Question: Put castles on the auction

Few Scars

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Bjorn Bjorn Longstaff
Hi Caly Dev team

The following castles are still MA owned. They should be released to the auction house as they lay dormant.


Grauschloss Castle - MindArk owned, Pos: 65873, 70031

Gustavborg Castle - MindArk owned, Pos: 58385, 84069

Wulfstone Castle - MindArk owned, Pos: 78317, 95546

Many players would like to own and use them. Please action this request and let us know when this will happen? Maybe next week?

Regards
 
How much do u think 1 castle will be bought for?
 
I think they should slowly release all estates they own. Still a lot around...
 
How much do u think 1 castle will be bought for?

As long as its starting bid of 200k should be okay then otherwise no :)

I think they should slowly release all estates they own. Still a lot around...

There's no reason to do this as it would hurt the current owners investments. People wanting to buy estates can always do so by going to existing sellers of estates for example my Morningtear castle shop has all kinds of estates on sale.
 
There's no reason to do this as it would hurt the current owners investments. People wanting to buy estates can always do so by going to existing sellers of estates for example my Morningtear castle shop has all kinds of estates on sale.

Correct me if I'm wrong since I've never owned any LA/castle/shop/booth here

* If MA sells those castles themselves with, let's say, 100k PED starting bid, that $10k will come to them instead to other players and MA is free to do whatever they want with the cash since the new castle owner now only has 1 pec castle deed (?), so that $10k is no longer liability for MA (ofc after 6 months according to the EULA).

* I don't really see all those shop/LA/castle owners as investors. Investors are the ones that own company stock in Mindark itself. shop/LA/castle owners are just, well, players that deposit a lot of money and decide to "own" a part of the game world, which still belongs to Mindark.
 
There's also a ton of apartments, shops, and other assets in game Mindark's never parted with either...

They haven't done much with the snug idea yet...

Perhaps make the snugs upgradeable to a castle... I think originally they wanted people to have 9 clds together for a plot, etc. Maybe if you turn in 100 clds you get a castle... and it'd convert them from cld or cld(x) to NOTHING but the castle plot deed?
 
There's also a ton of apartments, shops, and other assets in game Mindark's never parted with either...

They haven't done much with the snug idea yet...

Perhaps make the snugs upgradeable to a castle... I think originally they wanted people to have 9 clds together for a plot, etc. Maybe if you turn in 100 clds you get a castle... and it'd convert them from cld or cld(x) to NOTHING but the castle plot deed?

If MA were smart they would offer the castles as a complete trade in for CLD.
Example: 100 CLDs and you get the castle deed, thats it.
Then that is extra revenue they no longer need to payout weekly...not sure what the average dividend for the CLD's are right now but it used to be around 3ped each, so that would be 300ped a week/15,600ped a year, no longer required to give out.

May not sound like much and i'm sure they could have a reverse bid using CLD's starting at like 300 CLD or something and decrease by 1 a day or every 12 hours, etc. and get quite a bit of CLD's out of the game.
Do that for a whole bunch of things they still own, estates, LA's, banks, malls, items etc and many CLD will be out of the game allowing more for development.
 
If MA were smart they would offer the castles as a complete trade in for CLD.
Example: 100 CLDs and you get the castle deed, thats it.
Then that is extra revenue they no longer need to payout weekly...not sure what the average dividend for the CLD's are right now but it used to be around 3ped each, so that would be 300ped a week/15,600ped a year, no longer required to give out.

May not sound like much and i'm sure they could have a reverse bid using CLD's starting at like 300 CLD or something and decrease by 1 a day or every 12 hours, etc. and get quite a bit of CLD's out of the game.
Do that for a whole bunch of things they still own, estates, LA's, banks, malls, items etc and many CLD will be out of the game allowing more for development.

An asset they sold for 1k peds valuation they now would need to buy back at 2k ped valuation. Seems like a pretty crappy deal to me. Yes it will reduce the payouts they need to make but then those payouts are itself dependant on how well the game is doing, which if they are doing badly will turn to zero anyways.

I do not see any reason for them to not sell it for direct peds and make it dependant on CLD purchases as it will invariably reduce the number of bidders and thereby reduce the amount they can get for the assets.

As for castle, put a TP near it and put it for auction at 100/150k SB with no BO and 1 month bidding period. :)
This is assuming they have plans to sell it, if not then let it be as it is.

Divinity
 
An asset they sold for 1k peds valuation they now would need to buy back at 2k ped valuation. Seems like a pretty crappy deal to me.

Well its not a good deal for players :)
You would think that MA need to buy back at current valuation, but that's not really the case.
There are plenty of players out there who would go for that deal. The valuation wouldn't matter as much as it should, only what the players would trade for it, hence the reverse bid. It would get to the level where someone would think its a good enough deal for them to make money (or maybe they just like to have whatever that item/estate/la/caste is for themself). End of the day, its some pixels for MA and they can always come up with more whenever they feel like it.

Sure the player would be comparing it against current valuation, but they will also take into account the fact that someone else may scoop it up first. Not everyone has your business smarts in this game Div, there are many that over pay for, well anything.

And they would get some CLD's out of the game for good (like they have with accounts that have been banned/abandoned, etc).

And yes, they would make more from selling direct, but if they plan to have the game around for a long time, reducing the circulating CLD is a good thing for them (not for us LOL).
 
An asset they sold for 1k peds valuation they now would need to buy back at 2k ped valuation.

Divinity

I'm not sure how I ultimately think of the idea of doing CLD bids over PED, but MA wouldn't be buying back at 2k. The only thing that would factor into costs in this case would be if MA wants to consider what they "paid" for development of castles, (time, labor, etc.) in the first place to factor in (i.e., Net gain = 1k gain from previous deed sale - "PED" spent creating the estates - to-date CLD payouts + future CLD payouts).

The MU on the deeds is irrelevant to MA at least at this point in time if they went this route. Not so much the case on the player side, but doing this from MA's perspective could be smarter than doing a straight deed buyback with PED depending on how it was done. That's solely from an ROI perspective though. If it was a straight buyback, then MU on the deeds would matter to MA.

The tougher question is how to release MA owned estates. They probably should be making unowned ones at least available to a degree, but definitely not a mass-release either. This is probably complicated by actual MA owned estates vs unclaimed estates or inactive players, which is a different subset I thought was supposed to be auctioned off whenever the players account was eventually closed for inactivity after a year or whatever it was.
 
Well its not a good deal for players :)
You would think that MA need to buy back at current valuation, but that's not really the case.
There are plenty of players out there who would go for that deal.

I'm not sure how I ultimately think of the idea of doing CLD bids over PED, but MA wouldn't be buying back at 2k. The only thing that would factor into costs in this case would be if MA wants to consider what they "paid" for development of castles, (time, labor, etc.) in the first place to factor in (i.e., Net gain = 1k gain from previous deed sale - "PED" spent creating the estates - to-date CLD payouts + future CLD payouts).

I am sorry but I really cannot follow your train of thought guys. Economics 101..well might be 401. You cannot use tough to obtain item as a currency for purchase of another item with maximum efficiency/value. This has recently been tried on Arkadia where they put arkoins as currency to obtain a firebird. I had foretold it would end badly and that it did. If i remember correctly Forgo got it for some 15-20k peds. Does not make the worth of the firebird 15-20 cause if he wants to sell he can easily get 35/40k peds for the same. The bottleneck was the fact that someone had to buy/hunt for arkoins and then make a bid.

What you guys are suggesting is absolutely similar. There is hardly 20-30 CLD's on AH. So only those with 100+ CLD's would be able to bid in your test case scenario or if someone else needs to bid they would drive the price of CLD to 3000 peds wherein that entire value transfer happens to the person holding the CLD and not MA.

Please explain why would MA not sell an asset for 200k peds and instead sell it for 75 CLD instead when with the 200k they can buy more CLD's out of market themselves. How does cost of creating an asset come into picture here. The cost of creating is the same in both cases. We are talking about the process of sale and what would bring MA the maximum amount of advantage in terms of sales.

What i do agree with is that any sale that happens needs to be staggered and only if cash is needed and they have a purpose to use the cash. There is so much of real estate in player hands which is completely dead that we cannot say that MA have not released enough of them already.

Just my 2 cents,

Divinity
 
I am sorry but I really cannot follow your train of thought guys. Economics 101..well might be 401. You cannot use tough to obtain item as a currency for purchase of another item with maximum efficiency/value. This has recently been tried on Arkadia where they put arkoins as currency to obtain a firebird. I had foretold it would end badly and that it did. If i remember correctly Forgo got it for some 15-20k peds. Does not make the worth of the firebird 15-20 cause if he wants to sell he can easily get 35/40k peds for the same. The bottleneck was the fact that someone had to buy/hunt for arkoins and then make a bid.

What you guys are suggesting is absolutely similar. There is hardly 20-30 CLD's on AH. So only those with 100+ CLD's would be able to bid in your test case scenario or if someone else needs to bid they would drive the price of CLD to 3000 peds wherein that entire value transfer happens to the person holding the CLD and not MA.

Please explain why would MA not sell an asset for 200k peds and instead sell it for 75 CLD instead when with the 200k they can buy more CLD's out of market themselves. How does cost of creating an asset come into picture here. The cost of creating is the same in both cases. We are talking about the process of sale and what would bring MA the maximum amount of advantage in terms of sales.

What i do agree with is that any sale that happens needs to be staggered and only if cash is needed and they have a purpose to use the cash. There is so much of real estate in player hands which is completely dead that we cannot say that MA have not released enough of them already.

Just my 2 cents,

Divinity


Good points and i think its economics 601 :p
 
What you guys are suggesting is absolutely similar.

Not quite. In this case, it's something that costs MA money, unlike the Arkoins for Arkadia. To them, getting rid of X amount of deeds will give them more income/savings than a straight PED amount in a sale without even having to spend PED to buy back the deeds (let's assume no costs associated with developing the castles for now this time).

So if MA gets say 1 CLD for something, the deed alone has no TT value and MU is irrelevant to them unless they were paying to buy the deed. That's the key thing. They could set a sort of auction minimum to essentially say X deeds = 1 castle. It doesn't matter what the MU is because the conversion rate is at least X + whatever additional bids are. At that point, the exchange to MA is worth whatever the payouts on the CLDs are for their entire lifetime without paying anything to get them.

So let's say MA sold a castle for 150k PED direct (~worth of 75 CLD) instead. What then happens is if they wanted to buy CLDs, they would be reliant on people first selling without incentive, but they'd also have to deal with the potential for MU increasing while doing that.

Creating an exchange for a unique item instead let's them potentially spur the first, and control the second (i.e., give us this deed that has no immediate value to us, but has future payouts, for the castle that has no immediate value to us). The latter one is probably the bigger thing though. At that point the economics of PED doesn't matter as much because a unique exchange has been setup for something else. It's true if they lowball that exchange rate and don't value the "lure" effect of getting deeds not on the market appropriately compared to maybe getting more from a direct sale, they wouldn't be better off with the CLD route. That's part of the figuring they'd have to do though, especially since there's a bit of an apples or oranges comparison in accounting for that lure effect, so it's not easy to really total up all the unique added values from doing a CLD exchange.

This is all why valuation with barter and trade is really complicated when a currency isn't directly involved in the exchange (once-removed in this case). Some of the very things you mention about availability play in to what could benefit MA.

This is one way things can work, but obviously things could be screwed up too and not work in MAs favor depending on how they would set it up. Maybe no one really wants a castle that bad and this isn't enough to coax out the players MA would want to target hoarding CLDs to exchange them for something. MA would need to figure the value themselves, but it wouldn't be as simple as just comparing a direct PED sale and buying back deeds.
 
well, if they did the cld thing proposed here, since shopkeepers aren't on auction too much, especially as some seem to be putting them in apartments lately, perhaps an 'upgrade' to the existing castles and the new ones they release could include converting all the item points in to shop points?

upgrade of that nature could work for apartments too, etc. It'd be way more advantage vs just an item point upgrade for normal item points that don't allow selling stuff.

p.s. since this is about castles, anyone know the status of Treasure Island Castle after that little lawsuit spat?
 
I think these castles have been around for such a long time empty it would make more sense for them to simply list them on auction with a start bid of say 10000Ped for 2 weeks and see what the final price would be.

I think the CLDs should be reserved for when they eventually start working on the Land Plot buildings again.
 
MA would need to figure the value themselves, but it wouldn't be as simple as just comparing a direct PED sale and buying back deeds.

We will just have to agree to disagree on this.

well, if they did the cld thing proposed here, since shopkeepers aren't on auction too much, especially as some seem to be putting them in apartments lately, perhaps an 'upgrade' to the existing castles and the new ones they release could include converting all the item points in to shop points?

For some reason i actually thought they had Item trade Enabled. After reading your post had to go and double check and indeed they are not. No way anyone will pay 100k or more even with TP without this being enabled. It is intrinsic if MA want to sell them for high value they need to make :Item Trade Enabled, put a TP and put it on AH for 125k Starting Price and no BO. 1 month AH. This would make them the largest full fledged Shop Available in Calypso which would have some good value to many people.

I think these castles have been around for such a long time empty it would make more sense for them to simply list them on auction with a start bid of say 10000Ped for 2 weeks and see what the final price would be.

I think the CLDs should be reserved for when they eventually start working on the Land Plot buildings again.

The only castle that i see well kept and worth a visit is George's. I guess if nothing was changed and no additions made MA can just put it for 10k SB and see where it goes but it won't go to far from there. The 10k peds won't help MA in any way either :)
 
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