I don't agree with (1) though. We've seen here, and on other shards, that lumber and ingots never meet vendor price. Don't vets already spend gold on the new players? That's why, in my estimation, ingots and boards and such, never meet vendor prices. As for the BOD rewards including gold... for me at least, that gold goes to new players selling ingots, so the cycle can repeat itself. But, the gold from the BOD reward is generally a lot less than what I spent on the ingots. So there's a gold sink right there. I'm basically buying CBDs, colored anvils, and fortification power, from NPCs. And along the way, there's some stimulus effect on the economy. As for the quest rewards... there's nothing wrong, I don't think, with offering gold on the monsters in the quest. All you want is the player to earn less gold doing the quest than they'd earn through their normal activities in-game. If I can earn 50k an hour doing whatever I normally do, but I only earn 30k an hour from the title quests, that's a gold sink. That's interesting - I haven't thought about it like that before, but you're right.
While I agree with pretty much everything you and Gid just stated here -- I have to take issue with this. I've made the vast majority of my money on ingots here; and I've never sold them under 8gp per -- and a .5 gp per color increase for color ingots. I've never had any issues moving ingots at that price. That stated; I don't disagree with anything stated before. More gold sinks are always a good thing; but the balance between creating silo'd markets between vets and new players is always going to be a concern and I just don't have a good answer for that.
Gideon, we are like minded souls. Brothers from another mother! I couldn't agree more. Lumber and Ingots generated by newer players rarely last for more than a few seconds because newer players aren't botting them. Look at everyone who routinely has ingots in stock. A new player might have 5k iron ingots to offer after a weekend's worth of work and you know how long that lasts in the hands of a bod maker. I make most of my money on bods and I would hate to see the gold aspect dry up, yet I feel this is correct. If we did implement a purchased quest system, I would request that it does not run in an instance. This would allow of player interaction. I am in favor of exploring gold sink options as well as quests or other incentives to drive traffic to dungeon spots. Just about all of us have a 'secret' low traffic spot that we like to farm. I won't call them out now, because part of the fun is finding them. IMHO, the purest definition of Trammel is UO with out interacting with other players. Courtyards, Blessed Runebooks, Instances, Bods behind locked doors.. I take advantage of these things and I am not saying they shouldn't exist. I just want to reward people for playing bravely, out in the open!
Well, I suppose you mean it's +80k overall, since the initial 100k was already in the economy. Here's my argument against that. Let's eliminate the middle man. I mine 12,500 ingots, feed them into BODs, and get back 80k gold. That is indeed 80k of additional gold in the economy. But if I instead just sold the ingots and got 100k in gold for them, that's 100k that would be in the economy, because someone killed a bunch of liches and blood elementals to create that 100k of gold pieces. I think when most people talk about inflation, they talk about inflation of the value of gold. I tend to look at it as wealth overall. To me, it's the overall wealth on the shard (in the form of gold, ingots, rares, 7xGM characters, etc.) that makes things daunting for new players. The best way, IMO, to further reward player interaction, might be to beef up the (already stellar) prizes for doing champ spawns. Those are the instances here which seem to draw the most player interaction. And as for gold or resource sinks, if there must be some, I think most of the ideas in this thread are great.
Most who have played on Voldeshard would see this statement as almost ridiculous. THAT server has "FAR too many empty houses cluttering up the world". When making the ZIP code map, I had to look over the entire map on the main site, and I can assure you that we have an unbelieveable amount of available housing space. People like me, who have 14 houses, aren't doing anything towards filling up the housing space. And before you say it, yes most of those houses have uses and are necessary. I only have a couple of "novelty" properties.
I have played on another shard or two that have had a pay-per-quest type system and a poker/gambling type system. I found the pay-per-quest system fun but there must be a check in place where the players taking part will not be rewarded to where it will take away from the regular overworld PvM environment. I am sure if Telamon looks at that idea or if he already has looked at this idea this has already crossed his mind. Then obviously the poker/gambling system is quite interesting as well but the same idea there to where that this system won't overrule the other set ways of playing the game to make gold. Right now we already have a battle chess system which is quite interesting and could be looked at although most people might not find that as exciting as the other propositions as a gold sink. Also right now we have CTFs and other events that are relative low risk to play since you don't lose items and you only use up some resources, Telamon could just make those pay-per play events. I assume and I think rightly so, if Telamon made it so people had to pay for them, those that play them could afford to play and still would pay to play. As always the rewards, if any, I think always need to most attention because we don't want people just to log in for the special events and then basically log off, which as many of you know, has happened on other shard(s). I am not in favor of another rares shop because I don't see what that will accomplish other than being a relatively short term solution to the gold sink issue. This issue I think is always a problem on most free-shards because the size of population in relation to the amount of available resources, as mentioned before, are not very proportionate. Since resources are relatively easier to come by (gold, land, reagents, lumber, etc) than, like the one guy mentioned previously, on Chessy/shard of choice in '99. I am sure Telamon and his staff have been monitoring this issue and probably have been brainstorming about more solid, quality gold sinks to put in place on the shard.
Your scenario had two people, as did mine (Person A, Person B). And to be fair to me, I am not an economist or economics major, so I don't have an economics perspective :/ What would be the difference between this, and just a plain old platinum dealer who sells you platinum for gold? (this is not a rhetorical question - I honestly don't see a difference) Why is this a bad thing? Because it's proportionally harder for a new player here in 2016 to buy a castle than it was in 2013? I agree, that sucks for the new guy... but the fact is, people hoard their wealth for that specific reason, and gold sinks are generally only going to make a small dent in that. UOSA is on its 6th (I think) year right now. They've had massive inflation due to AFK scroll selling, which will not be a problem here, and still new players join there in the last couple of years and turn into "vets". So I'm not sure this is is even worth worrying about, let alone solvable.
It doesn't suck. It's probably the most successful freeshard in UO history, at least adjusted for age. (It's much easier to get 800 people to play on In Por Ylem in 2004 then it is on UOSA in 2008, and it's much easier to get 800 people to play on UOSA in 2008 than it is for UOR in 2012). There is so much here that is modeled after that shard, I really find it disappointing when people trash talk it. And as for steps taken to avoid that outcome, it's already been done with the checks against AFK selling to NPCs. That alone was responsible for probably close to 500 million gold pieces of inflation over there, and I dare say pay-for-play PVP tournaments and taxes on re-deeding houses is not going to ever come close to having that impact. Back to the topic at hand... One more question: I am unable to discern why adding 80k in gold to the server is worse than adding 10,000 ingots via mining. To me, there's no difference, but it seems like most people who discuss inflation are far more troubled by the additional gold, and the cost of items in gold pieces.
Hammer, meet nail. To me, thats the underlying point; the valuation in actual gold worth, at the end of the day, becomes pretty meaningless on a shard like this. As mentioned, UOSA has its inflation problems; but its no more insurmountable than it is here. I carved a good living out for myself in less than a month, and was thriving when I moved here -- and truth be told, most things feel pretty similar cost-wise GP for GP here as they did there. Minor adjustments in certain aspects, and none of the ultra-high-demand exclusivity that was found there -- yet. And the reality is, that the inflation of the artificially induced economy from there is an invariable end-game for the server. This isn't a bad thing though, because ultimately its about the experience in achieving that. Gold prices be damned, the economy will always billow over time and items will continue to amass. By these same merits, as Dalavar stated, resources of any sort in the game (be they craftables, items, rares, what have you) are no different from an economic standpoint as gold, because the same barriers of entry exist after the first year or 2 of existence. They, in fact, are more pronounced in discrepancy when it comes to items, because they are visible and they carry the aforementioned exclusivity for a large portion of what is desired by people. It doesn't make any of it insurmountable for a new player, but the reality of the UO world is that it will always get substantially more difficult to break the barrier of entry on a shard the longer it lives. To me, the best gold sinks possible will be the pay-for-pvp tourneys, and Clean Up Brit campaign that will eventually come -- and how aggressive that campaign will be. The more that people are encouraged to stop stockpiling so much, the better for the life of the server, both scale-wise, and economically, that it becomes in the long run.
Great points by all! I really like where this is headed. I would love to this shard to go in to 6+ years. I can only imagine how fat my stacks will be by then. Sure the AFK gathering system does help, but there are plenty of people like myself and Red Rover who can/do run 2-3 bots all day at work, or at least 2 at home while my third account 'plays'. I don't think there is anything more that can be done to stop recall mining, nor do I think there should be. If we change the gold rewards on Bods it definitely changes the alchemy of iron in to gold. It could even tank the price of ingots! In Gideon's example a player spent 100k on Ingots and got back 80k + replacement bods + reward items. Well what if that player was me, and instead of buying the ingots for 100k, I mined them. 100k gold = 12.5k iron ingots. I bet thats less than 2k recalls, or 18k gold. (not including the random color ingots I also get during the cycle) Now, we are talking about a person turning 18k spent at a vendor (gold sink) in to 80k + items from an Npc (gold creation). This doesn't even use up a resource, because the bod is replaced!! (ps. I am not including time in this equations because presumably you are playing the game and want to be) Not only am I able to 4x my money once I hit critical mass on bod collection and a gm smith.. but I am wanting to flip bods to increase my valorite chances! Yes, it is not fully auto like some servers, but imho it doesn't have to be. I am only really limited by time.
I want to provide some feedback on some of the ideas I read here. Back in the OSI days, I had some heated debates about gold sinks in the Stratics forums as I saw the inflation of gold as one of the major failure points in OSI shards. I also keep looking at the total gold graph for this shard and it continues to worry me. Just a few days ago I was trying to place a lager property and examined the map very long and very closely. I am pretty sure there are a lot more large properties (Tower and up) than actual person playing on this shard. This is where I agree with Pirul in the first idea for gold sinking : - Tax secondary properties (one house / account is free, each additional is 1% of deed price on the first of every month) Regarding the rares shop, I don't like this idea much. Selling something trade able for high amounts of gold sucks. It will never sell for more than you paid for it so in most cases you'll have to sell it for less. Unless the items you can buy changes every month which means we'd be creating tons of new rares - don't like that either. Instead, if you want to sell something to players for lots of gold, make it account modifications. Sell a 6th character slot for an account for 1 mil. Sell character transfer tokens to be able to move chars from one account to another for 500k. This could introduce a whole new business model. Paying someone for the creation of a char. Char renames for 50k is a very good start. I'm seriously considering that for one of my chars. Best thing about this is, the money is gone with a benefit to the buyer but no remaining in game value. More ideas for things to sell for large amounts of gold: Ship Hold weight restriction removal (valid for a single ship) Jewelery bless deed (fill those jewelery slots for decoration) Standard newbie items (Sell only items you can get by creating a newbie char)
Love the idea of increased ship hold storage. I'd pay a fair sum of cash to have painted boats as well!
Jewelry bless deed is a great idea. Increasing the weight of a ship's hold, you really need to be careful with. It would improve the ability of boat mining, so in terms of total gold and resources in the world, it may well increase rather than decrease it
FYI, you can buy those already for 100k and you can also buy char swap coupons for 150k. Although, I was informed last night by Ezekiel that the system for doing this is currently down as the last time it was done it crashed the server.
