IconBuffet | Free Icons, Stock Icons, Custom Icon Design

debbye on Apr 13, 2007

=) !

iconmaster on Apr 13, 2007

You need to think bigger. :)

ADM on Apr 13, 2007

How about every 100 points you get 1 token and then every token spent will give you 20 stamps (not sure how many stamps you get at the moment).

So it's a cycle. Encourages people to use the stamps and also allows them to continue on receiving stamps.

The way it is now means that once someone has used up all their stamps and tokens theres not much they can do until they get more tokens back.

As such they will drop off all inactivity until the date of their token reimbursement.

Not to mention you can add badges into the mix and say every 1000 points you get a badge.

aaroncampbell on Apr 13, 2007

ADM: Well, the problem is, that would be a never ending cycle that would allow people to collect all the icons in a couple hours.

Also, as for the points into tokens, if it happens I'm thinking the number of points would need to be higher. In the last 10 days I've accumulated 3890 points. I'd get 38 tokens...probably a little excessive.

aaroncampbell on Apr 13, 2007

Also, as far as the badges...earning 3 in 10 days just for points...they'd need to make a LOT of badges. (And I'm sure there are people with a LOT more points than me)

josh on Apr 13, 2007

We have ideas too. ; )

tamashii on Apr 13, 2007

To be honest, I think the token allotment, as it is now, works rather well. My only exception to it being that at a certain point, the VIPs will be wasting a lot of tokens every month - no more than 15 (given 3 of the non-free deliveries being all Gold).

I can’t help but think that the good folks at IB took that into consideration. Sure, the VIPs get a bonus, physical item for their payments, but there has to be more than a kewl badge and some kewl item every now and then. So what are they cooking up for the VIPs’ extra tokens? I really don’t know and can barely think of a guess.

More on topic: A token every 100 pts is waaaaay too small. I’d have 45 tokens. Of which would just go away next month because I wouldn’t have anything to spend them on (unless there are, in fact, other things to “purchase” with tokens like I alluded to earlier). Honestly, I don’t think Points-for-Tokens, or vice versa or any combination thereof, would be all that great (unless it was really worked out and balanced). I feel it basically turns the “trading” into a “who can get a delivery sent out the fastest”. And that’s not as fun.

I could see a badge every 1000 points, perhaps (or even 1k, 2.5k, 5k - so on). That sounds fun. I would like to see more badges crop up - that feature of this site makes it ridiculously fun.

tamashii on Apr 13, 2007

dammit - really need an edit button.

no more than 15
Should have been “no less than 15”

dyar on Apr 13, 2007

I have to disagree with tamashii slightly on this one. I think the Token arrangement does need a little tweaking and there does need to be a way for members to acquire a few more Tokens.

Case in point. I came to the New Buffet with all the Sets. As of yesterday's Authentic Jobs issuance I am out of Tokens and my refill date is the 24th. This means that I will be short 1 and maybe 2 Sets by the time my Tokens refill. These will have to be taken out of my refill allotment which will undoubtedly leave me short by the end of next month again. Unless my freebie is a Gold the next two times I may never be able to catch up.

The New IB has been around for just about a month now. So far 7 new Sets have been delivered for a total of 19 Tokens ( 2 Gold, 2 Silver, and 3 Bronze). Unless you've been really lucky and both of the freebies have been Gold Sets, everyone should be approaching 0 Tokens. At the rate Sets are being issued all the "old schoolers" will be in a hole they can't get out of at some point in time. Unless, of course, you upgrade to VIP.

The problem is even worse for New Users. They will never be able to obtain all the Sets. The current Sets have a Token value of 176 (18 Gold, 18 Silver and 32 Bronze). Without giving consideration to the first freebie, it would take a New User 1 1/2 years just to collect the Existing sets given the current monthly Token allotment. During that time there would be 72 new Sets issued (4 per month) with 18 of those being freebies, leaving them 54 Sets behind. Because of the new deliveries each month there is no way they could ever collect all the Sets.

Now, I have complete faith that the Chefs have taken all this into consideration and will make adjustments as time goes by.

mcd on Apr 13, 2007

There is some sort of imbalance in the force with regards to tokens. At first I just figured that once there were more users on IB, it would be easier to give away icons and the dispoportionatly large number of people looking to spend stamps would begin to parallel the number of users with enough tokens to receive those deliveries. But I'm thinking now that the problem is only growing exponentially. Sure, alot of new users are coming on board, but they spend their tokens in minutes and quickly join the ranks of the rest of us who have lots of stamps bu no one to use them on.

I'm not sure more tokens is the answer either, as I greatly prefer the challenge that the new system poses with obtaining all of the icon sets. I'd rather be frustrated by a limited number of tokens then to fidn it far too easy to obtain all the icons with a larger supply of tokens.

Still something just seems off. I recall a post early on in which someone mentioned that it would take a new user about a year to get all the icons, without upgrading to VIP. But as dyar mentions, there have been 19 tokens worth of new sets released in the past month. It is theoretically impossible for a new user to ever keep up with that, and even with VIP it could take a very long time to ever obtain all icon sets. Hell, I have 57 sets, and even at VIP, it'll take me at least 2 more months to get all the icons. More likely 3 or 4 months at this rate of new icon set release.

Points seem to be the wildcard, and while it remains to be seen just what the chefs will cook up with regard to point usage, I think it makes alot of sense to use the point system as a way of increasing your token count. If someone is willing to spend the time on the site and really work for those points, why not reward that effort by allowing them to speed up the process of collecting more icon sets?

tamashii on Apr 13, 2007

dyar said: Without giving consideration to the first freebie

If you refer to the first set, upon sign-up, that is delivered by Josh, then that set costs 1 Token (as it is typically a Bronze set). There is no freebie set for signing up.

iconmaster on Apr 13, 2007

Actually, the first bronze set is free. But it's always a bronze.

mcd on Apr 13, 2007

In case anyone is curious, by my quick math it would take a new user signing up today and purchasing the VIP upgrade until August 2008 to collect all of the icons at the current rate of new icon set release.

For non-VIP, it is impossible to ever collect all of the icons at the current rate of release.

Granted 19 tokens worth of new sets per month will probably not be the norm in the future.

But even if the chefs released just one Gold set per month, it would take a non-VIP user 3 full years to collect all of the icons if they started today.

tamashii on Apr 13, 2007

@iconmaster: you and Josh should prolly coordinate/communicate:

Josh said: The first delivery from me does cost a token. Only the mass deliveries of new collections are "free."

This was in response to my reporting GrammyG having to use a token to accept her sign-up set (posted in Josh’s Box - seen below):
GrammyG (a new user) might be experiencing a form of token bug. Upon signing up, she was given a delivery of Ashbury Welcome (from you) and it said it was a true Free Delivery. However, it seems to have taken the 1-Token cost for her to accept it. She has since accepted Oslo Atmosphere as well, leaving her with 4 Tokens.

Does the first set delivered from a Chef upon sign-up still cost tokens to accept?

iconmaster on Apr 13, 2007

Ah. I stand corrected.

iconmaster on Apr 14, 2007

Regarding the ratio of tokens:stamps in the system -- there are a ton of new people coming into the system every day that you guys (unfortunately) have no good way of finding out about. I suspect that if I had the tallies for both total tokens and total stamps across all users, it would look more balanced than you'd expect (though we are not aiming for a perfect 1:1 equality).

There will be ways for you to earn additional tokens, but to my mind this disconnect between established users and brand news users is a bigger issue, and one we are working to address.

Alpaca on Apr 14, 2007

iconmaster - Finding out about new people would be a fantastic way to not only meet them, but help integrate them into the community.

I look forward to the solution you might figure out to resolve that issue.

spiffinghat on Apr 14, 2007

I'm with Alpaca. The greeting of new people being better facilitated within the system would be an excellent boon all around.

dyar on Apr 14, 2007

iconmaster said: but to my mind this disconnect between established users and brand news users is a bigger issue, and one we are working to address

Quite frankly I have no problem finding new users, you just have to know where and when to look. I don't think the Chef's should just hand these to us on a silver platter, otherwise a new user would be spammed with lots of emails offering them Sets. This would most likely turn them off to IB.

If I had the Stamps I could easily spend 1000 today spamming new users. It's not my style. I much prefer to add them as a Friend (inviting them to add me to their Friends List) and leaving them a welcome note in their Box. They then come to me with the sets they want.

Granted this takes a little more time and effort than just spamming everyone that comes in the door. It has also gotten more difficult since a limit has been put on the amount of Friends you can have, but you can work around it by first deleting 100 friends to make way for some new ones.

rajr19 on Apr 14, 2007

unfortunately i do have a way of finding out. my friend count goes up due to my phantom friends.

SuperLlamel on Apr 14, 2007

Trading points for tokens would be a good idea, but I think that there could be some problems.

For example, when you look at the people with more points, they generally are the ones with most or all of the icons. This is probably because they have more icons to send to people and they are more connected to the site, since they've been around longer collecting icons and generally having a good time. Anyway, if the people who already have all the sets are the ones getting tokens, the people who have less points and probably less icons wouldn't get as many tokens.

For the people with lots of icons, getting more tokens would only help for getting the occasional new set, but not much else. The people who would need more tokens would actually get less and the people with all the sets still might have trouble getting rid of stamps.

I think that it's a good idea, but it might need to be modified a bit.

justG on Apr 14, 2007

I never thought I'd say this, but.. I agree with dyar. =] Really, can you imagine the state of the poor souls who join us after a nifty system to identify new users has been put in place? *shudder* dyar's right: they'll get bombarded with site and e-mail notifications and get quickly overwhelmed.

warriordes on Apr 14, 2007

Think bigger

mik on Apr 14, 2007

Maybe it shouldn't be easy for us to find new users en masse, for the reasons described above, but easier for newbies and lurkers to connect with a manageable number of others.

How about a 'make some friends' feature that was opt-in and generated a short list of other members (also opt in) you might want to introduce yourself to based on stuff we put in our profiles (esp. if they add an 'interests' category) and some kind of forums-participation ranking.

Sure you could use a search or tags but I think it's more about making it easy and fun for people who are a bit shy than it is about strictly the functionality of finding other members.

Newbies may not have sets to offer but do they realize they have valuable currency in choosing who gets the points for sets they accept?

If they did they might be a little selective about who they accept sets from - like people who took the time to also write a message on their page, or who wrote a forum post they found useful, or even sent only a specific requested set and not a long list.