Due to recent interests in reviving our card program (formally known as SPACE - South Pacific Card Exchange), I have opened this thread to give relevant information and hosted the discussion about it.
The goals: Whatever we do with the program, it needs to have two goals
Provide valuable cards (e.g. ultra-rare, epic, legendary) for cultural event, SWAN rewards,…
Host community events such as card giveaways, collection contest. Provide guidance and mentorship for new card traders.
In the past, goal number 1 was supposed to be fulfilled by a voluntary farmer system where citizens can dedicate some puppets to farming cards for the program, all legendary and epic cards farmed on those puppets will be collected by the program. At the end of the month, farmers will be gifted the nth most valuable card collected in that month if they answered the nth most issues in the month. While the scripting work required to do this has been done, I think the administrative work is gonna be rather intensive so we are going to need something simpler. Do note that whatever scheme we come up with, this program still has to rely mostly on one’s charity because I think it is rather impossible for all participants to consistently receive rewards that match the efforts spent while keeping enough valuable cards in the program for cultural, SWAN rewards,…, Right now, cards in the Southern Fort Knox storage nation come only from people with free time to farm.
The second goal is pretty standard and easy to do. Perhaps, we can start to implement this first. I would just copy-and-paste what worked like card giveaways, guide dispatches, collection contests,…
These are just some foods for thoughts. Please share your ideas and opinions below!
For the first goal, have 100 or more TSP cards guild-specific puppets owned by the Cards Guild director (or you) that regularly farm, and give a leg farmed by these accounts to the three nations that gifted the most legs (and give a valuable leg to the nation that donated the most legs)
Also I invite @Osheiga and @ConcreteSlab to this thread
It is going to be tough to enforce that job on a role though. We may just explicitly say that the program also receives no-benefit donations so people who are just kind enough to farm cards for us without benefits can donate (which are likely to be core members/the people that run the thing)
Just to reiterate, we may set up a scheme where you can donate with rewards but also explicitly say we accept donations with no reward for voluntary farmers.
We can mix the cards from voluntary farmers with the cards from donators and use them to rewards the donators. The value of the cards the donators receive will depend on how active the voluntary farmers are (as donators may donate a bunch of low-value legendary cards to get the prize easier and they will all receive low-value rewards if there are no high value ones from the voluntary farmers)
Setup a card storage nation. Each month, people will donate epic and legendary cards to this nation. We calculate a score for each donator based on the number of legs and epic cards donated in that month. The score can be 3*number of legs + number of epics. We then rank the donators by the score. We gift the nth most valuable card found in that month to the nth-highest score donator.
Limit the number of reward recipients to something like 50% of the number of cards found in that month. (E.g. if we only get 20 cards in the month then only 10 donators get the rewards, the remaining 10 is used for government activity rewards). This percentage should be decided and occasionally updated based on demand for government rewards and demand from the donators themselves.
There is a small issue with this of course. Everyone can donate easy-to-get low-value cards to get higher score which results in everyone gets low-value rewards at the end and potentially kills the incentives. The solution is to use the no-reward-needed donators (i.e. core members or government employees who run SPACE) to subsidize valuable cards in case there aren’t enough valuable cards for the incentives. We also have a big storage of valuable cards right now (Southern Fort Knox and friends) to get going.
This is basically a combination between @Banexet’s proposal and our old 2021 plan (made by Luca who has left our region).
On the administrative side of thing, we can setup a google form that people can put the links to cards they donated + nation name in. At the end of the month, export the form result into a spreadsheet and just count the number of links. We can make the form response editable so people can just add more links into it instead of sending a new form every time.
50% of cards going to donators is too much, I think the percentage should be 33% tops. Also, Southern Fort Knox should be a good enough card storage nation. Otherwise good
Cannot find which card has a highest value in a month if we use the southern fort knox. I intend it to be true to its RL equivalence of being a storage for rainy days. We should make a separate nation to store the monthly donations (empty this nation out when the month is over via rewards and sending excess back to the Knox)
I’m not going to object to anything — people seem interested in this stuff so let’s make it work out. Though I’m not sure about how long this program will last and if it will fade out.
I like the idea and everything but I think it should be less affiliated with the government. This program could be in coordination with the Ministry of Engagement however the current minister has decided to focus more on integration, mentorship, and engagement itself this term.
This program will be pretty much run by card traders. I don’t think any formal official has a mandate to carry it out at this time nor do they need to be. Don’t really care about sustainability tbh. We will lose nothing if it fails lol.
Thats a hard task as all of mine are devoted too expanding my current bank and with the time i do have its will be unlikely I will create anymore anytime soon.
I’d be willing to partake in donating cards too. I have a few regions for cards and can re-dedicate two of them (Sado and Shadow Legend) for the program specifically.
That said, it would be for any future epic+ cards I farm that I would donate when I start doing it, right? Or should also donate the existing ones too (that I found)?
You can donate any epic and legendary cards you have at any time, the program doesn’t care about the origin and time the cards were farmed, if you have something extra lying around that you want to give, just donate.
Forgive me for not knowing much at all about cards, but out of curiosity, how does the card donation program turn a profit?
Just doing some quick math — if gifting a card requires paying its junk price, then if 40% of cards are donated then (roughly) 40% would need to be junked to cover the costs of that. Does that mean only around 20% of donated cards are left available (or less, if those are transferred to a permanent storage nation rather than a monthly storage nation)?