Is MA actively undermining CLD returns?

jaydub

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Victor 'Brick' Vonn
My questions is one I first queried myself with when I first started buying CLD. Would MA actively undermine the CLD return in a way that minimizes their hurt but maximizes the reduction in payout they have to pay CLD holders thereby actively working against those who have invested avidly in the game. Are we essentially the frogs in the pot of boiling water...temperature rising. Is MA slowly converting current decay mechanisms on Calypso and other planets into non or minimal decay mechanisms slowly downsizing CLD payouts at the same time activity on planet is increasing? Now I'm sure all the CLD naysayers and poopooers will come running to dis CLDs on a thread like this but the real concern I have relates to the following issues:

1) The recent curtain raising on the affect shrapnel has on PP income as it doesn't seem to count towards decay or towards revenue. Thus all loot that would have normally been returned to the loot pool through the TT etc is now a percentage just turned into 'free' ammo and used up.

2) The introduction of low cost FAPs, i.e. resto chips etc that also tend to reduce decay and PP income.


3) ???

4) ???

Brick
 
My questions is one I first queried myself with when I first started buying CLD. Would MA actively undermine the CLD return in a way that minimizes their hurt but maximizes the reduction in payout they have to pay CLD holders thereby actively working against those who have invested avidly in the game. Are we essentially the frogs in the pot of boiling water...temperature rising. Is MA slowly converting current decay mechanisms on Calypso and other planets into non or minimal decay mechanisms slowly downsizing CLD payouts at the same time activity on planet is increasing? Now I'm sure all the CLD naysayers and poopooers will come running to dis CLDs on a thread like this but the real concern I have relates to the following issues:

1) The recent curtain raising on the affect shrapnel has on PP income as it doesn't seem to count towards decay or towards revenue. Thus all loot that would have normally been returned to the loot pool through the TT etc is now a percentage just turned into 'free' ammo and used up.

2) The introduction of low cost FAPs, i.e. resto chips etc that also tend to reduce decay and PP income.


3) ???

4) ???

Brick

Remember it's a revenue share so MA is only taking the other 50% of what is paid out to the CLD holders. Ergo if we're not getting money, neither are they. To that end I would have to assume that MA aren't going to take measures to actively reduce the amount of money that they make so as a CLD owner you would have to believe that your interest and those of MA are aligned.
 
I think they’re probably attempting to find a balance that works for everyone. It needs to be a balance as otherwise the whole place shuts down and everyone loses.

Considering the views on the forum these are the problems for MA:

  • Hardly anyone deposits
  • Those that do often don’t feel rewarded
  • The game is packed with evermore people (especially from growing economies), looking to suck peds out the system.
  • I’m sure the ratio of takers are far too high compared to givers.
  • Those that invested in CLD long term did it to avoid any further deposits (compounding the problem), I said that was a mistake from the start.
  • CLD income is far too good to be sustainable, although potential deposits for new investors buying deeds might counter that to some degree.
  • Other PP’s actively introduced an eco war with new items better than Caly, sanctioned by MA as it created turnover.
  • This forced Calypso to create its own eco war to stay in competition, especially when gear from other PP’s is used on Caly.
  • The player base is not growing at the speed required to cope against the ever increasing skilled player base (it’s top heavy)
  • The eco war then was used to balance the system so the everyone had a chance of some gravy
  • More gear is introduced which will become a requirement, to counter the eco to some degree for those that don’t have the extra tools.

In essence it would appear that "new" gear is now becoming more important than skills.

In many ways this is why I’m looking forward to the pet battles, as it’s something new (be it in EU or compet) that doesn’t carry much baggage from the past.
It will accumulate baggage though and the cycle of nerfs will begin.

At the end of the day this is a game, it wasn’t supposed to turn into an investment paradise. I’m sure there’re more investments than players, how the hell can that continue?
In fact I’m sure there’s so much ped floating around with investors whom only want to invest and not play that it forced MA to create the webshop to gain more deposited peds.

Investors are complaining but you are killing your own game.
When I owned CLD’s, I deposited as well.

Being an investor has more to do with “just taking”, you got to support the damn thing you invested in.

You know I don’t care anymore, all I do is train pets now. I’m shit scared my deposits won’t go anywhere unless I just limit it to events.

Rick
 
What do you mean with hardly anyone deposit ? How can you possible know this ? I agree there are a lot of unused peds in game that are not longer backed up by real dollars but without hard facts i would not dare to tell anyone how much usd are deposited each week on mindarks bank account.

Simply because it would only my intuition basing on my personal standpoint and those of my close friends circle and this can be far from correct because EU is way bigger as the small bubble of people i interact with inside of it.
 
Well only on me MA lost about 14K $ this last year because i stop to depo..dont feel that i get any feedback so i do not depo and i am only 1 avatar in this game.
 
Remember it's a revenue share so MA is only taking the other 50% of what is paid out to the CLD holders. Ergo if we're not getting money, neither are they. To that end I would have to assume that MA aren't going to take measures to actively reduce the amount of money that they make so as a CLD owner you would have to believe that your interest and those of MA are aligned.

The CLD is only 25% of the total revenue of Caly, more likely is that MA got 50% of Caly's revenue first as they're the platform provider and the screw up for MM came out of what's left.
 
The CLD is only 25% of the total revenue of Caly, more likely is that MA got 50% of Caly's revenue first as they're the platform provider and the screw up for MM came out of what's left.


Heh... goes to show, MA isn't giving away prizes for their events, we are.
 
For sure MA is cutting the profit from CLD payout and taking the money out to invest in selected real estates and BPO in South Asia.... We have seen people with official MindArk envelopes and Letter Heads inside Erricson building and have seen BPO building coming up in China town financed by MindArk....

Like all Top 50 Equity listed companies of World take money out of Company account as much equity of company is sold on Stock Exchanges over world....

We smashed some sentences on them, where you got such smartness and growth training as they were sure not from USA and still investing in Erricson company with USA Prepaid Debit cards....

This is what MA doing, making profit for over decade and still showing negative balance sheets.... Go to some official building of MA in Sweden and you find they take money out of CLD prices like they doing bad loot on hunting for months and then a HOF to few selected avatars.... We all like this game and again needs regulation since MA has profited a lot over 3-5 years..
 
I don't think they are trying to deminish CLD's, my feeling is that the current wave of threads about CLDs are more based on a not so clear understanding between the player base and MA-PP on how that relationship works and what a 50 / 25 / 25 split would actually in practice look like under the hood.

CLD's are as they have been since the beginning, a decent place to park your money if your not keen on actively pushing the money around auction/trades yourself and thats not going to change for a long time in my opinion. The only reason that would change is if MA/Calypso decided to do a buy back program.

In short: I think CLD owners can feel save in there investment

Cheers!
Jonas
 
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Well only on me MA lost about 14K $ this last year because i stop to depo..dont feel that i get any feedback so i do not depo and i am only 1 avatar in this game.

Nope there is more avatars like you. What you described is popular especialy amongs former biggest spenders and investors.
Personally withdrawed my hundreds thousnads of peds i had involved here and move them to other work. I thought i will be still playing from time to time, but when you once made big things in here (proterons, dyneras, lvl13 aps etc.) hunting punies and crafting BSM's is not fun anymore.

If MA/FPC don't care about veteran players with 10+ years experience, trusted, loyal customers you can expect nothing else than fall.

Only thing I can imagine makeing me wrong on this matter is some secret MA plan ,which is slowly bringed into light. Something like screwing completly veterans on biggest amount of peds possible ( CLD's, gear devaluation, poor loot) and focus on short term casuals, which can be robbed fast out of few bucks before they realise in what kind of RCE they are, and thats all on regular basis with flood of new ones. In this shape such model can bring MA regular profits, neverless i thing previous one was much better.

MA had dream to make entropia real massive game with milions of users. Maybe after years of trying they finally realised they will not become WoW, WoT or CS:GO in current system shape. Case is they shall start making whole new game for achieving this, not destroying old one in the process
 
[...] understanding between the player base and MA-PP on how that relationship works and what a 50 / 25 / 25 split would actually in practice look like under the hood.[...]


come on...same ppl, same office, same owners and one accounting trick. It's 75/25 not 50/25/25 and whole FPC bullshit was planned just after failed SEE deal to gain that 25%. Wast one of smartest business MA moves. Years after roughly half of CLD's holders thinks they are getting 50%.

[...]
In short: I think CLD owners can feel save in there investment

In short: After recent MA activity in CLD area I don't think so
 
come on...same ppl, same office, same owners and one accounting trick. It's 75/25 not 50/25/25 and whole FPC bullshit was planned just after failed SEE deal to gain that 25%. Wast one of smartest business MA moves. Years after roughly half of CLD's holders thinks they are getting 50%.

Let me re-phrase the misunderstanding point i was trying to make: I think there has NOT been a change in how they handle CLD payouts ever since they introduced it, i think they have always handled prices/quests/revenue split like they did with MM this year.
The only change was the availability/quantity of the quest rewards, and yes you can argue that a rakeback that soul crushingly big that it bottoms out the payout structure for a week is to much and i would agree with that but i dont think it can be argued that that tool is being used to undermine CLD value as a whole.

By the way your 75/25 split example is exactly what i was refering to in my post, in reality a 50/25/25 split equates to 75(MA/PP)/25(players) or in long form:

$100 in to the system:
$100 / 2 (MA takes there share)
$50 / 2 (Players get there 50% of PP earnings or 25% of total)

in the end it equates to: 50%(MA) 25%(PP) 25%(Players)
Or in short 75%(MA/PP) and 25%(Players)

Both 75/25 and 50/25/25 are correct mathematically and refer to the exact same thing, the only difference being that one lumps together the PP and MA and one does not.

This has been how i have understood the calculation from day one. The reason why i think this is such a big misunderstanding is that most people really dont view MA and PPs as seperate entities. Which should be obvious since 97%(yes i pulled that number out of my ass) of the forum population dont know who of the two to blame when something goes wrong.
If you don't view them as seperate then sure this calculation might seem odd to you and yes it might seem shitty that the Calypso company is in the same building as MA but what it comes down to is how are the two companies represented financially and there they are seperate not one.

Have a good day :)
Jonas
 
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yup...i refered to ppl thinking that when they get 10 peds CLD payout there was 20 CLD income total in that period, when in reality there was 40 ! Good you 're not one of them :p
 
Remember it's a revenue share so MA is only taking the other 50% of what is paid out to the CLD holders. Ergo if we're not getting money, neither are they. To that end I would have to assume that MA aren't going to take measures to actively reduce the amount of money that they make so as a CLD owner you would have to believe that your interest and those of MA are aligned.

In reality I think this is false because MA can't pay their employees with PEDs. MA takes money from your deposits. They work with money flow, if they have a positive money flow (deposits are increasing, influx of money is positive and increasing) everything is fine. Especially if the deposits are booming than MA can say they are making money. On the other hand if deposits are stagnating or god forbid even lower than withdraws than there are problems. In the case of latter - your CLD payouts and how much MA get from that is pointless since the company could go bankrupt and you will get 0 back.

Oh and one more thing - there are more PEDs in circulation than MA having USD in their bank accounts. This means that its pointless to talk about these percentages, it all depends on how much USD they have and how their money flow changes.

My point being that yes, they may be doing this on purpose to reduce the amount of free ped they are giving away and thus to increase deposits and decrease withdraws (surely, there are people with loads of CLD who make withdrawals).
 
I hopped in for CLD income check again (I work too much lately, so I haven't been able to play) and saw the low amount of 2 pec per CLD...

I am disgusted by this. Yes, I bought to no longer need to deposit (as much), that doesn't actually hurt the game, because they could also have just taken a loan, and that money would go bye bye. My payouts might be cycled back, so it is win win. Well, it was.

MA/PFC/whoever is hurting the confidence I feel for this game. The trust I have for it. As things are, I refuse to spend a single ped. Hell, I am actually seriously pondering the option of never playing again.

Support case made. They better come up with an extremely professional, and satisfactory, answer.
 
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Not so crazy.

Originally, this thread topic was a fleeting thought of mine as soon as MA made their first statement regarding MM event 'manipulation' and how payout may be affected. Given the returns from this week on CLD revenue I now consider this thread topic a probability rather than a conspiracy theory.

Payouts (ped/CLD)
4 weeks ago, 4.635
3 weeks ago, 4.15
2 weeks ago, 0.021
Last week, 2.877
This week, 1.51

This does not seem possible unless:
- player retaliation and no spending occur, en mass, or
- incorrect averaging of revenue over a few weeks to determine the CLD weekly payout, or
- manipulation of payouts to reduce CLD mark-up and decrease the PED bottom line.

MA should be obligated to explain the repercussions of the MM situation with full disclosure of how the last few weeks CLD payouts were determined. There are no circumstances in which this information should be deemed proprietary. The player base needs to be informed.
 
Be happy, Buy AUD.

Not only is this an inappropriate and rather shameless comment, but its misleading too.

If the parent company is undermining one planets shares, why would they not then do the same to anothers at a good opportunity?

Either MA is manipulating values, and therefore cannot be trusted anywhere....

or MA is not manipulating values, and the comment simply vapid.
 
Not only is this an inappropriate and rather shameless comment, but its misleading too.

If the parent company is undermining one planets shares, why would they not then do the same to anothers at a good opportunity?

Either MA is manipulating values, and therefore cannot be trusted anywhere....

or MA is not manipulating values, and the comment simply vapid.

One huge difference in sightening CLD and AUD is that AUD are determined to a special and closed land area.
CLD is everything on caly, AUD is everything in Arkadian Underground.
 
One huge difference in sightening CLD and AUD is that AUD are determined to a special and closed land area.
CLD is everything on caly, AUD is everything in Arkadian Underground.

It's even more different than that.

CLD is a share of the revenue for the whole] of the Calypso planet.

AUD is a share of the tax (not revenue) of a defined part of Arkadia.
 
One huge difference in sightening CLD and AUD is that AUD are determined to a special and closed land area.
CLD is everything on caly, AUD is everything in Arkadian Underground.

That's not a consequential difference though. My point is that both deeds, in fact all deeds in this universe, are backed by MA.

If somebody is accusing MA of manipulating prices on these deeds then it doesnt really matter what planet its on, what the resource is, or what the stated purposes of the deeds are.

Because the core premise, that the revenue of an asset is being shared, is not actually happening.

Therefore any hope that AUD will turn out any better than CLD is false hope.

So folks have to ask themselves: Is MA manipulating the prices?

My bet is no.

My bet again is that the players exploited the snot out of events over the holidays, and the planets bottom line was severely impacted as a result.
 
It's even more different than that.

CLD is a share of the revenue for the whole] of the Calypso planet.

AUD is a share of the tax (not revenue) of a defined part of Arkadia.

That's how i see it too :)

AUD is a more specific participation all in all.
And, we have no events obviously that may shoot down the revenue of taxincome from AUD's.
On CLD we see that there is a problem we are discussing about atm which needs to be solved or highlighted in details.
 
That's not a consequential difference though. My point is that both deeds, in fact all deeds in this universe, are backed by MA.

If somebody is accusing MA of manipulating prices on these deeds then it doesnt really matter what planet its on, what the resource is, or what the stated purposes of the deeds are.

Because the core premise, that the revenue of an asset is being shared, is not actually happening.

Therefore any hope that AUD will turn out any better than CLD is false hope.

So folks have to ask themselves: Is MA manipulating the prices?

My bet is no.

My bet again is that the players exploited the snot out of events over the holidays, and the planets bottom line was severely impacted as a result.

All in all i go okay with your points.
Sure, EU is backed by MA.
For me is still the way of the participation comparing CLD and AUD another one.

Having not decent revenues on CLD needs to be explained. But, if now it happens MA also gives " participation in CLD'S " regarding giving away bonuses of events on caly, its another new point added to CLD riscs.

If it happens that MA is suffering insufficient bankroll or PED roll, we maybe need to depo more or see an end incoming ? Not sure, but i havent seen some older friends since long. And having many cashing out would suck their company bankroll.

Those CLD's have also option for land plotting stuff, not sure everyone will have it as its quite expensive for normal peeps and those having bigger bankroll may observe the situation w/o interacting much atm.

Manipulating okay, why should they manipulated a thing that worked to a thing that confuses everyone ?
Having CLD's cheaper, for me in sight due compare CLD/AUD. Which is more a result of the "is" situation, i wouldnt start to manipulate stuff. Feeding feelings like "not trusting" is poison for everything, so henche a last option to pull.
 
My bet again is that the players exploited the snot out of events over the holidays, and the planets bottom line was severely impacted as a result.

I agree, but the lack of transparency and inconsistent/extremely low CLD payout cannot simply be due to a low bottom line which was accounted for with the 0.02 ped payout.

The 2.8 accounts for residual MM payouts or lack of player confidence. A secondary drop, 2 weeks after MM results in a 30% drop this week to 1.5 PED. This does not make sense given the average of 3.5 prior to the MM mess, and the 2.8 ped the week prior which suggests recovery from MM.

It's all food for thought and everyone will have their opinion, simple or complex. Either way it conjures more questions than answers.
 
Now that AUDs have sold out, I believe the situation may have changed.
IF the aim was to get AUDs out of the way to make room for ComPet deeds, then that has now been achieved.

Doing more nasty stuff to CLD payouts could undermine confidence in them, but then the market value would simply drop to try and balance out perceived risk: opportunity. I don't see how that could now benefit ComPet; if anything, undermining one set of deeds is likely to create less trust in the other type too.

On the other hand, we are now apparently seeing a mechanism by which MA can divert 'returns' away from CLDs and into players' loot 'bonuses'. Yes, the Caly PP has a worse balance sheet on paper too, but MA can improve its take at the same time, so it really is CLD holders paying for bonuses.

And why have we just had another pathetic payout? Well, it's not transparent, so speculation unless MA says - and I'm not in a positive mood right now. Is that what MA wants right before the launch of something 'big'?
:scratch2:
 
all the amo that was given away has to be hunted whit so your going to get some revenu back in the later week not everything is lost
 
I am sure all CLD holders will all see a positive balance in their compensation accounts soon. Wont they MA?? :)
 
well more profit for the other planet

they can have it both way there a event they get a portion of the profit it not like land area that they get a profit of the loot looted

all investment in the world are not garrenty the only thing you have whit ma is there word

i lost over 30k dollars in investment in stock back in 2007 i sold overthing i had and now use the money for my business the best place to put it

if i loose money its my fault

almost every one in this game everything is investhing that why the game dont grow we need more consumer players not investor
 
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