What we learned from the reactions

After reading all the comments on our concept, we learned that the connection between the data miner and its auction house is not clear enough.
Originally we only had the dataminer, but this concept on its own can not make users come back. Once they have mined all corridors, they will just quit playing. This is why we wanted to add some kind of living economy system. The most basic one seemed to be an auction house, as this is used in most multiplayer games and the users will be familiar with the concept.
It is true that the link between the mining and the auction system is rather vague, but we couldn't find any economy system with a better link to the dataminer. This leaves us with three options.

• We could just drop the auction system, but that would cause problems with players leaving the game due to a lack of content. This would also reduce the value of the news to nothing. It would just be a replacement of coins.
• We could replace the auction system with an other type of economy. Unfortunately we don't really have good ideas of what could come instead. The economy has to be related to the value of the news in the articles, to make sure users also read the articles. We don't want to have articles just as a replacement of coins.
• We could further explain the link between the two and keep the concept as it is, while just explaining why it is this way. In this system the users indicate how much some news is worth to them by setting a price for it in the auction house, meaning they have read the articles.

Choosing between these three options is hard, as none of them is an optimal solution. 

Once we have chosen what we will do, we will work out the concept in more detail, adding a storyboard for further explanation.