UPDATE: Catch-Up Boosts

[Mooncalf]

When it comes to "pay to win" (paying real money to get ahead), we've always wanted to avoid that model as much as possible. So it was with that in mind that we hit upon the idea of the "catch-up boosts" system, which is essentially a system which allows people who lead extremely busy lives, people who vacation, or people who have been inactive to regain up to 50% of their lost ground.

The nature of the idea means that you cannot use this system to get ahead of the pack, you can only use it to try to keep up with those who have tons more free time than yourself, which we believe is a much fairer way of doing things. If this is well received, we will be aiming to allow certain existing karma-only items to be purchased for in-game money in the near future, as we believe that catch-up boosts are a fairer way of generating income for the game than asking people to pay for things which help them to get even further ahead.

So what are these boosts, exactly?

You can find them on the Karma Shop page. What they do is allow those who have wasted lots of energy or PXP (due to vacation or similar) to catch up 50% of their lost ground. The amount you can buy depends entirely on how much energy you left unspent in the past couple of months, or how much PXP you didn't gain due to not feeding, etc.

PXP orbs are now one of these catch-up items. You still get to buy 1 PXP orb per month, regardless of how much PXP you didn't gain last month, but now you can buy more if you failed to gain PXP recently. Because you can only catch up 50% of what you lost, you must have missed out on at least 20 PXP in order to buy 10 PXP back. All of these figures are on the Karma Shop page itself.

You can also buy back lost energy. Every hour when your new energy is calculated, the system now remembers how many extraneous energy you had numbering more than you maximum energy cap. That total is ongoing, and when you reach more than 500 recently lost energy, you can start to buy energy boosts. Energy boosts give 50 energy points back, but you can only buy 1 for every 100 energy you missed out on. These cost 2 karma points per 50 energy.

At the start of every month, these ongoing totals of wasted energy and PXP are halved, making it so that those who have been inactive for a year can't simply return and level up 20 times, though they will be able to catch up a fair amount if they wish.