Hi there Snarkie! I’m a stamp collector and we (stamp collectors) have been facing – as you probably know/knew – stamp prices in levels that only a handy people can afford or either the stamp simply does not exist anymore (let’s ignore those sketchy accounts that come on the way selling them for cheap…). Talking about stamps like Coltzan, Garoo, Midnight Jelly… On the time you were in there, did you guys think about how to introduce more into the economy, and if yes, did you guys also considered how to keep them rare/kind of expensive, but still accessible/affordable? Could you share some of those ideas? I know we had the dr_sloth auctions a few years back, but even after that those stamps vanished and some go now for almost a billion NP which is non sense… thank you! 🙂
(Ps. Pleaseeee tell us the recipe of Spoppy II)
snarkie
Not a robot... probably.
Ohhh, nice topic. I know a certain staff member who would have LOVED to talk about stamps back in the day. I’ll see if they want to weigh in now after years of having not to think about it. ?
Either way, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I can remember. So let’s see…
For context, our goal was not really to make them “affordable”, meaning we intended them to keep their super duper ultra rare status. They should still cost a ton of NP. But since they were consumable and meant to leave the economy by design, that constantly made the few remaining, if there were any at all, essentially priceless. So we wanted to lower the scarcity slightly and create a more reliable supply that still let the market set the price. I was going to say we had lots of plans but I don’t think that’s really accurate. We had lots of ideas but only a few had gotten to planning.
Auctions were the main way we started that, yeah. They added supply while literally allowing the players to set the price, which is super important in open-market virtual economies. And we could tweak what stamps we released and when to help control things a bit. Except that account was run manually by a staff member in their free time at first just to get it going so the auctions were less frequent than we’d have liked. The plan there was to eventually automate it, with a bunch of parameters we could set and change on the fly. Again, they would have still been scarce but at least players could rely on that supply and set the price. We had the project planned out but were never able to fit it in with the team size and other priorities that kept coming up.
Also on the schedule right before the JumpStart sale was a Loot Table project. The original plan was to go through all the dailies across the site and update their loot tables, which was a massive project since every daily had its loot table hard-coded. That also would have meant we’d need to do the whole project again in a couple years. So instead, we were going to build central loot table tool that let us change things on the fly for any daily or game or anything else that had a loot table. (We would have started by adding it to a subset of activities and then kept working through the list, and of course using it for anything new. We were hoping to have Chia Bingo be the first new thing to use it, I think?) It’s actually kind of what we did for the new Random Event system but would have been on a larger scale. ANYWAY, part of that plan from the beginning also included adding rarer consumable items like stamps and books to specific activities that players could then farm if they wanted. Things that required skill, effort, or NP. So get Coltzan’s stamp as a possible prize for a specific boss fight in the Lost Desert BD or maybe Garoo’s from Nerkmids, etc. (Those are just random examples. We didn’t have the actual prizes determined yet.)
Oh! Adding a stamp as a super top tier reward in a prize shop was also on the list to discuss for the next big plot. There was a lot to consider with that one so we may not have ended up doing it. Wouldn’t have known until it came time to tally points and decide prizes.
That was it for plans, I think. There were also many ideas that were less “farmable” by players like ultra rare REs but we were leery about those because of the super random nature of them. Auctions were definitely the fav, and then we wanted to try the loot tables thing and see how that went first before trying anything else. We just weren’t able to get to them in time, unfortunately.
As for the Spoppy II, I don’t think it can be created, can it? I remember there was a big deal ages and ages ago about someone flaunting one and trying to sell the recipe and we had to step in. It turned out to be zapped and they were just scamming. So I’m not sure if it can actually be mixed but if so, I definitely don’t know the recipe. Sorry. 🙁
I hope that answered your questions (well, your first one at least)! Thanks for asking. ?