So anyone who scams people and the word gets out, their name is mud and the only people who will deal with them is other criminals!
Which is also again terribly interesting to watch a bunch of them (I spent a great deal of effort in the spying game to gain intel/etc.) as they rip each other off.
As such, huge amounts of resources are wasted with people infighting and the majority losing, for a few to rise to the top.
I also studied how wars started, as again this particularly interested me how events would start with a single moment and mushroom. (One war in particular I tracked to a single person shooting someone on their own side and refusing to apoligise, eventually leading to a civil war at a cost of something like 300 billion credits a day in losses.)
Those groups able to band together and work cooperatively could score big time, but the game environment made it very hard to impliment decent levels of security. (Eg. stopping your managers from running off with the stock.. I had 4 managers steal several billion credits from me, half of which I was able to recover by stealing it back
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
One idea I have to reduce the freeloader problem is to have a customer forum area where everyone can debate and initiate a vote to have someone removed. The aim is to encourage people to prove to each other that they deserve to stay, as the product is provided on a weekly basis.
(One thought from someone is that this will only result in liers and cheaters being able to stay with all the decent folk you really want being pushed out..)
Its a low cost product, so I can afford to give it a try and see what happens.
The product itself might best be described as a service, its a lottery prediction service. Unlike the competition which charges upfront a fee (And has something like 100,000 customers.) I'd charge nothing to join, no requirement to enter an email address, so people wouldn't have to worry I was harvesting addresses. And if the numbers provided won, I'd expect 50% of the winnings for them to continue to stay as customers.
(For the purposes of this example we can ignore the predictability of lottery numbers on the basis that even just providing random numbers, your still looking at some people winning anyhow.)
This way, with some 80 lotteries around the world, I can get people to enter the lottery for me, using their own money and reducing my risk to zero. As long as a few pay up their 50% I'll make something, and I can adjust the number of customers per lottery over time to get the level of income I seek, assuming that is that anyone pays up!
Eg. at the moment I'm thinking 30 people per lottery, a secure login site/forum for them to gain access to the numbers.