Talk:Event E2/Proposal Altricious


 * Participants may NOT gamble, beg, scam or pillage during this time. Exception: participation in sea battles while transporting goods will not cause disqualification as long as the participant was not the challenger.

Ok, If Viridian is anything like Midnight, it is near impossible to open a stall for less than 25k and without the ability to pillage one would be severely limited as to how to raise poes to supply the stall to earn poe. If the participants chat logs for the week is the only way you can confirm adherance to the rules you are setting yourself up to spend huge amounts of time on the judging process. I can think of several "loopholes" that would make cheating exceedingly easy and quite undetectable. Shandra (Taco)

--- Thanks for the feedback. I considered that the seed money amount might be low. The quandry is, the higher the seed money, the fewer pirates that will be able to enter. Not everyone has that much cash, even if they have a lot of assets. I'm certainly open to changing it. Then again, the lower amount would force pirates to choose their strategy more carefully because they would have less room for error. In rechecking stall prices on Viridian, 35,000 to 40,000 poe would allow any participant to easily purchase an Iron Working stall and buy lots of stock, while it would prevent the purchase of a Furnishing stall entirely.

As for the cheating, I realize there are monitoring issues. It's why I've listed it under OM assistance and workshop. I could ask for detailed accounting of all transactions, copies of vessel and shop logs, etc... Then I'd have to audit the whole thing to see that it balanced. Even then, I know there's things that wouldn't be captured. Hopefully someone has a good idea on that.

Altricious --- I'm a little confused about the 25k seed money. Is that the minimum amount that they must have to participate? From your description, it sounds like it's ok for them to have more. But in this sort of contest, having more money to start is a huge advantage. I can make much more money if I have 100k and several ships to start with than if I only had 25k and no ships.

As for cheating, the simplest way to cheat is to have a friend offer to sell me a commodity for way below market value. I have no idea how you'd prevent this, otherwise I would have run a similar event a long time ago. However, you're really not offering much in the way of prizes, so perhaps people won't resort to cheating. If you make it a familiar contest, you have to be very sure that people are playing by the rules. -- Bootlicker

Cheating methods
Just a couple I have thought of: Lets say I am on a commod run, it would be very easy for a mate to toss 100k and gobs of supplies into the hold of a sloop, come pvp me and lose. Bingo! Lots of poe and stuff.

Not sure if it will change or not, but in your listed rules nothing says a friend cant give you a gift. The sky is the limit there.

A prior suggestion of pricing your commods at rock bottom - to further that, one could also set astronomical sell prices and get their friends to buy buy buy.

I have purchased and run various stalls in my pirate lifetime and one thing I have found holds very true for all (in my experience) - it takes huge amounts of poe to start the "right" way, and most of the time, stalls are a losing proposition for quite some time before they turn profitable. Not only that, but your judging percentage makes almost everything you do with your start up poe worth less with the exception of stock on hand and bid tickets which get judged at fair market value. And quite frankly, most trinkets can be bought from someone else for around 25k therefore its not really worth it to enter. I would rather buy one straight out than do all that work to maybe win one and definately lose a decent amount of poe and have a stall Im not interested in once its all over and done with. -Im sorry if you think Im being harsh here, its not my intention. Shandra (Taco) -- This is all great feedback. It's exactly what I need to fine tune some of the criteria. Thanks again for all the feedback. I hope I've answered some questions. Altricious -- Oy! I apologize, I wasnt trying to say your event is worthless, I promise! I was just trying to think of potential issues/problems you might encounter and was putting myself into the shoes of your contestant base. Unfortunately any event host has to look at how people can cheat in an attempt to win. The more loopholes you are made aware of before you start, the smoother things will run once you get to actually run the event. Shandra (Taco) -- No offense taken. It just seemed that a lot of your points weren't from the perspective of the target audience. I fully expect a lot of pirates to find this contest to be outside of their skills and/or assets. The cheating issues definitely need to be ironed out... no doubt about that. Thanks again, Altricious --- Here's a concern/idea:
 * Seed money - I envisioned everyone starting with the same amount of seed money. As Shandra pointed out in her original feedback, $25,000 might be too low, so I would consider changing it to $35,000 or $40,000.  I made an allowance for someone already possessing a stall or ship  because I figured that the types of pirates who would enter this would likely already own some of those things and it could be an unnecessary loss to purchase another solely for the purposes of the contest. That's why whatever items they come in with would be automatically discounted from their profits.  Maybe I didn't explain that well in the write-up.  I should probably put a limit on the assets that they can pre-own. So... an example.  Contestant starts with $35,000 and an Iron stall, he ends with 50,000 and the stall. Since the contestant should have had to buy the stall from his seed money, we would subtract the start up cost from his earnings in the computation. Start up cost for such a stall on Dragon's Nest is 12,600 plus 10 dubs (currently valued about 1,000 poe per dub).  That means that the 50,000 is immediately reduced by 22,600, equaling 27,400.  Credit would be given for the remaining 'asset' of the stall, but only 30%.  (22,600 * 30% = 6,780 credit; 6,780 + 27,400 = 34,180) This makes the final assets of 50,000 really equal to 34,180 turning the aparent profit of 15,000 into a loss of 820.  The other option I considered for judging was to score a winner based on their profit ratio and not set a fixed seed money amount.  That would mean a contestant that turned 50,000 into 75,000 (75,000/50,000 = 1.5) would beat out a contestant that turned 150,000 into 200,000 (200,000/150,000 = 1.33).
 * Cheating - In my mind, I had lumped the gift idea in with begging, but you have a good point. I also hadn't considered people intentionally challenging and losing in PVP or getting one's friends to manipulate the market by buying or selling at extreme prices.  I think all could be spotted by requiring some degree of record keeping on the part of the participants.  Items which were bought or sold 'unnaturally' would stand out.  It would also be fair to exclude any spoils of the sea battle, since pillaging is not permitted under the rules of the contest.
 * Shandra - I recognize your points, but I have to say that I did not envision this as a contest that someone would enter if they were not interested in making money this way as part of their regular pirate existance. I don't expect someone to end up 'stuck' with a stall because I think most participants that would choose to use a stall in the contest would already own one or would want to continue to own one when it's over.  I agree that stalls and shops take a heavy start up cost.  I don't agree that the judging percentage makes everything worthless.  The only item with a heavy discount is a stall and I only did that because it can't be resold.  All of those rates are certainly subject to some adjustment if/when things progress and more trial calcs get done.  I also want to say something regarding the prizes.  I see this contest as something people would want to enter for the bragging rights with the prize being a secondary consideration (unless it was a familiar of course because that will draw everyone).  I agree that if I just wanted a trinket, I'd enter drinking tourneys or buy one.  To me, this is more of an opportunity for someone to prove themselves.  I think it's fairly simple in excecution, straitforward in goal (even if the math might get weird) and pretty low risk for people who actually *want* to be utilizing the economy in addition to pillaging.

Lets say I decide to take my existing stall.

I empty it of almost everything. I carefully document how many of each mineral/enamel/etc I leave in the shop.

I keep a total of 25,000 poe worth of materials in my shop.

In ten days, I expect a profit of 18,000, minimum (that's assuming ten bad days. Ten good days will turn 27,000.)

That's with an established IM shop, with plenty of workers, with a history of multiple swords a day.

And, according to your discussions, 15,000 profit is actualy a loss.

There is no way that a startup stall, starting with no employees and needing to hire them, can possibly turn a profit with this rule setup. Behindcurtai