Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Issue: 88   Editor: NYX2000


Reset of Establishment prices MikaPika
This Monday, players viewed their Establishment only to find the value reduced back to 'a humble' 16,9 million dollars. After a short period of confusion, Sabin created an Important at the Game Forum. By doing so, he ended the confusion and explained to the Bootleggers society why he had reduced the prices of the Establishments. The most important content of Sabin's thread are in the quote below.


Quote:
There is currently an issue with excessive land values introducing incredible, unforeseen amounts of unearned cash into the game. Because of that, Establishment prices have been temporarily reduced, capping the Appreciation time at 60 days. This is temporary, until a more permanent solution can be found.

Please note that any land purchased within the last two months will be unaffected. I will be reviewing the situation to determine the best way to make sure that land values will still be a potential source of money, without getting into the billions (which is crazy).



The main cause for the tremendous money increase where Scum accounts that owned an Establishment and went On Vacation shortly after buying it. While they were unable to be killed, they couldn't lose their Establishment, which kept increasing it's value by approximately 3% for everything 24 hours of ownership. Players had already complained about these accounts as they are seen as dupes by the general public. However, due to the absence of evidence to prove this claim these accounts still remain untouched.

By capping the Establishment prices, Sabin did put a stop to the tremendous amounts of money being introduced into the game. However, at the same time he had also placed some players in a somewhat difficult situation. Seeing some payed lots of points or billions of dollars for an expensive piece of land, they felt screwed over by his actions as they had now lost their investment. A valid argument used by some players was the fact that people might have spent real life cash on points and had used these points to purchase land. By this alteration, they had now lost their investment and thus their money.

In his thread, Sabin also asked players to come up with solutions for a permanent solution had yet to be found. A possible option was suggested by ThePiper. “Remove all interest from the game. Give players more to do in game to make money (ie booze which is already being worked on),” he said. Adding: “Then as much as I hate to say it, reset the game without the option to bank or establishment-interest.” Removing the interest features from the game is only one of the many possible options though.

Celestus even created a thread with a whole new Establishment concept, involving expanding your land so it could get more value. This would result in people having to kill each other to make sure their property's value keeps increasing. A part from that, he also suggested a button that needs to be clicked, similar to the way people are banking money in the Federal Bank. With inflation going faster each day, the suggested solutions all try to contribute to slowing the inflation down.

Other suggestions were to stop land from increasing in value when the owner is on vacation, putting a max cap on land value or having the state take a certain percentage of the value if land is sold back to the state. More suggestions were made, of course, and we can only wait while the Elite Guard considers the options and suggestions. All we know is that a permanent solution is bound to come.