[LCN] Proposed Change to Pawn Shop

Hey all,

So we know many higher level players have invested in Limited Items in the past, and over time those items have become less useful as new Limiteds have come out with better stats.

To help resolve this problem, we'd like to open up the Pawn Shop a bit more to give people a chance to trade in their old, lesser-used Limited Items in order to buy the newer, more powerful ones. If you haven't heard of the Pawn Shop before, essentially it lets you trade in unused items for FP, but it hasn't been used very much because most people do not have unused Limiteds given that people can use up to 2k items in-game.

Our preliminary thoughts on this are that we would offer the current trade-in value (20% of initial purchase price) for all Limiteds in your collection that are less than 70% as powerful as the current set of Limiteds for sale. For example, currently in LCN we have the Neanderthal Garb Limited Quantity item for sale with stats of A&D 384, for a total of 768. In comparison, the Defender Armor we offered back in the day has stats of A:111 D:116 for a total of 227. This item is only 30% as powerful as the Neanderthal Garb, so you would be able to trade it in for 5 FP, or 20% of the purchase price.

If this sounds great or awful to you, let us know in the poll! This change should only take a few changes to values in game, so it should be a pretty simple update if it sounds like a popular move. We'll run the poll for 7 days, and consider carefully — you can't change your vote once cast.

Thanks in advance for the feedback,

Sol & the Kano/Apps Team

 

It is decent idea but I think 20% is too low of a trade in value.

 

Agree with Eileen. 50% sounds much more equitable. So not voting cause selling back is a good idea, but the rate is too low.

 

More like a charity shop - I'd rather gift them to a new player or let them sit and gather dust - but appreciate that you are giving things some thought

 

i think it should go on shelf time not stats all the old items are weak so anything over 2 yrs old and make it 10 fps

 

How about opening a proper pawn shop that lets everyone use unwanted items they no longer use to trade in for items, fp, they can use. The original idea was for that, not for bought items trade in. That is what everyone wants kano.

 

i sure do got a lot of drop items from job, bosses etc, it would be nice for a proper pawn that takes these items in also, those i can see using a good amount for small fps, as far as bought items 10fps per item traded in (basically i would have to trade in 2 items to get 1 and in turn would give me good reason to spend alittle it would make a huge difference in over numbers id be losing 2 items and gaining 1 which would open a massive amount of spots). Please think about be alittle generous here on the exchange rate the other rate you mention was pretty shi**y esp. some of those item may have costed use 25 to 30 fps back in the day then we get only 1/5 or 1/6th of actual value back 10 fps still is not even 50% of the cost of the old items we have paid for years ago.....

 

It's another crumb

 

i think a exchange program should be available for 1 in every 5 years and with this your skill points are reset and/or other option of all your items you have purchase is refund in gfps full price, this would give us a option of taking all the old stuff we have sell it back for what we paid and be able to buy the same items the newbies have so we can have a chance to enjoy our game again. this again would be a 1 time thing every 5 years and you would have to played 5 years to use this option. keep in mind the skillpoints being switched also is due to the way you have influenced the way people play the game it used to never be about the stamina and att n def was all the game. Now its all energy and stamina and things have changed so in turn cant we have a option to change right along with our app since the long term players built there mobster out of a game that seems to no longer exist.

 

I honestly cannot see how this is going to help us.
Let's just try the maths...Say I have 2500 gf items I want to trade in, I would get 12500 GFs which I had actually spent well over 60000 gfs. Doesn't look good to me

 

Doing the maths of using the pawn shop would actually leave me 200,000 weaker over all. Using your lowest item you mentioned above and using the 30gf item also mentioned above. So infact it doesn't work at all.

 

I'm sure quite a few are delighted that you're looking into this but I don't think many will be happy with getting 5FP from items that they've had to buy for 25FP. Regardless of how long it's been, 20% is insulting.

 

Something Zynga forgot and Kano would be woe to lose perspective on is these are pixels being sold. Overhead is embarrassingly minimal. That being said, there is no harm in granting a more-favorable exchange rate. Zynga tried a pawnshop and it failed miserably because the exchange rate was not worthwhile!

 

Kano how about setting up a pawn shop that lets everyone exchange those items no longer usefull in game for items of use or fp. This as been put forward time and time again. This will help everyone and ignite more interest within the game.

 

So first off, we're certainly not out to insult anyone. The trade-in rate for the existing Pawn Shop has been 20% since it came out, we set that at the time but we're willing to change it going forward.

In terms of overhead, it's true that there's not a big material cost in doing trade-ins (though we do employ artists to draw them and writers to name & design them!) however, there are game balance considerations. We can't upgrade existing items — we've discussed the reasons for this at length in the past. The hope for this alternative is that it will give players the ability to improve their collections through trade-ins and new purchases over time, and restore some balance without a drastic, sudden change, like upgrading all old Limiteds or allowing all old Limiteds to be traded in for 100% value. At the same time, we're also happy to be able to give you guys more out of your investment beyond the ability to use them until they were obsoleted.

One thing we've been considering is raising the value of the trade-in based on how old the items are; this would help compensate for the fact that those items haven't been useful for a long time in some cases, and it would also be a little bit of a thank-you to players who invested in the game very early on. What kind of % return do you guys think is fair? We will need to run the numbers and see just how much FP that would stand to dump into the game if we raised the % — we might have to limit how many items you can trade-in weekly or something like that if the return was very high.

 

A good return with a weekly limit does not sound like a bad position.

 

you have missed the point of the pawn shop. trading in items thart we have not bought but earned through doing jobs and bosses over the years.

 

Limited items are all purchased - as far as I know it's not to include boss drops or crafted items - it states limited in the survey post

 

Anything less than 40% trade in value would be too low imo.

IIRC, in the Mafia Wars pawn shop, you didn't get points for it but you got to trade in a bunch of weaker items for 1 stronger item. Not sure if that's too difficult for LCN but maybe it's trade in 2 Limited Weapons for a new Limited Weapon (as an example). Then it's up to the player which Limited items to trade in.

Example: Trade 2 Leprechaun Razor Hats (121 Attack/97 Defense) for 1 Phoenix Rifle (348 Attack/348 Defense)

 

Something else I would like to know is why do the old GF items have to be 70% weaker?
A 350 combined total GF item is totally outdated and how this is set up we are stuck with it.