Originally, Cal had said the housing lottery wasn't intended as a gold sink.
Not too long ago, however, Phoenix suggested it was so-intended after all.
Either way, I am ever-less convinced that having a lot of gold around is all that much of an issue at all. Posts that wish to propose solutions for it would first have to argue that it warrants a solution, and few do.
Because people who do argue the economy is in some-way "broken" have secured the supremacy of their argument through repetition, I find it prudent to repeat my arguments as well.
So, here they are, with some modifications to answer this particular post.
One argument I do not deal with in this post is that too much gold is bad because it reduces the price of RL money/UO gold exchanges. I do not consider this to be a valid argument, because I fail to see why the in-game economy should be structured as to benefit gold sellers. I further do not see the RL money price of in-game gold as a valid indicator of anything in the UO economy, because RL prices are by definition the product of RL economic forces, not in-game economic forces. If, say, 5 million people played UO, gold would cost more no matter how easy it was to obtain in-game simply because there would be more demand for it. More customers plays as much a role in the price of a product as does that product's availability. Remember, it's supply and demand.
Why would there being a of gold in the economy be an issue at all? I can think of two arguments. Inflation and wealth disparity.
• Inflation
Is inflation the concern? Do we have UO inflation hawks here?
If you look closely at prices, they have actually gone down for some useful, or essential, items. Indeed sometimes prices have gone down enough that people complain prices are too low. I remember people on GL whining in global chat that GL was an "ignorant" shard because no one would pay over-inflated prices for, say, a metallic dye tub. (They were from other shards which had more of a merchant culture; GL's culture appears more skewed towards "get it yourself if you at all possibly can." I make no claim about which is superior, just highlighting differences.)
Prices on the Ornament of the Magician are down from a few years ago, down markedly. Crimson Cinctures are in the 12m to 15m range on GL; I usually sell for 10m because I'm all about the quick sale. Prices on Tangles have also rapidly come down in recent times, and now the price is on GL at least commensurate with that of a Cincture. Imbuing has made, say, an excellent demon slayer radiant scimitar decline from 20m in value to 3.5m in value. The catch is that it's imbued and will break down sooner or later; but by the time it has gone down in value you will have made enough money to buy another one. There is a shop near Yew that sells very respectable armor from anyplace from 5k to 100k a pop; those prices are all within range given time. For a little more gold there's a nice shop near Zento. This armor would have cost a lot more a few years ago.
Barbed Runic Kit prices are way down from just a couple of years ago.
So if it's inflation, if you see in-game inflation as bad in and of itself, then rest assured that the prices for some useful or essential items have gone down enough to suggest that in UO inflation is uneven enough to in effect render it a non-concern.
• Wealth Disparity
Is wealth disparity the issue?
Well, money is surely available. The catch is you need to hit a certain level of effectiveness before you can start making it. For an experienced player who is tired of being cash-poor? This is actually fairly easy. Demons, dread spiders, lesser hiryus, dragons (not greaters), those two-legged wolf demon thingies from Tokuno, troglodytes....All examples of monsters within range of a mid-level player that have great gold return.
The mid-range of monsters is very wide in this game. If anything some of them need to have, slightly, more gold, so a newer player can catch up faster.
And then of course there's joining a guild and talking them into chaining Corguls or chaining the Doom Gauntlet. An excellent way to make money, and to find good equipment, or at least relic fragments, along the way.
To me, wealth disparity is only an issue if it prevents those at the low end from getting what they want or need, and/or from eroding the disparity. When wealth is not zero-sum and someone without wealth can reasonably acquire it? Then I do not see the issue.
Where the failure is, is in a brand new player (we do get a few of those, just not a lot) trying to come up to speed and become viable. Even that's doable if you have someone teach you the tricks. (Make your first 20k to 100k on ettins; it'll take forever but then you can buy better armor and move on to earth elementals and demons.) So even the failure isn't complete. And even this failure isn't an economic situation; it's a new player experience situation.
I knew a guy who made a lot of money on crystal elementals.
And finally let's not forget one of UO's least-sung truths, which I wouldn't have realized had I not sent a character of mine on a random "wander around the map and explore" quest: There's a lot more casual players in this game than we give credit for. There are players who just log in and live out their characters' daily lives, killing, say, solen infiltrators to buy the bay new shoes and have enough left to kick back with some ale. For those players, neither inflation nor wealth disparity are all that much of an issue as long as they can get what they want and need. We at Stratics are not the entirety, or even the majority, of the UO player base, though we appear to want to think so.
In other words, one of the key proposals in this thread, reducing the amount of gold on monsters, would appear to be tailor-made to hurt the few new players we have and to hurt casual players.
• Conclusions
To me, inflation and wealth disparity would only be an issue in UO if they prevented characters from obtaining the equipment they needed and from functioning in the economy, from living their lives.
We are fortunate in that UO's "open faucet" system in effect insures that this is unlikely. And as the team's already pointed out, the faucet may need to be opened a bit more to ensure that newer players can get in faster. I suggest merely doubling the gold on some of the lower-end monsters of UO's long mid-range. Say, ettins, trolls, ogres. Things it is traditional for noob characters to fight to bring themselves up to speed. From 100gold to 200gold to 200gold to 400gold.
People refer to UO's economy as "broken" but the reality is that it's still functioning as an economy. And that's really all that counts. Neither inflation nor deflation nor wealth disparity are all that pressing, as none of them, at present, impinge seriously on the functioning of the game.
Regardless of your RL political or economic policy orientation, regardless of your stance on RL welfare or RL monetary policy, you simply must try and recognize that the RL economic rules don't apply in UO. The RL economy may or may not be zero/sum. UO's, however, definitely is not. One of the key proposals in this original post would make it closer to a zero/sum model, and that's bad. Horrendous in fact.
• Additional Thoughts
The temptation to use RL economics to understand the in-game economy should be resisted for two reasons. One, this is not an RL economy, it is a game, and the "economy" is less of an economy than it is a game mechanic. In single-player games, the economy in effect becomes a sub-game that most players have no problem winning. In an MMO, the economy has aspects resembling an economy but it still isn't one in any meaningful sense. It's a game mechanic. And messing with it is as tricky, or more tricky, as messing with any game mechanic.
Two, RL economics has a hard enough time explaining its own RL subject matter. Academic economics tends to forget how culturally dependent economies are, for example. And tend to foolishly see their own discipline as more of a hard science, analogous to physics or chemistry, and not as what it is, which is a social science, more analogous to sociology or anthropology than to physics or biology or chemistry.
(It is worth noting that some of the classical economists, David Ricardo and Adam Smith come to mind, were nowhere near as absolutist in their writings as contemporary economists are in theirs. Those guys understood what they were studying.)
In-game taxes are a bad idea, and I say that as someone who had sympathy for the notion not too long ago. But then I actually thought about it. IRL, you pay taxes and, whether you realize it or not, get services for them. Roads, cops, public schools, public universities, the Congressional Research Service, etc. In-game the most you could really do would be to obviously upgrade the guards' uniforms or something like that, or start putting in more impressive buildings. And that isn't really the same thing.
Gold sinks are always fine because they are optional. But as others have pointed out, they are a one-time sink in an open-faucet system. Not necessarily a bad thing.
And finally: Until you can eliminate duping we won't even really know what the in-game economy "should" be per game mechanics alone.
-Galen's player
