BabeTrader changes

[Morgan Lalique]

Oh, and I decided at the get go with Mogul that I wouldn't own pics, I would just deal in the auction. It turns out it is a viable game strategy, because you can make money bidding people up. Also, bidding in auctions lets you complete quests. Which really is how the game worked originally, but it has some big loopholes.

Once in a while the account gets stuck with one, so I buy it out, keeping it at zero. Really, the whole auction thing is weirdly done, but so are ratings. A third of the vote data is all wrong, so numbers on pics are screwy. You can go into any babe with more than a few hundred pics and scroll down, the hottest pics should all be in the top spots if the ratings were done correctly, but they aren't.

Anyway, I hope you change your mind and stick around a while longer.

 

[Morgan Lalique]

As for searching your own pics, AMEN. I've taken to bookmarking all my pics, organized by babe, and in numerical order. It sucks, but it allows me to find my own pics. It also allows me to find pics I missed looking at, as the list sort order changes when ratings change. If you have searched down to a babe at 9.59, and the rating goes up to 9.62, you end up doing NEXT a lot through pics you already looked at. If on the other hand the rating goes down, you end up skipping over pics you won't see. But pics are bunched by number, so you can type in numbers in the URL addy, to check any gaps in your sequences. I find a lot of pics that way.

 

[Morgan Lalique]

Umm, Dawnbreaker, you do know you can go directly to pics and buy them, right? You aren't restricted to auctions. I ask because you really only mentioned buying from auctions, and in the past I've had the impression it is your main activity. It never occurred to me before that maybe you thought auctions was it. I certainly didn't get over 9200 pics in the less than 3 months I've been here all from auctions.

 

[HotnessRater]

- We are talking about this like it is a full fledged game. The babetrader-environment has several characteristics of it but at the same time it also lacks a lot of things. For instance what is exactly the goal of this game....."gotta catch them all", "find and own the hottest babe", "win the auction", "top the leaderboard".....the fact that there are a multitude of options also leads to a lack of focus

Well initially it wasn't really a full fledged game. The point was to generate points and cash them out for real cash which turned into all kinds of fake traffic abuse. Then when that was cancelled, it kind of morphed into a half-assed game but no amount of real serious work was put into it. Now for a long time, it has just been sitting on the back burner as a low priority, largely forgotten about 3rd class citizen.

So yeah, the goal was pretty much up to individual interpretation.

Besides the "win me back"-achievement doesn't seem to work for me.

Correct, that is broken.

The interface needs a multitude of "Quality of Life"-improvements. For instance the search and categorize function for your own pictures are basically non-existent. Now if I had a couple of hundred pictures that will be a nuisance but when you are talking about thousands it becomes more than annoying and simply a waste of time.

Yeah I know... the interface was quick and dirty.

It doesn't look like someone took the time to build a smart "game" economy.

No because it was never really intended to be a game. It just kind of morphed into that. There wasn't a whole lot of direction.

Each owned picture at a specific time should cost the owner a weekly or monthly fee. I know this is not going to be a popular opinion

Yes, that is a very unpopular opinion. I'm not opposed to it though.

It also means that any investment is a good investment even a picture that is hardly viewed at all will eventually earn back its initial investment making the auction basically a win-win situation

Well unless the auction price has went so high that it is going to take just too long to earn it back. If it is going to take 20 year to recover the cost, I wouldn't call that a good investment.

The fact that Morgan has 582 bids outstanding some far from reasonable is a perfect example of it. You can't blame him for abusing this system but the way it currently works is not a smart solution if you want to have a fair auction.

I'm not really sure I see a problem with being involved in a ton of auctions if you have the points to afford it.

Either someone outbids you and you get your in-game currency back + compensation or you get a picture that earns you in-game currency over time......no loss whatsoever.

Or you pay too much for a picture that never gets any views and you are stuck with a picture that might break even in the next thousand years.

That said, the auction system doesn't really work like an auction since the losers do make a profit on it (at the expense of the winner) This was modeled after the initial buy and then sell model and isn't an auction at all. If it were an auction, the loser would just be refunded their cost and the price that the buyer paid would essentially be a sink, (instead of having just a 10 point sink for each auction)

Everything I've said about the "game"economy becomes null and void if the admins do not actively prevent and punish multi-accounts. I also have enough working brain cells to know that several accounts in the top (the same ones Morgan mentioned) are either the same user or at least working together. Admin said there is no proof to support that theory but the fact that the #4, 5, 6 and 9, 10 in the leaderboard (the ones not being Rcrus, Duderino, Acornet and Rich Garces) are within 32 pictures of each other AND are within 110.000 BTP of each other AND them using the same selling price for a lot of their pictures (10.000, 20.000, 30.000 and 80.000) without them somehow being correlated is statistically highly implausible.

Well I guess I don't have enough brain cells.

Being close in rankings is not an indication of multiple accounts. The Mogul and Morgan Lalique are multiples and aren't near each other in the rankings.

I'm not sure who 4,5,6 and 9,10 were when you made that post. I don't see a lot of duplicate IP addresses though. Having similar picture counts or pricing pictures in the same way isn't conclusive evidence to ban someone though. If I did that, someone could just imitate your behavior and get you banned.

Besides, I'm not going to spend countless hours tracing down duplicate accounts. I would rather just have a system that doesn't give an incentive to have duplicate accounts. I'm not saying this system does that. I'm just saying I would like it to...

I'm not saying there isn't some suspicious activity. I am saying it isn't conclusive. I'm not really sure what accounts you are saying are the same person since they could have moved in the ranks since you posted. So what accounts was this accusation about?

And what benefits do you really get out of having multiple accounts? I have my ideas of what can be gained but I am interested to find out if you have thought of benefits and exploits that I haven't.

There have been talks about changes for a long period but hardly anything has been changed in that time

Yes, this has been pretty much my last priority.

 

[Morgan Lalique]

The main benefit of multiple accounts right now is multiple quest rewards. That is subject to systematic point mining. To my mind that isn't a big deal right now, as the game mechanics and standings are so broken anyway. If the game mechanics are fixed, do a player wipe.

You can also use two or more accounts to bid up prices in auctions to prevent other people from costing you money by bidding you up. This doesn't take money away from other players, and doesn't make money for you, unless someone buys the pic at the higher price.

It does keep others from making money off of you by bidding you up. It also lets you effectively take the pic out of the auction by pricing it higher than anyone else wants to bid. But that really isn't any different than buying a pic for 10 and then pricing it higher, except you have to wait 40 days for actual ownership.

 

[Ian Doorbar]

So I had changed BabeTrader so that you could set the sell price. Before that, everything was like an auction forever where the price just went up a certain percent from the last buy price. People complained and wanted to be able to set their own price, resulting in giving people a chance to essentially just price their pictures out of reach of anyone. It deadlocked most of the pictures and made it so you could only really get a picture if you got it new and locked it in.

This kills the whole spirit I was trying to achieve where people who are playing could work hard and get any picture... and the person they took it from had a chance to get it back.

I'm looking for options on how we should fix this. Several have been proposed.

1) We could revert back to no setting prices. If you want a picture, buy it for 10% above the last buyer and its yours. People could steal pictures by making enough cash to steal them. The only way to protect them is to have enough cash to buy it back

2) We could impose some kind of tax on pictures based on their asking price

3) We could put a cap on the total asking price... maybe the users net worth or something.

4) I don't know, you tell me your idea

Personally, I would just revert everything back to no set prices and make it a free for all. No protection, if you can buy it, its yours. I know this would piss off the hoarders out there but I might be okay with that.

I'm not going to make any changes without some input so lets have some discussion. Speak up now and argue your case or you might not like the changes.

Any ideas?

I've recently joined and was quickly aware that very little trading is going on. I believe this is due to the ability to set unrealistic "do not touch" prices. It is making the site sterile and uninteresting. So, reset ALL values to 10 and get some life back into the site or it will wither and die. It should be a trading site, not a storage site.

 

[Tittylover69]

Well I may be a little late to this discussion but I was a minnow once and now I got a lot of points. I posted one of my pics at what I thought was an unobtainable amount (over a million I forget the exact price) and someone bought it. After that I went on a spending spree and started buying up a bunch of pictures now I get a couple hundred thousand points from views each month. I am definitely the hoarder type where I set pictures to unobtainable prices because I only get ones I like now and enjoy the passive income. As far as how that changed my playstyle before I would come in almost every day and buy up as many of the 10 point new pictures as I could, now I check in every month or 2 and buy expensive pics that look good. I like the way it is now but here are 2 possible thoughts I had to update the system:

1. Allow bids where people could send an offer to the owner of a pic for a reasonable price the owner can decide if its worth (I have def bought some for over 100k points before). This would need a new interface probably of a sort offers page.

2. Have the front page instead of being a feed of new pics be a feed of old pics and the price starts at whatever the owner bought at +10%. The owner can leave whatever bid amount they want on the pic (or maybe cancel the auction) but they have like a week to notice that one of their top performers in up for grabs or someone else can poach.