Well if you're playing 2v2 friendly ship battles, then only two people need to be active at any given time, which is the same as friendly CTF. Friendly ship battles are also significantly faster, which means that although the losing team in any given round doesn't get many credits, the speed of the rounds makes up most, if not all of the difference (not to mention that since the rounds are quicker, you get keys faster).
In theory, everyone would have to at least be active at some point in time to reap the rewards, but the active team could also just arrange to give some percentage of their credits to their AFK counterparts (and, actually, you could have a friendly ship battle with only one active player if they arranged to compensate everyone else for their time).
I'm not asking for friendly games to be monitored and for people to be banned. That's more work than it's worth for a community that's already on-edge. I'm just saying that there is no solution short of that which will prevent friendly minigames from being played. I agree that friendlies are dumb, but no one wants staff spying and banning people for doing them, so just give up and let it happen.[DOUBLEPOST=1526236555][/DOUBLEPOST]
Of course, but in lieu of those players coming back, there needs to be a different solution. Selling a small amount of ultra rares at fair but still high prices or making an item a gold chest prize will not destroy the game. New players don't have a chance and many don't stick around. It's not an effective way to grow a community.
Releasing ultra rare hats as gold chest prizes would absolutely destroy the economy of the game (at least if the odds were comparable to the current gold chest odds). If black flip was released in gold chests, the price would plummet from 2.5 million or whatever, to 150k overnight. And the whole market would be thrown for a tailspin because people would be scared that their ultra rare hat would be next. As someone that has studied economics a fair bit, this argument just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The super rare items in VMK are highly sought after precisely because there are very few of them. Not everyone can have a stitch hat or a black flip. If people are only playing the game in hopes of getting those items, then they can either grind for them, or they can give up. Either way, VMK is a game with a capitalist economy. You're not entitled to have everything in the game. There aren't enough stitch hats to go around. If there were, they wouldn't be worth anything.
The things that MyVMK could do to increase the amount of rare items in the game without sending the market into a complete tailspin would be to:
A. add super rare items as VERY rare drops from SITS (pls no) or chests. Like, 1 in 5000 rare.
B. establish a "price ceiling" by putting super rares in shops for a price slightly higher than the desired market rate. Then, prices can't exceed that amount, or else people will buy the item from the shop instead of from each other.
But at the end of the day, item scarcity is what makes game economies work. Maybe some people don't stick around because they give up on getting a black flip hat, but I think people would also leave out of sheer boredom if every item was easily obtained and you never really had to work for anything.