zomglanding.
More details in the zOMG forums or journals, as appropriate.
Updated: Fixed the 50% glitch and a couple other things; the curve still resets at 0:00 GMT. Based on user feedback, we're experimenting with making the granting more gradual. The current formula is:
100% up to 80k
thereafter it is max(0.20, 1.0 - ((earned - 80000) / 150000))
Note that this grants more gold than the previous curve and there isn't a sharp cliff. It looks like what we'll have to do is adjust the difficult of EB / Papa Saw upwards in order to prevent them from getting farmed. After we make those changes, we'll remove the curve if the gold has dropped down to a reasonable amount.
We appreciate the levelheaded level of discourse, and thank you for your understanding. I'm going to mention something at the behest of Customer Service, even though I don't believe that there is anyone in the zOMG community that would do this: using mules for the purpose of earning gold and funneling gold to one account is considered against the TOS. If the admins see a bunch of people running mules they would issue warnings / bans / whatnot, so they did want me to give fair warning to everyone.
Original:
Before starting off: if you want to blame anyone for this change, blame the Gold Grant Committee, or blame me if you need a personification. We're adjusting gold grants throughout the site, and zOMG was part of it recently -- just wanted to try and give some more information about what is going on. My journal has more backstory if you're interested.
What Were The Exact Changes?
100% earnings up to 100k; 90% earnings from 100k - 150k; 10% earnings post 150k. Resets daily at a set time -- I think 0:00 GMT, but I'd have to check the code. Someone doing sEB will hit the 10% limit in about three hours, although possibly less.
How Did You Pick Those Numbers?
We took a sample day -- 3/6. A total of 13k+ players played on that day. Taking all players and looking at the very top, there were 169 players that made 150k or more, just a touch over 1%. This was the source of "1% of players should be affected." The high player on 3/6 made a bit under 1m gold with 10 sEB runs, and the top 169 players made 25% of the zOMG gold granted on that day.
Why Are You Picking on zOMG?
zOMG is the largest single source of gold generated on the site, both in absolute terms and in terms of players / gold. We're reducing both zOMG and BG in order to bring their proportions more in line with the rest of the site. We're fine with CL 10.0 zOMG paying better than anything else -- we just don't want it to be magnitudes better than anything else.
But Why Pick On It Now?
Remember that what we want to do is drive more users to zOMG -- we're going to start testing it on the new user home page, increasing integration via item exchange, so on and so forth. We want to increase the amount of gold that new users get, but we need to get that gold from somewhere. It seemed to make sense to adjust the curve at the high end to provide more leeway for the low end.
But The Curve Takes All My !@@#!@#! Gold
As long as the total amount of gold given out is reasonable, we're fine with adjusting the
shape of the curve or the way that it's implemented. There are two current issues with this one: a) it doesn't report properly in the client, and b) the cliff is a bit shocking when you finally hit it. Using a more gradual exponential or cubic curve may work better.
Looking at the curve over time, the question here is a) when does it start to kick in, and b) when does it reduce to minimum. The current curve kicks in immediately at 2 or 3 hours; we could instead flatten it out so that you would have to play 12 hours to get the maximum amount of gold.
Gamewise, there are also options: taking EB as an example, we could reduce the payout or change it so speed runs are no longer possible.
But It Won't Help Because Of All The Gold Given Out
We have goldsinks planned, but we're planning zOMG and BG specific gold sinks to help drain out the gold.
I'll update OP as necessary based on any common questions.
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