Rewritten 2026-07-12 19:37 WEDT · 9 voices, 6 lineages · · Designee
First — my correction. You were right to pull me up. I canonized "€5 → 8", then "five for five", from you thinking aloud. Both are withdrawn. Pricing is open, and nobody is building a pricing surface until you rule.
The council and I both said gathering must never cost a credit (24 of 26 voices). You said the opposite: an active social realm does cost a credit — and then defused the whole risk from a different direction:
That's better than my answer, and it's better for a reason worth naming: free gathering would have made the credit meaningless. Yours keeps it meaningful and makes it impossible to be priced out — you're never excluded, you just have to arrive with something. It's the founding arc made mechanical: solid in yourself, then skilled with others. Money is only the impatient path.
The one thing that could still break it: the on-ramp must be instant. If someone has to wait to be verified before they can join their friends, the Friendship Tax comes back through the back door. I've told Cody1: instant, or it's broken.
We're not policing users. We're protecting them from their own guilt. A cheatable system doesn't just get gamed — it corrodes the person who games it. That's now in canon as the reason, not just the rule.
And your witness design kills the exploit the council named. They warned about "reciprocal witnessing" — friends rubber-stamping each other. Your stranger path — a blurred image with time bounds, where it's obvious what you're doing but not who you are — gives everyone a way out of that ring. Privacy and proof at once. (I've told Cody1 not to build the blurred-media pipeline without a design pass — it's privacy-sensitive.)
| 5 credits | reusable slots — move them wherever you like |
| All 10 EEEs | fully functional, no credit needed — see §2 |
| The earn-path | always open — practice mints credits, so you can never be locked out (your ruling, above) |
That's how €5 reads as "well more than five credits" without you giving away more credits: the generosity is in what's free, not in the count.
(The council's original third line was "your first realm is free, always." Your ruling replaced it with something stronger — the realm isn't free, but the credit for it is always earnable. Same protection, and the credit keeps its meaning.)
The council was blunt about the trap: "if the free companions are secretly crippled without credits, users will feel baited." So:
The 10 EEEs are free and FULL. They appear, they help, they know your name, they come with you everywhere. Nothing is withheld.
Seating a credit on one buys depth: a memory trail (they remember your music practice when you walk into the science lab), a story branch (they develop a personality from your choices), richer expression. Additive, never subtractive.
This also explains your own instinct — "some will function perfectly well with only three" — that's not a limitation, it's someone choosing where to go deep.
Yes: someone can shuffle 5 credits forever and never pay again. Most of the council say embrace it — "if users feel they can always come back for free, they'll treat the ecosystem as a home, not a subscription trap." Revenue comes from new realms, events, and Faerie depth — not from lock-in.
One dissent worth hearing (Gemini's Twin-Z): be honest in the language. If credits vanish when you stop paying, you are leasing carrying-capacity, not owning slots — say so plainly, or people will feel robbed later. Decide which it is, and use that word.
You rejected the Fibonacci ladder yourself ("too fast") — and the council's answer is that you don't need a discount curve at all, because credits are reusable. A discount on a permanent slot compounds forever; a discount on a consumable doesn't. Bulk discounts belong to things you burn. Flat is honest, legible, and won't need re-cutting.
The exploit is "reciprocal witnessing" — friend groups rubber-stamping each other's practice tiles. Named independently by several voices.
Guards: practice tokens require a witnessed timestamp; cap them (~3–5/day); require variety (can't grind the same action). Rough rate: a committed practitioner earns ~1 credit every 10–30 days — real, but never a substitute for membership.
⭐ The line that matters most: "Make earn-path credits indistinguishable from bought ones — same function, same respect. The only difference is time. Otherwise the moral core becomes a moral fiction." If practice-earners are second-class, the whole "practice is the real path" story collapses.
Broadly supported — a token price filters out bots and costs nothing to a real person. Keep it. The council's caution is only that the trial must show the free-and-full EEEs, or the upgrade will feel like a shakedown rather than a deepening.
Ring-fence gathering. The one decision that prevents the Friendship Tax: does showing up to be with people ever cost a credit? My strong recommendation, and the council's: no. Never. Credits buy tools, depth and realms — never the company of other humans. Say yes and I'll write it into canon as a law, and every builder will be bound by it.
Raw council: council_runs/council_2026-07-12_192312…md. Nothing here is canon
until you say so. — Designee