Gold Sink, How would you do it?

[linko50]

This is a simple question, with not so simple a solution, or if it is a simple solution, it hasnt been thought of, or impleminted yet.

The question is, if you were to be in charge of balancing the economy through a "gold sink" - How would you do it? what are the effects of your actions in your view?

 

[linko50]

Personally i think i would implement a way for the system to read when you have killed a certain monster from a certain spawn point, lets say you were in the entrance to the fan dancer dojo..... just for example.......... and you were just standing there, killing the fandancers over and over..... i think that the gold should get less and less on that spawn for you, untill there is no gold. Dont change the Item spawn, just the gold...

This would stop people from being capable of the current method of farming gold, which is to stand there, and leech life off of what they kill, then they loot the gold, and recall to the bank when they are full, only to come back and do it again.

All this would take is a code that recognizes an individual, and pairs that with the spawn location, keep in mind this is not by monster type, simply location, that way you can run around and kill like 4 different things, and maybe come back and kill that one again, no change, but when it is that one or two over and over, it lowers till the gold isnt there.

 

[Lord GOD(GOD)]

I think it's more important to address why a gold sink is needed. If it's to negate the huge influx of things like scripted heartwood kits/collections and duped event items/arties/val hammers then I would rather just address those things at the source.

By that I mean removing item turn in's for the collections, remove quests for runics, find and stop dupes quickly. I would rather that than say ah well it's here to stay but lets take some of their free money off them with this.

 

[RavenWinterHawk]

Personally i think i would implement a way for the system to read when you have killed a certain monster from a certain spawn point, lets say you were in the entrance to the fan dancer dojo..... just for example.......... and you were just standing there, killing the fandancers over and over..... i think that the gold should get less and less on that spawn for you, untill there is no gold. Dont change the Item spawn, just the gold...

This would stop people from being capable of the current method of farming gold, which is to stand there, and leech life off of what they kill, then they loot the gold, and recall to the bank when they are full, only to come back and do it again.

All this would take is a code that recognizes an individual, and pairs that with the spawn location, keep in mind this is not by monster type, simply location, that way you can run around and kill like 4 different things, and maybe come back and kill that one again, no change, but when it is that one or two over and over, it lowers till the gold isnt there.

I think its easy.
Make 1000 decorative items that go away.
Price them from 1 million to 50 million.
Buy em if you want them. Dont buy them.

But please dont complain the rich get them.

I hate that.

 

[Landicine]

I think a spawn tracker wouldn't work since with some experimentation, people would quickly figure out when to move to another spawn, and scripters would have it down to a science within a week. It also punishes legitimate hunting. There are days where I feel like killing Miasma, so I grab my paladin and kill Miasma. There are days I feel like fishing up SOS, so I do that. I tend to stick with one thing since there is less switching of equipment or characters. Farming the same monster again and again is one of those lazy things we do. I may switch up what I kill (haven't killed Terathan avengers in a year or so, Balrons since Treasures of Tokuno, regular demons since Magincia), but I tend to pick a target for a particular fighting session.

Also, if you are walking through a dungeon, they tend to have the same things. Fan dancer dojo is mostly fan dancers with a few other tasty bits. Despise is ogre lords and the stuff you fight while you wait. Hythloth is demons, demons, and bigger demons.

Gold sinks are hard to make. I have never bought expensive hair dye from the hairstylist NPC. I got my taxidermy trophies from a friend. I may have 15 boats for RP reasons, but they are cheap by today's standards. I have my fill of houses unless they let us have more. Training characters gets cheaper and cheaper.

Insurance is the last really good gold sink. Before insurance, we all used crafted exceptional armor, so resources got burned through making that, but insurance still costs more on average I would suspect.

One change that would work but would cause a lot of complaining is making armor repairs more expensive (burning up resources or gold). I know some games already do that, but these games also don't have insurance since characters keep things on death I think.

New items and decorations aren't terribly good goldsinks. They are either one shot goldsinks (buy them once and you are done), or they require expensive upkeep and no one gets them. What decoration would be cool enough that you'd spend a million to look at it for a month? What piece of clothing? I could see people spending uber money for temporary powerful items, but these have the drawback that they would be unbalancing. For example:

Glass Sword
1 Use
Instantly kills any creature or player on a successful hit
Use Best Weapon skill

Depending the the price it would either be broken or totally useless except in certain situations (player revenge).

New areas like the Nujel'm dungeon that require entry fees could be neat gold sinks, if they had more things to do. Special NPC guilds like the old days with neat perks that cost a great deal to be part of could be another neat gold sink. Heck NPC guilds could be the gold sink faction-like organizations of Trammel, controlling towns through PvM, trade, crafting, and general gold-sinking.

 

[E_T]

1. First, get rid of scripters. The spawn tracker mentioned is a good idea.
2. Change how often vendors charge their fees from daily to hourly. Lots of people move expensive items to a new vendor before they get charged for it each day thus avoiding ever paying vendor fees for those items.
3. Remove LRC. Nobody has to buy regs anymore. I'm sure that was a good gold sink in the past.

 

[love2winalot]

Vendor changes can be easier than that. Just make them take the Fee out when the item is sold. This way the seller gets his money, and the vendor gets his Fee.

 

[Saris]

how about.... BAN GOLD SCRIPTERS we page but devs dont listen.

 

[linko50]

how about.... BAN GOLD SCRIPTERS we page but devs dont listen.

I think that is a mis stated post.

we do page, but i am not sure that the development team, and the customer service are the same thing, the development team seems to be on their toes, tossing out new stuff fairly regularly, with good intentions. on the other hand, they seem to have about 1 gm that actually visits anyone, and makes any effort, any others seem to send pre-automated messages to answer any question possible.

 

[Nyses]

I agree that stopping the gold scripters will help slow down one problem, the rampant influx of unlimited amounts of new gold into the game.

One Idea I have on this is to put random "boss" monsters into the game. They would look like normal monsters and could use the Paragon spwning code (ie. 1 in 20) but instead of 5 times the strength, they could be 2 or 3 times the toughness. Maybe even just have the "boss" monsters in the dungeons, as I believe the scripters do not "farm" the overland spawn. Point is just enough to kill the unattended scripters.

As for a gold sink, lets draw on what works in real life. I really like the idea of casinos. Vegas is HUGE and successful, because the house always wins. To make it interesting in game, make some of the payouts, not only gold, but some unique items as well.

 

[K'torr]

Housing Tax.
Subtracted from your Bank Box every UO day. (ie. once every 2 hrs)
Amount should be a relatively small amount, and proportionate to the size of your house. (maybe .2% of the total value of your house).
If your run out of gold, your house is padlocked and a guard is placed. You cannot enter or get anything in your house until your Taxes are paid up.

I also like the Casino idea.

 

[Saris]

Housing Tax.
Subtracted from your Bank Box every UO day. (ie. once every 2 hrs)
Amount should be a relatively small amount, and proportionate to the size of your house. (maybe .2% of the total value of your house).
If your run out of gold, your house is padlocked and a guard is placed. You cannot enter or get anything in your house until your Taxes are paid up.

I also like the Casino idea.

I will go for this if there was anyone one in UO to tax us, but no taxation without rep........ lol

get LB to come back from NCsoft and ill let you tax my house to the ground.

 

[linko50]

I am up for a Cove Tea Party!!

 

[Laina]

Vendor charges - I agree - if the vendor charged a flat percentage when the item sold (and maybe a smaller daily amount too??) that would be a nice gold sink.

Housing tax - I have seen this come up for years and have personally never been able to see how the benefits outweigh the negative connotations. It just seems more like a punishment to the legit player because of some scripters gold farming.

One idea my hubby and I have tossed around regarding the scripters and gold farming is to actually increase the spawn rate rather than to decrease the amount of gold each one had. Right now, most of the scripters pick a spot that only one or two monsters spawn at any one time. If x number of monsters were killed in x amount of time, then more and more monsters would spawn. Theoretically, it wouldn't be long before a lone scripter would be overwhelmed and killed. Also, this way the game becomes more challenging for those with better armor/weapons/skills. And, there would be less standing around in more crowded dungeons for spawn. If the area was left, the spawn would slowly dissipate.

On another note, I really like the casino idea - it sounds like it has a lot of potential to add something fun into the game

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

Housing Tax.

ABSOLUTELY NOT

ANYONE who wants a housing tax can do it to themselves right now (oddly enough, much like people who have a ton of money and want higher taxes in real life, they NEVER seem to want to pay said taxes themselves voluntarily).

If you want a recurring expense for houses do the following:

1. Limit the number of tiles in a house that can be changed and start charging gold for any changes over that number of tiles (also LOWER The "refund" for removing tiles from the house structure).

2. Add on new features to houses that require an upkeep... more storage, special NPCs (like a banker (would be VERY EXPENSIVE) or a stablemaster and other ypes of town NPCs that could be used for the owner or for making a player run town), and so on.

The way it has always been proposed, all a house tax does is throw gold down a trash barrel for no return whatsoever beyond the status quo. You can do that RIGHT NOW if you were so inclined... I've yet to see anyone start though.

 

[Pickaxe Pete]

Vendor changes can be easier than that. Just make them take the Fee out when the item is sold. This way the seller gets his money, and the vendor gets his Fee.

This has been suggested many times in the past, and I think it is a great idea. Right now, I am not going to use the bug to get around fees. But, I can't stock with all of the high-end items I'd like to (small shard, would sit too long to pay for themselves). If this change were put in, I could offer a much bigger selection of nice things. I suspect variety would be greatly increased on everyone's vendor.

The con argument is that there would not be enough downward price pressure to keep people from just using it as free storage. There might be some of that, but if anyone actually wishes to sell things, I think fair market competition will keep things within reason.

As suggested, the cons could be mitigated by simply charging a very small daily fee percentage in addition (far smaller than the present one).

 

[JC the Builder]

First bring back the fees for house customization. At the moment it is nothing more than a type of bank CD. You can always get all your gold back. The reason the 10% fee was removed was players complained that minor changes would cost a lot. So instead just create a 24 hour grace period where you can customize all you want. After 24 hours a house customization costs 10% of the home's value.

Second, if a house is placed longer than 7 days you can no longer get any gold back by demolishing it.

Third, raise house placement prices. They are so low that even a complete novice player can make enough in a week or two for a Castle. A 7x7 should cost 250,000 gold to build and a 18x18 5 million. A Keep will now cost 25 million and a Castle 50 million.

Now here is where the real gold gets sunk. Forth, implement custom house plots up to 25x25. Their prices would scale up to 40 million gold. Eager players will want to spend their gold upgrading. The reason the developers only went up to 18x18 was because of bandwidth and housing space limitations. That was 5 years ago and it was stated some time ago that 90% of UO players were on cable or better. Plus what is the different between two 18x18 right next to each other or one 25x25? There isn't any. Players will want to demolish their old homes to place new ones. This will get out of a lot of gold.

Sixth a "luxury" tax for building the new large custom plots. The materials (walls, floors, etc.) cost 3x as much.


With these ideas I think it introduces nice new elements while pulling out a lot of gold. There will be almost no impact on players who don't want to pursue these larger housing options.