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For the record my idea wasn't necessarily a full on RPG. I meant that the plots of land & buildings would only be image files displayed in a section of one's profile. I'd never expected it to be more than that.

And now, my friends, we come to some forks in the road, and to allow each idea the opportunity to develop to it's full potential I've forked them off into separate topics.

Please continue to use this topic to bring up new ideas or ideas that have not been forked into their own topics. Otherwise, use this topic to discuss the land system that I proposed, and this topic to discuss the avatar system that @Chanku proposed. As mentioned earlier, the badge system that @Finrod Felagund brought up will be implemented in some form in the future, although of course we can still talk about it here too.

I'm very excited about all the discussions we're having...so far I think our odds of success are pretty good.

So I thought I'd explain the badge tiers, even though I'm sure a better system would develop anyway.

My original plan was to have badges in 3 tiers, the first 2 could be bought for all the participants in a thread, the third couldn't. The idea was that you could obtain a badge styled after the thread's badge, but one tier higher, to differentiate the creator from the people in the thread.

This is clearly inefficient, because it doubles the amount of badge creation work necessary, as well as being useless, tbh. Now, the logical thing to do would be to have the three tiers be completely separate. Posts like word association or things like it could get a normal posting badge, RP threads could get an "epic" badge, all depending on what type of threads should be promoted.

Legendary badges could be handed out for big achievements, for instance posting post no. 100.000 or something similar. I was thinking of making them different because of a different shape and possibly sparkles?

Also I was thinking this could sprout a sort of side economy, with people perhaps paying others a commission to draw up badge designs or something.

That's what I was thinking about it anyway. I'd be interested on other peoples' take as well.

I still think this is the most sensible option:

Tau's Krone Implementation Plan

Don't do it. At all.

That's always a choice, too.

Also, I'm not sure if forks are the best idea. It seems to suggest that the different proposals are mutually exclusive, which they aren't.

That's true @taulover, but I worry that if we keep all the discussion to one topic it'll be difficult to keep on top of all aspects of each proposal...both the land and avatar proposals are pretty major, and at the very least deserve the chance to be fully flushed out while leaving this topic open to more ideas.

Actually, they could be mutually exclusive if we chose.  Example being, if we chose to go the land route rather than the avatar route, what's to say we couldn't replace our main avatars with the placement of our land/home that would change as we added to it?

I hope you'll forgive me if this is stated somewhere and u missed it, but could someone explain the purpose of bringing a currency to the forums? Is it to increase activity? From my own observations everyone here seems pretty active and involved as it is.

It would generate more activity (no such thing as too much activity!) as well as open up new possibilities to us.

It would generate more activity (no such thing as too much activity!) as well as open up new possibilities to us.

I find that difficult to believe. I post here when I feel like it, just like pretty much every other forum I've been on, and would get no extra incentive to do so from an arbitrary system of 'monetization' - honestly it might even be a disincentive, considering that if you're a new person who is considering joining a community, there is already the barrier of introduction to worry about; why add another barrier by potentially gating things off for them, such that only people who have been there for an extended period of time will get them?
Sure, there's points to be made for rewarding people's loyalty, but there are multiple groups you have to appease at any given time, and the two groups that get the most appeasement are lifers because they have all the shit and the strongest voice, and new people because everyone loves the idea of new people, but these people have nothing, so to incentivize them joining you give them a bunch of stuff that pushes the dopamine button in their heads that makes them think 'yay this is fun'.
But at some point, the new people stop being new, and join the ranks of the 'everyone who can't really call themselves the old guard yet', and they're all sort of thinking 'well I'm kind of getting shafted by this system since there's new sinks being installed all the time and no new faucets, those old guys can get it because they ran out of sinks and have a lot of shit saved up, and those new guys get incentives, but I'm stuck here just...treading water. Treading water sucks. I wanna go swimming!'
And then they...go swimming, I guess? I'm not sure where that metaphor went.

Anyway; I agree with Taulover on the main thrust of each of his posts, which is, broadly, 'don't do it bruh'.

Incentivizing activity promotes activity. That's the point. It doesn't disincentivize posting, participating in RPs, forum games or other regional activities since it doesn't penalize anyone.

I agree that incentivizing activity promotes activity, that's implicit (and frankly explicit too).
But what I think is that while this 'economy' creates a different set of incentives apart from the natural ones that are inherent to the forum setting. You post now because, presumably, you want to; there's nothing that's pushing or pulling you away that is within your control, and so on some level you must find it fun, either because one find it legitimately fun, or because, like me, one is a lunatic who just likes hearing the sound of their own voice (even if it's entirely in your own head because you have to type everything out as opposed to being able to just say it).
Once you implement a system in which you're rewarded, sometimes, a bit, for this, then the incentive structure changes.

As an example; let's take Jim, a totally real person I didn't just make up. Jim likes posting a lot. But he's got other shit to do, so he can only do it in intense bursts, followed by lulls while he does his other shit, and then a fit of intense activity again when he has the time.
However, the incentive structure as developed (in this very real scenario I didn't just make up) rewards posts every two hours much more than a post every hour, and much more than a post every...say, 5 minutes. Jim is getting penalized, relative to a hypothetical individual who perfectly makes use of the incentive structure, which we'll term That Which Has No Life. Perhaps that's simply a problem with the incentive structure being somewhat unfair; instead of that, you reword it so that if you have 5 posts per day, then each post is worth X ;if you have 10, it's worth Y, and so on.
But Jim works too much to have time on weekdays. He can only do shit on weekends. He's shot 5/7s of the week, and so relative to TWHNL, his progression is suboptimal. Well, maybe we can rework that, too, so rewards are distributed monthly, and based on an averaged daily amount.
But once you've divorced the reward from the actions to that extent, are you genuinely still incentivizing certain patterns of behavior, or are people just going to keep doing what they were always doing?
Fundamentally, there will need to be a decision at some point between some arbitrary notion of fairness, and the ability to incentivize behavioral patterns.
And if you're not actually incentivizing behavior, then there's no point to introducing an economy; but on the flipside, if you are incentivizing behavior, there is a real chance that some people will simply benefit inordinately (obviously not to the degree of TWHNL), and there may be complaints of unfairness which could act as a disincentive, which flies in the face of the whole point anyway.

Currently there's no existing incentive to post. You either choose to post or you choose not to post. So starting an economy adds incentive. An incentive that could grow and become more appealing. And that's an opportunity we shouldn't pass up.

It also hasn't been agreed upon that posts=currency. Wintermoot actually has stated that he's against the idea.