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Any new info out about having gold be a number in the bank & not a pile of checks?

Tanivar

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Being on Siege now with a single bank box per account, this is becoming a concern.

I went back through the Ask & Answers and didn't see this listed. Is it still in the works, or did it get wind up in the bad ideas bucket?
 

MissEcho

Babbling Loonie
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Hope it didn't end up in the bad ideas bucket, I am seriously waiting for this to come in so it frees up hundreds of lockdowns in cheques across my accounts. Am sure they can make it so that people who want 'gold' can just keep a few piles in their house after looting from monsters, or perhaps 60k 'gold' is always a default in the bank before converting the rest to a 'number'. Shouldn't have to have gold on you to buy from an NPC, it would be really nice to never see 'begging thy pardon, but thou canst not afford that" again, unless of course my bank box does not contain the funds I am trying to spend.

An update on this would be nice.
 

Vexxed

Certifiable
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Being on Siege now with a single bank box per account, this is becoming a concern.

I went back through the Ask & Answers and didn't see this listed. Is it still in the works, or did it get wind up in the bad ideas bucket?
No idea on the status of this but I love to be able to do 176+ Mill transactions safely and EASILY without having to trust a 3rd party!
 

Lady Storm

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
oi Why not just make a platnum coin worth 1mill each... a bit bigger in size than a say an apple so it can be differencated from a silver coin. stackable of cource...
I am not a fan of the idea of one bank... There is not a glut of gold sitting in my banks on the contrary I have my characters own things there... oh and a tidy sum but not a glut!
If your sitting on that much gold go out and buy something (s) geesh
 

Tina Small

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Being on Siege now with a single bank box per account, this is becoming a concern.

I went back through the Ask & Answers and didn't see this listed. Is it still in the works, or did it get wind up in the bad ideas bucket?
*Squints eyes at Tanivar.*
Don't be thinking about quitting and stuffing your Siege bankboxes, Mister!
 

Aurelius

Babbling Loonie
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
As with almost everything, it should be player choice.... if I want an abstracted number of 'gold' that's fine, if I want to have piles of gold or cheques, that's also fine - as long as it is MY decision and not some bright idea imposed by a dev concentrating on "neat programming" and taking a few comments on a forum as "the right way to go".
 

Hannes Erich

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
As with almost everything, it should be player choice.... if I want an abstracted number of 'gold' that's fine, if I want to have piles of gold or cheques, that's also fine - as long as it is MY decision and not some bright idea imposed by a dev concentrating on "neat programming" and taking a few comments on a forum as "the right way to go".
If it virtually eliminated gold duping, would your feelings change?

And this really is just a question. I don't necessarily have strong feelings on the matter, especially compared to things I'd like to see more. An abstract number tied to characters and/or banks might have clear benefits, but in a game this old, devs can catch a lot of flak for fixing something that was "broken just fine". :D
 

Aurelius

Babbling Loonie
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
If it virtually eliminated gold duping, would your feelings change?

And this really is just a question. I don't necessarily have strong feelings on the matter, especially compared to things I'd like to see more. An abstract number tied to characters and/or banks might have clear benefits, but in a game this old, devs can catch a lot of flak for fixing something that was "broken just fine". :D
Not especially, no.

Duping of anything has always been a significant issue in UO, but given that - as far as I know - the methods used to dupe gold are pretty much the same as those used to dupe items, my interest would be in getting rid of those processes. If items could be duped, but not gold, I suspect we would just see a rise in the sites selling highly desirable items for real-life cash, rather than in-game gold, and those sites hold the potential of running assorted tricks, scams, trojans and similar - and could be abusing your real life payment methods too. In-game buying, if you watch and think about what is being sold carefully, is far safer.
 
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kaio

Lore Master
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I think people should have the option to write a check.
Imagine having a global bank.So that you could use you're gold on another SHARD !!!
Another cool thing could be a working mail-system, so fx.. If you bought some stuff on shard A, you could mail it to your'e self..for a fee ofcause :)
 

Cetric

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
I personally, just hate having to make sure i have plenty of gold, on every character, on every shard. one "chunk" would be pretty nice. Then i coudl buy things anywhere and it wouldn't matter where my gold was from physically.
 

Mitzlplik_LS

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
I wish I had such problems!

Oh my, I am all out of room in my bank box because of all these damn 1 mill checks. I hate this! :rolleyes:
 

Tanivar

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I wish I had such problems!

Oh my, I am all out of room in my bank box because of all these damn 1 mill checks. I hate this! :rolleyes:
Actually you have to include deco items, holiday gift items, and particularly normal play items. Remember uO has been item-based since AoS and that I'm a forager/crafter, there's a lot to store.

9 metals
9 granites
4 leathers
cloth
9 woods?
a few dozen Imbuing materials
10 small gems?
8 large gems
7 cannon items
30 items in three imbued spare suits (7 suit, 2 jewelry, the bag their in)
2 dozen slayer spellbooks

That list alone will fill a standard sized bank box easily, and then there are of course the deco & holiday items, vet rewards, and of course some checks, with the game economy and prices, you have to have piles of checks just to buy armor and other needed gear. Piles and piles of checks, go browse vendors, on prodo shards especially, check the prices. Heck they had to increase the top price a vendor will accept up a couple of trillion or such. :eek:
 

Cetric

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Actually you have to include deco items, holiday gift items, and particularly normal play items. Remember uO has been item-based since AoS and that I'm a forager/crafter, there's a lot to store.

9 metals
9 granites
4 leathers
cloth
9 woods?
a few dozen Imbuing materials
10 small gems?
8 large gems
7 cannon items
30 items in three imbued spare suits (7 suit, 2 jewelry, the bag their in)
2 dozen slayer spellbooks

That list alone will fill a standard sized bank box easily, and then there are of course the deco & holiday items, vet rewards, and of course some checks, with the game economy and prices, you have to have piles of checks just to buy armor and other needed gear. Piles and piles of checks, go browse vendors, on prodo shards especially, check the prices. Heck they had to increase the top price a vendor will accept up a couple of trillion or such. :eek:
Yep,

I wanted to buy something on someones vendor for 150mil.. had to empty my bankbox of everything just to get the checks in there lol.
 

Lady Storm

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
We in RL think the ecconomy went wild..... in UO its NUTZ!!!
For those of you who are not as old in the World of UO, here is a bit of history...
There was no Reward any thing... no fancy tools for reforging.. just plain tools you couldbuy off a vendor or make with your tinker....
No Arties.... No EM event goodies... we had events but no goodies to speak of.
Houses were in a deed form no tool to place any size you physicaly had to pre pick a size and type from a npc... No house tool.. no placement tool, heck you were lucky to get 1 125/400 secure and about 15 lockdowns... no matter the size you placed. Oh you could put in it any amount of junk in chests and nothing would decay. So you really didnt need the secures.. but you did have to keep the riff raff out or you would be riped off blind.
Armor and weapons came in a general way... you ether had a smith ... hopefully a gm one... make you a set that did the best it could.
Or
You hunted in every nook and cranny hoping for one of the better pieces Hardening, Fortification, Invunerable, in the armor the best being invun. Weapons...Ruin , Force, Power , Vanqisher.. oh dont forget Virtue. we had fighting wands too... The top of the weapons was the Silver Vanq. with one of these.... you were a power to be recond with...but for one thing..... die and you could very well loose all of it. We didnt have insurance... no blesses ether.. well 1 bless from the clean up brit bit but those were horded like mad and used only on top stuff.
PVP PVM it didnt matter.... You had the top armor,weapon a good horse.. oh and they didnt bond... so if it died... you best have a spare. No Arms race here... equil footing for all could be had.

Gold..... now there is the meat of this post... Gold in the bank box back then was in short supply... the average player was damn lucky to have a few hundred... looting was a poor bit...mongbats didnt have a dime on them then... well most didnt have much on them. But you could always depend on the bags they gave for a few coins...
Hard work and skills made for the prized gold you horde in your bank... I do remember thinking after I placed my first house the gold I spent took me sooo long to make. not minutes ,hours, or a day or two, we talking weeks.. and this was for a tiny little 7x7 wooden house. !0 thousand gold in the bank....No Bank Checks ether... my goodness players envied you!

No stone work furni, no fancy deco.... we had what your crafter could do on his very small menu. People wonder where players learned to be so good at deco..... you had to be.
Now you fight over banking space and not thousands but millions and bilions of gold checks. The eye candy is all over and you charge so much for things for the rareity that would make the player in the first year fall over dead in their tracks! And here we are talking so much gold that you cant spend it.... shame on you.

A handfull of yearsback a Lead Producer was toying with the idea of wiping the servers of gold due to the rapid duping of gold and the glut it was making... our money race was outdoing the Real world! Thinking back at it even though I was apose to it... perhaps he should have. Reduced the monster payout, and made it a bit harder to get... as well.

Look whats the ouside cost of gold... I know this might be a bit outside the box but have you seen what those scammers are asking for a mill gold? It's in the books we see dropped on grounds at every bank on the game... and there are all those sites ...well not so many now but still... their charge for a mill... (EA was stupid, the gold sales way back when would have made them a pretty penny!) Or even the Player who sells his own gold to others in game... I remember once being told 150$ for a mill was cheap... now 25 cents per or less some charge more depending on shard you need... Grante gold will never go back to the 150$ mark... there is way too much of it, and its too easy to get.
Wipe it out and give you a number ??? I dont like it. The gold race will not stop..rather it will be unstoppable... oh it will stop duping of gold... but they will just take more valuable things to dupe and there goes your plan to curb inflation in UO.
 

Cetric

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
i personally think, it would make a lot of sense for the devs to take all the gold in the game, all the current 1mil checks - And just remove a 0 or 2. Then for a while at least, we won't be talking about mils and bils like second nature.

The guy with 75billion then has 7.5bil. The guy with 100mil now has 10mil. Etc. Then we can start talking about "Selling Slither, 15mil" and stuff like that.
 
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Tanivar

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
A handfull of yearsback a Lead Producer was toying with the idea of wiping the servers of gold due to the rapid duping of gold and the glut it was making... our money race was outdoing the Real world! Thinking back at it even though I was apose to it... perhaps he should have. Reduced the monster payout, and made it a bit harder to get... as well.
Wonder how many threatening emails and PMs he got? He'd have not been a popular soul. How many threats do you think EA got that they'd be sued for the RL dollar value of the gold in spite of the ToS? The riots outside the EA offices would have been world wide news.

If they limited the gold these days they should just stop adding any additional gold to the game and free up some of what there is now by having some NPC or monster bank, house, and dead character robberies so that there is always some gold for adventurers to find. Not let it all be hoarded, but keep some flow of gold going, a couple hundredths of a percent of the total gold is always free for monsters to have and chests to contain should be enough. That should be equivalent to a few hundred million gold coins or so. This would at least stop any further economic damage.
 

Theo_GL

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Oh boy, here we go - another thread on the economy with people who don't understand economics throwing out a million ill conceived ideas. Lets respond to some of this nonsense in no particular order:

1 - The change of physical gold to bank account numeric balance is a needed and just change. About every other game does this. When 5k or 10k was all you needed in a single stack - it was ok, but now that things are sold in the MILLIONS of gp it is insane to sit around counting/sorting checks. You think making expensive transactions difficult is a way to 'limit' the economy you are simply ignorant. Do you think that if tomorrow banks got rid of checks in real life the price of a car or house would drop because hey 'its hard to carry $1m in 20's to go buy a house? It would be irrelevant to the price but it would certainly change alot of other things in life like crime. No different in uo. Making $200m transactions hard in UO allows crime/scammers.

2 - Simply removing gold is not the way to 'reduce' inflation. The value of a good is measured by the time/effort to acquire said item and to a certain extent the value of the currency. Reducing everyone gold by 10%, 80% or whatever will not reduce prices by 80%. For many the value of an item represents an opportunity cost to acquiring the item or acquiring the gold. How long would it take me to mine the ingots, gather the bod and complete it to get a Powder of Fort vial that is usable and consumable? An hour? Two hours? Now how long would it take me to acquire gold by hunting monsters? Kill masima's for an hour straight and I'll have 100k gold. No matter if I have 10m or 1gp in my bank - the value of a vial of PofF (all crafting demand equal) is about 100-125k because of opportunity cost.

3 - Simply removing gold by a percentage is also not fair across the playerbase. I store most of my wealth in items. Lets assume you store your wealth all in gold. You lose 80% of your wealth while my 'wealth' is hardly reduced at all becuase I still have all my stuff. So what if there isn't enough gold to buy the items I am now FAR 'wealthier' than you because the value of my items is again, somewhat supported by opportunity cost to acquire.

4- The DEV team is to blame for a huge part of the inflation in the game. Once upon a time they thought 'hmm, there is too much gold and new players have a hard time catching up - a way we can solve this is by making gold easier to obtain'. To do this they simply doubled the gold on all the monsters. This was the single worst item ever done to increase inflation on purpose. It basically gave everyone a 100% pay raise which inflated the opportunity cost of all goods. The devs NEVER should have done this. New players should be taught that the way to wealth is to acquire through gameplay the ITEMS that sell for large amounts of gold and not the gold itself. Case in point - pink scrolls. These are consumable and in demand and you can do the first level of a champ spawn and get a 1.0 (fel) or .5 (tram) animal taming pink that is worth either 2m or 1m in gold. That can be done even with a fairly new character. Opportnities through work to acquire higher valued rewards allows new players to gather gold from the existing economy. Simply putting 2x gold on monsters was a bad bad bad bad idea. Another developer fail.

5 - The way gold is 'created' in the game far outpaces the way it is consumed (gold acquision vs gold sink). Gold acquisition is through monster drops, NPC buying goods farmed by players and through champ spawn drops etc. The way gold exits the game is through vendor fees, insurance and community collections when gold is donated. The generation of gold is far outpacing gold use in most players playstyles. Lets say monster loot was reduced by 90% to 3 gp per mongbat and 80gp per blood ele etc and now lets assume overpowered armor was reduced causing more deaths and lets assume the only way to repair equipment was to pay for repairs (ala Diablo 3) then you would see a much lower collection of gold because your 'costs' as a player would go up. The game needs MORE gold sinks and by reducing the gold dropped in game - you could effectively reduce the total gold in game. As long as the money supply (M1 for economists out there) is continually expanding - with a constant player base or declining player base you have inflation.

6 - Another HUGE HUGE cause of inflation has been the decline in population and IDOCs. You have a shrinking playerbase now sharing/acquiring the goods from a larger playerbase. This, by definition causes inflation. You go from 200k players with items to a playerbase of 15-20k and every player (on average) has 10x as much STUFF as they did before. Granted some IDOC loot is crap and for certain not everyone participates in IDOCs to the same level - but in general that stuff that fell on the ground had to go somewhere. When you pick up 1m ingots from a player who left, that 1m ingots is now circulating with 1 less player in game. So everyone is 'richer' by 1m/20k players or 50 ingots. Multiply this times thousands of lost players that have NOT been replaced and you have inflation.

So there you have it... if you truely want to 'fix' the economy you have a couple viable options:

1 - Complete server wipe of all items gold and houses. In conjunction reduce monster loot dropped and increase gold sinks (insurance increase and add other sinks). This would create a 'clean' economy free of duped gold, scripted gold, idoc hoarded loot and let you start over from scratch. The hoarders out there would hate this but honestly I think it would be alot of fun for everyone to start over. The players will high skills will be able to move on faster and be ahead but this would likely draw new players to the game to start on somewhat equal 'net worth' footing. Many of the vets here would hate it because they play to enjoy the status they have achieved by acquiring things.

2 - Change ratio of gold drop to gold sinks and remove player repaired armor to vendor paid repairs. Replace 'LRC' with magery points you pay for like chivalry. This would generally begin to 'suck' gold out of the economy for playing the game as the money supply contracted to a reasonable amount for the playerbase - then change some of this back by reducing repair costs or insurance costs. This would reduce the overall 'inflation' and cause some level of deflation. This though would favor players 'not playing' and hoarding their gold as its relative value would increase without doing anything.

Anything else is just jacking with the economy artificially and won't solve the general inflation caused by rapidly expanding money supply and declining playerbase with more items distributed among more players.

It is funny how everyone wants to blame 'duping' for the economy's problems. I am not suggesting for a minute there haven't been duping problems in UO but the greatest 'dupe' of alltime has been the IDOCs and mass house fallings that have happened essentially dupping items for everyone (ie created out of thin air). EA should have removed houses from day 1 by deleting all contents. Yes, some shard history and rares might go but then that is what FUELS the rares market is things becoming MORE rare. Simply redistributing to a declining playerbase has made items less rare and more common. The only reason prices are driven up for them is that items are being chased by an ever increasing gold supply.

This ends your macro economics lesson for today.
 

GarthGrey

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
I won't quote you Theo because I hate when people quote really long posts, but i'll admit your long replies are the only ones (oh and Tina's :) that i even bother to completely read. Nicely done. :scholar:
 

Lady Storm

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Theo my dear,
Anyone who plays WoW has an idea of how the account gold system works and works well.
That is for wow... But this is UO.
I can see that in uo it would have a good use for moving gold for all characters to use in game for that account.
It does have its good side with the fact the duping of gold in game will poof...
Idk how it will be done so I can give my other accounts gold... unless we had a mail system like wow for it...
Not everyone has a vendor to pull gold off..
Question is: How much gold in the game has really been duped? And is it still floating around that much?
To be honest the Dev put gold way too easy to get and farm... Swoops was easy till they had to take care of the Guild of Dexers who farmed out the place from honest players who were there and being social. They pushed out everyone and were macroing the hell out of looting makeing millions on just about every shard. Everyone knew they were farming gold forsale. Took the Dev a long time to stop them after screaming our heads off.
The real reason gold has us by the short hairs is well..............Rares, EM event items, Atlantic houseing(castles and keeps), Mats for the Armor and weapons and tools for said items.
Yes your right the Dev is the root of this... but so are we.
We want more eye candy.. to best the next guy... to make the most uberist suit and weapon that can wipe the side in pvp...
My point has been that the game started out pretty much fair.. you worked and got the top you could go and that was it. After you got that high stuff you put your time into what ever game play you liked. It made sence. Now... our history has been filled with esclating arms race that is the real root of all duping... as well as the glut of gold horded in game.
I got 4 castles full of the junk the Dev have put out over the years, my museum is stuffed full of every trinket to a point.. Many i have not put the time to aquire of late as I was just getting tired of the damn gold rise in cost...
It's War.
Unlike some I started out hand to mouth so to speak, but i have a brain and started to put two and two together and did the legit gold management in game... (i do it in wow too, I am never under 100k in that game)
I had a caslte the first year in uo... all done by hard work and hard thinking things to get there.
I personally wanted to earn every gold coin i got. Not so some of us...
Even with balance in power acheivable some still wanted to gain the $$ base that was part of UO back then.
One person I knew of paid for his college tuition with money he made from the game.. others I have seen sold homes and faught in the house wars to do the very same thing.
Once people found having fun paid them $$$ in the real world we have had gold wars going full blast.
There will always be the guy out there who wants the short cut to get what he wants...
To take advantage of a stupid company who didnt know how to get its head out of the sand and see the way to curb it.

Theo sweety I can only say its the nature of some players to cheat... be it dupe, mass hunt mats with macro/bots, farming the hell out of uo for personal gain. Some even have made Mllions of real life cash on uo's back.
How to stop it.... you wont like the answer. hell I wont like it ether.
 

Assia Penryn

The Sleeping Dragon
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I support switching gold over to a number instead of physically in game. I'd also love it per account and per shard. That's this 187 month old vets opinion.
 
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