Well, to begin with, I'm a noob, day 2. I am an advanced noob though, as I've played several MMPOG games on the net, and know what to look for normally.
However, this is a bit different than most games I've played, since as I've read, there won't be resets. At first this seemed very unfair to us noobs, but upon further analysis, I can somewhat understand leaving it this way.
Now, I see that currently the conversion rate for $20 is over 106,000 gold, and I have no idea what it will be like on 9/30/06. But, I don't know how a noob as new as me can hold down 100,000 gold on the final day, and keep it all.
Are there suggestions on how I can keep my gold and have a shot at the conversion, or do I need to spend the next year building my ship up, and spend $100s to catch up?
I started thinking about banks, which I'm sure has been thought about, but maybe a good idea was never brought to the table.
I started thinking, put a bank at every 50 coordinate, so if I'm at a bank, then if I were to move 50 spaces in any direction I would come to the next bank. (ex 0,0 0,50 0,-50 50,50 50,-50 50,-100 -50,-50 and so on). But then I thought, a noob like me would just start "walking the line" to the bank, with my 1, 2, or 3 Radar Upgrade, and some veteran would just campout at 5,5 and hit any noob before they got to the bank.
So, then I thought, well, there are plenty of towns on the map, I went probably 200 straight moves straight south on the Prime Meridian (I think that's what line it was) and probably crossed through 20-40 towns on my way. So, maybe every town has a bank, but how easy is that, to just have a bank whereever. But I do feel you need them located more frequently like this, so that the veterans cannot just "drop their anchor."
So how can people be somewhat discouraged about using the services of a bank?
Well, my thought is charging a fee. The fee could be something like of the gold you plan to deposit, 10% plus 500 gold, OR 20% of the gold you plan to deposit. Whichever fee is smaller.
So a player with 10,000 gold to deposit would either be charged 1,500 and 8,500 gold would be deposited, or 2,000 as a fee, which would obviously not be taken.
But to make this easier on a smaller deposit, a 4,000 deposit would be either 400+500 = 900 charge or 800 following the 20% rule, and therefore depositing just 3,200.
So that is my suggestion. However, I could see where a veteran would prefer, no 20% rule, because then someone would just continue to deposit at every town, and never carry much money on them. So 10% + 500, would almost force players to save up to 3,000-5,000 gold before depositing it into the bank, as that +500 would eat up the deposit.
Now, from a business management standpoint, PTW will payout the same amount of cash based on gold, whether people are able to use the bank or not. The conversion rate will just be higher. Also, I haven’t had much stolen from me yet, so I don’t know what it will be like later on when I’m building toward a costly upgrade, but, I’m sure some players have or will be turned away because they find that there is no way for them to save their money. And with a bank, maybe they feel that they can keep building toward a cashout.
You may also want to charge a daily “security fee” of 1% to each bank account, so you may want to spend your gold on upgrades earlier in the month.
Now, if this is not enough, you can promote the game, bring in more cash, have larger payouts and so on, by charging an actual fee for the bank such as you have to pay $2.00 USD per month to have access to the bank. Or possibly, start a Subscription package for $5/month (if you don’t have one already, that I just have not found) where, for $5 you get access to the bank, plus an additional 100 moves every 12 hours. On other MMPOG sites, I’ve seen owners make quite a bit of money off of people who go on long vacations and forget to turn off their subscription in paypal…or don’t know how.