Fighting Gold Inflation

I think rent/tax on houses would go quite a ways in helping with more than one "issue". It would be a constant drain on the gold economy, and it would probably remove more than a few empty houses in the wilderness.

It's not hard logging on once every two weeks or whatever to refresh your 15 houses, but if all those houses slowly ate away at your bank account, things might be different. There has been talk on the forums about only allowing one house per account etc, to avoid the house farming, but there is a lot of resistance to that, and while I agree I can also see why you wouldn't want to limit it like that. However, if there was a tax, it would very possibly still bring down the amount of unused houses in the world.

Now, how much tax/rent should it cost? I don't really know. But someone with some insight into the economy could probably come up with a good price. Only idea I had was that it could be relative to guard zone proximity and house size. So you pay more if you live in a large house close to town. Sounds like the real world to me.

I'm fairly sure they planned for something like this in their original ideas for UO back in the day. Anyway, just another idea for a gold sink!

As an owner of..ehhh..6? homes on the shard, I'm in full support of a property tax.

10gp per month, per square tile?

That's around 10k a month, just to keep a castle/fort paid in full. Perhaps housing not current on property taxes have a doubled decay rate?

Everything I own in uo is in the bottom floor of a small tower.

It isn't about the value of the items for me. It is about efficiency. Honestly, I don't want a house. I'd much rahter not have one, but I need one to have a guild stone. I also need one to keep nonstackable supplies like leather suits and MD wands. They aren't valuable at all, but making one suit at a time, finding wands, etc every time I die would be a complete waste of time. Suits aren't "more stuff" than an equivalent amount of leather, but they are more items. A weight limit? Really? If I had to spend a half hour resupplying myself every time I died, when would I have time to play the game? I guess you'd also have to get rid of commodity deeds and checks and change the way house deeds work, right? Otherwise these are just work-arounds.

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Back to the main topic of this thread. Sorry to be obtuse, but what are the specific problems that people are worried about inflation causing? It isn't at all obvious to me. The op said the problem is "too much gold," but that isn't a problem in and of itself, so lets put it out there. Be specific.

Most of the answers I hear go something like "new players will not be able to afford x." I would like to point out that if there is more gold on the shard, it becomes more profitable to supply the holders of said gold with the goods and services they desire. Basic supplies become cheaper, relatively, for everyone. Rares are going to be "unaffordable" regardless of inflation levels because they are rares. If there is two of something, then only two people can have one. There is one specific issue that I can understand concern with: inadequate incentive to visit dungeons relative to the alternatives. Of course, people will disagree on what is and is not a problem before we even get to what the solutions are, just like in the real economy, but I'm still interested to hear your responses.

silly thread, we don't need more gold sinks, more content is fun, but things just to draw gold out of the economy for the very purpose of keeping gold out of the players hands doesn't make a lot of sense.

I would argue that it makes a whole lot of sense in a game design perspective. The designers of UO struggled a lot with this very problem and never got it fixed.
The more people have, the less value it holds. And the easier it is to get more, the less worth it holds yet again. It's really a question about retention and keeping people playing the game.

I know it might sound outlandish in the days of macroing a character from 0 to full 7xGM without ever leaving town, but when something takes time, is hard and forces you to commit it holds more value. Same goes with the economy in the long run.

Having money go away make people want to gather more money = play the game for longer. Which is a good thing if we want a healthy and lasting server to play on. The trick is really to make it a fun experience, and leave the player with a feeling that they are progressing, preferably with them spending all their gold on something even more fun, that ultimately is consumed by the game in the end and still leaving the player with an urge to farm all that crap yet again.

Here is another interesting post to read;
http://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-uos-economy/

There is loads more that I haven't read yet, so there might be some better examples in there, but this is what I stumbled over just now.

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I've thought about this more than I care to admit, but I'm not going to make a 20 page essay on something that is too prohibitively time consuming to get implemented. I'd argue that the algorithm in model one must have been pretty bad and, IMO, it would be the best system if done correctly. Additionally, the difference between the buy and the sell rate could be used to control the money supply. How awesome would it be to be able to walk into town and buy a barbed suit and 15 of each greater pot at fair market prices? How much less shit would we all have in our houses?

I rather like this idea, but only if it was applied after the first 2 houses per account. Just throwing some numbers out there to get an idea on what this might look like:

2 houses per account_____ 0 gold per week
3 houses per account__ 1000 gold per week
4 houses per account__ 5000 gold per week
5 houses per account_10,000 gold per week

6 houses per 3 accounts______ 0 gold per week
9 houses per 3 accounts___ 3000 gold per week
12 houses per 3 accounts_ 15000 gold per week
15 houses per 3 accounts_30,000 gold per week

I see an excessive number of empty houses throughout the game. This would mainly discourage people from throwing down 15 houses, just because they can. It wouldn't discourage new players, and most who currently own 15 houses have the money to pay taxes anyways. Do any of you guys fully utilize 15 houses??? This seems like a reasonable gold sink to me.

One house per account=no taxes.
Anything more=taxed.

That would still allow house hoarding but would limit most players to 3 houses total.

You guys are thinking too small. High gold items - super rares that cant be transferred 10x 10mill removes 100 mill of the 200 mill active on the server.
Charging 30k here and there for housing tax wont dent the economy. Would have to charge that amount 3,334 times to reach 100 mill. I would also assume that most people would continue farming after they reached their weekly quota and this would create additional gold in the market.

I'm "meh" on taxes

Regardless how anyone acquires gold it should be used towards something they enjoy or want otherwise whats the point of earning any of it?

Anyway I guess it looks like maybe a couple more house designs other than that there won't be anything anyway.

I actually thought the prices that Keza proposed were both reasonable (as a semi-retired guy sitting on a few houses and a bunch of gold) and also able to remove gold from the economy. Starting the taxes after one's first house is a good way to allow people to maintain a presence on the shard if they wish, while making the hoarding of 15 houses a more costly endeavor. I'd definitely think twice about my house ownership if it was costing gold each week/month, which is the other point of a tax like this.

Taxes sounds really shitty.
Yet another thing I have to pay attention to to refresh. That's annoying.

If you want gold sinks, just add in some purple shit that people can buy for large amounts of gold.

That's part of the point, to make it more expensive for people to hold properties. So if they're going to hoard 15 properties, they're going to deal some hassle and spend some gold.

It makes it annoying for me to refresh my one house though. Now not only do I have to click the sign, I have to check to make sure there's money in the tank.

Yeah, that's the point.

Well, the proposals above seem to want to start charging for the second, third, fourth and fifth houses on an account, not the first.

woops

Ya, charging for the first house would be too annoying for new players, or those who can only log-in a few times per month.

So in order to solve a problem that doesn't exist, the plan is to add a feature which adds annoyance and hassle as its central "point".
The "point" if there were to be one, should be to fight gold inflation (which is not occurring at any troubling level), not to add annoyance and hassle.