So ever since the game was officially released and gold coin purchases were enabled, I've been thinking a lot about the newbie referral prize/payment.

When you purchase gold coins with real money, the exchange is currently 10 gold coins = 1 USD.

I think this pricing is great. HOWEVER, comparing it to the prize for referring a newbie, it's 1 referral = 10 gold coins = 1 USD. Which basically means, every time you recruit a newbie, you earn 1 USD worth of gold coins into your account.

I currently have about 300 gold coins in my account, which would equal about 30 USD. Except, not a single one of those coins was bought with real money. In addition, if I combined the gold coins I have plus the ones I've already used I'd probably have around 600 gold coins total (which means that I'd have 60 whole USD worth GC in my account)....almost completely effortlessly.

Therefore, seeing this, I thought I'd suggest one of the followjng:

1. Lower the prize for recruiting a newbie with your referral.

2. Increase the number of people you have to recruit to earn the same number of gold coins.

Some of you might argue, "hey, that's not fair to the people who can't buy gold coins with real money.", and "we should be able to have easier ways to get GCs for the people who can't/aren't allowed to buy them."

Well, just like other pet sites, beastkeeper is also a way for admins and other workers to earn money from GC purchases. If they were handed away so easily, the number of purchases would become dramatically lower. And like most other pet sites, you can still live without them as long as you work hard.

Lowering the referral prize would also help our item value problem. Since some items aresupposed to be worth much higher than they are, if gold coins were harder to obtain, their value would increase, just like it's supposed to.

:)

I actually agree with this, it is very easy to gain refferall gold coins and some players abuse it by creating multiple accounts to gain gold. You have my 100% support in this matter.

Leila, simple creating of multiple accounts won't give user any gold coins since we give referral reward only once per IP. At the same time it will provide us with additional data for finding multiple accounts. I don't think that there are any issues here.