I don't see myself ever giving coins to a crowd fund or anything as long as theres things like Avatar Size to be bougten, which is already looking to be a pretty big investment overall.
And if more things like profile customization come along using the same system, I can't help but think participation in anytihng would end up being low due to people saivng up to make their profiles more flashy.
So how long before people start getting banned for using alts to farm coins?
Cause it's going to happen.
I like the idea of making negative ratings cost coins, but who would actually pay to rate child molester? I think having it unlock after a certain level would be better, assuming it's actually staying and isn't just a placeholder
I feel like this will backfire if people get a kick out of seeing how many coins they can make people 'waste' by making the worst possible posts
Well ideally, coins would be far less stingy and certain things much cheaper or pricier. A name change should be way up there compared to avatar sizes, (though increasing in cost exponentially obviously) and bedazzling being equally tied to coins as it is to post activity.
is avatar size really that desirable anymore tho? i feel like the massive and cheap background image kinda eclipses it. The only real use for an avatar now is to do cool alignment/emphasis stuff against your background image, which generally doesn't even require a very big avatar to do. There's gonna be so much stuff to use coins for ultimately and I don't really see myself spending anymore on my avatar, but maybe that's just me.
Tie coin income to level. Higher level, coins become easier to get. Level tied to post and age just like blue->gold on oldpunch.
A fair point.
Could probably do some really cool things with a larger avatar with the background system.
But this also doesn't really cover anything else that may come with coins for profile customization, I'm assuming titles/profile stuff would be next. In which I would prioritize that over giving coins to get an emote added to the forum.
Don't think so small custom subforums is something still on the table, but tossed temporarily due to spam. Great way to have coins be useful. Same with the pixel art type of content, with emphasis on user creativity. That was arguably the best aspect of Labpunch, and I'd be quite sad to see the entire idea scrapped.
I mean hey if we actually get ideas for stuff that coins are actually useful for, go ahead, but I don't think we will actually find that many. All I'm saying is that in the end coins are a pretty much just a gimmick, that we shouldn't let have too much weight. If the prize for sticking around long enough is just access to a silly joke forum and a gold username, I dont particulary care. But stuff like "crowd banning" or "collectively buying convenience features" sounds straight up dumb and contrived for the sake of justifying a half-thought out idea that shouldn't be treated as anything more than it is: a gimmick.
I mean, yeah, it's a gimmick I suppose, but Facepunch has just been a forum, something simple and mundane, and really unique mostly for our community, not so much anything about the site per se, other than perhaps ratings of posts and lack of annoying things like banners/sigs.
You can imbue more into FP than just "people talk to each-other about nerd stuff." Unfortunately our small size and simple design means there's very little bringing me here besides news and the people. I can't discuss many interesting topics like I can on Reddit because we aren't really big enough to have that kind of wide ranging focus, so world building, LEGO, etc. have to stay on an /r/. At least with the gamification you can elevate FP's big draw, the people, with more personalization options. As painful as it is to say, FP could take some inspiration from stuff like Second Life, just in forum format, especially since so many users here were so active on their for a long time, even if it wasn't for me. It's obvious that a lot of people here take customization and roleplay and silly ways of making themselves unique pretty seriously. The more options there are for creativity, the better.
If creativity and personalization was so important, why are we locking it behind coins then?
I mean, you have also deal with the whole "make people active and browse other threads and get out of their comfort zone" problem as well. Incentivize users interacting outside of niche communities by allowing cheap but meaningful additional personalization options. We all have to make money to pay our bills, but we still like to spend some of our hard earned cash on clothes and furniture to express ourselves, and a part of what makes that self expression valid is that we had to work to be able to show that. Saying "I worked for that" is just as much a part of the self expression as the thing you're showing off, since you're choosing, with limited funds, what elements of expression are most important to you to show off. The self expression has a new sense of weight and worth, like PS trophies or Steam badges or like real life hobbies (especially expensive ones).
Honestly the main reason I come to facepunch is the community and moderation. This board is great to discuss things on, since it's pretty open-minded as long as you aren't shitposting or flaming. We're getting more customization options than we have had before, so that's really nice.
(Bring back the old emoticons tho)
So it can be a dick waving contest of course.
a dick is a valid form of self expression as well
Except that isn't what's going to happen. Coin earnings will inevitably (and already have been afaik) hard capped to prevent spam, and I don't see how you are particulary encouraged to "explore" other parts of the forums if your natural interest already drew you towards the ones you already frequently visit. I don't know about you to be fair, but coins will not magically create interest in sections, if they didn't harbour any to begin with, for whatever reason that might be. Neither will the stuff that you can "earn" be any more impressive really. Your activity on the forum doesn't necessarily say anything about your qualities as a poster.
As for the achievement analogy, I guess I'll have to take you by your word, because I rarely cared for them in particular.
I mean, coin earnings don't have to be capped, that can obviously be changed; a lot is subject to change. If there are other ways of preventing spam discovered, then coin earnings can be less restricted. No reason to assume anything is set in stone. Yes, while I'm drawn to threads I frequent, I also never used ticker/popular threads and thus browsed the forums traditionally from the get go. I'm sure there are people who are browsing similarly now because of coins, but it is impossible to make assumptions either way.
The idea is that your qualities as a poster would award you more "funbux." It's a win-win, you get a better opinion of a poster, the poster gets to have people have better opinions of them, and they get coins to spend. You may not think a poster better because they were gold, and someone wasn't a better poster because they were gold, but it was a meaningless gimmick that became an intrinsic part of our forum. Gold added nothing and was awarded even more arbitrarily than coins, and thus meant even less objectively, but it didn't stop the actual effect it had on the users who got it and the blues who wanted it. For better or worse, it affected our site and was even less impressive than "funbux." Not to mention how people reacted when ratings were public on FP.
Statistically at least, gamification and long-term rewards for activity do incentivize behavior; it's now a fundamental element of pretty much every game now, from ranks in COD, to hats in TF2, to achievements and trophies and badges and new themes or Garry's Mod deathrun servers with playermodels and trails and taunts. It may not be your cup of tea, but it undeniably gets people motivated to keep doing what they're doing. We don't need that per se, but again, it can and already has incentivized better behavior is users and can have the secondary affect of useful but ultimately cosmetic rewards.
The entire premise of coins in the first place was that they wouldn't be tied to your explicit qualities as a poster. It's meant to be tied to your levels of engagement with the website (i.e. you can get a coin a day just by visiting the site without posting, probably more tbh). The amount of coins you can possibly earn also quickly tapers off, as does EXP, with a soft-cap per day (I believe coins hard-cap at a certain amount already but I'm not sure what it is atm). It encourages longevity, not necessarily quality. The idea being that the standard Facepunch moderation will enforce the quality we've come to know and love whereas this new system will provide longevity that OldPunch was sorely lacking.
Using your example of TF2 hats, there are some power users that scrape every second they can to farm hats, then you have casual players who couldn't care less. The amount of hats obtained doesn't necessarily determine the quality of the person who has those hats, all it is is a means of showing how long they've been active. Deathrun is another good example, a player could have a shit ton of top-tier skins/trails/etc. but that player could also be a complete douche even if he hasn't been banned from the server. All it incentivizes is longevity, not quality. Moderation is for quality control.
Speak for yourself. I never gave a solitary shit about gold. Sure, I went with a big avatar, but having a bigger avatar hardly defined my facepunch experience.
The RC? Good for a quick laugh. So are a ton of other things. GMF and OIFY were/are garbage.
Gold primarily was just rewraded to users who been on the site long enough and used well enough (excluding boostar), sure it's main benefit to most people were big avatars. But here as it stands, the only real benefit is continued access to GMF.
If I had to give input, unless garry wants to continue dishing out benefits to golds, I don't think it should be as expensive as it is on the store.
Lock it behind a level requirement, and then a much smaller coin payment
5 coins - decrease the max avatar size of another user by 1 pixel
finally we can combat anime avatars
namechange at 50 coins feels dirt fuckin cheap for something that lets people skirt stigmas they gain. Feels like it should be something that takes a very long time to earn compared to any other feature
still better than microsoft who charge REAL MONEY
most profile changes should be more expensive
let me sell my avatar size ups back for coins.
Bring back respected user - but it can only be earned from other posters giving coins.
Require something like X different users to donate Y amount of coins to a specific user specifically for that status.
And make it noticeable other than tagline under the username; preferably making their name purple or some other color again.
Put all of the ratings behind loot boxes and then make the loot boxes cost 100 coins but you can't open the loot boxes without keys that cost $3.99
Can I suggest an idea to not implement?
Saw this on the roadmap:
Coin Funds
User Bans
Allow users to nominate other users to be banned, and to crowdfund that. Likely to be high coin amounts, short durations.
I don't like this idea at all, even if it's going to be coin expensive.
I'd like to preemptively nominate EmperorScorpius for a ban.
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