Someone might have brought this up before, but might it be a good idea to raise the cap on the amount of gold per post? Right now the cap is twenty, and especially in the RP forum this ceiling can be hit very easily, as those posts can tend to get a little lengthy.

Would it be possible to vary the cap depending on the forum? Obviously we don't want people spamming in the other threads just to get more gold, but frankly it can be frustrating when I make an awesome post that is several paragraphs long and I only get 20 gold out of it.

Just a thought :)

Please don't take my question offensively but -

Why do you think role-players deserve a higher cap than anyone else who writes long posts elsewhere?

I assume it is because RPers more often go past that cap and as such lose much gold they'd have gained when it had been seperate posts, whereas it is only on rare occasions that at the other forums, you go well over 20g. Perhaps once in a hundred posts, and then it still would rarely have accounted for more than a few gold. Ofcourse, the Literature Forum has the same problem, because there long posts are pretty common too - but I for myself rarely see people in the exchange, quest-forum or charity forum post 20g+ posts, unless they are setting a thread up or posting after some absence, thus replying to multiple people, which can get you quite long posts sometimes.

Ofcourse, I am not Bounces, so I don't know if that was what they thought, but it's how I see it. :)

No...Silenia summed it up quite well. My posts in the Charity threads don't tend to be very long...but so far almost every post I have made in the rp thread has been worth 20 gold, which means it could have been worth more if it wasn't for the cap.

Frankly I am not in love with the idea of a variable cap, because on the rare occasion that someone posts longer somewhere else, like setting up a thread, they should be rewarded for that. I was just thinking that if for some reason you don't want the cap to high in a specific thread maybe a variable system would work.

Kind of like how gold earning in the word game forum has been turned off entirely.

EDIT: Case in point: This post prior to editing was worth 10.18 gold to me. It has 126 words in it prior to the edit. That's .08 gold per word.

My last post in an RP thread was worth 20 gold to me. It had 533 words in it. That's .03 gold per word.

I could almost take this to mean that my posting is worth half as much solely because I roleplay.

If they change the gold cap just in the roleplay or lit forum then people who don't use those forums would complain that its unfair that they should be penalised those few times they do make over 20g posts simply because they aren't roleplayers or story/poetry writers.

Most of the good posts in the debate forum exceed the 20g cap as well. I've seen people intentionally split up arguments (or responses to specific people) into separate posts to get more gold out of it.

Also (and mods, correct me if I'm wrong), I believe you're awarded gold based on the number of characters you use, not the number of words.

Personally I think there should be a minimum length to get any amount of gold (i.e., your post must be worth x gold before you get any of it), because I see a lot of people do one or two word replies (especially in GD or Life Issues), which defeats discussion.

I don't think Bounces was specifically referring to just RP -- I think he was just using that as an example to show where there tend to be longer word counts, or, as Keyori possibly pointed out, longer character counts.

When I came to Menewsha, I was told that one of the easiest ways to get gold was to post in the forums. Most people suggested I join an RP (I suppose, because there you tend to have a recurring revenue base). Now I know there are places where you can get just as lengthy posts, but ... I have to agree that it seems that the longer ones posts are, the less gold you get (per word count or per character count).

I don't see how I should be penalized because I try to further a [insert type of forum here, whether it be discussion, RP, literature, etc.)] by writing thoughtful posts.

I must say, though, that I kinda like Keyori's suggestion. You start getting gold for forum posts AFTER a certain cap -- say 100 characters or words, etc.

Or, maybe just up the ante. Maybe instead of max 20 gold, do max 50 - 100 gold, with a max cap of however many characters or words you think.

But then again, you might have people who just want to add to their word count by just writing whatever, even if it doesn't have substance.

*shrugs* I think, at the very least, it's worth considering a slight change ... in the future.

However, I must say that I appreciate what this site does and what the admins and moderators must endure. (I see what's on here and frankly, it sometimes scares me. ^_-)

No matter what the gold limit is raised to, there will always be people who post more and then complain that they aren't earning their full potential. Even if we made it go up to 1,000g, I guarantee that there would be posts here, asking us to make it even higher.

Right now, the limit allows a level playing field for everyone. It would be unfair for people to earn more gold just because of the nature of their post - While an RPer would habitually earn over 20, someone who tends to post in Books or Music would have to fill their post with spam in order to catch up. This is exactly what we do not want. A higher gold limit encourages a lot of less thoughtful users to post nonsense and spam, just so that they can fill up their character count and get more gold.

People who make longer posts already tend to earn more than the average user. Why is it necessary that they earn even more?


There's a good conversation about this topic here, if you are interested in reading it.

Knerd: Thank you for pointing to that other thread.

I can see your point about it possibly being never-ending in the request to up the ante where gold is concerned.

However, I will state that it IS a little disconcerting that I can play a game for 5 minutes or sp and easily rack up to, say, 40-50 gold, but spend 15-20 minutes writing out a well-thought-out, lengthy post, and only get 20 gold for it. I'm just saying. *shrug*

Like the other poster who began the other thread implied, perhaps there's at least some room or thought for a re-visitation as to how the gold works.

Anyway, in the end, we just want to be heard. Obviously we are nobodies and won't change anybody's mind once it has been made up.

Truthfully, at this point, even though I've only been here for a little while, I have latched on to Menewsha because I am enjoying the ... yes, RP. Hah!

^_^

Well he said

vary the cap depending on the forum

which implies certain forums should have a higher cap than others which would cause more problems because not everybody goes in every forum.

The forums that generally have the longest posts are Roleplays, lit and debates so if the gold cap was increased in those ones because they generally get longer posts it would cause complaints from people who don't go in those but do occasionally do longer posts in the other forums like General discussion and life issues.

If there was any change in the gold cap then it would have to be over every forum to avoid complaints from those who don't benefit from the increase even if they only rarely do posts over the 20 mark. That's all I meant, to be honest the gold cap doesn't bother me.

Originally Posted by Reeny

Anyway, in the end, we just want to be heard. Obviously we are nobodies and won't change anybody's mind once it has been made up.

You have been heard indeed! No suppression of opinions going on here. ;)

And no one on Menewsha - especially those who post well thought-out, reasonable, non-hostile discussions - is a "nobody".

It's possible it might change at some point, and trust me that sometimes I write long posts and regret not having earned possibly even 60 gold instead of the 20 I got. But please keep in mind the site's economy.

More gold being granted by the system means more gold in economy which means prices go up.

Yes - you can earn 50 gold from a game for less than five minutes of work. But you can only earn up to 500 gold in a day. Twenty-gold posts are permissible all day. So those who make the effort can ultimately earn more than the person who only plays games. That's only 25 twenty-gold posts to match the 500 gold gamers can earn. (And yes, if we assume that it takes ten minutes to write a 20 gold post that does mean you'd be on the site for four hours - but we're going to ignore that. ;) Because some people do spend that much time or more on the site AND they can also play the games for 500 gold if they wish.)

Again - I'm not shutting you down and saying, "You can't wish for more." I'm not saying, "The maximum you can earn per post will never go up." I'm just saying that you really do need to think about the economy when you ask for anything involving earning gold.

If you're thinking, "If I got up to 50 gold per post from my role-playing... I could get that (insert shiny rare item) much more quickly!" well... so can everyone else. And the person selling said shiny rare item can ask for more. ;)

Originally Posted by CK

(And yes, if we assume that it takes ten minutes to write a 20 gold post that does mean you'd be on the site for four hours - but we're going to ignore that. ;)

*ROFL*

Sorry, that's not ALL I took away from your post, but it struck me as the funniest! ^_^

Thank you for your long, thought-out response. What's funny is I only looked into this thread because someone asked me to .... who knew?!

Thanks for listening, and I do understand what you mean, re: the economy.

I guess it's wishful thinking on many people's parts, to eventually get to a system that everyone's happy with. Hah, as well wish for world peace!

^_^

*Applauds CK's obviously well-thought-out post*

Thanks for summing that up much better than I could have.

Wow...look at all the trouble I have caused...:shock:

First, I would like to say thank you to Knerd for posting the link to the previous thread. I figured that something like this had been discussed before but did not know how far back I would have to go to find it. I found the thread very enlightening and have thereby been able to see some of the legacy pit fall that I have stumbled upon in bringing this up.

Second, I want to say that I am not continuing here because I am trying to be confrontational. I only say that because I have found that it is hard to make yourself completely understood online, where text reigns but there is no body language or tone, without sounding standoffish or not caring of others opinions. My post here is not in that vein at all, and I want to make sure that that is known.

So...to clarify my position, I think I have seen that the first legacy pit fall that I have come across is associating it with RP. I did that because I am primarily an RP poster, but as has been mentioned by many above this really does not apply solely to RP, but to all forums, especially the ones that tend to have lengthier posts (such as literature, debate, etc.). The main crux of my point of view is that Menewsha is a virtual economy that is run, primarily, through gold per character posts. The earning in this economy is capped, much like say a salary cap in baseball, at 20 gold per post (for those baseball fans out there that are extending the metaphor, 200 thousand a year). I feel that this is too low of a cap, because there exist some posters, that if the cap were higher they would be earning more, just as in baseball where if the salary cap was higher they would be earning more.

At this point my metaphor falls apart, because baseball players get their income, arguably, through merit. In our economy it does not take merit to post a long post. I mean look at this. 20 gold is coming my way. WOO!

So, returning to the point. It seems it all comes down to how you want the foundation of the economy to work, and what you want the gold system to motivate. The gold system motivates posting, and talking to people. Okay good. But how do we want them to talk? The way the system is now we do encourage people to ramble on to a certain extent, in that "Hi, how are you doing today?" Earns many multiples of gold over simply "Hi."

The way the system is now we also encourage people to stop talking at some point. For example, at this point this post is well past the 20 gold point. This is Menewsha telling me that I should stop talking now, that I have been too verbose. Maybe I have, but frankly I think this is all necessary to make certain my PoV is clear to all. So I will deign to ignore Menewsha's persistent warnings that I am letting my fingers run away with me, and in retribution Menewsha will only give me 20 gold.

So the question is, do we want a system that not only encourages people to talk more, but at some point says "SHUT UP!" That is what we have now. It does not actually kill our posts if they are to long (I don't think anyone would put up with that) but it does say sorry, only up to this point was worth you getting paid for. Frankly, this seems counter to the type of environment that Menewsha seems to want to engender, based on what I have seen so far.

To touch on a point that has been made by many, and ties in quite well with this whole idea of "What does our gold system tell us about what we want?" The fact that games are much easier to get gold out of than posts is truly counter to the culture that Menewsha is trying to create. I can get 30 gold in two minutes from Harbor Fishing. It would probably take me at least 10 minutes (and two seperate posts) to get that much out of posting. Since I can get 30 gold in 2 minutes, that means I can reach the cap of 500 gold after 17 plays (34 minutes). In order to get to 500 gold through posting (based on the assumptions I have already made) I would need to make 25 posts and take me a little over 2 hours of constant writing, assuming each post is worth 20 gold. Hopefully my ability to be verbose won't fail me. So what does this tell us about Menewsha? The math implies that it encourages us to play games and be antisocial. Quite counter to Menewsha's mission statement! The game/post thing is a seperate argument, but raising the cap on post limits could certainly address some of that imbalance as well.

The next point that has been made that I would like to address is that raising the gold cap would encourage spammers to fill their posts with gobbedly gook in order to get the maximum amount of gold for it. I would like to address that point from 2 seperate angles.

1) This really isn't happening much now. If it isn't happening now at the 20 gold cap why would it happen if we moved it up to 25, or 30? Frankly, exploiters tend to work their system by talking in as many threads as possible, but their posts in those threads tend to be fairly short. In the extensive time that I have been in Menewsha ( created my Avatar on 10/11/2009, wow I am old!) I have not seen a single post that was filled with spam just to get to the 20 gold cap. I am not saying they don't happen, I am just saying they happen rarely and...
2) that there is a system in place to address them. We have the report button. We have hard working and diligent moderators. Spam is not very prevalent in Menewsha, and when it does happen it gets reported and resolved. That would not change. If the cap was moved up and someone tried to exploit it and get the most possible gold by putting a whole lot of exclams or something, report it and it will be fixed.

Finally, and for those of you that have made it this far on my typing marathon I do mean finally. You are almost there! Keep it up! Finally, it has been mentioned that in a virtual economy, just like in a real on, if the supply of money goes up, then the value of that money is devalued. This leads to inflation. In other words, the price of items and services goes up. Is this really a bad thing? Look at it this way, basic economics. You get more money, but so does everyone else. So the prices of everything goes up. So, in effect you didn't really get more money after all, the system where you were paid and pay for goods/services was just shifted. However, if people are not getting paid enough for the work they are doing, and so minimum wage is increased, well prices will go up, so you are back to paying essentially the same thing, but at least now you are being fairly reimbursed for your work.

Frankly, I don't care about getting more money. There is no item that I have found, yet, that I look upon with a glint of greed. I am here to post and make friends, not get bling for my avi. That is just a nice bonus. When I do post and make friends though I would like to be fairly reimbursed under the system that is in place, and I feel like the cap that is in place now hinders that.

*pant* Okay. I think that answers any questions/comments that have been raised since the last time I was here. It also says pretty much everything I wanted to say in regards to this topic. So while I will still follow it, and see what other people have to say in response, I will not be posting in here again. I could have broken my discussion here into multiple posts, and thereby gotten more gold for it, but honestly I think just making this lengthy post kind of makes my point as well.

Thank you for considering my point of view. Have coming from a forum that did not have a place for feedback at all I appreciate the fact that the creators, developers, and moderators really do care here. And if you didn't read this entire post, I forgive you :)

To address one of the points that you brought up in your post, you say (I'm paraphrasing), "After a certain point, Menewsha says to stop talking."

I see what you mean, but would like to counter that it's really the other users that tell you to "stop talking". XD I can tell you for a fact that 90% of the users on this site would not have read that entire post you just made. It's "tl;dr".

I regularly get "tl;dr"* responses from people when I make posts that are worth only 10 or 15 gold. If I make a post worth 20 gold, almost all the time, I get, "woah, textwall" comments - even if the post were not made directed to that person! So the users themselves presumably find long posts "unworthy" of reading.



*too long; didn't read <-- for those who don't know what that means.

I know I didn't read it.
It scared me. Maybe if he filled random lines with colours or spontaneous bolding and italicizing of words.... but not like that. xP
It's like a book excerpt.

But I just went up, dived in and read a line about needing to get your point across, verbosely or not, and I agree. Me, personally... I'm okay with my avi and don't really care for gold. It's just a plus of writing stuff.

I see the gold now as a gift, no matter how much I get, it's more than I had before. If I write, I'm writing not for gold, but for me or others, so it doesn't really matter. :/

~CK~ Ok, I can see your point about most users just not wanting to read that much, and when I tried to load a site on my cell (I'm horrible for checking threads on my cell when not at home) I can't load some pages that have text walls like the one Bounces just posted...but I, at least, tend to log on when I get home and read the post in its entirety from a real computer.

I can understand that a lot of people, probably even most of the people here just don't care to spend their time reading that much of what a person says...but I also don't think that if we were talking outloud instead of reading someone's words that these same people that are saying "too much!" would say so face-to-face. I'll admit that I've been nosy and poked around other forums before writing this, and really the people that are writing a substantial amount in their posts have interesting things to say. The people that don't read all or any of those types of posts are really missing out on some interesting and thoughtful posts.

I'll also admit that there are days when I can't think of anything to say...and that alot of the threads in some of the other forums are essentially 'dying' because nobody is really writing anything. Short posts filled with short questions, some of them are asked to try and induce longer posts but most just get short replies instead. Personally I like longer posts, in any forum. It gives you more of a feel as to the other person's personality and it gives you more things to talk about. Just my two-cents worth.

~Bounces~ Nice analogy...though sports are lost on me. hee hee.

Oh! Another point, sorry it just came to me, but whether you change the cap or not, the current trends is that alot of people are using text-talk to get say what they want said without being essentially told that they talk to much, both by the cap and those users that openly tell you that it was too much to read. Our new users (hee hee I've been here about a week) see this and think that not only is it ok to post in all text talk, but that it is considered the best form of conversation on this site. Not all forms of text-talk is universal...or for all age groups. I've got younger cousins (13ish) that use some variations of text-talk that I've never seen before, and I'm only 22! Anyway, my point here is that maybe the people that are telling you that you wrote too much are the same people who don't really 'read' a longer post because they think that it's just full of text-talk...and not all of it is decipherable? Just an added thought.

((I read it!))

I liked your post....

I don't know why I had temptation to read it over the other one... except my add kicked in in the last paragraph and it was hard to read through.

~Chouno~ Thanks! You made a few good points yourself. Some of the compaints about long posts aren't really that they are long but that sometimes we forget that not everyone likeks to read long novels and don't add little bits, like colored texts, into it to break up the monotonous-ness (is that a real word?) of it. Although, it can get really old when you are typing to change text color...although its nice that the bold and italiics work at least partially like they do in a word document...you still have to scroll past the ending of the change of text but you can initialize it with your keyboard saving time...

Like Bounces and Chouno, I don't post length items to earn gold, its a nice perk that I'm trying to use to help out some new people (currently one that I grew up with) but I don't need it..still its nice to be compansetated for my time...Have I confused anyone yet? If so I'm sorry!

OKAY I JUST GOT REALLY EXCITED

So the thing I was talking about making a "minimum post" amount before getting gold... well I may have found a "practical" way to implement it.

In another forum I hit "Post Quick Reply" on accident to a blank text box instead of "go advanced," and I got this error message.

The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 1 characters.

So, all a (whoever has power to change this) would have to do is change that number from 1 to... something else.

BAM! Problem solved!

However, that's only if someone who has the authority to do this actually thinks it's a good idea.

We'd played with the idea of a minimum characters allowed in the text field. I think when we tested out the forum software we set it at seven characters.

The problem came in when even the staff were like, "ok. SPAM TO MEET REQUIREMENTS FOR POSTING." Which meant that we were earning gold for stuff that was purely spam just so we could post "ok".

why not jut write 'alright' instead of 'ok'...that's seven characters....just a thought...ok is technically an abbreviation though its so common most people don't realize it...

I guess I could understand that, but I was under the impression that one-word posts weren't allowed anywhere except in word games... am I mistaken?

Originally Posted by CK

"ok. SPAM TO MEET REQUIREMENTS FOR POSTING."

xD
I figured something like that would happen.
But was it seriously so obvious, not just something to BS their way into 7 characters? xP

Considering I was one of the people who did it, yeah, it was that obvious. XD This was on the test server - not on the actual 'live' server, for what it's worth.

And one-word posts are all right as long as they are on topic. Only emotes aren't on-topic, but if (for example) you're in the exchange and someone says, "Will (whatever) be okay with you?" and all you really want to say is, "sure." that's perfectly fine.