Pyramid scheme

[OJM]

But in CoC you can just buy your way to the top and skip all the slowly building up. That's what SC wants you to do.

[Darkpye]

Let me expand on this analogy further.

In a pyramid scheme, or a pyramid selling/multilevel marketing scheme...people that have been in the program the longest receive payments from everyone below them in the pyramid. That is everyone that entered the program after. The higher you are in the pyramid the payments go up exponentially. At the bottom there comes a point where the new members can't progress in the organization because there is no new willing members, and/or there is market saturation for the products being sold, so new sales go off a cliff. This is where the pyramid collapses.

In COC, new members have to battle to gain trophies and gain resources. Initially. and forever after, they have to attack similar or lesser towns in order to get ahead. They will get attacked for resources and cups by players slightly higher in cups/experience, because they (the higher players) are in the same boat. Everyone pretty much goes up against towns of equal or lesser level, for the most part. The people at the top of this pyramid are the people that have been playing COC the longest and have the highest level towns. The "payments" they receive from junior players are the resources and cups. So hence, the resources get routed up the pyramid, both gold/elix/de/ and cups. Everything is good as long as there is new members joining the community. If newbies drop off, then the people that joined a month ago will see a scarcity in towns with resources or flat out towns to attack for cups. (maybe). They get stuck at their current level unable to progress further in cups OR upgrades because the collector income wont match what's getting taken from them from higher level attackers, and the constant raiding will dwindle their cups from higher level players that the lower player has no chance to revenge. The next higher level attackers wont feel the effects until shortly after. The players at high levels wont feel the effects for a much longer time after.

The point is that resources are being directed up the cup levels. Sure there are losses in resources due to spending on upgrades, but that is similar to the mary kay seller who has to buy inventory to sell. The excess profit is what makes it up the chain. What happens at the lower levels in resource availability will be invisible to people at higher levels and with a much delayed reaction.

I can see how your model works, although I feel you have over simplified the model.

I would agree that cups tend to travel up the ladder and pool toward the top however, with regard to resources I would tend to disagree.

Because of the exponential rate of increase in the cost from progressing from one TH to the next lower level players are able to subsist in the game without much fear of interference from the higher level players, the protection offered by shields and loot penalties makes this possible. The only thing a player has to put into the game is time, that time is "banked" when resources are spent on permanently upgrading a piece of the village.

Players are able to steal away other players time by raid each other for their resources and then locking away those resources by spending them.

In this manner a player can accelerate past older players, to move up the chain. This can be further accelerated by players spending monies earned outside of the game in exchange for extra time.

As a players village improves cups will naturally be acquired from victorious differences. Cup levels will naturally balance if a player does not attack and only defends to the mean defense strength of the village.

[archerm3]

I Bing'ed "pyramid scheme" definition. So I guess whoever Microsoft contracted for definitions.

And change: I'm, I'm, decapitalize "you", capitalize "I", drop the "ed" on "listen" because the rest of your statement is in the present tense, capitalize God because in the English language deities are capitalized, and change "your" to "you're"

There's seven punctuation and capitalization mistakes you made while telling me about your education.

Ironic.

Also ironic.

I checked your grammar with an online grammar checker. This came back. It is SO funny when people try to correct grammar on forums and invariably cannot do it without making grammar errors themselves in the very same statement.

Your English teacher will surely have a problem with the sentence "so I guess whoever Microsoft contracted..."



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[TheCleric83]

Also ironic.

Score: 67 of 100(weak, needs revision)

Damn theres some big balls swinging in here lol

Fairplay archerm3

[archerm3]

I can see how your model works, although I feel you have over simplified the model.

I would agree that cups tend to travel up the ladder and pool toward the top however, with regard to resources I would tend to disagree.

Because of the exponential rate of increase in the cost from progressing from one TH to the next lower level players are able to subsist in the game without much fear of interference from the higher level players, the protection offered by shields and loot penalties makes this possible. The only thing a player has to put into the game is time, that time is "banked" when resources are spent on permanently upgrading a piece of the village.

Players are able to steal away other players time by raid each other for their resources and then locking away those resources by spending them.

In this manner a player can accelerate past older players, to move up the chain. This can be further accelerated by players spending monies earned outside of the game in exchange for extra time.

As a players village improves cups will naturally be acquired from victorious differences. Cup levels will naturally balance if a player does not attack and only defends to the mean defense strength of the village.

I'll admit that the model I present is simplified. This discussion is purely for fun anyways. I agree with the statement of exponential increases but the increases are not that drastic from th to th. Its why we raid multiple times per hour for days on end to get the resources necessary to upgrade...beating mine and collector production by leaps and bounds. All the money comes from somewhere. It comes from small percentages from tens/hundreds of raids. 50K at a time lets say for a th5. 150K at a time for a TH7/8/9. Occasionally you find a nice nugget or collector town. And occasionally you throw 60K elix at a town and get back nothing when that lvl4 drag pops out of the cc.

Im a TH9 and I absolutely fear TH10's coming down and taking 400K out of my 3000000 gold in storage which happened a few days ago.

I think the people that don't play that often...which are probably people that never step foot in this forum...are not making much headway in progression. Those of us who are, are doing so at their expense. 50K or 150K at a time.

The reason I say that resources go up the chain too, is because of the roughly 200K each that you can make from maxed collectors from 12 shields, is pale in comparison to what most players need every day just to keep up never mind enough to make upgrades. Therefore you have to raid, take it from people slightly lower than you (to guarantee success), and they got their 200K-400K available from others too, more likely from others, as opposed to sitting on their mines and collectors for several days without getting attacked.

All those resources came from somewhere and are much higher in number than it would take an unattacked town to collect in mines. Of course I cant prove it without the data.

[Nahi]

Could it be true that god created human intelligence with a pyramid scheme in mind ?
(just thinking out loud)

[archerm3]

Could it be true that god created human intelligence with a pyramid scheme in mind ?
(just thinking out loud)

Now that's funny! LOL

[Darkpye]

I'll admit that the model I present is simplified. This discussion is purely for fun anyways. I agree with the statement of exponential increases but the increases are not that drastic from th to th. Its why we raid multiple times per hour for days on end to get the resources necessary to upgrade...beating mine and collector production by leaps and bounds. All the money comes from somewhere. It comes from small percentages from tens/hundreds of raids. 50K at a time lets say for a th5. 150K at a time for a TH7/8/9. Occasionally you find a nice nugget or collector town. And occasionally you throw 60K elix at a town and get back nothing when that lvl4 drag pops out of the cc.

I think the people that don't play that often...which are probably people that never step foot in this forum...are not making much headway in progression. Those of us who are, are doing so at their expense. 50K or 150K at a time.

The reason I say that resources go up the chain too, is because of the roughly 200K each that you can make from maxed collectors from 12 shields, is pale in comparison to what most players need every day just to keep up never mind enough to make upgrades. Therefore you have to raid, take it from people slightly lower than you (to guarantee success), and they got their 200K-400K available from others too, more likely from others, as opposed to sitting on their mines and collectors for several days without getting attacked.

In the spirit of a purely intellectual discussion, for the fun of it:

Statistics on the game would certainly be interesting to see how far a player gets on mined resources vs stolen resources.

The exponential curve is pretty hectic, more so on some buildings than others, if you take the cannon for example it pretty much doubles in price every level, the time curve does drop off though after it hits 2 days, but still. At Th6 it is very easy to subsist purely off your collectors without attacking anyone, personally when I reached th7 I had not yet raided more than 2M gold from other players, most of my gold came from my collectors and I was very easily able to prevent it from being pillaged. I was also able to keep 3 builders busy 100% of the time on that model.

I reached max TH7 (from TH1) after 4 months of play, it took me a further 4.5 months to reach max TH8, I will have been TH9 for 7 months by the time I am finished there.

If I played the game more regularly those numbers could be considerably lower.

Basically I would say that hard work and dedication is the driving force in progression, getting in early while giving a head start by no means ensures greater rewards. So I am not convinced that it could be classified pyramid model game.

The game is intended for players to play against other players around their level, rewards are not very good from players much lower than you and the best loot comes from player equal or stronger than you, if the loot penalties were not in place then I would be more inclined to agree with original sentiment.

Resources can flow both up and down the ladder is the way I see it.

It is true that with more it is easier to get more and there is a certain amount of entrenchment up at the top, but this typical of most capitalistic business structures and not really a qualifying quality unique to a pyramid scheme.

I would have to say that a defining feature of a pyramid scheme participators are unable to surpass their predecessors.

[187]

Could it be true that god created human intelligence with a pyramid scheme in mind ?
(just thinking out loud)

Humans created god, not the other way around. If what is believed currently is true, then why didn't we even think of worshipping ONE god until Egypt?

The power of belief can make anything possible, if enough people believe in it. There is no "god" only millions of people who believe in a higher power.

[rjdofu]

Also ironic.

I checked your grammar with an online grammar checker. This came back. It is SO funny when people try to correct grammar on forums and invariably cannot do it without making grammar errors themselves in the very same statement.

Your English teacher will surely have a problem with the sentence "so I guess whoever Microsoft contracted..."



Grammarly found 2 critical writing issues and generated 1 word choice correction for your text.
Start the free trial to correct your writing errors
and enhance your text.

Score: 67 of 100(weak, needs revision)

Plagiarism		The text in this document is original
Contextual Spelling Check		Spelling Ignored words Commonly confused words
Grammar	2issues	Sentence structure (1) Passive voice use (1) Use of articles
Punctuation		Punctuation within a сlause Closing punctuation Punctuation between clauses
Style and Word Choice		Writing style Vocabulary use

lawl, that's some epic ownage right there.