Quoted from the cashtowns forum:
"In the last 5 weeks, the players number grew from 900 to 10.233 ....yesterday. Today we are talking about 11.000 players and the number is growing every hour. The nice graphics and the addictive gameplay payed off. The game is growing fast. But we have a problem !!!
This huge number of new players that started to produce tons of raws collapsed the markets in the wrong way. From an average of 50 wood / gold we have reached an average of 1500 wood / gold.
The never ending stream of free players that sell raw materials for gold and never sell gold to buy raws are affecting players that invested time and money to build their towns.
In our initial design notes, the market was NOT build to bring profit to players. It was a nice and easy way to EXCHANGE STONE FOR WOOD. But in the same time we need to protect the investments of our paying members.
We have received a big number of requests from those members to limit the access of free-players on the market. This is the full list of measures to stabilize the raws prices:
1. Only players with a happiness of 100% can sell raws for gold
2. The players that sell raws for gold are limited to an ammount of n=Pop*10 raws / day, where Pop means population. A town with a population of 1000 citizens will allow you to sell up to 10.000 resources / day (combined !!!). So, its not enough just to have an 100% happy town. You also need a balance between the population and the number of factories.
3. On level up there is a bonus of 0.1 gold (for beginers up to level 5 the bonus is biggers ). Also introduced 2 new bonuses. The population bonus (0.001 gold / citizen / day) and the occupied towns bonus. Those 3 measures will push the market down on the long run.
4. All production increase advantages (+25%, +50%, +75% and +100%) are suspended.5. Energy is growing with 1 point / hour for everyone. This will also limit the production output. On the left we have a large mass of players with small qty of gold that can only SELL the gold. On the other hand we have a smaller group of big towns that will sell raws. On our simulations, those measures will stabilize the markets in the next 2 months.
The most important aspect is that actual free players have a GOAL and a real REASON to have a "happy town"....
"Link to the forum post here.
These are some big changes to the game and they strike at the new players and favor the older and many players is going to hate these new changes, but I think they are necessary for the games development in the long run because the raw-market is really getting out of control.
Let's just hope that these changes is enough so the devteam doesn't have to make any more drastic changes.
