This will never be an effective gold sink because it will be ignored and never used. Instead of the elections and governorships being something to bring people together and interact more, it's headed for being a disaster, thanks to poor thinking, bad implimentation and hopeless 'advertising'. The only way it'll take gold out is is people choose to spend a fortune on something some people maybe might benefit from. As a gold sink, and appeal for people to throw cheques in the bin is likely to have about the same impact.
Suppose you want to stand for Governor. You cannot see who your electorate are, have no clue how many or how few, or what they want. You can try through websites and chat channels, but we surely all know by now you only ever reach a fraction of the playerbase that way. Whether opposed or not, you can't argue anything remotely resembling an electoral platform to a majority of the people who MIGHT be eligible to vote.
Come voting time, assuming it's accurate (my confidence about that is frankly low - buggy and poorly tested code abounds in UO, and someone manually re-starting the election stones each few hours for the first days of voting is not too likely to help me trust the accuracy of the system), you'll get some - essentially, people with most guildmates, friends or associates - who can swing a proportionally huge vote very quickly, since zero loyalty is needed to be eligible to vote, and in a social game friendships or similar matter a lot. However that also opens up the old 'let's rig this for a laugh' option for spoiling a system, and we all know people who will try that on just because they can. Setting the voting requirement slightly higher than 'make three clicks on the options for your character to be able to vote' might have helped there....
Who people are voting for regularly boils down to 'do I know this person', 'will they mutually support me', and 'what's in this for me' - and since you need to be a higher loyalty to use the advantages of the voting system than you actually do to vote (who the hell dreamed that one up!) the majority of 'voters' are probably getting .... nothing. Do a friend a favour since they say they want the Governor title.... then watch when they learn it's a potential cost of 2m per week for effectively almost nothing bar the ability to display the "Governor" title for 3 months...
(Might have been possible to sort out 'town meetings' where voting went on, scatter a few through the week at varied times so everyone had chance to attend (and advertise it properly so people KNOW!), somewhere like Blackthorn's castle so some types of disruption are limited, and have the voting follow some sort of discussion from the potential governors - if they can't be there at least a book of their manifesto could be.... Far from perfect, but at least it means some people meet and talk about this, rather than the none who are doing for the huge majority of towns on all shards.)
When elected, what actually can a Governor do - apart from choose to lose 2m per week on a buff that some people might use? Well you can supposedly sit on the council and talk to the EMs - except on a few shards, there's no EM so that's out, and EA have been completely silent about what you can achieve by this talking. Some have mentioned maybe deco for the town, or steering plotlines - but those 'some' are just players like the rest of us, the information should come from EA, but never does. You can give titles to citizens - pity you don't know who your citizens are, then, that might have been fairly relevant. (I don't share the concerns about inappropriate titles some people have raised - if it's offensive it's bannable, and you choose which titles you display anyhow so it's no more open to 'abuse' than the ability to give Guild titles). The titles would be really useful for RP, if only there were big enough RP communities to support a 'town council', but frankly those are damn rare nowaday.
It's just the latest in the apparently neverending stream of good ideas ruined by hopeless planning and design. So frustrating since there was so much potential, but it's looking more and more like a slow motion train wreck. Maybe it will be salvaged by the developers getting a grip on the whole thing, but frankly I reckon it's headed the same way as far too many past big, clever systems - looks shiny, people try it a couple of times, and then it's completely abandoned bar a very few who try make it work for their preferrred playstyles. I wish them well, they should be able to do anything they enjoy in the game - but when a big system with huge potential takes developer time, it needs to be something that a LOT of the playerbase will use, and as it stands this isn't.
Again, it lacked a 'game designer' and got a 'systems designer' instead, and the result of that is never good...
