Fighting the urge to make duplicate accounts

[LebujianAdmin]

Or at least limit the amount of money that can be laundered.
I am suggesting a limit on prices, something like 2x manufacturing cost. And as patrik already added in some cases, a NPC with unlimited resources after a certain price.
Problem is, having multiple accounts means more buildings and safer/faster transactions, lower risk/overhead.
Steps have to be taken against multiple accounts.
Suggestions?

[patrikAdmin]

Hi Lebujian,

This exact problem consumed more than half of my time on last few months.

There are these 2 forces at play:
-> You want to give starting companies a boost, so the game is not slow and boring at the beginning, the bigger boost, the better for the new players, but more money available for laundering
-> The more you limit players at what they can do with the money, the less they like the game. Even if you limit to the start of the game, players don't know if, and the start matters

I tried to balance the both carefully.

A) There are limits currently, not allowing to sell resources at low prices for starting companies.

B) There are also monitors watching if a company is not aquiring resources at prices significatnly differnet to game average, or selling resources at prices siginificantly different to average.

For about 4 weeks now, the B stopped firing after implementing stricter A.

I consider this problem solved for now. But let me know if you find way to take advantage of the starting bonus copmpanies receive.

[patrikAdmin]

Maybe Cowboy fields can give us more in-depth info about this. I remember seeing his company triggering red flags

[LebujianAdmin]

One trick to gain an advantage would be to use multiple accounts, even if trading close to average prices, but you can use multiple buildings at once this way. Say, one account that produces minerals/silicon/chems, another that makes electronics out of them, and say a third one that sells them to the electronics store. Even if you move stuff at production + a little profit (because this trick is based on all of them growing together), the main advantage would be that you don't need such a high overhead, you know you will sell, you know what price you will sell for, and you know when you will sell.
Limits help with laundering, but multiple accounts can still give you an advantage.
Which reminds me, why limit the number of buildings? This kind of limits how far you can get. what do you do when you have the most expensive buildings fully upgraded? Just increase your income?

Not using this trick cost me a lot so far. I have lost countless hours waiting for a buyer.

[patrikAdmin]

Right, I see, If you have N accounts, all of them growing together. I don't necessarily see a problem with it. You can build your empire, but at the same time you can also find a supplier for your minerals/sillicon/chems , if you are willing to pay market price for it.

You still should not have ability to move the "wealth" to one of them.

This will not get you to the top of the charts, which if what I found unfair against other players.

Buildings count is limited to make playign the game sensible (not clicking on 100 buildings) and also to make sure your growth is slowed down after you get bigger. As a sideffect, the new interface would not work with unlimited buildings either. I do not plan to change that.

[LebujianAdmin]

Makes sense. I guess the issue is fixed for now.

[V.G.V.]

Buildings count is limited to make playign the game sensible (not clicking on 100 buildings) and also to make sure your growth is slowed down after you get bigger. As a sideffect, the new interface would not work with unlimited buildings either. I do not plan to change that.

Right now I'm thinking that probably e-factory will be not profitable after 14-15lvl, cause it will grow the unit cost of end product, I mean, now I have only one mine(10 lvl) and one normal factory(10lvl), and 6 e-factories at lvl5, I stoped producing and demolish my power plant cause I produce power for $0.24 per item, in market I could my for $0.23, even by contract for $0.21. I think at the end al giants will have only end production factories, stores and a always searching for low-cost resource suppliers, cause whole chain production will not be profitable.

[patrikAdmin]

I think at the end al giants will have only end production factories, stores and a always searching for low-cost resource suppliers, cause whole chain production will not be profitable.

That's kind of the goal. I want to promote cooperation.

Btw. judging from your anwer, this may not be clear, but your total employees count impacts the efficiency. So, upgrading your store, will bring up unit cost for all your buildings.

wanted to say, that while I consider this problem solved, if you have ideas about how to fight the unfair money laundering from newly setup accounts, i am happy to hear your ideas. Imposing strict limits is not the ideal way of dealing with this - just couldn't figure out a better solution.

[V.G.V.]

I know that employees count impact the production cost, but I can't do anything else, my prodction stuction is so that I can't sell my daily produced products in market so I have to have reliable "spot" where I can sell my products. I tried to sell by contract, I did it for 1 week, it was headake to sell 1000-1500 phones 20-60 per contract to 15-20 companies. So it's ok for me to have that amount of stores.

About the multi accounts, everygame problem. I don't know how to solve it, find and ban the new accounts or so. but the thing is, as you said you solve the problem of shifting/sending wealth. So now as Lebujian said, the multies will produce resources for final account. in that case the problem is that they'll grow faster, at least the last account(let's say "seller" account) cause if it's selling in low price form account to account, the seller will get the biggest profit, aaaand as they can't send huge amount of money to their supplier accounts, they'll start sell in normal price that all the accounts could grow and meet the production, and in that condition they'll get headake, cause playing with muliaccounts will bring headake, at least I'll have. So I want to say that that account will be normal playing accounts, with one difference, they'll have non-stop production and have low-price "suppliers". Now I'm doing the same but with normal player/suppliers, I have non-stop production (just lacking on bauxite time to time) and low-cost suppliers of resources like water, power, CPU and Displays.
So what I want to said it is not harming too much other players. What I'm doing by talking to another players, they're doing themselves)).

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