[Retracted suggestion] Make pokemon purchases from Mart eligible for cashback payments (after waiting period).

thunderclap

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Has anyone ever gotten any significant cashback from their Crystal bank account? How does it work - what type of purchases are eligible? The bank account page says there's a max payout of 50 million Pd per month. I've never received enough Pd to notice any gains at all, even when spending a lot and paying close attention to my money. Pretty sure only fees like the 25pd listing fee are currently eligible for cashback, so the most you ever get is a few hundred Pd. It'd be nice if this system was better utilized, as it was originally intended. It has significant potential since we have such stagnant trade and lack of money in the economy.

I propose that the cashback percentage would apply to all Pokemon purchases on the Mart, if abuse could be prevented. For example, buying a $15M pokemon from the mart would give you $1.05M cashback (that's 7% with a Crystal bank account). To prevent abuse, we just need a probationary waiting period (let's say 90 days) before cashback is paid, and a final check. If the pokemon is traded again during that waiting period, the reseller gets no cashback, the delay timer resets (if sold on mart), and the new buyer must keep it for 90 days to get paid the cashback. Theoretically two conspiring people could still abuse the system by trading a pokemon back and forth every 180 days to double dip on cashbacks, but few would risk that if it's a bannable offense.

As far as method of implementation/coding difficulty, it should be trivial to extend the qualifying purchase types to include mart pokemon. The slightly harder part would be keeping track of the 90 day probationary period for each pokemon to prevent abuse.

One way this could work with minimal coding would be as follows. Create a new tab on the "My Mart" page called "Pending Cashback". On this page, any pokemon you had bought on the mart in the last 90 days would be displayed. It would look exactly like you were selling each of those pokemon, each at the 7% cashback price. Clicking the pokemon will take you to another page with the time remaining, seller, price paid, etc (similar to existing Mart pages). A final check by Playerdex would be performed when the timer expires to ensure the "Current Trainer" is still you, and if it matches, you get the payout.

cashback.png

If you sell that pokemon during the 90 days on the mart, it will be automatically added to the new buyer's "Pending Cashback" page, and thus removed from yours. It will search and update your page similar to how Adverts works: Right now when a pokemon with an active Advert is traded, it says "Pokemon no longer available" on that advert page. It's not necessary to collect a pokemon from your Advert box to use it in-game or to sell it. The same search-algorithm that Adverts uses can be re-used.

If you sell it in-game, nobody gets cashback, and it won't be removed from your Pending Cashback page until Playerdex does its periodic Advert-style cleanup search to check to see if the Current Trainer name still matches. That'll mean your list won't always be current (there will be a warning stating this). The advantage of this is that your pokemon won't be held hostage in a Global Link box awaiting cashback -- you will be free to use it in game exactly like any other pokemon. You could even still trade the pokemon in-game, and that wouldn't create an exploitable loophole because only pokemon bought/sold on the Mart would be eligible for cashbacks. Trading it in-game would just mean you and the buyer lose any potential cashbacks from the trade.


Summary of necessary changes. Minimal new code should be needed:
1.
Extend cashback to include Pokemon mart purchases.
2. Add a tab on My Mart page to display "Adverts" for all pokemon you have bought on Mart in the last 90 days, with "sale" prices equal to 7% of the purchase price.
3. Clone Mart page and use it for recently bought/cashback tracking as a Moderator tool... see screenshot in my 2nd post.
4. Playerdex does a periodic search to check if you still own the pokemon that is awaiting cashback payment (using the same search routine Adverts uses) to remove any pokemon traded in-game or released off your list. This is just for informational purposes to keep things updated.
5. Any time a pokemon is sold on the Mart, trigger a manual Advert-style availability search for both buyer and seller to instantly update their My Mart pending page.
6. Just before any payout, when the 90 day timer expires, Playerdex performs a final check to ensure Current Trainer still matches. (It currently checks Mart Logs I'm guessing - just a slight modification needed?)


This expanded cashback system would provide extra incentive for those high-value very rare pokemon to change hands more often. Not trading would be like (real-world example) keeping all your savings in a zero-interest chequing account instead of investing/keeping up with inflation.

And yes, introducing Pd from thin air would create some inflationary pressure. But that's not a dirty word, it's actually HEALTHY in an economy to have some inflation. Currently all prices are in free-fall which is deflation, ie. bad. Deflation means money gains value over time, so buying anything at current market price equals a loss over time. The current system rewards those who hoard money, and contributes to the huge wealth divide we now see.

BTW The only reason I haven't suggested including items for cashback is there's no trackable ID# to prevent abuse.. if anyone can think of a workable system for item cashback safe from abuse, it would be great to have that as well.


Thanks for reading. Got a little carried away with the details on this one. Any thoughts/suggestions/improvements?
 
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Isguros

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Yeah.. no. Even with the proposed restrictions in play, you could still make a deal with someone, sell some commons for ridiculous prices, and make loads of money this way.

Right now the only things that contribute to your feedback are the various fees that you have to pay: Mart listing fees, move change fees etc. (even though I've said 'etc.' that's pretty much it). I know 7% of almost nothing amounts to practically nothing at all, but I don't think the payback feature was meant for you to "counterfeit" money, but more so as a way go give beginning trainers 900 tokens.
 

thunderclap

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Yeah.. no. Even with the proposed restrictions in play, you could still make a deal with someone, sell some commons for ridiculous prices, and make loads of money this way.

Right now the only things that contribute to your feedback are the various fees that you have to pay: Mart listing fees, move change fees etc. (even though I've said 'etc.' that's pretty much it). I know 7% of almost nothing amounts to practically nothing at all, but I don't think the payback feature was meant for you to "counterfeit" money, but more so as a way go give beginning trainers 900 tokens.
Moderators/volunteers could see all the pending payouts on Pdex, sort by amount or time remaining, view a particular player's activity etc. All the cashbacks of all players at once would be posted/viewable as hidden sales, on a separate Mart page. They will each be up for 90 days, impossible to miss if anyone's paying attention. I'd volunteer for that.

cashback2.png

The payout is only 7% so a pokemon needs to be really egregiously overpriced to make much difference in the cashback. If people start buying shiny Natus for 50m it will be super obvious. If they attempt to avoid detection with low values it'll be even more obvious and not even worth it (eg. buying 10 trash S Golbats for 500k each only makes the buyer a total potential 350k profit). Whenever something's suspicious, looking further at a person's trade logs/history should confirm any ill intent -- such as one-sided gift tradebacks of 49.95m, or multiple suspicious trades.

I don't think anyone would risk it since it'll be a bannable offense.
 
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shodan21

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this is... probably one of the worst ideas youve ever suggested, thunder. ripe for abuse, significant effort to curb said abuse, difficult to actually detect any but the most blatant abuse, potential for abusing the anti-abuse mechanic, undoubtedly a massive development effort to implement, and only serves to inject more money into a game that has no real money sink - other than people quitting, which is a terrible sink.

plus, why in the world would you want to incentivize adding pokes to a mart that is perpetually overcrowded with useless junk that any player who's been here more than a couple months would be releasing?

also, how would you or any other player tell the difference between "overpriced to abuse the cashback system" and "overpriced because they dont know any better"? case in point, theres a shiny natu on the mart right now for 50M - obvious abuse of the system, right? except the system isnt there, so how would you tell the difference after implementation of the proposed system?
 
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thunderclap

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You make some valid points. It would surely take some work to implement and to test since it has several elements. But all the pieces exist, and whether it's worthwhile or not depends what the developers think. I've tried to make it as easy to implement as possible, reusing existing systems. I will say, I've made other suggestions which would be more impactful with less development effort, which I would implement long before this suggestion. The best one (most impactful and easiest to code) being this: https://forum.pokemon-world-online....ny-odds-pokemon-disposal-npc-using-rep.38360/

What I mainly disagree with you is about potential for abuse. I think any abuse would either not be worth it and/or be extremely obvious. And policing potential abuse wouldn't be a big deal.

ripe for abuse
Can you expand on this? I don't think any profitable abuse would make it past 90 days of examination. Only people with established accounts (lots of money) could afford to overpay enough to profit from abuse, but those players won't want to risk their established accounts for a small profit anyway. They also have to rely on their trading partner to return the extra overpayment, and to risk THEIR account in doing so. Any request to do that could be screenshotted and reported. People trading with themselves and their alts are already under a microscope.

significant effort to curb said abuse
Not really.. there aren't that many trades happening, especially high value trades. I'd start by sorting by price descending and not even bother looking at anything under about 50k unless I already suspected that user (read the next point below before you take this out of context).

difficult to actually detect any but the most blatant abuse
Any abuse would have to be glaringly blatant in order to be worth doing - the low 7% payout ensures that. Even the 10 Golbat example barely pays anything. You either have to go big, or buy a huge number of slightly overpriced things. If someone wants to risk their account for 3.5k Pd, they can go ahead, they'll get caught eventually. It'd still be obvious if they're paying 50k for multiple garbage worthless pokemon. Once might be lack of knowledge, 10 times is highly suspicious. And it's not abuse until they conspire and get their overpayment money given back to them. People can overprice/overpay as much as they want.

Monk stopping Easter said:
also how many people would volunteer for checking all these for free
People would volunteer to help police the system both from a self-serving desire to preserve the integrity of the game/economy, and to gain market price insight. Right now we see everything that's for sale but not what actually sells - knowing actual selling prices is valuable information.

potential for abusing the anti-abuse mechanic
Any abuse would be punished appropriately, including abusive reports. It would take all of two seconds to confirm or deny whether a report is valid. Only trusted, knowledgeable, established people would be reporting and investigating to begin with, so they'd be unlikely to jeopardize their accounts frivolously.

undoubtedly a massive development effort to implement
Maybe, maybe not. Most of the elements are basically already coded, reusing other systems. I'm sure it would still be a significant effort. Maybe it's the type of effort somebody would be interested in making. Playerdex is already a highly impressive website, it's Takuku's pride and joy, and it's likely he originally intended the cashback feature to be more useful (evidenced by the 50m maximum payout).

and only serves to inject more money into a game that has no real money sink - other than people quitting, which is a terrible sink.
The game does not need another money sink, the game needs more money. Currently nobody can afford anything and prices are in freefall. There are actually plenty of money sinks already btw - buying memberships/tokens with Pd, changing moves, pokeballs, transport tickets, etc. But adding more money uniformly would have no positive effect -- this suggestion is good because it only rewards players who are actively playing/trading.

plus, why in the world would you want to incentivize adding pokes to a mart that is perpetually overcrowded with useless junk that any player who's been here more than a couple months would be releasing?
This is to incentivize BUYING, something which is sorely lacking in our economy. There was a 6,500 Pd shiny on the mart this week for almost 24 hours before it was bought. People will sell things so they can buy more. The more you buy, the more you grow your wealth, like compound interest. The result is increased activity in the mart. Currently, sellers don't want to bother selling things because you can spend hours listing 300 things at low prices and only 10% sells if you're lucky - then you have a huge mess to deal with after in relisting or box organization (see my other suggestion thread about auto-relisting). Over-crowdedness isn't much of an issue since we have powerful filters already to find exactly what we want to buy.

also, how would you or any other player tell the difference between "overpriced to abuse the cashback system" and "overpriced because they dont know any better"? case in point, theres a shiny natu on the mart right now for 50M - obvious abuse of the system, right? except the system isnt there, so how would you tell the difference after implementation of the proposed system?
This is something I failed to explain adequately. People are free to overprice and overpay as much as they want. It only becomes abuse if, after buying a 50m Natu, you meet in Saffron and get your 49.5m back. If someone actually bought that Natu, it might be grounds for suspicion though.


One weakness of my suggestion (other than the coding/investigative effort needed) is that volunteers would need access to those in-game trade logs to properly investigate potential abuse. To see if the Natu buyer got paid back. It'd be nice if Playerdex automatically linked their recent trade logs (ideally highlighting trades between those two users), to make it easier to investigate. But that adds to the coding effort. IIRC trade logs aren't the easiest things to navigate.

Klay also mentioned privacy concerns. When buying you could possibly tick a "Private Sale" box to opt out of the cashback, so that your transaction wouldn't appear on any of the "pending cashback" pages for people to look at. Even without that checkbox you could go to the pending page and click the equivalent to "remove from sale" to opt out and make it private.



One big benefit of this suggestion is it rewards players who actively trade. Players who hoard and never buy/sell will find their hoarded money losing value over time. All players new and old will benefit from being able to sell things, with the extra demand created from cashbacks.
 
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shodan21

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i think you vastly overestimate the willingness of this playerbase to police itself in the manner you speak of. also, if theres an advantage to be gained, there will be people to take advantage of it. your point about getting the 49.5m back is poor, because you could have two people colluding on a long-term arrangement where they both overprice pokes for each other to buy over greater timespans than the 90 days you reference. i dont think the signal to noise ratio (of abuse to legit transactions) is strong enough in your scenario, and the policing system requires people to actually know fair market prices, which most players do not know, especially the more unique you get. further, this de-incentivizes trading in-game, and thus also de-incentivizes trading pokes for other pokes - and how will people do such trades with this system? theyll put the pokes they may otherwise have swapped one for one on the mart, undoubtedly for higher prices (so a third party doesnt intercept), and bam - they both get flagged for abusing the system. in short, the system encourages its own abuse, which is just going to result in needless work for GMs.

also, player transactions involving money are not money sinks. the term is for mechanics that cause money to leave the economy entirely - paying for safari is a good example of that, as well as paying the NPC who begs for money in goldenrod union room (lol), using TMs or other consumables, etc.
 

thunderclap

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i think you vastly overestimate the willingness of this playerbase to police itself
I don't think so, and I don't think it would take many people to do the policing.

the policing system requires people to actually know fair market prices, which most players do not know
It does not. It only requires people to check to see if the seller gives money back to the buyer. People can overcharge/overpay as much as they want. Yeah, knowing extremely rough prices (within an order of magnitude) would help people spot potential abuse, but like I said, because of the low cashback payout, overpricing would have to be extremely blatant and obvious for it to be profitable. If anything is suspicious, it can be easily verified by looking at other transactions and in-game trade logs.

you could have two people colluding on a long-term arrangement where they both overprice pokes for each other to buy over greater timespans than the 90 days you reference
Logs go longer than 90 days. Nobody is going to loan 50m long-term and risk their account just to make 3.5m (or 1.75m each if the colluders split the profits). Seeing repeated overprices will make people check the logs. If they in turn overprice another pokemon by 50m to pay back their accomplice, that can easily be detected also. It will have to be blatant to be profitable and it will never be worth risking your account for 7%.

Playing devil's advocate, here's the worst-case, most abusive, least enforcable scenario:
Player A buys pokemon for 4m (worth 3m) from player B. He "profits" 70k.
Player B buys pokemon for 7m (worth 6m) from player A to pay him back. He also profits 70k.
Cycle repeats

Who is to say that the pokemon aren't worth the prices paid? Prices are all made up based on what people are willing to pay. How can we cast suspicion on these two generous people? I'd say, yeah they might get away with it once or twice, and that's a flaw of my suggestion, but 70k isn't that much money considering the risk/amounts being spent. And it would be difficult to find people to collude with since they could report you for asking. Due to lack of corrupt trading partners, in order to make any real money, these players would need to repeatedly make overpriced trades between themselves back and forth. And that would establish a pattern you could easily see in logs. A simple warning could be retroactively removing all gains if foul play is suspected but not clear enough for a ban. It would be said "all cashback rewards are gifts which can be revoked at any time for any reason at staff's sole discretion".

But I see how abuse could be less obvious and harder to police than I originally thought. I for one would not risk my account regardless to make a few ill-gotten scraps.
 
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shodan21

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you always have to dig your heels in on every one of these... :rolleyes:

there are a thousand ways for players to subvert the appearance of abuse, and they absolutely will risk it if they think they can get away with gaming the system.

also, you completely ignored my point about the disincentive for in-game trading leading to mutual overpricing. i dont think this idea solves anything useful (you cant just fix the economy by dumping cash into it - if anything, that usually worsens an economy), and in that process of not solving anything it creates a trap for players to get penalized for actions that are literally encouraged by the system itself.
 

thunderclap

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you always have to dig your heels in on every one of these... :rolleyes:

there are a thousand ways for players to subvert the appearance of abuse, and they absolutely will risk it if they think they can get away with gaming the system.

also, you completely ignored my point about the disincentive for in-game trading leading to mutual overpricing. i dont think this idea solves anything useful (you cant just fix the economy by dumping cash into it - if anything, that usually worsens an economy), and in that process of not solving anything it creates a trap for players to get penalized for actions that are literally encouraged by the system itself.
I didn't ignore it on purpose, you didn't explain that point very clearly. Edited my post above. You do make some good points.

Either way, my other suggestions offer more benefits for less development work than this one, so this suggestion wouldn't be my top priority, even if abuse wasn't a factor. I still think it's necessary to somehow funnel more money/rewards into the game for active/deserving players. The current effort/payout ratio is too low for most people currently except during events.
 
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thunderclap

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you could have two people colluding on a long-term arrangement where they both overprice pokes for each other..
After some more thinking, I regretfully conclude shodan is correct.

This suggestion has too much room for abuse. In a mutual overpricing scenario, the "signal to noise ratio", as he eloquently put it, is too weak, since there are no set prices for pokemon, and no obvious repayment for overpayment. Friend prices could look the same, or at least would be argued to be.

Wish I had seen that problem sooner, but oh well, it was fun arguing anyway. Thanks everybody for reading.
 

Boora

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i'm alll for your ideas TC you know that, but an honest question,
what stops me from giving a few hundred mils to a someone and just rebuying pokes over and over until i max out
and than collect my paycheck in 90 days .

if abuse can be prevented, sure i'm with you, but it seems too risky
also , didn't read comment so my bad if was said already
 

Jinji

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This is a good example of the kind of difficulties we as Staff face as well, when trying to come up with effective systems for solving problems within, or implementing new features in PWO. I admire you for trying though thunder :)
 
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