The Big Economy Thread

[Bill Gates OSD]

Re: On Reagents

I'm not quiet sure the point of a bag w/ regs when we have LRC.. however if it was capped or we were somehow required to use Regs & Scrolls again I would willing to feed it say 2500-5000gp per hour.. I figure a couple blood eleys/fans/drags & ww's would provide that in 5-10 mins.. a small price to pay for 50+ mins of blessed regs.. not having to worry about losing them..

I agree with what you said but only to a point, Lord Essex. I have a pure warrior too and it annoyed the hell out of me when monsters and other players would loot my bandaids. When in Trammel hunting monsters, I simply put multiple stacks of 33 bandaids in the lower right corner of my pack. Monsters normally only loot one item and they almost always go for the gold first and the bandages second. This leaves enough bandaids on my corpse for me to recover and continue fighting.

I would like to see a blessed physician's bag that could hold a SMALL amount of bandages that is no-loot, no-steal but it should only be able to be purchased from NPCs, be character bound and cost a damn fortune! There Phoenix, I just created a gold sink for you. You can mail me a check at your earliest opportunity.

 

[popps]

Re: On Reagents

Reagents are an interesting subject. Here's a question:

BUT FIRST, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. This is not an idea that we are considering implementing.

Suppose there were a magic blessed bag that could hold up to 100 stone of reagents and scrolls, but in order for it to work you would have to feed it gold on an hourly basis -- otherwise it loses its blessing. How much gold would you be willing to feed it, and how did you arrive at that number?

AGAIN, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. My purpose in posing that question is to elicit some responses specifically about the value of reagents, and LRC, and scrolls.

Personally I'd say a fraction of the worth of the reagents contained. Since you said per hour...

If not loosing the reagents would cost more than what the reagents are worth, I'd take my risk, not use that bag, and just rely on trying to retrieve the bag upon death.

Since most players do not PvP, but PvM, chances are that they will retrieve their bag with the reagents.

So, an acceptable cost would need to be only a fraction of what the reagents contained in it are worth. What fraction ? I would say comparable to the reagents consumed through normal game play. Perhaps 20% of the value of the contained reagents so that in 5 hours of game play the cost of the bag will match the worth of the reagents....

But if you want players to use that bag, it should also make the reagents contained weightless.

A major bonus of LRC is not only not having to use reagents, but also not having to have the disadvantage of carrying the weight that the reagents have......

So, any such bag should add no weight to players...........

Also, do not think that such an addition might magically solve the problems with gold in the game on its own......

Spellcasters are only a fraction of the templates used in the game.

One of the most popular and on the rise, is the Sampire who uses no reagents.......

So, I have serious doubts that such a gold eating bag might actually do more than a dent to the gold existing in the game......

Furthermore, by adding such a bag you might open up a can of worms. Unbalancing worms...........

Why ?

Because by freeing players from having to have 100% LRC on their suit, they will be able to pick up other mods instead and so gain advantage over other templates in combat.

As I said, you might not fix the problem with the gold in the game and create more problems in other areas of the game........

 

[Woodsman]

There is something you failed to understand. if the bottles are sold for 20 elsewhere, it means someone bought 2K bottles at 5gp (or maybe only 1K if they fixed it), then 2K at 6 gp, then 2K at 7 gp etc... until 21 gp per bottle. When the npc buys at 20 it means he sold at 21: 1gold removed from game per bottle. The initial buying of 5 gp per bottle is 5 gp removed pre bottle from the game....

I did miss that, however it's still an easy avenue for scripters, and that's something that should be looked at - do NPCs really need to be able to buy 100s or something at a time?

I'm not saying go the Siege route where NPCs don't buy anything back, but do we really need NPCs that will buy 100s of bottles or ingots or whatever other items can be used by the scripters? You can restrict the amount of an item that an NPC would buy back, or put in other measures that would discourage the scripters, while at the same time still allowing for new players who gathered a bunch of different items from monster loot, bank dumps, etc. to sell them back to NPCs.

 

[Woodsman]

I say tax around 5% when making/breaking checks. Tax when an item sells off a vendor at a few %. things like this.

As for you wanting it to have a point. Then have a rares/decoration/whatever NPC that sells you items with points you've earned.

points what?

Whenever your character/account pay a tax, then you earn points (kinda like how debit card points work). Then when you earned enough points you can spend them at certain vendors that sell ONLY point earned items. Every few months retire the items and add new ones.

yes it's forcing gold out of people pockets, but it's giving them possible rewards also.

If the players don't want the rewards, then it's just going to generate animosity towards the game/devs.

People pay taxes in real life, and in theory there are tangible benefits.

Paying taxes in a game because the devs think there is too much gold is just going to **** off people.

 

[Kael]

They do need to increase the gold on Mobs so that New Players and older Players without millions in gold can gather gold to buy the ridiculously priced gear they need to play the game. Joe Newbie who plays a few hours a day a few days a week between worktime & family time can't get anywhere in this game due to the prices for the good gear. Joe Newbie says %*$#@% it and leaves UO for another game.

The Mobs in UO have been designed to be difficult for Joe Uberdoobie with his superuber weapons & gear. Many of them can't be hunted without such gear. Joe Newbie, playing a dozen hours a week, can't gather the gold needed to buy such gear so can't hunt where the bulk of the older players hunt and winds up hunting solo, or leaving the game. You say getting gold is easy? Try starting a new character on a new shard with 1000 gold in your pocket and see how long it takes you at 20 hours played a week to buy the uber gear needed to hunt uber Mobs. And keep in mind, YOU know the game well, Joe Newbie doesn't.

They need to just trim the gold stashes down to size by a flatrate high percentage amount and so drop vendor prices for the good gear down to where a New Player playing a few hours a week has more than the fabled snowballs chance as far as gathering enough gold to buy the needed good gear.

Those far richer than anyone else stay far richer than anyone else. Those who come to UO and play a dozen hours a week have a chance to gather the gold needed to buy the good gear by gathering gold from monsters.

New players have it easier than we did starting up...

Imbued suits that are pretty cheap
Insurance for gear
SOT's dropped from low level spawns
Alacrity for quick gains ( and easy to get for tmappers)

 

[Woodsman]

3. allow us to purchase gametime codes ingame (i know this is far fetched because then ea not making the $$$ they could be)

It's not just far fetched from the point of view of removing revenue from UO, but it's also far fetched given how much ill-gotten gold is floating around.

You'd basically be allowing the scripters to play for free and at that point they'd start opening up even more accounts if they could play for free which would increase the scripting.

This isn't EVE Online where people who buy and sell gold are banned. If the scripters can provide gold cheap enough, then people will be giving money to the scripters and using it to be gametime codes which would be very bad and would probably make EA look down upon UO even more than they do.

Now if you added into the TOS a part about players who buy gold or other items for real-life cash will be banned like in EVE Online, then things might change, but you'd have to be willing to enforce that.

 

[Roland']

Please use UO's time and resources on fixing bugs and updating 2s or getting EC out of beta.

I am an average player with enough gold to get good enough stuff. If i want a sash, glad collar god forbid slither i realize i have to work for it.

I came to Atl from SP a few months ago. Yes i know the ins and outs of the game and had a very easy time get the items i needed to do what i wanted.

A new player shoul dnot focus on any items other than bare minimum gear and scrolls to enhance his character. The game should be hard for someone with no experiance. You should have to dungeon crawl to learn your skills and how best to use them.

If you realy wanted to help the new player, give every one detailed verified information on game mechanics that anyone can easily access. (why so stingy with formulas and changes?)

Fix what is broken. Use your resources wisely.

 

[Woodsman]

Promote capitalism to fix economy. Make a shard auction house. This will decrease value of items and at same time promote competition.

I think in the end, an auction house or vendor search would be the least destructive method of leveling the playing field, albeit the hardest to code.

It's got major advantages:
1) It'd help new players and old players alike
2) It would level the playing field among all players, both inside and outside of Luna, Zento, and probably New Magincia
3) It would address the third party search sites
4) It would be voluntary
5) If you are wanting to attract new players, many new players are used to some kind of auction house.
6) It's not a changing of the amounts of gold coming into the game through monster loot, which would be controversial whether the loot is reduced or increased.

#1 can't be emphasized enough, given how thin the populations are across most of the shards.

#2 and #3 would stop people from recommending that new players head to Luna or to a third party search site. It really pisses me off when I see this, because it takes people out of the game and it's reinforcing the behavior that players should bypass vendors outside of Luna and Zento that aren't catalogued by the third party search sites. There is also the fact that the third party search sites are run or paid for by the gold sellers and are used to advertise their activities. Those people would obviously fight tooth and nail against a shard-wide auction house or vendor search but we need to discourage players from looking to the third party search sites.

From the point of view of a fairly new player, it would open up a lot of avenues, as it would make their goods more easily available to other players without requiring them to find a vendor spot in Luna or Zento.

 

[Wojoe]

Re: On Reagents

Reagents are an interesting subject. Here's a question:

BUT FIRST, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. This is not an idea that we are considering implementing.

Suppose there were a magic blessed bag that could hold up to 100 stone of reagents and scrolls, but in order for it to work you would have to feed it gold on an hourly basis -- otherwise it loses its blessing. How much gold would you be willing to feed it, and how did you arrive at that number?

AGAIN, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. My purpose in posing that question is to elicit some responses specifically about the value of reagents, and LRC, and scrolls.

The problem is if you tax regents and/or LRC it become's a magic user nerf. So unless you somehow tax people that use weapons to fight its totaly unfair. You would have to require weapon users to carry something to offset the tax unbalance or buff magic users to offset the extra burdon. The next problem is it opens up alot of room on magic users suits that could be unbalancing.

 

[Adol]

I personally don't think the issue is inflation at all; Ultima Online doesn't track the real world economy in the sense that anybody is wiped out by changing currency values, because as long as your characters themselves remain viable, it's possible for anyone to become productive all the same. Thus whether there is 1 or a hundred Zeros after a figure is irrelevant (except for the number of piles of coins the server has to track I guess) as long as people all have equal opportunity to access the resources; it's just a matter of time or effort from there until they can trade those resources at the values other people give to them.

The real issue to my mind is transparency of the market values of what exists within game; let me speak from my own experience here. I've been back 59 weeks now (I coincidentally found a parrot the first week and perched him, who now keeps track for me of how long I've played!) I logged in completely naked, and all my characters had empty bank boxes. Within 2 months of pretty intense playing, I had about 200m in cash. This was because I wasn't sure how long I would play, and I wanted to get the one rare I'd always desired when I first played; A Singing Ball (which doesn't sing constantly, boooo)

And I gained that by selling Valorite ingots, a Fireman's Helmet EM event drop for 35m to a cross sharder, Seeds of Renewal from a few minutes gardening each day (they go for 1m per 10 on Europa)... Basically, I read up on Stratics and asked around for what was desirable, and set out to procure that. How much am I worth now? I'm not really sure, as I don't look anymore... but by the 3rd month my total potential went up enormously by getting 1 of only 4 sashes dropped on an EM event... my guess is in total I've 500 to 1000m in items and what nots now.

If you were to drop 2 zeros off the value of gold in the game, my potential worth doesn't actually change though; the relative rarity of that sash for instance will stay the same. Except... and here's the kicker... if you don't apply a unified approach to everyone technically I can actually get richer if only a few people respond to gold sinks; Let's say Joe Bloggs and Schmoe Bloggs have 100m in gold, but Joe sinks some of his. Both want my sash, which hasn't become any less rare, but now Schmoe has much more chance of getting it, and both he and I will stay super rich, because we'll trade with his greater gold.

Now Joe can in theory trade up until he gets the cash, or substitute items to make up the difference... but like me he when I came back, he still needs to know the correct value of his goods; otherwise I can get richer still by short-changing him. Hence the best thing to do for the economy is to open it up to everyone; We've all seen the cliloc changes in the patches which seem to indicate Auctioning is on it's way in some form. This will I believe address the main concern, if at least handled correctly. Let it link to people's homes so they don't need to find a Luna spot to get into the auctioning, and this is most important of all, redesign the newbie experience so they are introduced to the market right at the start. Perhaps even give them a random chance at the end of the experience to get 1 of 100 different desirable, once per account newbie rewards (random so the value stays reasonably high); what matters is not that they get everything they could want within the first day, but that on that first day they realise 1 or even 100 million gold isn't that daunting to get...

Furthermore, add descriptive terms to most items to give players a sense of where they are from when moused over in an auction; and that Codex of Wisdom could do with being updated for a start... so when someone sees "Buying Seeds of Renewal for 1m per 10!" they don't go "Damn, I'll never have that much gold!" they can instead say "Oh wait, a few minutes gardening every day for a random chance of them? I can do that!"

Essences Of... from Treasure maps also sell extremely well. Rare pets. Bloodwood and up does. White Pearls from fishing. Unravelling materials. Give people information and the market will be much, much fairer.

 

[Nyses]

What about if LRC suits needed to be charged up with reagents? Something like each piece could hold up to 255 reags as a max "charge"? Makes reags required, but does not totally undo LRC.

As for an auction house, I think it is long overdue. The only way for it to be a gold sink, is for the auction house to take something like 10% off the top and out of the economy.

 

[Phoenix_Mythic]

Re: On Reagents

The problem is if you tax regents and/or LRC it become's a magic user nerf. So unless you somehow tax people that use weapons to fight its totaly unfair. You would have to require weapon users to carry something to offset the tax unbalance or buff magic users to offset the extra burdon.

Assume such a hypothetical addition would be completely optional. Nothing is changed about LRC or even the ability to carry regs around in normal bags. How much would it be worth to you to have the blessed reg bag option?

The next problem is it opens up alot of room on magic users suits that could be unbalancing.

It seems to me that those options are already there, if you're willing to use reagents. 100% LRC is not required for casters yet it seems to be a must-have, just like max resists.

What I'm essentially asking here is how much is that LRC actually worth to you, and why?

Again, keep in mind that this is an entirely hypothetical exercise; a thought experiment if you will. This represents the kind of new gold sink that could make a lot of sense. It doesn't arbitrarily introduce a new tax and it adds new optional benefits.

On the downside, it's one of those things that would be difficult to price, and the reasons for that are at the heart of the purpose for a thread. That is why I want to see discussion along those lines.

 

[Lord Essex]

What about if LRC suits needed to be charged up with reagents? Something like each piece could hold up to 255 reags as a max "charge"? Makes reags required, but does not totally undo LRC.

As for an auction house, I think it is long overdue. The only way for it to be a gold sink, is for the auction house to take something like 10% off the top and out of the economy.

I think the charging of LRC suits & items is AN AWESOME compromise.. Yes you don't need to carry regs, but you still use them!! You could further expand this idea by introducing items/armor n such that could be charged up w/ scrolls.. "A Flamestrike Magical Staff" w/ Can have up to 100 charges.. 1 scroll = 1 charge

 

[virtualhabitat]

Re: On Reagents

Assume such a hypothetical addition would be completely optional. Nothing is changed about LRC or even the ability to carry regs around in normal bags. How much would it be worth to you to have the blessed reg bag option?



It seems to me that those options are already there, if you're willing to use reagents. 100% LRC is not required for casters yet it seems to be a must-have, just like max resists.

What I'm essentially asking here is how much is that LRC actually worth to you, and why?

Again, keep in mind that this is an entirely hypothetical exercise; a thought experiment if you will. This represents the kind of new gold sink that could make a lot of sense. It doesn't arbitrarily introduce a new tax and it adds new optional benefits.

On the downside, it's one of those things that would be difficult to price, and the reasons for that are at the heart of the purpose for a thread. That is why I want to see discussion along those lines.

I started playing in January. I've made some gold, but I can't afford LRC with good resist.

I was given a 70's LRC suit, but it requires jewels for resist and LRC so I don't really use it much anymore except for a couple of pieces.
I value faster casting and recovery more than LRC.

I don't mind using regs at all and I can afford a better suit if I use them.

It would be stupid for me to even think of PVP at this point, and PVM I think of LRC as just another luxury.

I do like and use LRC on my lumberjack so he can carry more stuff and I really liked LRC for training magery.

 

[UOKaiser]

To think lrc is even a issue these days. Some thoughts are worrysome.
This train of thought is seige current and pvp 1998 era. We moved on from there any type of revertion will only cost loss of new age customers. this is the train of thought that has plague UO this last few years. Everything for everyone, nothing has value, there is no purpose in pvm, everyone is even. those who work less can achieve the same as those who work more. holidays gift nothing is rare, rares drop like flies, items have no value, the art of slowly building something to have meaning is lost. This type of thought only helps pvp i repeat only helps pvp and destroys everything else. Remove this train of thought as soon as posible unless the goal is to make UO only pvp base revertion to pre aos/pre trammel times.

Seriously thinking back pvm players all wanted a bump in the intensities of the monster loot instead it was made completely useless. I sometimes think it was a cruel joke or some dev's idea of getting back at EA for firing them.

 

[popps]

Please use UO's time and resources on fixing bugs and updating 2s or getting EC out of beta.

A generic call to fix "bugs" does not mean much to me.

What bugs do you find so game stopping that should receive immediate attention over anything else ???

Fix what is broken. Use your resources wisely.

Again, "what" is so broken, precisely, to require immediate attention and priority over other issues ?

 

[Basara]

Observation: most reagents cost 4-6 each.

LRC Gold sink idea: Have LRC still work for Magery, Necromancy and Mysticism, but takes 10 gold (maybe as much as 20 or 25) from the person's pack or bank for every individual reg replaced.
For Chivalry, the LRC value is multiplied by 1/2, as a cost reduction (not a chance to cast without cost).

This way, it becomes a convenience, not a neccessity, and could even become a liability under some circumstances.

It could even be modified to actually apply to Inscription in this case, as it would now cost considerably more to use LRC for scroll-making than using reagents.

Result: Use of an LRC suit would take 10-40 gold (at 10 GP per reagent) from the economy per spell cast, as opposed to none (LRC as is) or 3-20 (cost of equivalent reagents) gold per spell.

 

[Derium of ls]

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin: Yes, sir. ... Mr. McGuire: Plastics.... er wait no, I mean: Gambling.

Open an EA owned casino in game. I've seen some servers *whistles* that had some really awesome HUDs for texas hold em, the server of course taking the rake. I'm sure something like that can be done.

Will people complain? of course, but we are UO players we would complain even if EA gave us all a free year of play time.

 

[Draxous]

Well, I thought I was clear in my original post, but I wasn't talking about duped gold, I was referring to duped items. Well all know that the number of duped items is staggering.

Further, I am not out to "punish" anyone. Whats done is done. I just don't want to see dupers REWARDED. Ultimately, I am hoping to find a way to help the economy and hopefully keep it in a healthy state, if thats even possible at this point. In any case, the bottom line is that people are going to have to part with gold to get the economy back in check. How that happens is the question.

You can't do that. Yours is a worthless crusade. Face it, the dupers got away with it, and have already been rewarded. You can't impact them without screwing over every single legitimate player who's achieved wealthy status.

Move on, accept the reality of it and just fix the economy.

The simplest way would be to move over to a new currency and make the current currency (gold) obsolete, but worth 1/10th, 1/100th, 1/whatever of what the current gold is worth by trading it in for the new currency.

The people with wealth will still have it comparatively. Everything will be traded en' ratio to what it's currently traded at. The difference being that it won't be in such ridiculous sums, and perhaps things that are now considered past-times (such as killing earth elementals in shame) would once again become worth while.


Point is if it's a problem that simply can't be addressed (like the one Kat brings up), please just move on and fix the economy.

Also, please, please, please take into consideration Siege Perilous when you implement this. Please do not implement the same ratio or the same anything you do on other shards because its economy is no where near as inflated as the rest of the servers. We did not have the dupe issues or players farming freely, afk, what have you. While yes Siege does have inflation, it's quite literally nothing compared to the rest of the game.

 

[Macrophage999]

New players have it easier than we did starting up...

Imbued suits that are pretty cheap
Insurance for gear
SOT's dropped from low level spawns
Alacrity for quick gains ( and easy to get for tmappers)

When I started playing,
Suits were either naked or standard leather, almost free.
Insurance didn't exist, thus you would nt lose thousands of gold upon death.
You didn't need sot's since you have power hours and skills were much faster to level.
You didn't need alacrity either.

 

[Draxous]

Also, some additional thoughts.

Big ticket items do not help. They either aren't worth it to give up the wealth people have... or if they are, then they disenfranchise all the not so wealthy, and new players. That seems a lot like a lose lose situation...


Taxing wealth to just tax it. People will just store their wealth in metaphorical mattresses (loopholes in the system.) Unless stacks of gold across Britannia just start disintegrating into nothing... doesn't seem practical. Also seems like another added obstacle to the guys without wealth trying to build wealth. Going by the original post in this thread... I don't know if this is a good idea either.

 

[Draxous]

New players have it easier than we did starting up...

Imbued suits that are pretty cheap
Insurance for gear
SOT's dropped from low level spawns
Alacrity for quick gains ( and easy to get for tmappers)

When I started playing,
Suits were either naked or standard leather, almost free.
Insurance didn't exist, thus you would nt lose thousands of gold upon death.
You didn't need sot's since you have power hours and skills were much faster to level.
You didn't need alacrity either.

Powerhour... haha!

I remember it taking years to GM magic resist. Or hell, spending months on end getting beat down by a wisp trapped in my house to gain parry. I remember training magery when you had to find the scrolls needed to complete the spellbook. I remember training magery before there was a such thing as meditation. Before items that made you not need regs, lower casting costs, or increase casting speeds.

Go figure.

 

[virtualhabitat]

OoO

 

[Trebr Drab]

All the money flows to the top.
You can go out and hunt for Imbuing materials, and sell it for money. Usually that money comes from the top down. But they use it to make things to sell at a profit. If you want what they made, you have to pay the profits. The money still flows to the top.

This isn't "bad" except that it's such a long road, and in the meantime the players not at the top are restricted from other game play.
Event? MOBs with things you can sell for the big bucks? Got to get looting rights? You are competing against those top players for those rights. You need the gear at least similar to what they have.

Want to hunt in the Abyss? To be effective you need the gear, go buy it from the top players. Pay the price. Work to get it. In the meantime, you are restricted.

To make matters worse is the effects of inflation, where that top gear is priced according to the top player's ability to pay, not yours. Takes longer to get "there". You are restricted even longer from the gameplay you want.

Now, most of you will say that's what games are about and it should be this way. I'll agree to an extent. The problem is that that extent has gone way too far for a "worldly" game like UO. At this point, UO would be better off to start zoning the world out into level groups. Make it more like WoW. Now, if you want to get something from an event, or hunt for materials to sell, you are competing with players like yourself. You can get somewhere at a more reasonable speed, because your zone is designed for you.

The alternative is what you've seen. You could cut half the gold out of UO and this will still stay the same. You can increase gold from lower level MOBs and it will only flow to the top again.

So, as much as I hate to say it, if you want UO like it is and won't give up the item based grind, then make it another WoW clone. Where players can play according to their "level". But then you have to compete with WoW.

Or you can do away with such hard to get requirements to compete. (You can still have hard to get items that aren't a requirement. Cool stuff, fun stuff, but balanced stuff.)

But you can't have it both ways.
You've seen the results. If you want to stop the entropy, you have to allow all your players to compete without this long, difficult road. Or be a clone trying to compete with WoW.

 

[virtualhabitat]

All the money flows to the top.
You can go out and hunt for Imbuing materials, and sell it for money. Usually that money comes from the top down. But they use it to make things to sell at a profit. If you want what they made, you have to pay the profits. The money still flows to the top.

This isn't "bad" except that it's such a long road, and in the meantime the players not at the top are restricted from other game play.
Event? MOBs with things you can sell for the big bucks? Got to get looting rights? You are competing against those top players for those rights. You need the gear at least similar to what they have.

Want to hunt in the Abyss? To be effective you need the gear, go buy it from the top players. Pay the price. Work to get it. In the meantime, you are restricted.

To make matters worse is the effects of inflation, where that top gear is priced according to the top player's ability to pay, not yours. Takes longer to get "there". You are restricted even longer from the gameplay you want.

Now, most of you will say that's what games are about and it should be this way. I'll agree to an extent. The problem is that that extent has gone way too far for a "worldly" game like UO. At this point, UO would be better off to start zoning the world out into level groups. Make it more like WoW. Now, if you want to get something from an event, or hunt for materials to sell, you are competing with players like yourself. You can get somewhere at a more reasonable speed, because your zone is designed for you.

The alternative is what you've seen. You could cut half the gold out of UO and this will still stay the same. You can increase gold from lower level MOBs and it will only flow to the top again.

So, as much as I hate to say it, if you want UO like it is and won't give up the item based grind, then make it another WoW clone. Where players can play according to their "level". But then you have to compete with WoW.

Or you can do away with such hard to get requirements to compete. (You can still have hard to get items that aren't a requirement. Cool stuff, fun stuff, but balanced stuff.)

But you can't have it both ways.
You've seen the results. If you want to stop the entropy, you have to allow all your players to compete without this long, difficult road. Or be a clone trying to compete with WoW.

This post, in my opinion, describes how the UO economy is currently working.

Gold trickling up means those at the bottom are not producing anything of value. At least not producing value fast enough. Items wealthy players want are delivered through a combination of high end mobs, the RNG, and a little luck.

I am not a proponent of giving everything away. On the contrary, I prefer to work and learn for myself, but in the short time I have played this game I have worked 7 different crafting skills and have found them to be utterly outside of the real -actual economy.

My first character, a scribe mage, is mediocre at best when it comes to participating in EM events such as the Blackrock Golem thing or killing other high end mobs where looting rights is the name of the game.

Some of you may not be aware that when you are new, the game offers template suggestions. How many of those templates would be successful for a new player to enter the economy within a reasonable amount of time?

Samuri, Paladin, Ninja, Warrior, Blacksmith, Necromancer, Mage. These are the suggested templates I saw. When I went to my first EM event anyone care to guess which of those templates, as suggested to the new player, were getting the looting rights?

Who was getting looting rights? Archers, Tamers, Mystics, Sampires? Spellweavers?(uncertain if spellweavers were there getting rights and I still don't know exactly what a Sampire is)

Not one of those templates are even mentioned when a new player is confronted with making their first character. (warriors, Paladins, and Samuris all begin with swords or fencing, not Archery)

If you want to get the economy going in UO, players and the RNG must be able to produce more value into the economy. Otherwise the money will behave exactly as Trebr Drab describes it.

The rich will still be rich, the not rich will still have to earn their own way, but gold will circulate.
Is not entropy a measure of of energy not available for useful work? Then release it.

 

[Roland']

A generic call to fix "bugs" does not mean much to me.

What bugs do you find so game stopping that should receive immediate attention over anything else ???



Again, "what" is so broken, precisely, to require immediate attention and priority over other issues ?

Im being vague because the list is so long. If a EA rep came to me and said, "Okay i want a list Roland." I'd ask him to give me a couple days and id write them down as a i see them.

But how about the whopper where my client keeps crashing to desktop? Just for starters that is. Another is EC clients memory leak. Maybe alot of other things arent "bugs", but constant annoyances that could be updated. Still more than enough bugs to go along with the annoyances. EC's UI is much better than the 2d but id like to see more. The latency issues and rubberbanding would also be high on my list. Having clones of players on my screen all the time, rubber banding off twigs and house steps, broken life bars, screen jitters or false enlarged items on screen, going out of synk with server making it apear you are not where you are.

Anyway already more text than i like to post to be polite and just a handful of "bugs".

 

[UOKaiser]

This post, in my opinion, describes how the UO economy is currently working.

Gold trickling up means those at the bottom are not producing anything of value. At least not producing value fast enough. Items wealthy players want are delivered through a combination of high end mobs, the RNG, and a little luck.

I am not a proponent of giving everything away. On the contrary, I prefer to work and learn for myself, but in the short time I have played this game I have worked 7 different crafting skills and have found them to be utterly outside of the real -actual economy.

My first character, a scribe mage, is mediocre at best when it comes to participating in EM events such as the Blackrock Golem thing or killing other high end mobs where looting rights is the name of the game.

Some of you may not be aware that when you are new, the game offers template suggestions. How many of those templates would be successful for a new player to enter the economy within a reasonable amount of time?

Samuri, Paladin, Ninja, Warrior, Blacksmith, Necromancer, Mage. These are the suggested templates I saw. When I went to my first EM event anyone care to guess which of those templates, as suggested to the new player, were getting the looting rights?

Who was getting looting rights? Archers, Tamers, Mystics, Sampires? Spellweavers?(uncertain if spellweavers were there getting rights and I still don't know exactly what a Sampire is)

Not one of those templates are even mentioned when a new player is confronted with making their first character. (warriors, Paladins, and Samuris all begin with swords or fencing, not Archery)

If you want to get the economy going in UO, players and the RNG must be able to produce more value into the economy. Otherwise the money will behave exactly as Trebr Drab describes it.

The rich will still be rich, the not rich will still have to earn their own way, but gold will circulate.
Is not entropy a measure of of energy not available for useful work? Then release it.

Agreed. Of course looting rights don't matter anymore. Anything that us vets want we can get ourselves. The things that lower end players can get us is pretty much all in the abyss and some rare drops around. The rest of the creatures "rng item system"/crafts other than imbuing produce nothing of value that can be sold to us that we cant produce ourselves in moments.

 

[Kaladin]

For a gold sink I would pay a NPC to have my gear repaired without having to use my crafter. When I got to res what if the healer can also repair all my gear for a fee?

Take that one step farther.... What if I die in a really bad location (would only be in trammel).... and I went to get a res.... what if all my belongings also were given back to me for a fee? I'm talking about Potions and things which would fall to the ground....

 

[Kaladin]

New players have it easier than we did starting up...

Imbued suits that are pretty cheap
Insurance for gear
SOT's dropped from low level spawns
Alacrity for quick gains ( and easy to get for tmappers)

When I started playing,
Suits were either naked or standard leather, almost free.
Insurance didn't exist, thus you would nt lose thousands of gold upon death.
You didn't need sot's since you have power hours and skills were much faster to level.
You didn't need alacrity either.

Powerhour... haha!

I remember it taking years to GM magic resist. Or hell, spending months on end getting beat down by a wisp trapped in my house to gain parry. I remember training magery when you had to find the scrolls needed to complete the spellbook. I remember training magery before there was a such thing as meditation. Before items that made you not need regs, lower casting costs, or increase casting speeds.

Go figure.

When I started playing, it took 10 hours to get a set of vendor purchased armor and a weapon. Then, I went outside on the road and got killed by Mr Dread Lord and lost all my UO wealth.

At some point we make it to Covetous (my bro and I)... and we are really rolling in the gold... We've made almost 2,000 gold and we get hit by Pkers and lose not only all our gear but also the 2,000 gold.

I end up getting 12,000 gold by mining and selling my shields to a vendor.....Most of my time is spent in UO just mining... half the time I would lose everything to a Pker even mining.

 

[TitusPullo]

Put in poker, system takes a rake out of each pot.

Put in a real lotto system that takes a % of the buys and awards the rest to the winner(s)

 

[popps]

Taxing wealth to just tax it. People will just store their wealth in metaphorical mattresses (loopholes in the system.) Unless stacks of gold across Britannia just start disintegrating into nothing... doesn't seem practical. Also seems like another added obstacle to the guys without wealth trying to build wealth. Going by the original post in this thread... I don't know if this is a good idea either.

With a notable difference that this is not the real world but this is a code generated virtual world that the Developers can change to their liking altering the existing code to what they want.....

Meaning, that players cannot hide nothing. If the Developers write code to keep track of all belonging, gold and items, that any given account possesses, in order to then tax them, well, there is nothing that players will be able to do to hide this gold or items barred from deleting them..... Move them to another account ? They will tagged to that account which will then be taxed for them anyways........

So, it won't be possible to hide nothing if the proper "taxing code" was to be written.......

Players might move part of their belongings to another account to fall under a lower tax brackets but it will cost them extra monthly subscriptions which will bring revenues to UO which is good..........

 

[Pinco]

Re: On Reagents

Assume such a hypothetical addition would be completely optional. Nothing is changed about LRC or even the ability to carry regs around in normal bags. How much would it be worth to you to have the blessed reg bag option?



It seems to me that those options are already there, if you're willing to use reagents. 100% LRC is not required for casters yet it seems to be a must-have, just like max resists.

What I'm essentially asking here is how much is that LRC actually worth to you, and why?

Again, keep in mind that this is an entirely hypothetical exercise; a thought experiment if you will. This represents the kind of new gold sink that could make a lot of sense. It doesn't arbitrarily introduce a new tax and it adds new optional benefits.

On the downside, it's one of those things that would be difficult to price, and the reasons for that are at the heart of the purpose for a thread. That is why I want to see discussion along those lines.

IMHO could be a nice idea... but I think would have sense only in 1 case:
if the gold for keep the bag blessed is withdraw only while your character is logged in...

The price for me should be based on the amount of reagent inside... the empty bag is free, the full bag should cost maybe 600 gp/hour

To balance this you need to add a bag for potions and bandages with weight reduction (10-20% max) that works in the same way of the reagent bag
Why weight reduction? because using reagents will cut down 1 mod per piece on the mages armor and the only fair thing is allow the other characters to carry more potions

Another note: a character should be able to keep blessed only 1 type of these bags. So you can carry 20 reagents/potions bag (that will grants a good gold sink), but you can't carry 1 reagent bag and 1 potions bag and keep both blessed because this would create more problems on balancements.

 

[Wojoe]

Re: On Reagents

Assume such a hypothetical addition would be completely optional. Nothing is changed about LRC or even the ability to carry regs around in normal bags. How much would it be worth to you to have the blessed reg bag option?



It seems to me that those options are already there, if you're willing to use reagents. 100% LRC is not required for casters yet it seems to be a must-have, just like max resists.

What I'm essentially asking here is how much is that LRC actually worth to you, and why?

Again, keep in mind that this is an entirely hypothetical exercise; a thought experiment if you will. This represents the kind of new gold sink that could make a lot of sense. It doesn't arbitrarily introduce a new tax and it adds new optional benefits.

On the downside, it's one of those things that would be difficult to price, and the reasons for that are at the heart of the purpose for a thread. That is why I want to see discussion along those lines.

As a spell caster and a pvp'er I can assure you nobody uses reg’s on the field today. You cant replace them on the field and it takes to much time to restock...I understand your just asking if we would use something like this and the answer is I doubt it to be honest. Your not going to take any chance of running out of reg’s mid fight (consider a harry as an example). And why even bother to inconvenience yourself and be required to restock when there’s LRC? Not to mention the weight issue's this would cause...for both PVP and PVM.

Reg’s have gone the way of the wooly mammoth for spell casters in both PVP and PVM, not to mention training also. And the truth is, you could give them away for free now and spell caster's wouldn’t use them over LRC...That makes a blessed bag to hold reg's useless, sorry.

You might want to consider getting away from the whole tax/gold sink chain of thought, it's never fair and always to complicated... Kinda like RL and the IRS...

What to do about the problem is a very tough question, But im sure we can figure it out in time.

 

[Theo_GL]

Re: On Taxes

Regarding the idea of taxes, I'm against any form of arbitrary taxation system. Intellectually, I think it could be done in a way that is fair. It would be the simplest way to get the desired results. But in reality, it wouldn't be fun for anybody involved.

Some specific things I am against are: 1> Reducing gold drops from mobs (think of it as "income tax"). That just makes it harder for the less wealthy to accumulate gold, so it benefits those who already have piles of it. 2> Wealth taxes (just flat taking away gold without returning anything). This just penalized players who have met their goals of accumulating fortunes, and it's not fair to just vanish it.

That's not intended to be my final word on this subject; I'm just stating some of my thoughts on this subject as they currently are, to provide a specific jumping-off point for more conversation.

Any new "taxes" have to come in the form of fees for new services provided, along the lines of vendor fees, or in the 25% NPC Shopkeeper markup. Of course, if the prices for such services can be determined by the market instead of by the game designers, so much the better.

Taxes - No one likes taxes and you certainly can't impose it on houses or things that might be lost by inactivity. The current 'tax' in game is the death tax with insurance. Leave it as is.

Gold Drops - They were doubled at one point as the devs thought 'hmm, lets make gold easier to get so new people can catch up quicker'. What it created was more inflation. Duh. Basic econ 101.

The biggest problem with UO is a rapidly expanding money supply. There is more and more created each day and not enough gold sinks to keep the economy in equilibrium. What if monsters only dropped an amount of gold each day equivalent to the gold lost via insurance? Once all the insurance money was used up - no more gold drops on mobs? That would keep the money supply constant.

If someone wanted to 'climb the ladder' then they would have to acquire other items/drops that they woudl trade for money. The money moving between players would be good, would not be inflationary and would allow new players to acquire 'wealth'.

The problem with UO is no way to control the money supply and in fact they have increased the growth with higher drops.

To further increase the problem - we have a rapidly declining population. Now there is a large amount of gold lost in players bank accounts when they leave, but there is also a large amount passed on by IDOC's to a smaller population.

An increasing money supply is ok if your population is increasing, but couple a rapid money supply increase with declining population and you have huge inflation.

In terms of the current system - they should implement a new currency to bring some of the numbers down. I'm tired of everything being hundreds of thousands of gold. Its crazy amounts that just make transations difficult.

Introduce a currency that is 100 gp to 1. That would help with the sheer numbers.

I'm also in favor of a virtual bank account. I don't like managing checks. It doesn't make things cheaper - just more difficult to trade.

 

[Longforge]

The first fact of the matter is:

You cannot use pre-aos solutions to the current economy.

Gold sinks are always a great idea, but they don't particularly solve anything as you would have to remove probably a trillion or two from the economy to make a noticeable difference. (That is highly impossible) That would lead into a case by case, "shard by shard" consideration. Some shards barely have an economy to speak of. The legacy shards have 13 years of gold in the system plus whatever dupes put gold onto the market. I doubt that gold dupes still exist.

The UO economy has remained relatively stable in the present. There isn't much room for it to get any higher. Anymore, there is a lot more competition for sales. For as much gold that is in the economy, I think we are seeing a very stable economy. As more years go by, that means more gold... inflation will rise just as it does with countries and their populations increasing faster than the death rate. More people = more demand for jobs/good = more money circulating. Count the hundreds of thousands over the years, in and out of this game and you have a boat load of gold laying around. And just like in real life... most of the gold is left to other players, etc... so it really isnt going anywhere when someone "permanently" leaves the game.



That leads to... the new players, or the casual players. They are basically left with no choice but to buy gold or not really play the game. Of course, that is not always the case, but its a good point to be looked at. Seeing that you can purchase gold for an outrageously low price, those purchases are what are mainly responsible for the inflated, but stable, economy that we have right now. If I have the money, I can inject 100-500 million into the economy in an instant. Whereas, it would take a player who had to "earn" that money, probably 1+ years or a lot more depending on their committment.

I can say this much... I have no issue making gps. I can simply take a decked out holy warrior into the abyss and clean house on ingreds in a relatively short amount of time. Without IRL distraction, I can spend 6 hours in the Abyss, undercut the market by 25% on the sales of my ingredient loot and EASILY clear 6-10 million per day. Is that ridiculous? No! Otherwise the rarity of these things would make imbuing out of reach and would push prices far higher for both materials and the end products.

I can also make 250-500k per hour hunting a variety of creatures. Takes a wicked committment to it, but that's just straight gps alone.

I would safely say that the first and foremost solution to inflation is the ability of people to open "virtual businesses" and sell in game items for real money. It flat out is the main reason for the inflated economy we are in now. The owner of the game can at the very least stop the most flagrant sellers of these ingame items and gold. They openly advertise and run businesses off of "graphic art". Once you set a loop of trade/sell/real money/in game money, you have an endless supply of stock.

I would say the easiest and least disruptive way of eliminating gold from the economy is to eliminate the psychotic vendor house fees that players can charge. Atlantic alone has a 2m per week price tag on the most passed by house in Luna just outside the gate. They have about 20 vendors and the owner is cranking 40 million a week and probably more. My math may be wrong but that is over 2 Billion gps a year. While that cannot prop up a succesful business of selling gold on a major shard, its avenues like this that start pointing you in the direction you need to be looking.

I'm just sayin... back in the day you had to rely on the UO society, your guild and other factors to be comfortable. Anymore all you have to do is throw in a credit card number and you can bypass a veteran player of 10 years who doesnt buy from the brokers in the blink of an eye. And you can do that for a very small amount of money.

I say squash the IRL brokers from operating in the easy open, put them underground and that will have a decent enough impact to reverse the current trends. While it might tick off older players, I doubt hardly anyone would quit and if they did... a more reasonable growth in this game for the newer players will well outnumber the losses of doing so.

I remember a day when 50k was a small fortune. Now, I have no issue dropping it on the ground and leaving it there without being the least bit "feeling like I actually lost something", in order to outrun a monster because it cursed me.

 

[Longforge]

Re: On Taxes

Taxes - No one likes taxes and you certainly can't impose it on houses or things that might be lost by inactivity. The current 'tax' in game is the death tax with insurance. Leave it as is.

Gold Drops - They were doubled at one point as the devs thought 'hmm, lets make gold easier to get so new people can catch up quicker'. What it created was more inflation. Duh. Basic econ 101.

The biggest problem with UO is a rapidly expanding money supply. There is more and more created each day and not enough gold sinks to keep the economy in equilibrium. What if monsters only dropped an amount of gold each day equivalent to the gold lost via insurance? Once all the insurance money was used up - no more gold drops on mobs? That would keep the money supply constant.

If someone wanted to 'climb the ladder' then they would have to acquire other items/drops that they woudl trade for money. The money moving between players would be good, would not be inflationary and would allow new players to acquire 'wealth'.

The problem with UO is no way to control the money supply and in fact they have increased the growth with higher drops.

To further increase the problem - we have a rapidly declining population. Now there is a large amount of gold lost in players bank accounts when they leave, but there is also a large amount passed on by IDOC's to a smaller population.

An increasing money supply is ok if your population is increasing, but couple a rapid money supply increase with declining population and you have huge inflation.

In terms of the current system - they should implement a new currency to bring some of the numbers down. I'm tired of everything being hundreds of thousands of gold. Its crazy amounts that just make transations difficult.

Introduce a currency that is 100 gp to 1. That would help with the sheer numbers.

I'm also in favor of a virtual bank account. I don't like managing checks. It doesn't make things cheaper - just more difficult to trade.

I COMPLETELY AGREE 100% to a "new currency". It would effectively change the whole system overnight without a real harm. Frankly, with the content advantage of UO... there should be several currencies and they should be race specific and regionally specific.

You can even toss in "capital gains taxes" to help get rid of 50m+ purchases. Penalize the crap out of the seller at 25-30% and the buyer. I know that's a bit ruff, but you gotta do things like that to reign in out of control currency in the economy.

As I said above tho, go after the openly marketed broker web sites and put them out of business. Might as well be a F2P game... all I need is about 750 bucks to be at the top without a lick of experience and EA gets kicked because it would normally take someone YEARS to earn it which equals... EA just lost hundreds of dollars.

 

[wavace]

Why not take the item status away from gold? Make it a number you carry with you till deposited. Put weight on it or not, up to you guys. Seems like that would cut down on the amount of space it takes up. Once deposited in a bank it becomes a number in the bank and not an item you can move around. Would free up alot of space.

 

[Orgional Farimir]

Re: On Reagents

Assume such a hypothetical addition would be completely optional. Nothing is changed about LRC or even the ability to carry regs around in normal bags. How much would it be worth to you to have the blessed reg bag option?



It seems to me that those options are already there, if you're willing to use reagents. 100% LRC is not required for casters yet it seems to be a must-have, just like max resists.

What I'm essentially asking here is how much is that LRC actually worth to you, and why?

Again, keep in mind that this is an entirely hypothetical exercise; a thought experiment if you will. This represents the kind of new gold sink that could make a lot of sense. It doesn't arbitrarily introduce a new tax and it adds new optional benefits.

On the downside, it's one of those things that would be difficult to price, and the reasons for that are at the heart of the purpose for a thread. That is why I want to see discussion along those lines.

I would consider it. Considering most people who would use the bag would be PvPers I would price the bag off of the champ spawn gold drop weight. Considering 4 people can do a rat spawn in 45 mins. and the get 250K gold from the drop that is about 60K per person for 45 mins of work, and that is not including if they get any good 120's to sell. I would make the cost of the LRC bag around 50K per hour.

IF you were to do something like this you would HAVE to make ALL reg vendors have 999 of each reg at all time and not have the reg prices increase.

If people are concerned about running out of regs then you could make it so the bag could "sell regs", but at double the NPC price.

I would also like to see PvP insurance reduced. Instead of getting %100 of the insurance gold from a person you killed make it %80. It is a small step, but 10 small steps equal 1 big step.

 

[Tina Small]

Why not take the item status away from gold? Make it a number you carry with you till deposited. Put weight on it or not, up to you guys. Seems like that would cut down on the amount of space it takes up. Once deposited in a bank it becomes a number in the bank and not an item you can move around. Would free up alot of space.

How would a change like this affect PvP though? And what about shards like Siege and Mugen? How does someone else take your gold by theft or by killing you if it's no longer something you carry around in your backpack? You can't just code it so that your gold automatically goes to the other player if he kills you because not all killers will take your gold.

 

[Visago]

Re: On Reagents

Reagents are an interesting subject. Here's a question:

BUT FIRST, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. This is not an idea that we are considering implementing.

Suppose there were a magic blessed bag that could hold up to 100 stone of reagents and scrolls, but in order for it to work you would have to feed it gold on an hourly basis -- otherwise it loses its blessing. How much gold would you be willing to feed it, and how did you arrive at that number?

AGAIN, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. My purpose in posing that question is to elicit some responses specifically about the value of reagents, and LRC, and scrolls.

In order to make using a reagent bag worth using either in my opinion, either of the following would have to happen:

A) LRC would have to be either removed or capped as people with 100% LRC aren't going to use the regs anyways. This would then just become a tax on spell casters without an LRC suite otherwise.

B) The gold fed into the reg bag to create the blessing would have to be less then what people would loose in insuring their LRC suites. This may entice people to move away from a full LRC suite depending on the mechanics.

Splitting the container might also be interesting. A Bless/Insurable scroll book for carrying around scrolls to cast would be interesting. Then a separate container for Bless/Insurable regs. Insurable amounts could be based on the average play time for people, what ever that may be. To use a number I'd through out a 2 hour interval. Then charge 500 gold per slot used within the container per 2 hours to Bless it for that interval. For example, a container holding 4 scroll types would cost 2000 gold to insure.

I arrived at 500 as a middle ground rough estimate for the cost of scrolls I've seen on vendors (100 gold multiplied by spell level) in the past. Its been along time since I've had to buy scrolls so I apologize if the numbers are off.

 

[Trebr Drab]

All the money flows to the top.
You can go out and hunt for Imbuing materials, and sell it for money. Usually that money comes from the top down. But they use it to make things to sell at a profit. If you want what they made, you have to pay the profits. The money still flows to the top.

This isn't "bad" except that it's such a long road, and in the meantime the players not at the top are restricted from other game play.
Event? MOBs with things you can sell for the big bucks? Got to get looting rights? You are competing against those top players for those rights. You need the gear at least similar to what they have.

Want to hunt in the Abyss? To be effective you need the gear, go buy it from the top players. Pay the price. Work to get it. In the meantime, you are restricted.

To make matters worse is the effects of inflation, where that top gear is priced according to the top player's ability to pay, not yours. Takes longer to get "there". You are restricted even longer from the gameplay you want.

Now, most of you will say that's what games are about and it should be this way. I'll agree to an extent. The problem is that that extent has gone way too far for a "worldly" game like UO. At this point, UO would be better off to start zoning the world out into level groups. Make it more like WoW. Now, if you want to get something from an event, or hunt for materials to sell, you are competing with players like yourself. You can get somewhere at a more reasonable speed, because your zone is designed for you.

The alternative is what you've seen. You could cut half the gold out of UO and this will still stay the same. You can increase gold from lower level MOBs and it will only flow to the top again.

So, as much as I hate to say it, if you want UO like it is and won't give up the item based grind, then make it another WoW clone. Where players can play according to their "level". But then you have to compete with WoW.

Or you can do away with such hard to get requirements to compete. (You can still have hard to get items that aren't a requirement. Cool stuff, fun stuff, but balanced stuff.)

But you can't have it both ways.
You've seen the results. If you want to stop the entropy, you have to allow all your players to compete without this long, difficult road. Or be a clone trying to compete with WoW.

This post, in my opinion, describes how the UO economy is currently working.

Gold trickling up means those at the bottom are not producing anything of value. At least not producing value fast enough. Items wealthy players want are delivered through a combination of high end mobs, the RNG, and a little luck.

I am not a proponent of giving everything away. On the contrary, I prefer to work and learn for myself, but in the short time I have played this game I have worked 7 different crafting skills and have found them to be utterly outside of the real -actual economy.

My first character, a scribe mage, is mediocre at best when it comes to participating in EM events such as the Blackrock Golem thing or killing other high end mobs where looting rights is the name of the game.

Some of you may not be aware that when you are new, the game offers template suggestions. How many of those templates would be successful for a new player to enter the economy within a reasonable amount of time?

Samuri, Paladin, Ninja, Warrior, Blacksmith, Necromancer, Mage. These are the suggested templates I saw. When I went to my first EM event anyone care to guess which of those templates, as suggested to the new player, were getting the looting rights?

Who was getting looting rights? Archers, Tamers, Mystics, Sampires? Spellweavers?(uncertain if spellweavers were there getting rights and I still don't know exactly what a Sampire is)

Not one of those templates are even mentioned when a new player is confronted with making their first character. (warriors, Paladins, and Samuris all begin with swords or fencing, not Archery)

If you want to get the economy going in UO, players and the RNG must be able to produce more value into the economy. Otherwise the money will behave exactly as Trebr Drab describes it.

The rich will still be rich, the not rich will still have to earn their own way, but gold will circulate.
Is not entropy a measure of of energy not available for useful work? Then release it.

Agreed. Of course looting rights don't matter anymore. Anything that us vets want we can get ourselves. The things that lower end players can get us is pretty much all in the abyss and some rare drops around. The rest of the creatures "rng item system"/crafts other than imbuing produce nothing of value that can be sold to us that we cant produce ourselves in moments.

I think the important aspect here, the outcome that is really at the heart of UO's economy problem, is the lack of ability to be consistently productive until you get to the top. The "top" being so rich that you can buy anything, and not affected by the inflation, and thus driving the inflation.

Under that top, there's no productivity. GM smith? What can you produce that makes you viable, competitive, gives you a steady business, and is worth the effort (i.e. can sell for enough to be worthwhile)? This is the case for everyone except at the top. This is why you see the loss of player vendors and the condensation of business into just Luna, basically. With this situation also comes a lack of competition for those Luna merchants, solidifying the problem.

Compare today's economy to early UO's. Without the extremes of item grinding power gaps, anyone who wanted to produce and sell could in a reasonable time frame. The same issue was there, but it was much more reasonable.

Fixing this is the only real answer. But I can understand that I'm talking about a massive change, one that UO isn't likely to have the desire (time and cost) to go into. It extends into other aspects of the game too, and is wide ranging. It would be an overhaul. There's also a lot of separate issues, and in a real Sandbox and Worldly game everything affects everything else. For example, trying to turn Alchemy into an adventuring skill affects it's economic function. And if this situation of item levels were to be fixed, it would enhance the problems of imbalance in skill sets such as "Sampires" and Tamers.

-------------------------

If you want to change the money system to take away the affects of inflation over the years, I'd suggest this. Story wise, "discover" that the gold in Sosaria has been counterfeited on a massive scale to destroy the Britannian economic system, to cause a collapse that might allow Britain's enemies to control the true wealth and power. These would be discovered to be mostly gold plated brass, and sometimes, very rarely, a true ancient gold coin is discovered (rare item). Issue a new coin, the Gold Sovereign, and change all NPCs into this new monetary system. Allow players to turn their existing gold coins into the Royal Treasurer, who inspects them, and gives them new Sovereigns for the "true" value of the stack (or check), a random value that's much less.

Gold on critters can still be the old gold, mostly counterfeit, and leave the Treasurer in game for exchanges. Some of the newer Sovereigns can be added to loot, or not. Over time, or not.

This would reduce the gold that's in UO and remove the inflation, while still leaving "the rich" rich comparatively. It would cause a revaluation of the economy and it's items, without the inflation. It would leave players where they are in the food chain, and not punish anyone. It would remove the affects of inflation, and allow players with less to afford more. It would increase the flow of business, which would increase the demand on materials and ingredients down the line.

This would help. But it does still leave the original problem in the game.
Phoenix, Cal, Messana, all of you, in my mind the best thing you could do for UO would be to get the financing and the ok to overhaul UO's entire system with this in mind. But I'm also sure that that expenditure would be a very hard sell. Especially right now.

And it's obvious from the replies here that most players don't really want change. They want some specific quick fixes, but not real change. That's another hard sell. I don't expect to see it happen. And that's really a shame.
Edit to add: But if you just did it anyways, they'd go willingly, kicking and screaming.

 

[Theo_GL]

That is a really really good idea. No sarcasm. Though I'd substantially lower the amount of "Uros" a player can purchase per account.

This already doesn't work. I don't hold most of my 'wealth' in gold, I hold it in items.

I have stacks of 120 scrolls, xfer tokens, ethies etc. I only hold about 250mil in gold.

After the xfer - I could sell tons of my stuff for Uro's or whatever and still be much richer than the average player.

This only penalizes people who hold gold. Transactions would stop happening in gold and then move to a barter system.

One of the keys to an economy is holding the value of money stable. If you suddenly make gold unstable - then transactions will stop happening in gold/uro or whatever.

 

[Wojoe]

I think the system we have now is just to far gone...And I doubt if any gold sinks will fix it...Sure you could put some in but people will not use them and it would take years to accomplish anything.

The only thing you can really do is something like a gold wipe, Maybe 90% across the board...The wealthy would still be wealthy but its sure to lower prices and not make some items seem out of reach for new players.

 

[Zero Day]

With AoS items in UO gained something for players which hadn't existed before: Permanence.

With insurance, at a small cost players were able to keep items indefinitely. Add to that Fortification and items could last almost indefinitely.

With the addition of new skills, items, and abilities, as well as the widespread ability of gold, players have become almost godly.

Players outside of PvP almost never die so insurance doesn't work as an intended gold sink. With items never being lost or destroyed, and gold being readily available, the selling price of top tier items is ridiculous, but at the same time completely worth it since they will remain with the character indefinitely.



Game balance really needs to be looked at and addressed. Many people complain about balancing for PvP affecting PvM, but I think that this is where things have erred in the past. Fighting a player and a monster is very similar, the level of intelligence is just way better. Introduction of abilities where players do nothing short of insane damage to a monster, shouldn't ever have been possible. If its way too strong for players, its probably too strong for monsters.



--------------------------


As for trade/gold etc in general, the removal of NPCs have left the economy in shambles. It's truly a player run economy with an abundance of gold inflow. There's no outflow into the world so all of the gold stays with players.

Finding a way to involve NPCs as part of the UO economy would be a vital part of taming the inflation.


Protection fees from the guards? Increased stable cost? banking fees?
Property tax?

Limited Lifetime consumables?

Public Moongate Usage Fees?

Ship Docking Fees?


For me I think making monsters and mobs a bit more dangerous without 1 hit kill, and making players a bit less powerful would go a long way for general gameplay improvement while at the same time, decreasing the rate of gold inflow.

Then figure out whatever outflow methods utilizing the NPCs/services to maintain a healthy outflow and you'd have a healthy plan towards stabilization.

Introducing new currencies or denominations will just contribute to inflation as it does nothing to address the issue other than change the label.

 

[Spree]

Make unique mount and pets (ex. ice colored cusi dog), but they cant be bonded or retamed, when you lose it you have to buy a new one.

 

[Nexus]

Re: On Reagents

Reagents are an interesting subject. Here's a question:

BUT FIRST, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. This is not an idea that we are considering implementing.

Suppose there were a magic blessed bag that could hold up to 100 stone of reagents and scrolls, but in order for it to work you would have to feed it gold on an hourly basis -- otherwise it loses its blessing. How much gold would you be willing to feed it, and how did you arrive at that number?

AGAIN, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. My purpose in posing that question is to elicit some responses specifically about the value of reagents, and LRC, and scrolls.

I probably wouldn't be interested honestly for several reasons.

A) The Hourly basis would quickly outweigh the value of the regs I'm carrying for this to be effective meanings of creating a gold sink I'm losing more gold keeping a blessed bag than I would if I just lose a 100 or so regs.

B)We'd be going back to a day and time where Reagents on vendors were scarce or if they auto-restocked the price would go up so extreme it would simply punish new players.

 

[blueturtle]

Why not sell transfer tokens via NPC for 20 mil ea. Honestly how many people buy tokens from uogamecodes anymore.

 

[R Traveler]

Why not sell transfer tokens via NPC for 20 mil ea. Honestly how many people buy tokens from uogamecodes anymore.

This will limit real cash income. Read my cross shard mail suggestion above. Ignored anyway.

 

[Lord Frodo]

People need to keep in mind when posting here is that UO’s population is very fragile and need to keep some simple rules in mind.

Rule #1: Do not make UO players mad.

Rule #2: Any gold sink needs to be fair to the not so rich to start with.

Some suggestions that I have seen here: taxes, new monetary system, gold wipes, doing away with things in UO that everybody has become used to (LRC suits), house taxes, anything that will raise the cost of playing UO as we know it today.

Please refer to rule #1. Making UO players mad only does one thing, makes them quit. We can not afford to lose any players.

Gold sinks need to appeal to all players. Make them tiered like the ToT system but do not stop at 2 tiers. This can be anything from house deco items all the way up to some very nice armor pieces, vet rewards, power scrolls and stat scrolls. There needs to be a lot of things here and reasonably priced on the first tier. We also need to be able to turn in items from lower tiers so we may move up the ladder to higher tiers or pay gold.

1st tier gold only, 2nd tier = 2 tier 1 items or the gold for 2 tier 1 items, 3rd tier = 3x1s, 1+2 or 3 x gold of tier 1 so on and so on. The main question is what goes in which tier.

This is just an example.

Tier 1 is gold only.

If we use 105 power scrolls in tier 1 then 110 power scrolls would be in tier 8. This is because of scroll binders. As you can see this tier system could be huge by the time you get to 120 power scrolls alone. Many items can be put in this system, new items, items that we get from spawns that people buy (IE power scrolls), items from past spring clean ups (IE sorcerer’s suits), the old ToT items, vet rewards. You name it, it could be here or you could go farm it just like now and use them for tier turn-ins or keep them or sell them.

Yes this means that UO will be setting the prices on a lot of things. This will do 2 things; #1 make gold worth a set price on all shards and #2 set the cost of a lot of items in UO. This will make the IRL sellers made because UO will tell them what their gold and items are now worth (almost certainly less then what they are charging.) This will also make a lot of the controlling guilds mad because if they want to sell something they will no longer be able to control the market and price gouge. UO has become to item dependent and UO needs to rein in the inflation by setting prices.

Maybe if people stop worrying how much things cost (because UO has set the price) then they can just go out and play the game and have fun for a change.

 

[Woodsman]

With a notable difference that this is not the real world but this is a code generated virtual world that the Developers can change to their liking altering the existing code to what they want.....

Meaning, that players cannot hide nothing. If the Developers write code to keep track of all belonging, gold and items, that any given account possesses, in order to then tax them, well, there is nothing that players will be able to do to hide this gold or items barred from deleting them..... Move them to another account ? They will tagged to that account which will then be taxed for them anyways........

So, it won't be possible to hide nothing if the proper "taxing code" was to be written.......

Players might move part of their belongings to another account to fall under a lower tax brackets but it will cost them extra monthly subscriptions which will bring revenues to UO which is good..........

If all players are taxed simply because somebody decided there was too much gold in the system, it's going to really **** off a lot of people. Really **** off a lot of people. It would be covered by the gaming media and it would not help UO's reputation at a time when EA acts like they want to bring in some new players.

It would really **** off the honest players who would question why they should have to suffer when the problem was caused by dupers and scripters as well as legitimate game mechanisms. You don't ever want to punish 100% of players for the actions of the dupers, scripters, and scammers, as well as bad coding, especially when UO has seen such a drastic decline over the past decade. UO could afford to lose players in the past over a major decision. It could not afford to lose players now - this is 2011, not 2000 or 2004.

EA would be much better off chasing after the scripters or looking at adjusting the the buy/sell mechanisms with the NPCs or loot drop rates. They may not be able to go after the people who duped years ago and got away with it, but they can go after the people who are scripting these days.

This needs to be remembered:

People need to keep in mind when posting here is that UO’s population is very fragile and need to keep some simple rules in mind.

Rule #1: Do not make UO players mad.