Roaming Credits.

Xli

Make unbound credits that have been bought IG not be transferable to offline characters, therefore you can't transfer them to an alt without multiplaying...

Silas

@Cardan, come back.

Korben

I have an alternate idea.

I understand the spirit of the 'OOC rule' as: you can only transfer credits you buy from IRE between your characters.

Problem is, the system doesn't discriminate between bought credits and other credits. Rather than create a new kind of credit, why not change the rule to "When you buy X credits from IRE, you gain the right to transfer X credits from that character to another of your characters." The advantage is that this way would be more flexible: the right would not be bound to those specific credits. I could buy 100 credits, spend them on lessons, gain 100 credits through IC means over the next few days and then use my transfer rights on these new credits.

A modification to the TRANSFER command would be necessary for the game to know when people used their transfer rights - something like TRANSFER 100 CREDITS TO ALT_NAME FOR ALTTRANSFER.

My version of Credit Report would be:

Credit Report

-------------------------------------------------------------------

You have 0 Credits reserved for sale.

You have 0 Credit(s) left.

You have 0 Bound Credit(s) left.

You may transfer 100 Credit(s) to your alts.

You have converted 0 Bound Credits to lessons today.

You have 0 Lessons left.

See HELP LESSONS to learn how to receive your 2500 Bonus Lessons.

Silas

@Korben's idea seems the cleanest.

Oceana

I find the 0 credits from @Korben's report confusing, if you have 100 you can transfer, than you have more than 0...

Jacen

I think it could be worded a little bit better, but essentially, he bought 100 credits OOCly, used them on lessons/arties/wtfever, but didn't use the ability to transfer the 100 credits OOCly, and thus that ability can be applied to credits he obtains ICly.

Basically, with his system, when you purchase X credits by the website, you would get two things in return: X credits, and the ability to transfer X credits without discretion, whether they be the same credits you bought from the website, or credits you obtained otherwise.

I think his idea is the cleanest, but I also don't think the admin would support it.

Trevize

Roaming credits...

Can you credit me now?

If it's something you mark and unmark yourself for your own records, why can't it be done elsewhere? No objections from me on it, I just don't see the point. Nice concept if it did it automatically, but it would be difficult.

Borran

Freedom!!!!!!!! We should be free to do add we please with all unbound credits! If they are not to be transferred, then make them unbound.

Anaidiana

 

Borran said:

  If they are not to be transferred, then make them unbound.

 

ftfy

Cardan

For the record, I have actually investigated a small group of players over the course of three months previously who were using alts to rat enough gold for org credit sales and then transfer the credits to their mains via each other's alts. Anything to do with credits is generally taken very seriously which includes the logging of transactions. If need be, we can and do go audit through player's transaction if we feel that they are breaking the rules, but it is a crap of a job so not something I like to do.

The main thing against any change in either the case of the OP or Korben's variation is that the credit code is mostly common across all the games (fiscal record keeping requirements and such) which means making any changes to how credit purchases and transfers work is no small matter.

I'll leave this open for now while I have a chat with @Tecton about it, but I don't know that this would be something that we are likely to be messing with any time soon.

Oceana

Thank you for responding, @Cardan. As an alternative, would it be possible for people to "issue me" and ask how many of their credits can be transferred to alts? Is it something you can get with a simple query, or is it a helluva job?

Rangor

Having bought as many credits as I have with the $$$$'s, I just assume all my unbound credits can be freely transfered between characters.

Sylvance

Rangor said:

Having bought as many credits as I have with the $$$$'s, I just assume all my unbound credits can be freely transfered between characters.

This, right here, is the crux of the problem. Until it's possible to identify individual credits and track whether they were bought with IC or OOC means, I'd say that 50% of the playerbase could probably make a very good argument for having x-hundred roaming credits. For me, it comes down to the mens rea; if somebody is trying to circumvent the system by having a mutual-m----------- party with a group of their buddies and play 'Pass the credits', such as in Cardan's example, then they clearly need paddling. In the case of a genuine error, I really hope people are getting a few warning shots before anyone reaches for shrub button.

Silas

They tend to be pretty reasonable with genuine mistakes, in the sense that I've only ever heard of people being punished for actual abuse of the system. Given how Achaeans love to complain, I'm quite certain we'd have heard of people getting bitchslapped for miscounting.

I still think the added security of the ideas in this thread would be nice, though.

Sarapis

Yeah, we really only punish people here when there is clearly intent to mess around.

Xith

Xith said:

Oceana said:

@Xith

Such as:
- forgetting to convert them, and not remembering afterwards how many there were
- converting "insane" credits to "sane" credits, by accident or not (also hard to track for admins, probably, and if they can track them, then they can also tag them for us)

The problem I see is that "roaming" is a tag that you would have only assigned to purchased credits from the site, but that doesn't cover all OOC credits, such as coding payment or simple person to person gifts, meaning those recipients still have to convert or label the credits anyway.

I think the acquisition of non-roaming credits is easier to tag:

- CFS

- creditsale

- achaean quest

- etc

But it also has a hardcodeable effect in not being able to accidentally cross-transfer them to an alt. If you designate them as "roaming", that's an aesthetic label and simply means they can be transferred, which they already could... Make sense?

The reason I approached it from the other side is so that the work that goes into this supposed coding has an effect on credit transferring, which was the goal, I think.

Yeah rather than marking site credit purchases as "roaming", wouldn't it be easier to make gold-purchased credits in-game appear automatically as "Sane" credits in your stats (i.e. credits that can be sold on your character but not given to alts)?

All sane means of acquiring unbound credits should add those to the Sane pool. The only trick is when "sane" transfers from player-to-player occur, there's no objective way to determine if it was a sane or insane transfer (e.g. for coding vs. enchantment).