Beyond 5000, a Savings Bank and More!

And, here's some of the news that many of you have been waiting for.

Next week we will release changes to our upgrades, bank and the concept of Wealth on Empire Avenue.

Going Beyond 5,000 investments, sponsored by Privé!
Currently our top users have been limited by a portfolio size of 5,000. Next week, we will enable users to break that barrier with an upgrade to 5,500 that has been sponsored by Privé (e)PRIVE.

Our goal in going beyond the 5,000 limit was to make sure that Empire Avenue would be balanced and fair for years to come. With that in mind, effective immediately, we will establish a limit on the number of people that you can earn Dividends from, up to 5,000.

For example, if you have invested in 5,500 people, you will receive dividend payments from the 5,000 investments who would have paid you the highest dividend amounts based on previous days' numbers. For top-end users this will mean less micromanagement of Portfolios and, most importantly, allows us to increase Portfolio sizes to much higher levels in the future.

A Savings Bank
Some of you probably know that you can save Eaves for specific items in the Shop. We are removing the "feature" of saving per item and instead giving you a Savings Bank. You will be able to move money between your Bank Balance and your Savings Bank as you wish. When you go to purchase an item in the Shop, we will deduct from your Savings first and then your Bank Balance. You will be able to see a history of your transactions to and from your Bank Balance on the Bank Page. Eaves that are currently saved per item will be placed in the Savings Bank. At this time there will be no interest paid on Savings.

We are doing this for a number of reasons, chief amongst them being that supporting per-item savings is a drain when someone cannot find what they saved for (as an example). In addition it allows us to expand the Shop further and is much easier to explain to new users. The Savings will be available on your Bank Page with Deposit and Withdraw buttons.

Upgrades will be changing in price
Many of our upgrades will be changing in price. In some cases they will go down in price, but we will introduce the concept of a "base price" plus a factor based on your Wealth.

This is the same type of concept we used with our first Power Up last December. As you become wealthier the costs will go up. While the factor of change based on Wealth will not be dramatic, it will give users a challenge as they grow in stature on Empire Avenue.

The first upgrades to change will be Increasing Portfolio Size (renamed from Buy More). These particular upgrades will see an additional requirement of hitting a particular portfolio size before being able to upgrade to the next. For example, to purchase the 1,250 portfolio size you will need to have made at least 900 investments.

Goodbye Luxury Wealth
Our last major change that we will introduce next week is the removal of a feature that very few people understood and was hard to explain simply. It also goes against our central premise that Empire Avenue is about earning Wealth for what you do online, and being able to use that wealth.

Luxury Wealth was a magic, imaginary score that went up every day if you owned Luxury Items. You could not use Luxury Wealth; it has a Leaderboard but little else.

We will remove Luxury Wealth, but we will do a little more for anyone with Luxury Wealth as a thank you for trying out this feature.

Even though Luxury Wealth was never meant to have an impact in our economy, we have decided to convert (one time) any Luxury Wealth you have on a 10-to-1 basis, up to a maximum of 1 million(e) paid out.

For example, if you have 1,000,000 in Luxury Wealth, we will give you, 100,000e and deposit it into your Bank. If you have 12 million in Luxury Wealth, you'll receive 1,000,000e in your Bank.

You will get to keep the Luxury Items you bought and we will evaluate what Power Ups and Upgrades new Luxury Items will have when they hit the store.

Please Note: Items which give you real Eaves on a weekly basis will continue to do so. This also means that when we talk about Wealth it is your Bank (including Savings) and the value of your Portfolio

When will these changes be made live?
We are targeting all these changes for Monday January 16th or Tuesday January 17th. These changes are all currently in testing internally.

Update: Thanks for all the feedback. We are planning other features which would use the Luxury Items which generated just Luxury Wealth, however, we will fast track a second feature to address some of the concerns you've had in response to this. In addition to the one-time Luxury Wealth conversion to Eaves (you'll see it on your Bank Account statement), you will be able to sell back to Empire Avenue any Luxury Item bought with Eaves only and which only generated Luxury Wealth, in order to recoup the cost. However, once you sell back, if the item is not in the Shop, you will not be able to buy it again for any future use that may be attributed to it. The choice then is yours. Items that were bought with Real World Money (ie $) will continue to pay you real eaves weekly, as before.