GC Prizes and Ticket Stockpiling

[Polo]

Because a number of players have now purchased either the majority or all of the GC prizes and are just amassing large numbers of tickets, we are looking at ways to reduce the number of available tickets and give players something to work towards obtaining. One of my current ideas is to introduce a limited set of weapons as event prizes, but give them a dynamic ticket price.

For a long time we've disallowed weapons from being GC prizes (or any item that harms other players. One of the main reasons for this is that weapons are much more desirable than regular items, and would therefore carry a ticket premium (eg: 100 tickets). By making weapons so expensive it would prevent new players from obtaining them for a long time, and this would give people who have hoarded tickets and can purchase the prizes easily a large advantage over them. This is why I'm considering a dynamic pricing structure, whereby prices increase depending on the number of prizes you have bought.

Consider this example: There are 10 weapons, each with a starting price of 20 tickets. After you have purchased your first weapon, the remaining nine double in price to 40 tickets. After you buy your second one the price of the remaining eight doubles to 80 tickets, and so on. The first few items, at 20 and 40 tickets will be quite easy for newer players to obtain but the later weapons, costing a lot more, will give the ticket hoarders something to work towards. Working the maths out, the 10th item would cost 10240 tickets. A new player could easily get one or two weapons, whereas a long time ticket stockpiler will have a challenge purchasing their 6th and 7th ones.

Obviously the example above isn't ideal (10240 tickets for a GC prize is a touch expensive), but I'm interested to get some player feedback on the idea of increasing ticket prices in general (eg: each time you buy a prize, the price goes up by 10 tickets). If we do choose to go with this idea I'll need to have a good think about the numbers.

Anyway, that's the basic idea. Would you enjoy the challenge of trying to get all the prizes, or would you be put off at having to spend more than 'the other guy' to buy your next one? I'll make it clear that this is just one idea; we have a number of other things planned to help fix the ticket economy.