As I read this, I need to ask, one question. What happened to truth and honesty? This is to everybodys benefit! This is the #1, biggest problem, everybody is having!
Truth and Honesty is a nice idea. But this is how we wish the world to be. Economics studies how the world really is. There has to be an incentive. For most situations we can understand that truth and honesty can benifit us. Since not all use truth and honesty, then economist try to dig deep and see what benifit the people have when they pursue certain strategies.
As an example they told of a daycare service in Israel that had on average 6 sets of parents picking up their children late every week. To correct this they sent a letter to the guardians saying that for now on a $5.00 late fee would be charged each time a child was picked up late. They thought that with this penalty, it would fix the problem.
But to the dismay of the agency, and the 3 daycares they had implimented the late fee, now on average they had 20 sets of parents collecting their children late. What was the incentive for the parents? Well by studying the situation it was found out that guilt made a lot of parents gather their childeren on time. But now by having to pay a penalty it removed the guilt. Also the penalty fee was low enough that paying a babysitter was comparable to the penalty.
So the word of caution was to be carefull of what incentive you set because you never know how people will respond.
I find it will be difficult to set rules to control for this. In chess certain principles will allow you to be a better player (develope your pieces, control the center) even Poker has some principals that can be applied to increase your odds. But these are games that we play against other competitors. Games like slot machines are a crap shoot. The house wins with these games. So if we think Chnlove is like a slot machine, then my advice is don't play.
In our game called Chnlove, we have 5 players. And their Standard possible Incentives:
Player 1 Us - To find our soul mate (or Sole mate when hunting for red shoes :icon_biggrin:)
Player 2 The Lady in Red - To find her man
Player 3 The Agency - Their big payoff is the marriage contract fee. The small stream of EMF's cash is nice but the big payoff is the contract fee. So they would want speedy results.
Player 4 Chnlove - They get money from store gifts purchases and multiple EMF's streams. Their best interest is for longterm letter exchanges
Player 5 The Translator - Keep his job
Now with any one of the 5 players or combination we could have a slight collusion of alterior motives. For these motives, there would need to be an incentive. And don't be so narrow minded to just think it is only about the Money. Money is a great incentive but other things can motivate anyone of the players to be playing an other type of game.
But I do understand that the jest of this thread is to establish rules. The number one rule of any game is to understand that we are in a game. And the Economist would say that rule number 2 would be to identify the players and establish their motives. So please don't scream FRAUD when this unfortunate strategy is part of the game. I don't like it either, but then I also detest Christiano Ronaldo when he takes a dive from a puff of wind (although he is my favorite player to watch)
As a side note: If a reader from Pfishy came here to read this posting - I bet at no time he would hint that maybe I was being paid by Chnlove to preach the gospel.