Platinum has little to no value.

You damn 1%ers and your UO accountants! You always know the loopholes and how to pay less taxes!!

If that was implemented, it would be time to start using Buccaneer's Den as a tax haven!

I like the idea of taxes for large properties but I think the idea of taxes really kind of ruins the escapism of it.

Paying taxes, in other words, sucks.

So I propose the following:

1) Shard donors get one free house of any size, linked to an account, which is untaxed.

2) Shard subscribers get a second and third, but only as long as their subscription remains current.

Each "tax free spot" is linked to a specific account and character.

These houses work just like houses now.

All other houses are taxed at the rate:
Area x 300

Examples:

Small house:
7 x 8 x 300 = 16,800, to be paid by the house owner only on placement or refresh (means non-owners can no longer refresh, and the house can't be dropped and replaced just to avoid taxes).

Fortress:
31 x 31 x 300 = 288,300 per placement or refresh cycle

So basically people can either pay their taxes, donate 5 bucks for one house in perpetuity (this is mainly to avoid VPN trickery), or subscribe for 3 (and pay taxes on the rest).

Maybe platinum would be accepted as a tax payment at 7k/plat or something.

In lieu of donations, maybe copper could be used somehow. But I don't understand the copper system well enough to propose that.

A non-issue if you make it so that you cannot get the dead back for properties that are in arrears on their taxes.

That's ice cold there Eherruh, ICE COLD.

So you're saying a deed could only be retrieved on a property that is "like new".

If that's easier to code than just charging the fee immediately upon placement I'm certainly fine with it.

I mean, the shards favored vets "got away" a lot of crappy stuff being involved in real money trades, the tower that magically fit on Justice island, proof of using forum alts to bid up their own auctions, more than 3 accounts, and whatnot.


But this is hardly anything worth complaining about. Something is only worth what people will pay for it. If a group of players is keeping the cost of plat secretive so it appears less is selling to keep prices high.... well that sounds like "playing the game", which is what everyone is here to do right? You guys can simply "not pay it", it's not like you need plat for anything. Sounds like a pretty smart move on their part, and if there's anything to say about them exploiting champ spawns to do it, it's that they are at least active in game, which is all you could ask from any player, good or bad. It's a net positive thing for the server.


No reason you can't organize a group large enough to fight them off and exploit the champ spawns for yourself. Are champ spawns a problem? Yeah probably, but you can't blame anyone for taking advantage of it while they can. It's not like they are doing anything exceptionally heinous like killing an afk player at the bank. The server is already flush with gold and far too PVM-centric it should be no wonder that the economy has spiraled out of control, but it doesn't really change the game.



It reminds me a lot of the complaining over the iDerp guild and their idocing (well, basically the same players but different situation). Why complain? Any time there's a larger more organized group than your own, doing the same thing, you're going to lose. But it's not "unfair". Just do something about it. You need to organize a larger guild, or just be smarter about handling it. Some players are always going to have 24 hours a day to camp a spawn and "ruin it for everyone else", but that doesn't mean they are doing anything wrong, they quite literally just put more time into it. It's a persistent MMO, you kind of expect "putting more time into it" to allow you to get ahead of players that don't have that amount of time to put into it.

@snap dragon - Great analysis, thanks, I agree.

Naw. Consider an implementation where taxes are assessed (and automatically deducted) once every `<TBD period, post-placement>` or upon re-deed. Until it's paid (automatically, like stabling a pet but in reverse) the home cannot be refreshed or re-deeded, otherwise everything works as-is. Simple enough, no?

If you add taxes upon purchase of a deed, you might as well raise deed prices

Emphasis on post-placement.

Is the point of this taxation to prevent hoarding of houses or to be a gold sink? (It will never happen, but fun to war game these things)

Ohhh Ok for some reason I didn't see that earlier

It would have to be reasonably low to allow new players to afford the taxes without a huge burden, otherwise the whole point is kind of moot right? That wouldn't discourage vets, and likely just increase the value of homes for sale on the used market. Not to mention it's just annoying to deal with that sort of thing. What if I don't want to farm gold to pay my rent but I am still active in game for a few weeks? Why punish active players who aren't hoarding homes?


Should just cut to the chase here and lower the number of houses players can have, but that has been a topic of discussion since 2012, and nothing has come of it... so good luck.

Without weighing in with an opinion on what the right number of homes a player should be allowed to have here, this idea would require a level of expropriation that would be hard to mete out fairly and would affect a huge cross section of the shard's population. As you said, "good luck".

Emphasis on massive homes, as defined here: http://www.uorenaissance.com/list/MassiveHouse/P

One way to fix things, for sure!

For what snepdregen said: The refresher-bot super hoarders are usually the richer populous. This cuts off them from holding so much land.
Against what snapdagr0n said: Even though it's little work, you can really make some money by being a "house hunter" just like those HGTV nerds. If a newer player wants to be a real estate agent, cough @Earsnot they could thrive in a way many others may not have thought of. Thus creating a culture that helps churn out new owners.


As much as i've stayed away from the "housing needs _______" conversations it's not a bad idea, at all. Pretty sure nobody who owns more than 10 houses has a good, useful reason for it.

29 people is 1/8th to 1/10th of this server...

If you took the possible 15 homes cap, knocked it down to 2 homes per account. 6 properties would seem excessive to most.

My plan let people have an untaxed house if they're donors, and 3 if they're subscribers. So there's the option of giving a sandwich's worth of coin to Chris to be used for advertising or (even better) testing/coding help so we could see some of these things promised 3-5 years ago finally implemented.

it just feels so pay-to-win. I make a decent living and am still against it. Since houses can be held then sold for higher rates, paying rl money to the server could be considered giving us an advantage that could be turned into gold. So therefore leading to the pay-to-win system others servers have tried, and closed with.