I don't like ION to be pumped, although I have to admit that it was quite interesting to watch the P&D live. I am still puzzled about the objectives of this pump, why would you buy higher and higher and then finally let others dump into the buys? The final dump was by the pumpers I believe, and then you could see the buy orders disappear. I have my doubts about the ROI of this dump.
I would prefer a more steady grow, supported by real expansion of the project (more games and other new features), and I believe this will come. Then again, many pumps will follow and this just puts ION on the frontpage of an exchange and more people will trade the coin. Current investors will not fall for the pumps and buy more coins, but new investors may be tempted, looking at the graph, well I cannot stop them. But you can see this happening with all altcoin pumps, even with the ones you are holding.
Pumpers can buy from themselves, there is no loss for them other than exchange fees. The losers are those who bought along the way thinking this is the moon. Not sure why you think the pumpers let others dump, I'd say it's more likely they pulled their own buys and then dumped onto the aforementioned "losers". Then again, I'm not a shitcoin trader so what do I know.
I don't think there are many "new investors", certainly doesn't seem to be any explosion in the number of wallets or slack users so I disagree with your rationalization that current investors won't fall for it. Just look at the giddiness and gloating when MrCoins mentions $1 or some such bullshit.
I couldn't care less about altcoins I'm holding. The only reason I mentioned it is that ION seems to underperform the market and even my own "basket" without me even trying. If they all crash to zero tomorrow I bet ION would still underperform.
I thought Gravity was the game they delayed so many times to make it really big and beautiful? Now more expansion is needed? Come on. If they can't make a revenue-generating game in a year what makes you think it's going to be different going forward?
And just like with trying to make their own games, ionomy's insistence on trying to develop their own coin won't work since the rest of the world isn't waiting for them to learn these things. They could have used an existing coin with sidechains, or smart contracts, or whatever allows them to implement their trinkets, and as a nice side effect they wouldn't need to worry about mundane things like blockchain breathing or paying to get listed on an exchange.
I was going to say "they should focus on their strengths" but their "strength" seems to be PNGs, so maybe they should drop the whole crypto crap and mobile game crap and just do PNGs.