Time for gold to 'weigh' less?

[Arch Magus]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

 

[Sarphus]

Loot in general is pretty messed up in UO. Gold has been devalued to the point where it's not even worth picking up off most monsters. I would be in support of reducing the weight of gold unnerfing BoS if it weren't for gold farming bots.

I think we need an answer to this problem, but I don't know what the answer is. I just don't think the answer is to make gold easier to transport.


I'm really not a fan of physically looting gold. I would rather see an award given based on how much stuff you kill rather than needing to go up and loot the monster. I like artifact reward systems that drop arties in my pack. I also liked the book of truth award system, but didn't like needing to go through the huge stacks of corpses to get to the loot I care about.

How would you feel about the addition an item you can have that automatically loots gold from all your kills, but when the hunting is over it gives you a check for half the gold it looted. Would that be something you used? I would certainly use something like that.

 

[Jhym]

TR uses the "credit award" system. You end up gathering millions of credits that end up being useless to you with very little extra effort. Effectively like gold appearing in your bank box constantly for killing mongbats.

I'd rather they concentrate on making the items dropped be either 1) worth keeping or 2) usable for components or other combinations for other uses. What is the point of dropping 30 junk magic items that you can't even carry home to sort?

Back to gold -- it makes sense to limit it as a physical requirement in looting. Otherwise the gold inflation people have been arguing about would be real as huge masses of gold would pump into people's bank boxes from constant low level monster kills.

I wouldn't mind some alternate way to capture gold for us, perhaps allowing us to have 'hirelings' who can hold the gold for us -- we effectively hire a fence that holds whatever we dump on him/her. They take a cut of 20 or 30% of the loot, and give the gold to us as a check, the items in a bag (up to 200 stones.)

Plus their hiring fee and upkeep, of course. But nothing automatic. And of course the hireling can be killed by things, so you'd have to put him somewhere safe and hope he stays there...

 

[Gildar]

Lighter gold will simply increase the in-flow of gold into the system, devaluing it at a faster rate than it already gets devalued.

Something needs to be done about the in-game economy, but it needs to be much more complex than changing the weight of something.

 

[Sarphus]

TR uses the "credit award" system. You end up gathering millions of credits that end up being useless to you with very little extra effort. Effectively like gold appearing in your bank box constantly for killing mongbats.

I'd rather they concentrate on making the items dropped be either 1) worth keeping or 2) usable for components or other combinations for other uses. What is the point of dropping 30 junk magic items that you can't even carry home to sort?

Back to gold -- it makes sense to limit it as a physical requirement in looting. Otherwise the gold inflation people have been arguing about would be real as huge masses of gold would pump into people's bank boxes from constant low level monster kills.

I wouldn't mind some alternate way to capture gold for us, perhaps allowing us to have 'hirelings' who can hold the gold for us -- we effectively hire a fence that holds whatever we dump on him/her. They take a cut of 20 or 30% of the loot, and give the gold to us as a check, the items in a bag (up to 200 stones.)

Plus their hiring fee and upkeep, of course. But nothing automatic. And of course the hireling can be killed by things, so you'd have to put him somewhere safe and hope he stays there...

I agree... and what I posted earlier would probably only contribute to the problem.

I think the idea of making a monster drop more items (rather than better items) just because it's a harder monster is inherently flawed. Better loot should come from better monsters, but the overall quantity of loot dropping on high end monsters is ridiculous.

I love strongboxes, though... they drop decent items and not so many items that you have to look through a million things.

 

[Nexus]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

Anything to increase gold flow into the economy is pointless. They need to devise means to take it out and reduce the influx. The bag of sending "nerf" did just that it slowed gold flow into the games economy. I know I'm not going to champ spawns and walking out with 200k+ anymore...now it's more like 32k My Pack plus draining a fully charged BOS.

There was a topic about future Virtues a bit ago probably on Page too where I thought that one of the new virtues should be built by donating GOLD only GOLD to the various community collections. In Exchange it would passively enhance the results of all of the other existing virtues...Compassion would rez a person with even more health...Sacrifice would get extra times per week, Justice would give a chance at even more PS, and Honor wouldn't eat as many bubbles when evoked or possibly have an extended timer. This is the type of Gold Sink if put in properly and was costly enough would be effective as it's something in some way a large portion of the player base could benefit from, thus causing them to actually want to do it!! Cause after all you wouldn't only be getting Virtue Points...you'd be getting 1 donation point per 12 gold.....

 

[Basara]

I would rather see Bags of sending changed back to one charge per use, but a 50 GP per stone of weight sent system (coming out of your pack first, if available, like with player vendors).

This would totally eliminate sending gold (gold weighs 50 coin per stone), while giving a use to coin collected in the field, for sending items that have more important uses in the game (resources for crafters). The resource gatherers could collect gold as they hunt/mine/chop (even miners and lumberjacks run into hostiles), or just rely on their gold in the bank.

In that way it would function as a gold sink.

 

[Arch Magus]

At least make characters able to carry more gold.

Gold has to come from somewhere, I personally LIKE killing the tough creatures, going through the items and putting 2.5k in my pack.

Sorry everyone thinks gold is worthless, even though that's what you buy everything with.
I've always made my gold from farming critters. I guess it's just not viable anymore.

 

[Redxpanda]

Gold is nice and all but i would be for gold being reduced if loot in general got a bump. The economy always seems to devalue gold faster than you can get it (unless you are a farmer of course). Kill the gold, bump the loot.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

I think it would be better to remove 90% of the gold from the game, and then cap the total amount of gold on a shard. That would keep gold in circulation, and it would make people trade items instead of selling them for an insane amount of gold through their Luna vendors.

 

[Arch Magus]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

I think it would be better to remove 90% of the gold from the game, and then cap the total amount of gold on a shard. That would keep gold in circulation, and it would make people trade items instead of selling them for an insane amount of gold through their Luna vendors.

Cap total gold on a shard? why?
I don't have lots of nice items to trade. Why shouldn't I be able to buy things with gold?
No one is forced to buy from these Luna vendors anyway.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

Cap total gold on a shard? why?
I don't have lots of nice items to trade. Why shouldn't I be able to buy things with gold?
No one is forced to buy from these Luna vendors anyway.

Because the circulation of gold and items are essential for a working economy. Currently, the economy in UO isn't really working. This has several reasons. One of them is the hoarding of gold and the hoarding of items. It works the same way in real-life economy. The government doesn't produce an endless amount of money, otherwise we would have the same massive inflation we have in UO. The total amount of money is LIMITED. That's the secret of balancing an economy.

Edit:
This would mean, for example, that when players "hoard" gold, monsters hardly yield gold as loot anymore. When a player loses insurance gold because of dying, this amount would go back into the "monster loot gold pool". There have to be gold sinks, like insurance, that circulate the gold from the hands of players back to the monsters. Like items bought for gold being lost and destroyed.

 

[Eslake]

They could make gold weightless for transport, drastically reduce scripters, and put all gold-gain under a reasonable restriction at the same time.

1 - add an NPC near town banks, a roaming NPC who has a different name at least daily (script killer). A script changes the name so there is no continuing dev effort involved.

2 - take all gold off of monsters.

3 - copy/paste the fame system as a gold system.

So as you fight, you gain a sort of gold-points.
These accumulate in the same maner as fame, larger creatures giving more etc.. and with the diminishing returns that fame has. (high fame gains less)

So to actively hunt for gold you would need to make relatively frequent (but not excessive) trips to town to "turn in" your points as a good citizen for gold, which is deposited directly to your bank box.

Because the NPC's name changes, scripters would have a hard time making a bot capable of finding him (since searching for any creature with a name it doesn't know would find players).

I think it a relatively simple fix for several issues in one go.

The biggest changes would of course be the difficulty in creating a gold-farming bot, and that after a certain point, lower monsters would stop giving any gold points at all.

But I don't really see the 0gold from low creatures as an issue. If you are killing things high enough to take your gold/fame over tier 3, you really don't need to kill mongbats for coins anyway.

 

[Eslake]

I think it would be better to remove 90% of the gold from the game, and then cap the total amount of gold on a shard. That would keep gold in circulation, and it would make people trade items instead of selling them for an insane amount of gold through their Luna vendors.

The problem with that is the same problem we have in the US right now.

What I (in humor) call, sponge economics.

Picture all of the gold on the shard as a bowl of water. (rl $ the same)

Each character is a tiny little sponge. Each soaking up just so much water.

But because there is no /character cap on water content, some sponges eventually start soaking up far more than the others. (Bill Gates)

As time goes on, those Big sponges have taken so much of the total water, that there is none left for the little "normal" sponges. They dry up and shrivel.


Graphic, funny, but terribly disturbing in that it applies perfectly to our economic system and the one you propose.

For a Closed economic system to function long term, it requires a limit on maximum holdings. Even adding more water (the government's solution so far) only helps for brief periods.
The bigger sponges' surface area (money they already have) lets them soak up the new water faster than the little ones can. So each time it happens, the "fix" fails sooner and sooner.

This ends my medication-induced economics lesson for the evening.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

The problem with that is the same problem we have in the US right now.

What I (in humor) call, sponge economics.

Picture all of the gold on the shard as a bowl of water. (rl $ the same)

Each character is a tiny little sponge. Each soaking up just so much water.

But because there is no /character cap on water content, some sponges eventually start soaking up far more than the others. (Bill Gates)

As time goes on, those Big sponges have taken so much of the total water, that there is none left for the little "normal" sponges. They dry up and shrivel.


Graphic, funny, but terribly disturbing in that it applies perfectly to our economic system and the one you propose.

For a Closed economic system to function long term, it requires a limit on maximum holdings. Even adding more water (the government's solution so far) only helps for brief periods.
The bigger sponges' surface area (money they already have) lets them soak up the new water faster than the little ones can. So each time it happens, the "fix" fails sooner and sooner.

This ends my medication-induced economics lesson for the evening.

That's an interesting analogy!
However, what will the big, fat sponges do with all their gold? Sit on it? I guess only few people will do that, because owning gold is useless. you have to DO something with it in order to have fun. Merchandising, buying rares, whatever. Also, keep in mind that with only few gold in circulation, the prices will drop. Which will be the automatic regulation tool.

Maybe a little tax should be considered, to make sure that some of the gold (especially from the rich people) will be returned to the monster pool.

P.S.: Bill Gates isn't that rich when you just look at his cash. He invested his money into other companies (stocks), which means, it is in circulation. If every rich guy would sell their stocks and try to turn them into cash, their prices would drop massively -> automatic regulation tool.

 

[Ericge99]

They took BOS's out of the equation to stop scripters, so, as a few previous posters are alluding to, why not dispence with gold from monsters altoghter, and just give gems. Yes ... Gems, they can be traded in at the bank for gold.
A lot of creature have Gems in the loot anyway, so why not increase their amount to compensate for the gold value? Works for me.

 

[Landicine]

I would be in support of reducing the weight of gold unnerfing BoS if it weren't for gold farming bots.

You mean the bots that fight trogs most of the day and recall out when full? The bots that had work-around for the BOS changes a few days later?

The bag of sending change didn't really reduce scripted gold farming since the price of scripty gold didn't seem to increase much. Sure it went up a little bit for a week, but it came back down pretty quickly.

Gold sinks are a great idea except that unless there are a fix for scripters, they can simply produce more gold. Breaking the back of the scripter society is the only way to insure that gold sinks work. For example:

Community collections: Gold can be turned in to the collections, but the exchange rate is pretty poor. However since the collections are very frustrating, many people would just turn to gold turnin, EXCEPT that most of the items are cheaper to buy from a player vendor. Scripters have a huge advantage for dull repetitive actions that need to be done thousands of times, so they do the community collections a great deal. Rather than millions of gold being taken out of the economy, those millions are given to scripters who can sell the items for less.

Compare the price of talismans directly from the collections for gold (8.25 million) or from a vendor in Luna (2-2.7 million, 8 million for a "owned by no one" version). Which are people going to buy? Which keeps gold floating around? Failed gold sink? Yup.

 

[Black Sun]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

I don't think there's an answer to this problem that won't make the gold farming bots flood the economy again. If we can find a way to stop them, then some changes can be made.

Personally (in a perfect virtual world) I'd like to see some kind of account bound bank system for gold. Sorta like SWG has, only a little more accessible. I was thinking like when you kill an enemy & open the corpse the gold is auto credited to an account that all of your chars on that particular account on that shard can access. (It would eliminate the need for transferring funds between chars) And by going to a banker you can get either a check or a stack of gold coins for player to player transactions, and all NPC's and player vendors could withdraw directly from the bank for transactions of any amount. You would be able to deposit gold into your bank account directly by dropping gold or checks into your bank box. The would be auto converted and credited directly to your account. Not only would this free up some peoples bank boxes from clutter and items, but I would assume it would also be a little easier on the servers with less items (ie. piles of gold & checks) to display when we open our bank boxes.

 

[Black Sun]

They took BOS's out of the equation to stop scripters, so, as a few previous posters are alluding to, why not dispence with gold from monsters altoghter, and just give gems. Yes ... Gems, they can be traded in at the bank for gold.
A lot of creature have Gems in the loot anyway, so why not increase their amount to compensate for the gold value? Works for me.

Because then you'd just have script bots looting gems and selling them to the NPCs in town to get the gold that way. It's only a small extra step, but they're not at their keyboards, so it really wouldn't bother them in the least I'm sure.

 

[Lore Master]

Or at least fix bags of sending?

I am often disheartened at the amount of gold I leave lying around with no way to get it out , i.e deep in the twisted weald.

What do you all think? Lighter golds?

i agree that gold should be lighter another thing i want is for the bags of sending to be reverted back to the way they once where. i believe bags of sending where changed because of all the gold farmers and scripters and the sad thing about it is we honest and decent players are paying for it too with the changes to them which is just wrong if ou ask me.

 

[Lord Kynd]

How would you feel about the addition an item you can have that automatically loots gold from all your kills, but when the hunting is over it gives you a check for half the gold it looted. Would that be something you used? I would certainly use something like that.

would work for me, i'd use it.

but..
i am not sure how helpfull that would be..
how would it stop farmers ?
and wouldn't taking 1/2 the gold collected hurt normal players ?

 

[Lord Kynd]

but I would assume it would also be a little easier on the servers with less items (ie. piles of gold & checks) to display when we open our bank boxes.

well you almost had a good idea , well copy anyhow..
but you severly lost my intrest when it came to this part
i happen to like seeing the little gold piles .
the backpack/bank graphics we have for items is good, it's something that keeps me playing. and what keeps me from playing other games(seriously dislike WoW's backpack/bank graphics).

i would rather see them copy the vendor house idea's and remove player npc vendors to reduce server loads.

 

[GFY]

IMHO the problem isn't gold streams coming into the game. It's 10 year plus vets that own everything there is worth owning and have more gold stored away then Bill Gates has dollars!

The gold system needs to be reset. Have a natural disaster or magical disaster where every piece of processed gold is destroyed. Then everyone would have to go out and get gold again and all those players with every item known to UO wouldn't be able to sell stuff for zillions of gold.

Perhaps UO could start charging hugh sums of gold for services like banking and stabling. Or have the high council charge hugh taxes to rebuild the towns that have been destroyed. The taxes could be % income based so players depositing larger sums of gold would be charged the most.

Lastly if players are dupping every valuable item in game do you really thing they aren't dupping gold?

How about making bags of sending only usable in Fell areas that can't be recalled out of? This would solve the problem of gold lying around and make it worth while to go into a Fell dungeon if your not champ spawning.

 

[Thrand Graywolf]

They took BOS's out of the equation to stop scripters

I have a great deal of trouble believing that was their real reason. If it was, it failed.

 

[Omnius]

remove the ability to sell to npcs from every shard.

No more ways to earn gold. too many already and too much inflation.

 

[Velvathos]

There is a simple solution to this. And Yes, GOLD should weigh nothing. But it should never leave your backpack, physically, we should not be able to move gold like it is an item of some sort. I also raised a voice on getting TWO zero's knocked out of the economy, with two new currencies, Copper and Silver. So it would work like this. 100 Copper = 1 silver, 100 SILVER = 1 Gold. This would make something that is 1 million gold, 10,000 Gold. Wouldn't solve a lot of problems, but the word MILLION, should not be a word used in a game such as UO, this would be a lot less tedious for new players. Basaclly we would have some kind of a gold ledger of some sort where all of our money goes, that tells us how much gold, silver and copper we would have, gold would no longer be a physical item and you wouldn't be able to move it physically, there could also be a max on how much you can have, so that the economy will never spin out of control. Fixing loot on monsters is another problem, WAY less money on monsters is needed, too much gold is flowing into the economy, the gold in the economy, the less inflation, thus, making gold worth more, and fixing prices.

 

[Velvathos]

Because the circulation of gold and items are essential for a working economy. Currently, the economy in UO isn't really working. This has several reasons. One of them is the hoarding of gold and the hoarding of items. It works the same way in real-life economy. The government doesn't produce an endless amount of money, otherwise we would have the same massive inflation we have in UO. The total amount of money is LIMITED. That's the secret of balancing an economy.

Well, as of late, the country I am from anyways, has a rather bad economy. The Federal Reserver prints money out of thin air and lowers interest rates, causing inflation to rise, this makes a weaker dollar, rising the cost of living, and that my friend is called the INFLATION tax. UO has the same problem. And the U.S. dollar, just like gold in UO, is backed by nothing, nothing at all, if the dollar was backed by gold, it would limit chronic inflation and boom bust business cycles, and would put a limit on how much we could print. Gold in UO needs to be backed by something, Copper and Silver, in my opinion, like I said above..

 

[Lucy of Kenton]

The sad thing is that this is another effect of the cheaters. they exploited the sending bags so we all have to suffer. i agree with it though but yes its frustrating to leave all that cash behind