Premium Tokens Valuation

ByThunderous Cadence January 18, 2023

While performing maintenance on the Price Guide, we noticed a price manipulation attempt using Premium Tokens in the final hours of December 31st that managed to slip through our auditing process. We’ve determined that this had a significant impact on the prices of Premium Token prices, over pricing them by 40 per piece from the period of January 1st to January 16th.

As our group has no desire to mislead players, we are issuing a refund on Premium Tokens purchased from us in this time frame. If you made a purchase, you can either:

request a complete refund (return the premium tokens for the amount you paid)
request to refund the difference (you keep the premium token and we pay you back the doubloons owed for each one)

If you used the premium token after purchasing it, we will still pay you back the difference (second option) if we have your transaction on record. Please do not let this be the reason you do not seek the refund you are due.

Stock Exchange Impact

The good news out of all this is the stock exchange has a built-in mechanism to remove errant records. Anytime the AI that checks for manipulation flags a potentially fraudulent entry, it removes it completely from the calculation until it is reviewed by a human. We typically true up all records at the end of each month, but this one was missed which means it was never added back into the calculation. It also means that if you were using buying or trading through the stock option, then you were not impacted by the error.

Premium Tokens in December. The price manipulation attempt occurred at the end of the month and did not have an impact on the final close reported on January 5th.

Premium Tokens in January. This is the price point for Premium Tokens with the errant price manipulation attempt removed.

The issue is with the price guide which allows flagged references to remain active until they are reviewed and removed. Normally, this isn’t an issue as the stock and bond ratings do not rely on the Price Guide. Also, we manually audit all flagged records before we post it. However, because of the holidays and the ongoing tournament that was happening, I admit that we were distracted. We also made a false assumption that no major trades were happening in the final hours of the year. A mistaken assumption as we know now.