Slightly OT:
I’m also curious/interested in seeing how the new shop will affect gems, since there is no longer any incentive to purchase them directly with USD anymore. (you will always get a better return purchasing PP).

Out of curiosity, was the 1PP:4g rate determined by the fact that gems have been pretty consistently hovering around 1:3000 with nuggets? The discrepancy between the site:user costs for gems (3600:3000) is the same as the USD cost between gems and PP (5:4): 0.8.

Jacq... what? you don’t get a better return purchasing PP, because you only get 4 gems for your 5 dollars? you lose a dollar… whereas, if you buy gems DIRECTLY, you get 5 gems for 5 dollars…

am i missing something? xD i’ve been studying for my finals all evening aha…

doragon I think they’re referring to those that will purchase PP vs gems to make nuggets in game? Someone wanting to make some nuggets can buy 5 gems for 5 dollars, and sell those 5 gems for around 15k nuggets (at 3k each). However, someone could instead purchase 1 PP for someone for 5 dollars and get about 20k for it. You would make back more nuggets with the PP, which in exchange you could use to buy up the 5 gems you may have wanted and still have 5k left over, so like 1 2/3 bonus gems for your buck! (although I guess the lack of gems being bought could slowly cause gem prices to rise again… Though seeing as no one will ever buy them for more than 3.6k, PP will pay off more because it’s gong to be the equivilent of “$1=4k”)

Or if that’s not what they meant/I did some math wrong there oops, ignore me… :’)

Blemy
ahhh. :0 yeah i was thinking it would result in gem prices rising again and it sounds like it probably would 80 nice.

I’m beginning the push now :) Please bear with us if anything breaks! <3

Looks like email receipts are a little wonky… I’m working on getting them fixed right now, and will be mailing out replacement receipts for the wonky ones as soon as I can!

Edit: replacement receipt have been sent out!

Thanks for the heads up Kiwi, it looks like I missed updating the link in a few places. They should be all set now :)

The new URL for the pricing guide is at https://www.mycenacave.com/order/pricing_guide :)

Sorry doragon, I meant exactly what Blemy described. Someone who wants to spend real money on in-game stuff (nuggets, items, etc) is always going to get a better return on their investment by buying PP instead of gems. In fact you could way the…. purchasing power of PP is greater ;)

I thought it might cause gem prizes to rise, too, but I’m not sure it would happen for a really long time. There’s lots of gems in the system already and the only sink is OotS. Gems are already a disfavoured currency, and this just serves to make them less useful. Though it might even out the huge discrepancy between fr:mc exchanges lol. (still curious as to the reasoning behind the 4:1 rate)

edit: I was fiddling with the new thing. It’s neat but I still have the privacy concerns I had before.
Was there always a transaction fee for low-dollar orders?

Jacq

There was a transaction fee on anything less than $10 There has been for gems now at least (that’s why I rarely buy less than 10 even if I only need 3)

Jacq Condor
*nods* it’s supposed to apply everywhere on MC. When I made the latest updates to the CC shop ago I forgot to include it (and have been too busy with other things since then to go back and fix it) which is why it hasn’t been there recently for 5 CC purchases.

It’s there to help offset credit card transaction fees: we pay a fee of “$0.30 + 3%” for the privilege of charging a credit card (paypal fees are, oddly enough, even higher). For orders $10 or more that comes to 6% or less which we’re happy to cover ourselves, but for smaller transactions — 9% of a $5 transaction, 33% of a $1 transaction, etc. — it starts to become significant enough that we need to compensate for it.

Hina
Thank you! I wasn’t sure how that worked so…

Sage14
PP is order bound, and not account bound. This means that there is no account limit on PP (even if someone happens to have 200CC from the old system on their account), but also that players should avoid purchasing more PP than required to pay for any one order (as excess PP cannot be carried over to future orders). That said, should someone have 200CC on their account they are advised to avoid buying PP unless their order would cost more than $200 (the equivalent of 40PP), as any PP they might buy would be converted to gems upon the orders acceptance.

As an example:
Player A has 200CC on their account, and buys 1PP (the equivalent of $5)
Their order is accepted by an artist, and priced at 40PP or lower (the equivalent of $200 or less)
The order is paid using CC first. This covers the full cost of the order.
The 1PP attached to the order is unneeded, and consequently converted to 4 gems.

Did we ever get an answer on whether it was possible to buy PP directly, for EU players? And also, when you have for example 2 pp and you need to pay 8 pp for your order because it’s been picked up by an artist, do you buy pp or do you just pay for the custom? By that of course I mean that if EU players cannot buy pp directly, would we have to go through glitch EVERY time? Because I know that buying a custom directly was fine for EU players, because it was manually delivered. But PP is not, it is instantly delivered, correct? And that wouldn’t be good for EU players?

I apologise if this has been answered or if I don’t make sense hahaha!

Gabriel
I believe glitch is currently looking into whether or not it will be possible for EU players to directly purchase customs, so I will leave that part of your question to him. In the meantime, please refer back to this post for an answer as to whether or not it’s possible for EU players to directly purchase PP.

Gabriel [@deddo]:

Paying for Paw Prints with a credit card is fine, even if you are in the E.U. Here is the reasoning:

Either:

1. You make a payment on your order after the final price has been set:
   This is no different than it was before with paying for your custom, other than that little Paw Print icons appear on your order. This is unambiguously fine.

2. You purchase Paw Prints on an order that does not have a final price set:
   It’s true that your Paw Prints could turn into gems, which would be a roundabout way of buying gems for real money using a credit card (albeit at a bad rate). However, the VAT regulations apply only to products which are automatically delivered, and your order is not fulfilled automatically: an artist needs to manually claim your order and set a final price before you receive your gems

Earlier we announced that players would be able to withdraw their PP as gems while an order is still pending. This would create an odd corner-case in which an EU player could place an automatically-fulfilled order for gems via PP. This feature is not yet implemented. We’ll be talking to a lawyer about this in the near future (sadly “it seemed reasonable to me” doesn’t hold much legal weight).

Depending on the answer we get from the lawyer, we may not implement this feature. While we are an American website that optimizes for players located in the United States, I think most of us here (including our American players) would value
EU players can purchase PP automatically
over
Players can withdraw PP as gems on pending orders

EU players can purchase PP with a credit card. It is only gem purchases which carry the restriction.

[@assassin]
Actually you simply can’t receive PP. the buyer will get a message saying “this user does not have an open order” or something, they don’t have the option to buy you PP at all until you open an order AND set it to allow PP donations from other users.

doragon
That clears everything up!! Thank you!

I haven’t chimed in yet, but I do like this system! Thanks for the updates, I like the fact that PP will be purchaseable at all times, so it can still be used to save up in a way for a custom. The hold system is a great idea too and the six months on that I think is ample time to save up.

As I think was iterated a few times in this thread, if you’re going after a custom you have to do your research and be prepared. Customs are awesome, but in the end they are a financial commitment (be it with IRL money or MC savings). Now that I have a steady job I am excited to sell or give away PP fir people :)

I have a question~

Can you make an order for a sprout while still on cool-down and just not be able to enter it into the queue until the cool-down is over? Or do you have to wait for the cool-down to go away first?

Just a heads up that something got lost in translation on the sprout page:

Sprout orders cost 20 Paw Prints. Species and lineart edits will depend solely members of the parent geness are.

glitch Not so much a PP issue, but more of.. an issue as a result of the new system? haha. I think when we transferred over to the PP system a couple things got a little borked with orders under the old pricing system. I have a custom order open right now that says “unspecified” for lineart, but I specifically remember selecting active before? I’m… hesitant to edit my order to include this though since I’ll lose my old pricing and, while it’s not a huge difference, I’d rather not lose my old estimate since the only reason he went up in price is because cat lineart was bumped up by $10. lol.

Figured I’d just go ahead and post about this vs. sending an echo in case anyone else had a similar issue they needed clarity on. Is it possible this can be fixed somehow, should I just notify the artist when I get picked, or would I have to go in and actually edit my order?