The Anti-Laundering System is a Card Duplication System

[Ballotonia]

*bump*

Reason for putting this thread back to the top is that it is likely that in the coming few weeks changes will be made in response to this thread. If you have any comments to make, especially in light of more recent events, this is your last call to add your opinion.

Ballotonia

[The Northern Light]

My view remains the same as what I had written at the start of the thread here. If anything, the way the anti-laundering system has been used since it was first reported has reinforced my views:

1) The bidding mechanic overwhelmingly favors players with big card farms, who are best positioned to freely create arbitrary amounts of copies of any card they want, with minimal risk. [EDIT: See also here for another way the bidding mechanic favors established players.]

2) Price correction generally does not work. It has happened for some cards (the top few epics), but high-value legendaries that are being spawned in copious amounts remain just as expensive as before. Even when the price of a card does drop, having vast amounts of copies of the, now lower-valued, card still results in deck value increases. What's even worse is that the many lower-valued copies tend to concentrate in the decks of very few players, who are then free to drive the price up to its previous levels. Finally, in certain cases where a pull event is organized to attack the value of a card, players that own multiple copies of the card can "block" the spawning of new copies by simply placing some random common card on the market at the same time.

3) As the numerous transfers of large amounts of bank show, this mechanic is not effective against bank transfers.

--------

I have two proposals for how to change the system:

a) This is what I had proposed in my original post: Remove the bid mechanic, and change the system so that cards that are on auction simply have higher odds of being spawned in packs that open during the auction, independently of the number of bids placed on the card. The odds could be set so that about 1 copy would spawn for every 1000 packs opened---this number is certainly not set in stone, it's simply my own crude estimate of the spawn rate we had in regularly-attended pull events before the bid mechanic was discovered. Other factors that currently affect spawn rate (people suspect that the auction price is one of them) can remain in place. [EDIT: See also here for another advantage of this proposal.] [EDIT2: As I had mentioned in my original post, the pull rate can be subject to some modifiers (some of which we suspect are already in place), e.g., the odds of pulling a card can increase as a function of the auction price/junk value ratio. But it should not be dependent on new bids, or any other such easily manipulated mechanic.]

b) Change packs so that their contents are determined when the pack is created (i.e., when the nation answered the issue that created the pack), and not when the pack is opened. This would make pull events a lot less effective, as people would no longer be able to stockpile essentially arbitrary numbers of packs, in order to open them while a specific card is on auction. Additionally, participating in a pull event would require answering issues (and potentially creating new nations to get more issues) on top of opening packs, making the whole process a lot more tedious.

To offer some statistics in support of proposal (b): Currently, I do "private" (i.e., not advertised, so that they only benefit me) pull events, where I open 3000 packs across 1000 puppets, to spawn extra copies of two cards that I constantly bid on. The whole affair takes me about two hours, and I generate about 20-24 copies total (10-12 for each card).

If proposal (b) was implemented, the same event would now take me at least eight hours, given that I'd need to answer five issues for each of my 1000 puppets. During that, I would only be able to open 800 packs new packs, bringing the number of copies I spawn down to 5-6. All in all, I would need to work for 300% extra the time to get only 25% the number of cards.

[Valentine Z]

b) Change packs so that their contents are determined when the pack is created (i.e., when the nation answered the issue that created the pack), and not when the pack is opened. This would make pull events a lot less effective, as people would no longer be able to stockpile essentially arbitrary numbers of packs, in order to open them while a specific card is on auction. Additionally, participating in a pull event would require answering issues (and potentially creating new nations to get more issues) on top of opening packs, making the whole process a lot more tedious.

On the subject of this, I would like to add a not-so-useful note that video games (like Overwatch, a game I have not played in a long while, but the mechanics should remain the same) has done this before and it actually helps out. So, like TNL has suggested, OW actually sets what you are getting in a lootbox when you get it, not when you open it. There is also the case of different boxes depending on events (like Anniversary Event, Halloween, Christmas, etc.) but I digress. So in any other average day, you can amass hundreds of lootboxes, but you are not going to get new items for the events, or even of the new characters that has been released, i.e. in the case of NationStates, that one pack you saved from the S1 days, will not give you S2 cards just because you opened it a few seconds ago.

Will this solve the issue? I am honestly not sure; I'm just that guy that plays intermediately with 96 nations. I am confident that it might solve some issues, such as amassing packs for the pull events to get a rare card, and this will also force players, regardless of the number of puppets they have, to farm on the spot during the auction period.

The potential drawback is how changing this might break the find_history attribute of the individual cards. I'm not sure what kind of hoops and coding problems might arise from changing it.

-----

I am sure this has been suggested before, so I do like the idea of seasonal packs (whenever they might come in) that gives you a slightly increased chance of getting Legs (or Epics)? So, for instance, if you get a Legendary every 100 packs, maybe these seasonal packs could help your odds (1 out of 50 packs, for instance). I'm not sure of the actual odds, I'm just providing an example.

[Refuge Isle]

1) The bidding mechanic overwhelmingly favors players with big card farms, who are best positioned to freely create arbitrary amounts of copies of any card they want, with minimal risk.

2) Price correction generally does not work. It has happened for some cards (the top few epics), but high-value legendaries that are being spawned in copious amounts remain just as expensive as before. Even when the price of a card does drop, having vast amounts of copies of the, now lower-valued, card still results in deck value increases. What's even worse is that the many lower-valued copies tend to concentrate in the decks of very few players, who are then free to drive the price up to its previous levels. Finally, in certain cases where a pull event is organized to attack the value of a card, players that own multiple copies of the card can "block" the spawning of new copies by simply placing some random common card on the market at the same time.

3) As the numerous transfers of large amounts of bank show, this mechanic is not effective against bank transfers.

I agree with all the points that r3n has stated above.

Regarding correction: Although I wanted to use the mechanics to break up insane market and deck values, using the system to this sort of anti-monopoly end seem not possible either. Whereas lower difficulties are much easier to find and crash, mass-duplication of legends on a scale that's required to drop the value are excessively difficult, and so they're mostly protected.

Pull events specifically designed to undermine a card's value take weeks to put together, immense time gathering capital and preparing packs, and rely on public attention. It's very much the opposite for players who want to protect these inflated values, for anyone has the ability to block the duplication by running several common cards at high rates, and anyone who has at least ten copies of the target card can reinflate the value in an hour in the middle of the night. Every copy gained from the crash event now adding to the original problem.

a) This is what I had proposed in my original post: Remove the bid mechanic, and change the system so that cards that are on auction simply have higher odds of being spawned in packs that open during the auction, independently of the number of bids placed on the card. The odds could be set so that about 1 copy would spawn for every 1000 packs opened---this number is certainly not set in stone, it's simply my own crude estimate of the spawn rate we had in regularly-attended pull events before the bid mechanic was discovered. Other factors that currently affect spawn rate (people suspect that the auction price is one of them) can remain in place.

I enjoy this suggestion, and it seems like it would return pull events to how we thought they worked originally. All of that seemed reasonable and generally fun. I don't know that it has any mechanical options for Creative Activities, but evidently neither does the current one

b) Change packs so that their contents are determined when the pack is created (i.e., when the nation answered the issue that created the pack), and not when the pack is opened. This would make pull events a lot less effective, as people would no longer be able to stockpile essentially arbitrary numbers of packs, in order to open them while a specific card is on auction. Additionally, participating in a pull event would require answering issues (and potentially creating new nations to get more issues) on top of opening packs, making the whole process a lot more tedious.

I've noticed that when Noah's going at it during update, intensive farming can have some interesting effects on gameplay (read: hello lag). It's my personal theory that the mass issue answering could be partly to blame for the delegate glitching issue. It's not my role to worry about server load, but I wonder if the site would be able to handle some or most of the high-puppeteering farmers in the game all aggressively spamming out issues for an hour, where things are a little more spaced out right now.

[Evrigenis]

I had not previously commented here because i doubted I could constructively add something to to the discussion. It is much easier for me to find flaws in others’ solutions than it is to think of my own. However, I think I may be able to add some nuance to the conversation now. My opinion on TCALS is a bit more complex than the topic name: I have both gained valuable cards (S1 Yuno, Nervun), watched my new finds crash (Perg, Fratt II, HMS), and failed to see many new copies materialize (Abacathea, Loop) from pull events; I am both relatively new to the cards game and a fairly large farmer.

Proposal A, sponsored by Ransium, Noah, and r3n, seems promising at first glance. Keeping the increased probability of pulling a card while it is at auction but removing the bid mechanism would prevent further duplication. However, I agree with Racoda in that this idea would be detrimental to the newer generation of farmers. It would create an insurmountable gap between those who have had the chance to play earlier and benefit from the “old system” and those who came after.

b) Change packs so that their contents are determined when the pack is created (i.e., when the nation answered the issue that created the pack), and not when the pack is opened. This would make pull events a lot less effective, as people would no longer be able to stockpile essentially arbitrary numbers of packs, in order to open them while a specific card is on auction. Additionally, participating in a pull event would require answering issues (and potentially creating new nations to get more issues) on top of opening packs, making the whole process a lot more tedious.

Proposal (b) still favours large farmers as they can make an arbitrary amount of puppets ahead of time, not answer issues on them for 30 hours before the event, put the card on auction as usual, answer many issues with scripts quickly, bid up as necessary, and then open the packs at any later time. It would be slower, yes, but still quite exploitable (and frankly more convenient for those who don’t clean their puppets while they open packs during pull events).

Proposal C, supported by Racoda and Unibot, is doing nothing. Based on Ballotonia’s recent comment, this is unlikely to happen. The issues with the current system are well-expressed enough in others’ posts to merit a correction.

My idea is to do a smaller-scale version of what I understand to have occurred during the initial closure and reopening of NS Cards. Because I started playing NS cards nearly two years after the April Fools event, I can only speak of my second- and third-hand Information about what I think happened.

Since the event was meant to be a temporary joke, the release of Season 1 cards had overpowered features, like buying packs with bank. It was then closed. When it was taken more seriously than originally intended, the community lobbied for its reopening. The moderators agreed, and it was re-released in its current, nerfed form. The players were able to keep their cards, but the MV set to JV. The International Artwork ranking was added later, at the insistence of vocal cards players.

Based on that, I think we could 1) implement a nerfed version of the current system with bidding increasing pull probability 2) reset the MV to JV and 3) add a new census stat: Gallery Size. 1) would allow new farmers to continue to benefit from pull events, while the probability boost could decrease at an increasing rate as a function of number of bids (if that’s unclear, think about the graph of 1/x). 2) lets the free market reign as we see which prices people actually trade at. 3) incentivizes other forms of play, and helps people remember that DV is not the end-all-and-be-all of this game (I personally think the object is to have fun and be a good community member, but that’s not quantifiable for a stat XD).

Please tear my idea apart as you find its flaws. I merely want to find the optimal solution for the community.

[Vylixan]

If one of the problems we're dealing with is the inflated MV of some players caused by pulling tons of legendaries. Why don't we try to fix that as well?

Here is a random idea.
At the moment the DV is determined by just adding all the MV of all the cards a nation has.
What if we halved the counted MV for every extra card a nation has until the amount per card reaches JV.
Even if you inflate the card value the maximum of DV you can get out of that legendary card will not grow much bigger then twice the amount of DV. For example:

A legendary with a (heavy) inflated MV of 1000
1000
500
250
125
62.5
31.25
15.625
7.8125
3.90625
1.953125
1

1999.046875 total DV for this card.

Or this not inflated legendary
80
40
20
10
5
2.5
1.25
1
1
1
1

162.75 total DV for this card.

This at least takes away part of the reason to keep around massive amounts of legendaries.
You can still use these legendaries for their perceived trade value to get more bank of course.
And this also does not really incentivize collecting of non-legendaries or other slight flaws in the card game.

[The Northern Light]

I enjoy this suggestion, and it seems like it would return pull events to how we thought they worked originally. All of that seemed reasonable and generally fun.

That is indeed the main goal of my proposal (a): return pull events to their original form, which generally seemed to be enjoyed by the community, while still allowing for some very rare cards to become more available.

One more advantage of proposal (a) that I did not mention is that it removes the competitive/adversarial nature of current pull events: Currently, one person finding the card during a pull event removes the opportunity for anyone else to find the card, unless further new bids are placed. This leads to an arms race for scripts that make pack opening faster, which in turn favors (in yet another way) established players and completely removes any chance casual players may have of pulling the card.

With proposal (a), a casual player opening a few packs still has a chance of getting the card they want, without having to compete with other big farmers opening massive amounts of packs in parallel.

[Refuge Isle]

IHowever, I think I may be able to add some nuance to the conversation now. My opinion on TCALS is a bit more complex than the topic name.

The topic has drifted slightly from what Ransium's complaint originally was to reflect the ways in which the system has been used since it was posted. Namely, the card raid and four-ish players duplicating high value legendaries to inflate their decks to silly levels. The degree to which the ALS spawns new cards, at this time, largely reflects bid rate, pack open rate, and potentially the value at which the card is traded (although I suspect not).

It would create an insurmountable gap between those who have had the chance to play earlier and benefit from the “old system” and those who came after.

This is no different than players who started answering issues in 2005. A fair system doesn't require any player be able to jump to the most valuable deck in short order, the goal is for all players to be able to play with reasonable rules and mechanical structures.

Since the event was meant to be a temporary joke, the release of Season 1 cards had overpowered features, like buying packs with bank. It was then closed. When it was taken more seriously than originally intended, the community lobbied for its reopening. The moderators agreed, and it was re-released in its current, nerfed form.

Cards returning as a regular game form was the intention nearly since the beginning. Their acquisition and utility markedly transformed for sustainability and exploit prevention. With those solved, now we have new exploits

1) implement a nerfed version of the current system with bidding increasing pull probability

Out of curiosity, why is it important to you that pull events require pennybidding? Especially since this system was designed to spawn cards that can upset high-volume transfers.

2) reset the MV to JV and

If it's already been shown that owners who have ten or more copies of a card can arbitrarily set the market value to any number within an hour, what does this solve?

A better idea would be to change the market value to be a percentage of all sales that have ever occurred so they're less prone to artificial manipulation.

3) add a new census stat: Gallery Size. 1) would allow new farmers to continue to benefit from pull events, while the probability boost could decrease at an increasing rate as a function of number of bids (if that’s unclear, think about the graph of 1/x). 2) lets the free market reign as we see which prices people actually trade at. 3) incentivizes other forms of play, and helps people remember that DV is not the end-all-and-be-all of this game (I personally think the object is to have fun and be a good community member, but that’s not quantifiable for a stat XD).

I have no idea how adding a new census stat accomplishes that, or what you mean by implying that farmers don't benefit from pull events now (or even with your plan to use the current system but nerfed). The only thing it incentivises is for everyone to toss all their cards into an "everything" collection to participate in the badge.

[Noahs Second Country]

If one of the problems we're dealing with is the inflated MV of some players caused by pulling tons of legendaries. Why don't we try to fix that as well?

Here is a random idea.
At the moment the DV is determined by just adding all the MV of all the cards a nation has.
What if we halved the counted MV for every extra card a nation has until the amount per card reaches JV.
Even if you inflate the card value the maximum of DV you can get out of that legendary card will not grow much bigger then twice the amount of DV.

I'll copy paste my response in the discord here:
So basically you want playing for MV to be a game of randomly inflating commons, from what I'm seeing here? The current system works fine, imo. Big farmers buying legendary cards en masse redistributes their wealth throughout the market. Oftentimes you'll note that smaller collections are basically funded by the selling of 1 or 2 cards.

(opinions on TCALS inbound, give me a sec)

[Mikeswill]

The Game is Rigged

[Noahs Second Country]

So initially I was typing up this response basically agreeing with a lot of what is being said here and endorsing my previous stance. Then I realized I didn't actually believe what I was typing.

Anyway here's my inevitably controversial opinion. I agree with a lot of what Refuge has already said but I'll try to make my rather inconsistent opinions clear here.

1. Pull events/TCALS as both an anti-inflation mechanism and a card duplication mechanism can be combated with 10 bank and 3 commons - though perhaps the problem is that people are unwilling to try and stop them?

2. Removing mechanics deemed 'harmful' by a vocal minority of cards players is kind of pointless and not necessarily healthy to the game either. Mechanics like TCALS and inflation create new ways to play the game (at least for those who play for MV) beyond simply doing the same monotonous farming and buying legendary cards process over and over again. It has become more and more clear to me that the community really only wants to have one way to play this game - as seen by the unreasonable dislike of players such as Farrakhan, Timao, and Refuge for the way that they play the game.

3. The market is completely public and anyone can theoretically join in on the pull event fun... even the 'private' pull events.

4. My conclusion is the following: People will always find a way to exploit the system. People can adapt to whatever meta shift comes there way - heck, even Koem Kab has started doing pull events. The system is fair.


Enlightenment courtesy of Racoda.

If the cards game is about collecting MV/DV, and we're complaining about the unfairness the current system creates, changing the rules without giving players an equal start will only cement existing inequalities. Keeping TCALS allows everyone to challenge those inequalities in the same way, with the same techniques with which they were created. Potentially, someone can use TCALS to create their own monopoly on a high MV card they've boosted or will boost. Hence, fairness is preserved better than by changing TCALS without giving players an equal start.
Someone without a large farming setup wouldn't be able to get these high MV cards in the first place: the exploit favouring Big Farma is a red herring. A small(er) farmer can abuse the system just as well by creating multiple copies of a card they can afford.

If the cards game is about collecting MV/DV, and we're not complaining about the unfairness... Then what are we complaining about? Highly volatile decks crashing? Others having the same opportunities, playing by the same rules, now that they are publicly known?

With that being said I will still welcome any changes with open arms and I'm glad to see that the admins are willing to create change, even if I may not support it.

[Aclion]

*bump*

Reason for putting this thread back to the top is that it is likely that in the coming few weeks changes will be made in response to this thread. If you have any comments to make, especially in light of more recent events, this is your last call to add your opinion.

Ballotonia

I'm... glad to see it is hopefully being adressed, butam unsure what wecould comment on not knowing what kindof changes are being made so...

Yay(I hope?)

[Vylixan]

If one of the problems we're dealing with is the inflated MV of some players caused by pulling tons of legendaries. Why don't we try to fix that as well?

Here is a random idea.
At the moment the DV is determined by just adding all the MV of all the cards a nation has.
What if we halved the counted MV for every extra card a nation has until the amount per card reaches JV.
Even if you inflate the card value the maximum of DV you can get out of that legendary card will not grow much bigger then twice the amount of DV.

I'll copy paste my response in the discord here:
So basically you want playing for MV to be a game of randomly inflating commons, from what I'm seeing here? The current system works fine, imo. Big farmers buying legendary cards en masse redistributes their wealth throughout the market. Oftentimes you'll note that smaller collections are basically funded by the selling of 1 or 2 cards.

(opinions on TCALS inbound, give me a sec)

Yeah, I get your point. And too be honest the enormous DV of some nations isn't really that big of a problem in the grand scheme of things.

[Noahs Second Country]

I am still in favor of "no change" but I'd like to bring up an alternate solution here to see what others think.

Why not simply remove the TCALS mechanic entirely on epics and legendary cards, while keeping it on lower rarity cards? (I know, the immediate "no" can be heard quite loudly, but hear me out here)

The intention of TCALS is to make transferring value from puppets to main nations more difficult, the idea being that heisting would be more likely this way and thus making transferring value more costly - Ballotonia.

With this in mind, spawning high value cards in pull events is not and should never be the intention of this system. TNL's solution of setting a certain "yield limit" operates under the assumption that we're supposed to get cards from pull events, which was never the point. Pull events ruin the built-in scarcity that epics/legendary cards have that make them unique from other cards in the first place. I don't understand is why everyone is trying to create an intentional mechanism that allows players to control or change pull odds in general to something of their liking. There should be no near-guarantee of pulling an expensive card ever... right? Only a possibility of pulling a card. This "solution" seems to only slow whatever negative effects that people are pitching here.

Nobody transfers on epic or legendary cards and I don't expect this to change even the fix is implemented as it's not a sustainable way to transfer, considering that most epics/legendary cards are highly sought after in general. Even I, with 116 copies of a legendary card, still cannot safely transfer a large amount of bank knowing that others have significant numbers of the card.

In comparison, lower rarities and transfers in general create the threat of inflation, which can be considered a problem in itself. TCALS is at least mildly effective at bad inflation attempts, and if I really wanted to I could still probably pull a piggyback transfer if I happen to spot it on the market. You could argue that this would just create a shift to duplicating these lower rarity cards, and I agree but only to an extent. These cards spawn too often to keep their value (unless someone is actively keeping it up, where I don't see a problem).

EDIT: This still maintains some of the more positive community aspects of pull events, since the mechanic can still be used to produce lower rarity CTE cards and other cards that may be essential to a collection. In general, the problem with these CTE cards is that they don't spawn, rather than simply being expensive as a legendary or epic card may be.

EDIT 2: HumanSanity brought up a good point - What about ultra rare but high value cards like Improving Wordiness, formerly Frattastan II or NASTIC II?
And to that I say the following: Note that the low owners URs of this season are not inflated, and I think that these high MV s1 exnations come mainly from a couple of people inflating them - I don't see this being a problem moving forward.

[Honeydewistania]

I can get behind Noah’s suggestion.

[Cardegarth the Collector]

I could write a lot, or just say: I like R3n's proposals better than any other, and I can't come up with anything better.

Elegarth out.

[HumanSanity]

I agree with r3n the most.

I will say I've enjoyed this little foray into the field of mass card duplication. It's been fun for me, especially as a relatively new card player with a medium-sized but not massive farm, to get a chance to watch all of this go down and get my hands on a few of the previously prized relics. But ultimately, I think it's time for things to normalize -- there's no way to undo everything that has been done but let's go back to the way we thought the system worked.

I think Noah's Epic/Legendary block suggestion is arbitrary. It would also prevent pull events on those cards -- and I think those pull events are good.

I don't agree with the idea we shouldn't formalize an accidental game mechanic like pull events. Yes, they're an accidental game mechanic because they're based in abusing TCALS. But now they've become normalized and the old ones didn't produce mass market swings, rather huge gains for lucky folks. There's definitely precedent for admin choosing to implement a mechanic in response to how players use the existing system when that change makes the game better -- in the same way influence was introduced as a new game mechanic to effect R/D, thereby normalizing it and making it a part of the game when it wasn't originally intended to exist.

[9003]

The short and sweet of my thoughts are:

Pull events are part of the game.

Pulling x card should always be a probability not a guarantee. Under the current system with the byproduct of others also getting the card a player can, and has the ability to, pull x card. Rather then just a chance at it.

From a psychological perspective being handed cards with out "earning" them via answering issues or buying them while rewarding in the short term is not rewarding in the long term.
Meaning that players are hurting themselves by using TCALs, most of the time. With all psychology things it is not an everyone statement so if you disagree that's okay in general people will stay with the game/subgame longer if they are rewarded for the work they put in. As stated a few times now as well other people see TCALs as a card printer it becomes less intresting to those players.

My two cents is change the way TCALS works so that if a card is up at auction every pack has a whatever chance of pulling it. Changing the bids shouldn't increase the chances for the card to be pulled. Anything with a first come first serve to get the cards will favor the big farmers. Hence a flat % chance would be better in my mind. Maby have a wild card slot that has a chance of being any any card, card at auction, old session. If every pack or even every other pack had a wild card slot both the cards with 0 owners would get created and traded more and pull events would work again AND TCALS would stop transfers better.

As many have said why close the gap and remove a tool that could level the playing field to me the issue is the big farmers will keep using it to make sure the paying field is not level. It's far easier for them to host and do that sort of thing. So while we can not correct what has been done we can stop the bulldozer from widdening the gap more even if the small famers have a smaller bulldozer trying to catch up.

[Nick Danger]

This discussion has elements reminiscent of the phrase "having your cake and eating it too."

Make all pulls equally random and the contents of the loot box determined at the time it is created. TCALS hasn't been any good for this game.

Too many new players get disgusted and abandon the game.

[HumanSanity]

Too many new players get disgusted and abandon the game.

I don't get why TCALS is the cause of new players abandoning the game in and of itself.

In order to get heisted on a transfer, you have to know that you should be doing a transfer, which means you have to have thought about transfer security. There's also a lot of guides posted to how to avoid heisting at this point.

I hate getting heisted as much as anyone else but I think it's created an interesting game dynamic.

[Nick Danger]

Too many new players get disgusted and abandon the game.

I don't get why TCALS is the cause of new players abandoning the game in and of itself.

In order to get heisted on a transfer, you have to know that you should be doing a transfer, which means you have to have thought about transfer security. There's also a lot of guides posted to how to avoid heisting at this point.

I hate getting heisted as much as anyone else but I think it's created an interesting game dynamic.

Me neither, especially since I didn't say that.

In cop talk that's an attempted 484 on a 470. Crime takes a bite out of crime.

Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Defender and Raiders. Short of gun violence and sex, some random character has to try and steal something from another in order to gain appeal.

[Ransium]

Honestly my opinion is the TCALS is necessarily a card duplication system. No matter how you rig it will be either completely ineffective at anti-laundering or a far too effective of means of card duplication. Any time you allow players to increase the card pull odds of any card significantly it will be exploited to duplicate cards. I don't really see transfers as being a huge deal and any efforts to stop them are likely to mess with the free market, and given how essential they are for large farms it's very likely highly effective work arounds will quickly be found. I fear any fixes will have a cascading effect of unexpected consequences that will be as bad or worse than the current ones. Get rid of TCALS. If you want, increase the odds of CTE cards being pulled more to balance things out. At least then big farmers won't be able to stack the deck so they can pull all the good cards.

[Benevolent 1]

Is there a way to mitigate the damage done by the the players which have overly abused TCALS? I mean, can these duplicate cards taken by the worst offenders be removed and placed back into the guf for redistribution? In doing so, it may dis-incentivize the next selfish manifestation from players prone to such behaviours.

[Noahs Second Country]

Is there a way to mitigate the damage done by the the players which have overly abused TCALS? I mean, can these duplicate cards taken by the worst offenders be removed and placed back into the guf for redistribution? In doing so, it may dis-incentivize the next selfish manifestation from players prone to such behaviours.

I don't think you can punish players for utilizing game mechanics(accessible to everyone) to improve their deck. Plus, enforcement of this would likely be completely arbitrary, not to mention the more widespread market impacts of simply going in and deleting cards.

Most people would not consider the original April Fool's game to be particularly balanced, and there were lots of ways to manipulate the system to get a leg up on other players. There are still players who haven't really touched cards since April Fool's sitting in the top 100.

Should we punish them for playing during a time where card spawning was significantly buffed? Retroactively going in and punishing players for what effectively is/was just a valid strategy doesn't make any sense to me.

[Riemstagrad]

-snip-

I think i'm slowly turning towards this idea.
In short:
TCALS was implemented to make it harder for large farmers to transfer bank.
--> The result = almost no losses for large farmers, while small players see their small scale transfers heisted.
TCALS was discovered and used by players to create more copies of the very special cards.
--> The result = almost all extra copies are pulled by large scale farmers.

There is nothing wrong with large scale farmers, and they will always have an advantage, because of the scale, their wealth and their knowledge of the game mechanics. That's not a problem.
But there is no need to give them even more advantages.

"no problem because the mechanics are open to everyone"?
The benefits of TCALS not simply scale with farm-size, they multiply.

There should be a balanced chance to pull those special cards from normal packs though...