Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj4xW0pC_4c
To jump for a quoin is pretty fun, but if there are other players around you are often either acing someone else out of the quoin — or someone else is snagging it before you got there. Hmpf! We've always thought that all the climbing and leaping would be better as a collaborative activity. So, now it is a collaborative activity.
Here's how it works: whenever you collect a quoin with other people nearby, the quoin "shards" and fragments of it shoot off to the other nearby players.
You, as the initial collector of the quoin get the full value of the quoin (same as you would have before this feature launched, and same as you would today, if there was no one around).
The other players get a percentage of the quoin's base value (ranging from 5% to 50%, depending how close they were) multiplied by their normal quoin multiplier. These fragments do not count towards the daily quoin limit (but the initial quoin collected still does).
So, the bottom line is that the best result for everyone is to try to "keep to the flock" — the closer you are, the more value you get from each quoin. Sometimes you'll hit the quoin yourself and therefore get the most — other times you still get to wet your beak a little, and it doesn't take away from your daily limit. And, it turns out that trying to keep together is a lot of fun — it's been a hard thing to stop testing. (Note that anyone following another player is excluded from quoin-sharding … each player has to be controlling their own selves.)
This is the first iteration of quoin sharding — we intend to build on it quite a bit: adding rewards for hitting the quoins with larger groups, achievements for sharding, mini-games, a new party space and … more.
In addition, there are two new quoin jumping areas called Hoama and Kloro (like the original ones, Balzare & Roobrik, they are out in the Miscellaneous Islands).
Have fun!