Kyronix, after the gold conversion happens, how will we accomplish the following common transactions:
(1) A guildmate tells me that he is transferring some items to another shard in two days. I decide that I'd like to have him take 5 million gold to that shard for me in his transfer. Unfortunately, in planning for the transfer, we realize that we're not going to manage to meet up with our characters in-game before he wants to get the transfer done. Prior to the conversion, I would have just gone to his house on the shard where he was starting the transfer and locked down a container with 5 checks or dropped said container in the mailbox and then sent him a message via ICQ to tell him where to look for the checks to take. After the conversion happens, however, I won't be able to do that. My guildmate will be forced to delay his transfer or go without my gold if we are unsuccessful at arranging for an in-game character-to-character transfer.
(2) A guildmate asks me to purchase something for him on Atlantic because he doesn't have enough gold there to buy the item. He will be transferring some items to Atlantic in a couple of days and will send over some gold to repay me. I agree to purchase the item for him. A couple of days transpire and he makes the transfer. Prior to the conversion, he would have just come over to my house on Atlantic and locked the checks down and I would have been repaid. After the conversion, however, we will have to arrange to make an in-game character-to-character transfer, which may be difficult to pull off if our times to play don't coincide. Meanwhile, when I do play on Atlantic, my gold supply has been dinged plus I may be really starting to wonder if my guildmate is purposely being evasive about meeting up with me to make the repayment!
I can already see that both of these situations, which I believe are VERY COMMON these days, will have a very negative effect on people's attitude towards playing UO. There are still quite a few of us who don't have shard shields to do our own transfers and are not overjoyed at the idea of paying for transfer tokens for ourselves just to transfer over a few gold checks. Much as I really don't care for the idea because of its broader implications for moving huge amounts of gold, I think we are going to need to have the ability to transfer gold to other characters "in absentia" via some currently non-existent system.
