We are this community, we make it what it is.

Just reading through the thread about scamming above, and was not very happy with either the story (I feel bad for that person), or the response (there are a lot of extremely selfish, dishonest people defending their "right" to be nasty profiteers).

I think we as a fairly small community in a game that COULD (if we do things right and the devs do their part) grow back to its former size and activity, or even better... need to do a couple of things, listed below.

1) Be smart -- don't sell your runes to unknown persons, don't trade with known scammers, and generally avoid trading outside the site itself. (Really, don't sell your runes at all, as it hurts the game, the company, and the community).

2) Be vigilant -- if you see a scam in action, if you notice a scammer lurking around, report them in chat, in forums, and to mods/devs.

3) Be caring -- take the time and energy to nurture the noobs. Play some TG games with them, make some unranked battleground games with them. Donate some of your extra runes to a runepool, give decent runes to them in unequal trades, just to get them started and happy.

4) Get real -- this is an online fantasy game. There are no big prize payouts, there is really no way to profit in real dollars unless you are willing to be quite... unpleasant. Get the runes you want to use in game by earning gold and buying packs. If you've got the extra cash and don't want the grind, buy the packs with hard cash.

The success of the overall game at this point depends in part on our actions. Do you like the game? Then act accordingly.

Finally, I really think we need the Devs/Mods/DOG administration to step up, here. Clearly the secondary market has always been and remains a serious problem. There are many legal ramifications to explicit support of secondary trading shops, and legal ramifications to allowing sale of the digital property. They've (so far) turned a blind eye to some of the more reputable folks that run trade shops (and buy/sell on the side)... that might have to stop.

However, we as a community enjoy the service those trade shops provide, and Pox benefits from that side of things in many ways.

Time to get lateral and creative: How about if DOG hires or subcontracts the traders that have proven themselves to be legitimate, honest, diligent and above-board? Hire a lawyer to wend through the tangled thickets, and figure out a way that A) the tradeshops can remain active, B) both DOG and those shops can make a decent profit on legitimate trades and sales of rare/out-of-print runes, and C) the scammers, sharks, losers, and thieves who are stealing (yes, it is theft) from the community, the company, and the artists can get shut down, shut out, and shut up.

 

Hate to throw a monkey wrench into your well-thought out post, but..................people are ********. There is no way this plan will work due to this one simple fact. Very few people in this game can actually be trusted, or counted upon to be kind, honest folks who truly have the best interests of the game at heart. I personally lost my faith in humanity years ago, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.

 

I know, me too. But there are ways to prevent the typical "tragedy of the commons" that always seems to come about... I got scammed pretty badly several times when I first started playing, and never forgot it... I've always wanted to figure out a way to get some long-term, final, cold-blooded group revenge...

 

Stand up to bullies!

And Jazzypoo, you may get a kick out of being all hipster and cynical (or you may not, I don't know your life), but I'm gonna throw a LoL reference at you real quick- in LoL, for those unaware, you're on a team with 4 other people. As you might imagine, tensions can run a little high sometimes and flaming isn't the most infrequent occurrence in the game. The thing I never understand about this is that a decent number of the people flaming still think they're trying to win the game.

But there is almost no benefit to creating a whole lot of teamwide tension and disharmony. If you want to win, you either have to solo-carry (nigh impossible) or work as a team, and continue to try to work as a team.

That requires constant effort from everyone, and yeah maybe constant vigilance as a group for people that break these norms. And from what I can tell, this carries over to Pox. So once someone steps outside the system, unless they're brought back in somehow, everyone else might think it looks better.

Might be kinda disjointed, distracted atm

 

Im kinda new to the game, but I think that all this secondary market and scammers problem could easily be solved if DOG gave us a currency for the game and made a new trading system.

The idea would work something like this:
1) We should be able to include gold or crystals in our trades (not both, just one of them).
2) Public trades should be changed to "Public sales", so I post a rune at a certain prize and anyone could pay that amount of gold/crystals to get it.
3) Rune for rune trades should be limited to private trades.

In this way every rune would get a price according to its usefullnes and supply/demand, the secondary market could be completely eliminated and changing the rune/rune trades to rune/gold trades in which you can see every copy in the marketplace of the rune you want with its prize should eliminate most scams.

This is not my idea, its completely stolen from urban rivals, an online tcg with a rather big community (with the exception that in UR, gold is completely useless), you should check it out to see what im talking about, that trading system is wonderfull.

 

Since Red had a thread about community, I'll chime in with some thoughts with a minimum of sarcasm, antagonism and/or irrelevance.

Al Capone doesn't exist if morons don't pass the poorly considered Prohibition legislation. I am neutral on alcohol and barbituates being something that need exceptional controls, btw. However, I am not neutral on the need to plan for the consequence cascade that follows if you do put controls in place. The gray and/or black markets of Poxnora exist because the official system sucks. Legendary and Limited runes are too important to simply opt out of acquiring. The majority of those runes do not exist in the system anymore and you can't reliably buy them within the system. That is a fact because of decisions by the developers. The question is whether you fix it now. I am not shy about spending money but I have always drawn a line when it comes to runes like Garu Chosen or Seeker of the Source; the economy just got way too ridiculous. That economy has literally strangled the player base which should absolutely motivate the developers to do something. Instead, either none of them have taken sufficient classes in economics or they have some rather quaint idealism channeling their laissez faire approach. Enough already. You've screwed with the economy often enough with policy changes. Decide which way you are going to make runes reliably accessible for new and existing players and what part you want third-party traders to play. Because, if you think you are doing that now, then you have a problem because you really, really aren't.

 

Why do you think I only ever play ARAM or bot games? These things never happen there (very rarely in ARAM sometimes), and I can feel secure in the knowledge that no matter what goes down, people just won't feel the need to flame each other since bot/ARAM games don't matter at all.

And before you suggest it, normal games are usually just as bad as ranked games.

 

I wasn't going to suggest that normal games are better than ranked games, knowing you and your general attitude I'd assume they'd be about the same. In arams and bot games your champ selection is taken almost out of the picture, so that's a huge chunk out of the way. Still, you can have ragers in either format. I experience more ragers in ARAM and more bad new guys in bots, generally speaking

 

My thoughts 100%. Sadly, the boneman is right.

 

I believe that currently Owls have all power to make this game popular and accessible. They are doing revamp. They could before putting revamp online also think about new trading and runes accessability system so people could profit from unfair trades and 3rd party trading sites wouldn't have upper hand in getting runes for players. If they just could figure out how to make game fun both for old players and new players.

Or they could just nerf everything and then release powercreeped expansion for fast cash.

 

I'd recommend reading this bagel story ^_^

In general I'd have to agree that the large majority of people are good or at least decent individuals.
The truly unscrupulous are the minority but things can be done to the system to minimize those negative interactions.

 

As much as I would love to not trade outside of this site - I gave up on trading with people long ago. There are several reasons for this. 1. People are generally not fair. If you offer someone a fair trade, they will want a great trade instead. They want massive overbids. 2. There really aren't many people to trade with in the first place. 3. Many runes are not easily available through trading with people, or doing so would take an exceptionally long time. 4. Many runes just aren't available unless you shell out cash to someone who has a huge stockpile. Some people don't want trades, they want to 'cash out' so to speak. The devs do not give people a reasonable opportunity to obtain many runes they want in a simple way, or even at all.

This is one of the biggest problems with most card games I play or have played. Playing the game should be the most important thing, in my opinion. Unfortunately, many games are too worried about upsetting 'investors', 'sharks', 'speculators', collectors, etc. It's a big reason I haven't gotten back into MTG. The cost of some cards is just absurd. Of course WOTC won't reprint certain cards because they don't want to upset people sitting on stockpiles of cards (which are now useless) as they are simply being hoarded like a commodity. Sure, those people may put some of those back into the market - but almost never at an affordable price to common people.

Why did this format die out? Why did this game die out? People are priced out of the market or cannot get what they want. In a game like Magic I can understand it a little bit. They actually print cards for the paper version. For an online only game like Pox though, I can't understand. I always thought this was supposed to be a strategy game with cards/runes - not a stock market simulator.

/end rant

 

What's worse is that all those, who cries about trade sharks and unfair trades don't want any changes to trade market.

 

Thank you for a very interesting read

 

You mean the complaints of sharks that got sharked and scammers that got scammed? I could care less about them.

 

All I see here are a lot of long words presented to fool the people with only a superficial knowledge of the subject area (much like yourself). While I agree with the last two of your four points, the previous two have been disproved by numerous case studies, naturalistic observation, and anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In his classic and timeless treatise, Charles Cooley wrote "The imaginations people have of one another are the solid facts of society". His work, Human Nature and the Social Order, is an examination of the flash point at which the human imagination ignites to produce the infinitely adjustable social temperature without which man has not yet learned to lived. That flash point may produce the cold of the concentration camp or the warmth of the family, but the point is that the idea of people being innately compassionate is absurd.

Surely a person will be troubled by the sight of suffering, as long as the troubled feeling is confined to feelings and thoughts alone. When it comes to actual behaviours, it is rare to see a person give more than a few quick sympathetic words before moving on their way. People suffer every day in various parts of the world, yet we are not overwhelmed with guilt and emotion at this knowledge. Outliers exist on both sides, as they always do, and obvious if a person's need is clearly dire, help will be offered more readily, but the only reason we are able to live in this culture is because we have developed a tolerance against the suffering of others. Consider the homeless man, pitifully begging for food on a cold winter's day; hundreds of people walk by him without even a second thought as to his suffering. If he's lucky, he'll get a few coins dropped in his cup, or if he's REALLY lucky, he'll get offered to be bought a sandwich by some especially philanthropic individual. More than likely however, he will starve and die eventually.

No case has more captured the stark realities of these facts more than that of Catherine Genovese. You have likely already heard about it, but for those that have not, let me outline the important details:

- Catherine Genovese was stabbed to death outside her home in a borough of Queens, New York in 1964

- Genovese arrived home at 3:15 PM from her job at a bar, whereupon she parked her car approximately 30 m from her front door

- As she approached her house, she was set upon by a man named Winston Moseley; Catherine ran, but Moseley overtook her and stabbed her in the back twice

- Her cries for help were heard by several of the neighbours, only one of which attempted to help by shouting (from his apartment window) "Leave that girl alone!"

- Moseley fled, while Catherine staggered to her front door and became unconscious from her wounds; still no one came to her aid

- Moseley returned 10 min later to stab her several more times, **** her, rob her, then leave; these attacks spanned the time frame of over half an hour. Catherine was eventually found, rushed to a hospital, and died later that night.

This is the most famous of several cases in the same vein that showcase the utter lack of concern and compassion humans have for one another. In the official police report, one neighbour reported hearing Catherine's cries, but was unwilling to open his window because he "didn't want to let the heat out of my apartment; I thought it was just some trick anyway". In total, 38 people saw the murder take place but none of them did anything. Keep in mind that I am aware of the existence of cases on the other end of the spectrum, and it is precisely the existence of both kinds of cases which leaves the true nature of this debate up to philosophers: are humans innately good, or are they innately evil? Psychology merely presents one view, and as an open-minded individual it is my belief that psychology alone cannot solve these problems. You, on the other hand, speak as if what has been found up until now is undeniable proof for one side over the other. The human mind cannot be fathomed in absolute terms, and because of this I think we should simply agree to disagree.

 

- Now compile all this data about human compassion/nature/norms and cross reference it with the age of social media and it's effect on human nature. Integrate the low risk anonymity provided by the internet and the next to zero accountability for ones actions, behavior or stances. Now compound that with internet alt's and alter-egos created on the internet. Now your left with a husk of realistic human interactions after wading through that.

- I would then point you further down the rabbit hole of how impossible it is to try to superimpose "empirical" data, based on "real" human interactions, on to an "internet" front end masquerading as "realistic" human behavior. People are inherently good is a possible truth, but that is within the guise of a real life setting with repercussions and transparency. If at my job when I screwed up I could just disappear altogether or walk in the next day as a new identity it would likely have an effect on my behavior in general.

tl;dr - Can we stop with the gen/ed psych tutorials in a game forum, it is being used grossly out of context and only serves to prove the point that the internet allows people to get a little off the reservation in terms of realistic self awareness.

 

Pox should have its own rune trading service, you don't have to support a 3rd party for the game to have that. All they need to do is offer store credit for trade ins at a reasonable rate and then the playerbase will provide the inventory. This doesn't negate the purpose of the shard store because the shard store doesn't have variable stock and pricing, but its prices will need to make sense existing alongside a rune trade store.

It wouldn't be hard to add a few formatted tiers to ranked play where the lower rank formats have a few rarity restrictions in the runes allowed (or use a point based system for deck building). this provides a 'safer' environment for new players (who mostly wouldn't be able to exceed the rarity restrictions anyway), and it provides an incentive to rank up. The specific restrictions for each teir can be debated, but please forget about rarity = power, this is about the perception of p2w and the new player experience.

 

not sure how you test the effect anonymity has on the behavior of primates, but my guess is the monkeys would act like selfish pricks online. the internet is like the windshield of your car, for some reason, being behind it induces or excuses a level of behavior that wouldn't be attempted face to face.

 

@Astamir A wee excessive mate considering Jazz's final line was "let's agree to disagree"
But hey, yeah people, they can be ****s and they can be compassionate beings as so happily proved by this thread. Woo Social Sciences.