UO gold worth nickels

[TheLostKnight]

I remember the first days when a charecter enters the world, when he has nothing and needs everything, when everything is difficult and long to accomplish. When he seeks for what he needs and cannot get, or it is difficult to find. When after killing a monster he loots his first corpses which gives him only a small amount of gold with a few weapons maybe magical, which won't help him much along his journey. The blacksmith which doesn't pay a lot in return for the sales of them considering all the efforts which it has required to acquire them for the previous transaction. To go along the journey and become more able to take advantage of the Ultima Online features and to acquire better skills to finially be able to start having a decent gold income. This was really the core of the game, how it was written and designed with the gold system. And then his charecter being properly trainned, it is much more easy to have access to riches. Nothing to blame, we all need that resource but later on for an experienced player what does gold mean?

I ran through a very basic feature of the game when I realised that the NPC system and the items which it sells or the various other ways where a player spends his money are not well balanced to give a real value to gold. Most players after a few weeks have become millionaire or are already become multi-millionaire. I cannot blame the game system for being what it is as this is the most advanced RPG game ever created, neither for it's rare item drops which as created a world of player vendors where it would leave the blame on the possibility to make a lot of gold from our loots. At the same time the fact remains that it is difficult to compare the price of regular items with the fortune of a player.

One exemple which I found stunning tonight was when I was selecting items in the item insurance menu and I realised that the system doesn't consider the magic attributes or the artifac rarity as a factor to give a value to the item which is to be insured. This is as an exemple where a player should spend his gold to insure items that are sometimes worth millions at the risk of loosing it.

There are many factors to consider but I believe that for most experienced players gold has become like nickels or iron in uo terms.

 

[Smokin]

I am pretty sure the insurance does check the weight of properties for the cost. Maybe not all things but most. Maybe you just have all artifacts or high end stuff so its all capped to the max cost of insurance.

 

[TheLostKnight]

They should change the way the insurance system works to balance that.

 

[UOKaiser]

They should change the way the insurance system works to balance that.

Won't work. Value of a item is determen by players and that value of a item can drop in a instance because of use or other factors. There is no way a system in UO can keep up with anything like that. Yesturday 5 mod items where worth millions today they are junk because of imbued items as a example. It's impossible to gauge thousands of players interpretation of price to give a insurance value to a item. Considering a newbie today is running in max suits and probably no gold because of imbuing of another player that decided to give out to someone. Lost cause to even consider it

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

Gold in UO has always been the "base" unit of currency. There has never been a staggered currency in UO (aside from the rat coins, but those were more of a special event, not an actual "currency") the way there is in other games such as WoW or LotRO.

Want to compare the economies between those games? It's easier than you think, all you have to do is know how the currencies break down.

In UO, the base currency is gold. In WoW and LotRO, it's copper. The breakdown per game is as such:

UO: Gold
WoW: 100 Copper -> 1 Silver, 100 Silver -> 1 Gold | 10,000 Copper = 1Gold
LotRO: 100 Copper -> 1 Silver, 1,000 Silver -> 1 Gold | 100,000 Copper = 1 Gold

So...

10,000 UO Gold = 1 WoW gold and...
1,000,000 UO gold = 100 WoW gold

and...

100,000 UO gold = 1 LotRO Gold and...
1,000,000 UO gold = 10 LotRO Gold.

Then of course you have to measure how easily the currency is obtained within each game (the faucet) and how effectively the currency is sunk (removed/deleted from circulation). And of course all kinds of factors play into it from the game's base currency flow to the use of vendors, auction houses and the like.

Really UO hasn't been that far worse than WoW in terms of the gold faucet even being active for at least twice as long as WoW (which WOW has from what I have been told has basically turned the "faucet" side way up compared to when it was first released). However between the 3, I've definitely noticed that LotRO seems to be the strictest of the 3 games not just due to the silver to gold ratio, but due to the actual "faucet" side of the game as well.

The point is though that because UO uses gold as a BASE and not as a staggered currency, the numbers in UO will always be bigger than games that put gold at the higher end of a currency stagger. If you want to compare to see just how UO is doing in terms of economy, take the comparison game down to the base unit then work your numbers.