Suggestions from a new user

[aloha]

Writing this because I think this game has a lot of potential but is being held back. These are the issues I see, but I'm not sure if they've been brought up before:

• The pricing system allowing established players to set sky high prices reduces how dynamic the game could be. A new mechanism should be introduced to make prices more reasonable, without forcing players to set certain prices. This could be something like: if your photo doesn't sell within 30 days, it gets auctioned.
• Being able to spend some large number of points to permanently keep a photo.
• Uploaded photos can be immediately purchased by their uploader. Instead, uploads should immediately go to auction
• The hotnessrater discover search query is in need of optimization, it is extremely slow.
  

 

[HotnessRater]

Originally they couldn't set prices at all. Everything was like a permanent auction and could be outbid. People wanted to be able to set a price to make it impossible to lose the picture. I never did like the change. I wanted people to be able to outbid people on pictures and create a bidding war. The auction came out of that as a compromise. I am tempted to change it back since you are right, it totally kills any dynamics in the game and makes it impossible for people to take over someone else's pictures.

 

[aloha]

Originally they couldn't set prices at all. Everything was like a permanent auction and could be outbid. People wanted to be able to set a price to make it impossible to lose the picture. I never did like the change. I wanted people to be able to outbid people on pictures and create a bidding war. The auction came out of that as a compromise. I am tempted to change it back since you are right, it totally kills any dynamics in the game and makes it impossible for people to take over someone else's pictures.

Yeah changing it back or some middle ground like I suggested could work. You could do this:

Let people keep their photos permanently but only if they spend 10,000,000 points or some huge number. Otherwise, unsold photos go to auction after a week or a month or something. This will help keep point levels similar (old time members will have something to spend their accumulated points on, bringing their point values back down to reasonable levels). In short there need to be balancing mechanisms.