Hi everyone,

It has been brought to our attention that it is possible to profitably sell a forever coat for just over three gems: simply register a new account on Mycena Cave for the sole purpose of trading away your freebie pet, and eat the one-way trade fee. In so doing, you end up essentially acquiring and selling a pet for the cost of a 1-way transfer fee.

After looking at trade and activity logs, it is clear that this has actually been occurring.

To fix this problem, we have just pushed a small change to the trading mechanism. It is now no longer possible to complete a trade which would result in either party giving up all of their pets. That is to say, it is no longer possible to perform a 1-way trade with all of your pets. We decided this was a good solution (rather than, say, requiring a 7-gem one-way trade fee for your first pet) because this change should be completely invisible for almost everyone, and won’t affect you at all unless your reason for signing up is simply to sell your freebie pet.

If anyone has any questions please don’t hesitate to ask :)

I’ve got a fodder pet in a similar way once, though the user was leaving. ^^;
It’s kinda sad that at least one pet is going to be forced to stay on an abandoned account, but the rule makes sense~ Doesn’t making another user create an account just so you could benefit from it count as multi-accounting? I think it did on some sites…

I am curious Glitch, what if down the road someone wants to quit and sell or give away all their pets?LAsDarkFireWolf

Then they will need to keep at least one pet. Presumably the pet that they got for free, but it can be any of them if for whatever reason your freebie pet has become valuable (e.g. via mushroom or something). So *nods* you’re absolutely right, my first post is slightly inaccurate in that this change doesn’t only affect people who are signing up to trade their freebie pet, it also limit your ability to sell your freebie pet if you quit.

But I’m not too concerned about that particular situation: I don’t think it makes any sense for Mycena Cave to prioritize people who are quitting at the expense of people who are not quitting.

Phage: probably not many, because people who care enough to post or say hi are probably in it for more than just a trade.

To me the bigger question is, how many of these accounts are being registered by the same people to do it more than once. To which the answer is that so far we’ve found at least seven:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

just a quick note, the “this user has been banned” message says “muti-accounting” instead of “multi-accounting” ^^;

now all i can think of is mutie being behind all these accounts

Seems like an effective solution, and I’m glad to see you guys aren’t afraid to ban when necessary.

Tamagotchi effect is making me feel bad for the pets stuck on their banned accounts though ^^; Are they “the lost” Mycenians mentioned in the backstory? Forever frozen and left basking in the sun as statues because their inner light died when their human companion tried to squeeze through a loophole and got strangled by it instead? D’:

I’d seen this happening (trading users’ freebie pet for offsite currency, for example) but had no idea it was against the rules. I guess it’s good to patch up the loopholes and ban the multiaccounters, but until this post I had no idea it was “bad” behavior.

Is it also bad to trade offsite currency for MC gems, if the person you’re trading with opens an account here just to buy gems? It would mean I’d have to be careful setting up trades on FR, if I don’t know how old their MC account is.

Is it also bad to trade offsite currency for MC gems, if the person you’re trading with opens an account here just to buy gems? It would mean I’d have to be careful setting up trades on FR, if I don’t know how old their MC account is.Jacq

That is totally fine :) The difference there is that the thing that you are trading/selling is not given to you for free by the site; any value involved in such trades must be created or paid for by the traders themselves. There is also no incentive to register a separate account every time you perform a trade.

I guess it’s good to patch up the loopholes and ban the multiaccounters, but until this post I had no idea it was “bad” behavior.Jacq

It isn’t “bad” behavior exactly, as it falls squarely within the rules. When considering situations like these there’s two things going on here: (1) a person who wishes to buy fodder pets cheaply, and (2) a person who wishes to gain something off-site in return for registering an account.

I wouldn’t call party (1) “bad” behavior because it’s simply using an asymetry of valuation to gain utility, which is what all trading is to a certain degree (e.g. “I value this item more than I value X nuggets so I will pay you X nuggets for it”). Party (2) is a little trickier because what the person is doing is using the leg-up that Mycena Cave gives people in order to gain elsewhere, which is against the “spirit” of why we give out a free pet in the first place.

But the real problem that this situation causes is that it incentivizes rule-breaking. We have carefully engineered Mycena Cave to provide as few incentives as possible towards registering multiple accounts, and those that exist are easily detectable (e.g. circumventing the games cap by playing on >1 account then pooling the nuggets, double-participation in events, etc). In fact, one of the reasons that the one-way pet transfer fee was created in the first place was to lessen the incentive towards breaking Rule 1.

However, it was clearly not effective enough (and the only way we could make it completely effective would be to charge 7 gems to transfer a pet, something we felt was undesirable), so we went with this solution instead :)