Plat Imbalance

Zero, you are far too triggered for something that will never happen... chillax, this thread was just created to divert attention from mounted elves changes that benefit your guild

I've had my vote, so It's time to put some Ideas out for public ridicule.
- Leaving the current game mechanics/champ system appears to be a no go because this requires coding changes, and we have all accepted that Chris 's Real Life is more important than a hobby server. Good on him. Real Life has to come before a game.
- the game changer items from the Plat store are Blessed RB and Ethies, why not make them available for Copper or HC or Dubloons or even Gold.
- if the above idea doesn't fly, Plat chances from alternative methods should be a reality, be it Boding, Crafting, resources gathering, T Mapping or fishing.
I don't champ, I have in the past, the reason I stopped was the change that removed the lootable corpses from the ground. I lost my big earner because I didn't double box or triple box my tamers.
Personally, I think that , contrary to the general opinion, Welfare Plat should be reduced the longer you have been on the server, to encourage people to get out there more, actually play for their rewards and not sit AFK in their house/towers/forts. to earn more gold for their expensive Deco rewards or what ever.
Anyway that's my two gold coins worth.
Oh and one other thing friends, at this time of year, think about your fellow UORers, get into the spirit of Christmas, Choose NOT to tear someone down because they have a different Guild Tag, or a different game play niche, this year has had the lowest turnout for Secret Santa for many years and I can only put it down to people are scared to have to get something for an enemy. We are all closet Nerds playing a Wizards game well into out 30's and 40' or in a few cases 90's So guys remember at the end of all of this, It's just a game.

I majorly agree with the guys saying etherials and runebook bless should be made available via copper and dubloons. Those are really great ideas that achieve the goal of making these critical rewards much more accessible to all playstyles. That along with a few cool vanity rewards added to the plat store would be great.

See this is the problem, your not forcing anyone to do anything. The other playstyles are out there, if you want plat buy it from a player that enjoys that playstyle. Just because YOU dont like it, doesnt mean its not viable.

see thats the thing, im not triggered, im sorry its being conveyed that way. im at work and have the time to talk about this right now hahaha

Plat is available to Everyone. you dont HAVE to champ to get it. I want BoD Rewards, i buy them with gold or trade them for it, I want Potions I Buy them or trade for them, I want Rares, i buy them or trade fro them.

I dont expect the mechanics to get those items to change just because i dont like the manner in which they are farmed

You want to sell your large plat stash at the best price possible, I think we got that point. Seems a lot of folks disagree, and feel these rewards should be able to be achieved without triple boxing or paying premiums to those who choose to.

What you arnt getting is that gold and plat and dubloons are removed from the system when you buy something right? A plat sink.

Anyone can do any version of dubloon farming. So if you want flooring you can run a scroll in any method you want and you can get the doubloons to buy wood floors. If you hate amibs you can BUY wood floors/doubloons. But you can do amibs via Ironman dexter, triple box tamer, as a group of friends, single box with a mare, or what ever...archers do it. And most importantly, you can also enjoy UO without wood floors. They arnt CORE.

Xmas is the same. You want the rewards you can do the activity which is accessible to all types of combat builds. Or you can skip the step and buy it. Again, UO is playable without snow bless piles and Halloween skeletons.

Plat (and champing) is currently locking CORE items. Not floors or carpets. Not runebook copy pens. Not Trammell deco. Not special mounts. But CORE mechanics behind a wall that only ONE type of playstyle will be successful at. And if you don't do that style you HAVE to make people who do it, rich.

No other system locks CORE items behind a non era mechanics. That's the point. If you don't see it, your willfully blind to it, because you enjoy the activity.

I dont wanna pay 700-1m for a Val hammer swing, but thats the price for those that put in the time and effort to make a val hammer.

See you see it locked behind something, but its not. Cause its 100% available through other means. Nothing is LOCKED up.

you all think im purely doing this because i have a huge plat stash, i Dont. I spend mine, and i dont sell it. Cause there are books i need still.

I have never sold Plat, i have given some away here and there to some players that needed a kick to buy their first Ethy, or Runebook.

You all think you understand my motivation. Like i have this Dark need to preserve my plat value. That has nothing to do with it. I want to preserve that some things other than Deco bullshit are hard to get in game. "Needs" keep people interested. You want a Easy [pay to play server? this isnt it. Things take time and investment here. You take that away, and this place will die.

The items made by val hammers are much more niche, and have many substitutes that can be used instead of them. For example, a player who can't afford, or doesn't want to pay for a val katana can get a high end vanq, and still be able to play with it quite effectively. Blessed runebooks and etherials mounts are not the same - there are no easy substitutes for them. Nobody is suggesting that acquiring blessed runebooks or etherials should be made easy, they are just suggesting that alternate playstyles be given a route to work towards these items without having to triple box, or pay up to the guys who choose to. The fact that you have a rebuttle for everyones opinion on this isn't really helping your case imo. You have said your point many many times now in this thread and I think everyone heard it by now. Maybe let others voice their opinions without sparking up an argument to each of them?

I guess im sorry to be passionate about something and that my opinion differs from others, Dreamweaver. Ill be sure to ask permission if i can add anything further, in the future.

Can the staff/volunteers that are currently around increase the plat drop/amount on all mini-bosses (including the newer Keza ones)? If the drop rate was higher and had the potential for a larger amount (like a 1/10 or 1/5 chance to drop a stack of 5), then that could provide an alternate source of plat at a much lower rate than triple-box champing, which would still be the number one source of plat. Upping the plat amount/drop rate on Keza bosses would also incentivize people to farm in other areas of the world that are not currently hot spots. A lot of different builds can also farm these bosses. This plat source would be open to all types of PvM characters.

This would provide another source of plat and also might get folks farming in new locations.

You’re all a bunch of fucking whiny dorks.
You’re never going to stop the people who play this 24/7, have spreadsheets on everything and/or run more than 3 accounts.
Merry Christmas!

There are a couple of logical fallacies in your argument here, and perhaps it's just a poor choice of something to compare to, but we'll stick with your example. It has been stated multiple times, this thread included, that the demand for plat is low, almost non-existent from a macro perspective. So with demand being low, and supply being extreme, we should see plat pretty much bottom out, but it doesn't. You can find smaller quantities of plat around for cheaper prices, but if you want to do business with the holders of the big quantities (i.e. the monopoly) you need to pay their price. Since the only sustained driver for demand of plat are the game changing items of blessed runebooks and ethies (although I would put these at an order of magnitude less game changing than the runebook but I digress) and these are more expensive, plat-wise, than most, you either have to wait it out and obtain via a relative trickle or pay the "set price". There's also limited incentive for sellers of smaller quantities of plat to more severely undercut the price because they cannot offer enough to meaningfully impact the set price (or they get Hydroxed and the big fish buys them out to sell at a profit).

Comparing plat to fort powder, fort powder has several key differences. First, it is somewhat easy, albeit tedious, to get involved in the acquisition of powder for sale which makes it difficult to form a strong monopoly and set a price (not to mention this tends to be a solo focused activity). Second, demand is almost constantly high because, similar to regs, people regularly need fort powder for most activities. Third, as opposed to plat this demand typically skews heavily towards well established players due to its use case (masks, high end weapons, etc). These factors keep a floor relatively high because supply tends to be relatively low compared to demand. If supply were to drop even a little bit, the price would rise and conversely if the supply were to rise you'd see the price drop. We've seen this play out a bit over UOR's history where the prices have gone up when supply is lower (1250 is the highest I've seen) and dropped when supply is higher (lowest I've seen is 600 per). We've never really seen a similar scale of hording to plat so it's not a great comparison.

Really the only thing that compares to plat is holiday coins and doubloons. The former is somewhat curbed by the time-limited nature of their availability and the market items being almost exclusively decorative (aside from the raffles). The latter is too new to see how the trends play out but due to their instanced nature it's hard to see a similar level of monopoly ever being established.

As to your assertion that a player doesn't need a blessed runebook, that is accurate. But it is significantly more convenient (res, click blue button. no need to mark/copy for replacements) and safe (pks/thieves won't have a rune to my house/cy). Those two considerations are game changing, hence the high demand for them. Even if we consider the plat store as a vet + end game store, something with that kind of impact doesn't belong. If you look at my post, I'm not arguing that they should be cheaper, far from it, just that they should be separate from a store that should not have those types of items.

I will reiterate what others have mentioned. The goal isn't to make the chosen playstyle significantly less lucrative. It's to give you your own set of rewards, which there's an overwhelming demand for anyway, and to balance it out so that any one playstyle doesn't exclusively control the central/generic rewards market (plat).

And apologies for not giving this discussion the attention it deserves. Trying to get my furnace fixed over xmas has been a challenge and I'm mostly without a computer in the meantime. I'm freezing my ass off to type even this one message.

Fooka, im sorry but i completely disagree with this statement. Every option that has been brought forward is to make plat "easier" to obtain.

What has been brought forward to make plat appealing to farm?

If you remove the main reason from why people farm it, the farming with come to a halt.

What are the options to replace it with?

So far in this thread i have seen nothing but how to make plat more available...

I honestly have no idea what could replace it that would have a similar "need" that wouldnt be seen as putting something behind a percieved wall.

AMIBS have proven there is next to no market for just plain deco items. Especially considering the effort to farm Dubloons makes Plat easy to come by

What are the options? Bring back the original Plat store ideas that have never happened, Teleporation tiles, etc?

I think the solutions would be different, depending on what is decided upon in terms of items like runebooks and ethies.

I think its been well stated already, and I agree, that items like rune books and ethies should never have been locked behind a specific activity in the first place. In fact nothing with any major in game impact should be. That includes the above mentioned teleport tiles, and other things like that.

Just like amibs, I think the answer that Chris himself proposed was a good one. Have a reward store unique to the champ system, to reward those that want to go ahead and participate in it. That will allow the peeps that want to champ to have a unique set of rewards that they can keep, sell, whatever.

So then what do you do with plat? And where do items like ethies and runebooks go?

I think what makes the most sense is to consolidate all of these types of items into the plat store, so that plat is still required to purchase them, and then make plat something that can be farmed viably with any template. Increase drop rate drastically via mobs, add plat in the bod reward table, drastically increase plat drops from amibs and other instances, drastically increase plat drops from tmaps, etc. Basically make it available to people regardless of what activity they like to do in game. Its the only way to provide that reward to players of all types. Personally I still like the idea of increasing plat payout according to account age too.

Unless you make these rewards available to any and all players, regardless of how they like to play UO, you are making a mistake and the shard population pays for it.

Why is anything in this game tied to anything. I should be able to farm whatever i want in this game however i want. With that Explanation NCCML.

I want Smith Rewards, i should be able to kill monsters for them.

I want Tailor Rewards, I should be able to Fish for them

I want Copper Rewards, oh wait, its already available to everyone


My point here is, Plat is available to Everyone, through whatever means they find fun. Gold can be produced in every manor imaginable in this game, You simply trade that gold for Plat.

thats the whole reason there is a Huge world in this MMO. Something for everyone. You shouldnt be 100% self sufficient in this game. it was never inteded that way on OSI, or here. Player markets are extremely needes on small shards like this.

Nothing is Hidden behind some wall. Noone is blocking anyone from buying plat.

That all being said, im all for improvments, but so far in my life on this shard, ive only seen things broken and Half done. everything has been done half assed. The AMIBS 18 months later still arent done on somehting that was originally supposed to take a few weeks.

do we really want them screwing with another system that will never get finished? Unless they really want this server to die, whish in this state of neglect, its happening...

IM done guys, im sorry if it seems like im triggered, i want to be involved in this conversation, and im not trying to be nasty or negative about any of it. its just another players POV thats all.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!

Well you are completely ignoring the fact that the only REAL source for plat in any measurable amount is the champ system. Aside from that, its not even remotely worthwhile. So, for example, you are taking the fact that a mongbat can drop a plat, once in 5 years, and saying "SEE! You CAN farm mobs for plat!" Its just a ridiculous stance to take.

And you don't need any further explanation of this, anyone with any ability to think this through can see this.

Same as saying that Smith rewards should be available to all classes. Or any of your other examples.

We are talking about game altering items that are not class or activity specific when we reference rune books and ethies. And the idea that champing would have its own set of activity specific rewards has been covered.

What you are defending is basically the idea that these items that ultimately help or hinder the very basic idea of mobility in this game, being locked in any practical sense behind one specific activity is great for the players here. It isn't.

Hate to necro this but seems like a bunch of whiners that haven't taken the time to make tamers to do this content. Easy fix to allow newer players to have a better chance at plat is to use the luck property that is part of RunUO and perhaps allow a timer that decrements with account age until they are like the rest of us. That is an easy code change and accomplishes the end effect of newer players getting some plat without having to be at a champ or harrower. Just saying.