Fighting Gold Inflation

How about just a content expansion with more bod rewards added, more neon hair colors (that can swap every year with rare hues only alternating every few years) and stuff like that. The housing tax is a garbage idea.

I should have said "a" point. Property taxes would accomplish two things, it would both fight gold inflation and ensure people are still using the property they're taking up (or at least paying for the spot). The purpose is to suck gold from the economy and disincentivize hoarding of houses.

The annoyance and hassle is central to accomplishing both these purposes, but it's not the end goal. If you think neither of these are problems, you likely won't care for the idea. If you agree house hoarding or gold inflation is an issue, then taxation addresses both these concerns. I'm not sure either are really problems at the moment.

House hoarding has been an issue since day one. Those players who got in on the ground floor of UOR farmed until their fingers were blue so they could secure all the castle/fort plots. I remember hearing discussions a year or so ago about certain people holding onto 5+ forts just so they could sell em a few years down the road... Yup that sounds like a server health problem to me.
Now gold inflation will become an issue soon. Example #1 is the 2nd anni mask's STARTING bid of 13mil, which was easily reached within minutes of the original post. This type of sale price is not even rare these days. Tell me that's not a problem either...

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So placing and holding extra houses with the intent of flipping it for a profit is the problem?
http://uorforum.com/threads/despise-valley-house.9692/

But seriously, considering you can still place large towers in good locations all over the map, I am having trouble believing that house hoarding is an issue here. Especially "since day 1" since there was a housing area rollout on this server.

I still don't get the issue with keeps and forts, I would get it if they Never went up for sale, but they do, if every person on the server had a fort they wouldn't be special. I see zero issue with a fort holding a 2m+ premium, just like desired real-estate holds high values in RL.

Again i don't really understand whats wrong with a super rare being extremely valued, I myself love the system of rares and working to collect them, again if everyone could afford one of these they wouldn't be special (honestly i think the color is awful )

In this game time = wealth, and items like AMIBs for example can easily spread that wealth into the hands of new players(you can macro a gm fisher in a few days), if its new players we are concerning ourselves with then we should be thinking of more items that a new player could farm that the super wealthy would want to purchase from them.

side note this is just my opinion, not knocking yours

If you really want a gold sink, put in a plat vendor that sells plat for 8-10 k a pop and people like me would be collecting it by a few coins at a time. This is something I'd really use and would find beneficial

Wall of text warning etc.

Okay, cool! That flared up into an interesting discussion.

Now I know many of these things won’t be to peoples liking, because we are all very set in our ways in how this 18 year old game should work.

It does not mean it is the best way however. Most MMO games and UO servers run into this problem with the inflation and economy eventually. You could see it take a different from in World of Warcraft just the other year, with their stupidly high numbers inflation. All caused by a very flawed system of progression.

Now one would think adding rares that cost millions of gold would solve the problem, but it really just makes it worse in the end, unless you ”soulbind” it, which causes a whole other set of problems, because ”insured” or ”soulbound” items does not belong in this game, we can all see what happened with that on the original servers.

But yes, adding very expensive things like this actually just makes it worse, because after a while the 10 million price will be a baseline, just as pointed out by Player X above. The starting price would just keep growing at the same rate as the inflation, because that's how it works. And that only serves to devalue the gold even more. Causing yet another need to add some random rare, but lets price it at 20 million this time! (See a problem emerging here?)

This can all be offset however, if the drains are fairly balanced with the rate at which gold enters the economy. If gold is rare enough to keep prices from just growing endlessly, it won’t be a problem in the long term, which is the point of all this.


I do obviously also see the rampart house hoarding as a problem, but only because it’s something that's basically free once you pay for the deed. If you have a ton of gold, I don’t see why you shouldn't be able to buy up all the plots and sell them off to other players, I like this aspect. But when you can hold on to all the plots forever without it costing you more than a few logins to refresh, there is yet again a long term problem here.

Now, personally I would prefer houses to be taxed from the start, similar to Blaises idea, but I guess it could be too much of a change starting out.

Also, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to keep the house tax small, I would even prefer it to work as the vendors do, it draws some smallish amount daily, that ends up at a balanced price at the end of the month. Because as many of you have pointed out, it’s not much fun seeing all your gold disappear into a black hole all at once for seemingly no reason at all.

That's why you slowly draw it out over a set period of time, so it feels like less of a big deal. I would again argue that many smaller drains is better than a huge one, as it feels better for us. I mean I rather spend a few dollars in the store here and there over a period of time compared to spending all of it at once, because it feels way worse.

I do see a need for both though.


As the first article I linked earlier suggested, I think some kind of auction would also serve the game quite well. It should of course be held by staff or an NPC so the gold gets drawn out of the economy in the end.

It could be held once a month or once a week, it’s all a question of balance I think. Now this auction could be about special rares or whatever, where players could bid against each other to get that rare and desirably hued fish steak.

I guess you could somehow include players into this system as well, where you could put up X item for auction and the game taking a % of your asked price.

It could then show up in the auction and be sold to other players. This would move some of the forum bidding into the game and make a fun event out of it. I know I would go there to watch even if I was dirt poor, just to see who wins.


These are just ideas and intended to start a discussion, I don't expect much to come of it, but it's worth a try to at least bring it up.
/ramble

That makes perfect sense. But it might be a real bitch to implement code-wise.

Also the bigger the property the bigger the tax, based on relative footprint.

There are only two certanties in life, death and taxes!

Ps Just never bloody ever allow custom houses...

Here ye!! Here ye!!

By order of Lord British, there will now be a taxation for all houses on the main land, this will exclude housing on some islands with out towns, as our Lord does not govern these. Sir Chris will hence be forthcoming with further details.



Problem solved since this is coming from Lord British himself...

Planning for server growth, some sort of this needs to be done. Lot of empty houses these days.

A little off topic, but not really if we are talking about empty homes too. Do homes condemn if the owner doesn't log on here? In other words, can homes be refreshed by friends indefinitely without the owner logging in at all? If so, should it be this way?

Yes, it's currently this way. A friend of the house can maintain the house.

I thought houses condemn after 6 months without owner refreshing

I'm still very new on this server, however I've played UO for over 15 years. I can say for one that when you go to Marble island, and one guy owns every house on the island probably all 15 slots he has, it's a bit ridiculous.

Just charge people 1% of the deed price per week. Everyone's balance with the "man" starts at -2000 gold per week. This means that you can own a 200,000 deed home without paying a single gp. But when you own 5 castles, 3 towers, 2 keeps and 5 villas, it starts to make a dent in your bank account.

The main benefit here is that it disincentives the guy who owns 5 castles, uses 1 of them for himself and refreshes 4 religiously.

I say own 1 house per account at no cost, but only the smallest house gets the free slot.

Just a few of my own thoughts on fighting gold inflation:

- I like the idea of the property tax to a degree. I would make it a set amount per house type.
- Buying platinum from a vendor at a slightly higher market price (8k to 10k as someone suggested).
- Buying extra bank space, payable in gold. I would do it similar to that of World of Warcraft (Example: +10 for 100k, next +10 for more and so on). Limit of say 50 extra items.
- Buying extra secure or lockdown spaces for gold (at a higher exchange rate to platinum).
- Ability to temporarily pause the delay of house decay. Used if you know you are going to be out of game for a period of time or just want to be lazy about refreshing houses.

I’ve done some more thinking on the subject.

I thought I would try and break down the real problem in a very simple and understandable way as far as I understand it myself.

The main problem in our case as I said before, is that when you get too much gold it loses it’s value. Therefore the reason for it's value is mainly it’s ”rarity”, this is easy to understand. So what in the world creates pure gold coins?

Right me if I’m wrong as I don’t claim to know about every faucet and drain in the game.

- Monsters

- Treasure chests

- NPC vendors in exchange for items that hold value

- BOD rewards throw out some amount of coin

Now everything above trades you gold in exchange for something else to some degree, fighting monsters cost you durability on your gear/reagents/bandages, dungeon chests cost you lockpicks/recall regs and so on. All small drains on their own.

Now what in the world pulls gold out of the economy?

- NPC vendors (selling you reagents and what not)

- Player Vendors (rent)

- Gear and item decay/breakage

- BOD’s?

BOD’s only count if they take out more gold value in the form of items you craft compared to how much item value they bring back in, in the form of decoration, hammers etc.

I’m sure there are more I can’t think of at the top of my head right now, but this is enough to serve as an example.



This here is basically where the problem is. If you have too many things that generate too much gold, and too few things that take gold/items of value out of the game you will sooner or later have an inflation problem.

This is why I suggested housing tax as a way of solving two problems, it potentially removes the clutter of unused houses in the world (bonus), but mainly it adds another drain on the gold economy. And that’s really only working if all houses have a tax to them, even the smallest ones.

I don’t think the tax should be too high, it should in fact be quite low so it doesn’t cause stress on the player and makes them feel they have to grind gold day and night to afford their house. This is all about the bigger picture, if you have a total amount of X in rent per week across all houses placed in the world, you have an effective drain of X gold per week from the economy.

Example:
There are 181 active house deeds according to http://www.uorenaissance.com/worldeconomy , if this just means deeds or houses placed I have no idea, but it serves as an example. Say you average the rent to 2000 per week over these houses. That would equal a drain worth 362000 gold a week, which is about 1,5 million a month.

As I have no insight into which drain the most gold vanishes, or how much goes away per week, I can’t say if this is a lot or if it’s very little. But I’m fairly sure this wouldn't hurt. It all comes down to balance yet again though, making sure your drains and faucets are balanced to not cause imbalance in either direction.

Now the other solution would be to either increase how much the existing drains drain out, or decrease how much gold is generated in the form of what vendors pay for your stuff, how much gold monsters drop etc.

I’m sure Chris can look into this fairly easily, because I’m assuming he has charts for these things.

I have more thoughts about this, but this is already a wall of text so I’ll spread it out over other posts if these is any need for it.

*EDIT
In fact, after looking at the Item Graph for total gold, bank checks and house deeds just during the month of may, the amount of gold value there increased by about 60 million gold just in one month. This makes the 1,5 million drain quite on the low end I'd say.
This is a real problem because if you look at previous months it just shows you the gold added to the economy each month is increasing as we go. (It's actually even worse as it doesn't account for the value of resources and items)

It would be very interesting to look at a graph of how much gold that leaves the economy each month.

I really should do my homework! The world has clearly a whole lot more than 181 active houses placed. Just counting by hand gave me 80+ on Dagger Island alone. So the drain would be quite a bit larger, it might even put a dent in the 60 million gold added!

Okay, so after doing some mad haxing on the world map I came to the conclusion that there could be about 1887 houses in the world, based on how many house icons the map has. This would mean a 2000 gold tax averaged over all the houses currently in the world equals 3756000 gold drained a week and 15024000 gold every month. That means even with a low tax like this the economy would see an addition of about 45 million gold a month. Still a big problem!

I hope that clarifies it somewhat for you people out there that don't think there is a problem with inflation here.

@Volkov Chris posted the number of houses placed in the world a few posts ago:

Code:

Type, Value, Count
patio house - 9,779,200 - 64
fortress - 144,014,400 - 73
keep - 3,991,200 - 6
large house - 8,959,000 - 62
large keep - 103,740,000 - 130
log cabin - 8,979,000 - 82
castle - 12,273,600 - 12
marble shop - 7,686,000 - 122
villa - 22,795,500 - 167
sandstone patio    - 7,813,100 - 79
small house - 11,388,000 - 260
small tower - 22,656,000 -256
stone shop - 4,410,000 - 70
tower - 114,364,800 - 264
two story house    9,427,600 - 49
marble patio - 8,448,000 - 44

I think Chris addressed what the best indicator of a problem with inflation is. Sure inflation exists to some extent, but looking at the purchases I had to make when starting out here a little less then a year ago, and comparing them to a new player making those purchases now, I see like zero differences in the cost of these purchases. If inflation is a problem, its in extremely rare masks and sandals. Regs, magic weapons, magic armor, magic instruments, starter houses ->towers, all the same prices OR cheaper then they were last year.