Some More Suggestion

Several people where discussing (on irc) ways to spend gold and things we would like to have.
Thought I'd toss some of these ideas out.

Carpentry bod rewards and possible reward items. ( furniture seen in game) Such as
the vanitys and dressers. Players could than purchase these items.

Crafters being able to craft (seasonally) holiday items. Such as Door wreaths, xmas trees.
Again players could buy from other players.

A special vendor (not player owned) where super rares could be purchased for super prices. LOL
Lot of these rares could be things such as potted flowers and trees. The Whispering Rose, etc.
Perhaps these items on this vendor would auto refresh, but twice a month. This would give a space between players being able to buy.

I feel all these ideas would be a plus for the shard and encourage ways for players to spend gold. Not only purchasing from other players, but ways to dump gold.

Thanks all

I like it.

I think the Holiday tree for X-mas would have to be made from a special tree cut by a GM LJ, maybe % chance to come away with a douglas fir or holly for the wreaths. Limited time of course. A lil something to give those guys who sweated out the LJ grind to make a semi rare sale aside from oak.

The carpenter could then use the mats for the holiday items.

Well there are a couple good thoughts for sure, but like a vendor for rares? That doesnt sound fun at all and kinda defeats the purpose. People would camp it once it has items, buy it all instantly, and then put it on their vendor and sell it for more, no skill involved or anything. Although i do admit it would be a gold sink. But then people would just be encouraged to farm even more gold, which means less pvp.

I think gold sinks should not encourage to farm more, but actually just take the existing gold out.

You do have good points. Camping out to horde/sale the rares, is one thing I think would be a strong possibility. Which I hadn't considered.
Thanks all for the input.

:}

Ok, wandering super-rare vendors that spawn in completely random and unpopular areas selling one or two insane rares at insane prices.
Once the item is purchased, the NPC runs off never to be seen again.

This way, 'finding' the rares will still be a challenge requiring travel to all the corners of the lands. If players try to attack the NPC, it teleports away and turns into a champion spawn.

What I have always wanted was walking patrols on the roadways with good loot/protection for new players. Like a caravan of npc merchants with guards.

I do think the guards at guard towers should protect the innocent from monsters in the area. Wandering packs of NPC paladins would be cool too that auto-aggro Murderers. Don't make them super-beast but enough for a fun little fight the red can have if they stumble upon them. Meager loot to make it worthwhile to kill tem, and decent enough stats to make it worthwhile to heal them for your defense.

Yeah, when I first started playing the game I would follow the roads. I would stop at guard post and look around, thinking it would be cool for monsters to attack. I actually did lure some of the emerald elementals to a guard post and that guard beat the gold right out of it! :lol:

As long as the items can be created with a 30 skill and not require a lot of mats. Shouldn't have holiday items going for so much $$$.

This isn't going to be a popular opinion, but I'm going to put it out there anyway.

First, I believe that official Ultima created so many new things like neons/bonded pets/ethereals/special rares/whatever to draw new business, not to enhance the game for the people who were already playing it. That's how businesses operate; once they have you, they hardly pay attention to you anymore. Everything is geared towards getting new customers. Case in point - even early on they re-released expensive rares that veterans had worked their butts off for (Black Dye Tub anyone?) and made cheap trinkets out of them. I'm not saying that Renaissance shouldn't be enhanced in any way; I'm just saying we should always think about the real motivation behind the things they did.

Second, if the gold sink was a this-for-that rare/enhancement system it WOULD get rid of a lot of gold but it would be elitist and cause more division and dissent in a game where enough of that already exists. It would likely only be accessible to people with a vast surplus of free time, fantabulous vendor-selling or resource-gathering macros, etc, and those people are already the ones who have everything that everyone else wants. This server wasn't even live two days before people were asking for a wipe "to make things fair". You don't want to create any more jealousy and haterade than is necessary. Not only that, but perk/item gold sinks do absolutely nothing to curb the player's ability to make more gold. Someone who (through whatever means) can generate 5 million gold a week will keep bringing in 5 mil/week, even after they've bought every special item or perk you're offering.

Here are a few suggestions I'd like to offer - if you insist on creating a gold sink perk, consider these criteria:
It has to be desirable enough that someone would want it at all.
It should be vastly overpriced. Because perk/item gold sinks will only work on those with the most disposable gold anyway.
It should be something that is not extremely visible/readily apparent. An example might be more bank space/lockdowns/secures.

But I think the most effective- and therefore probably least popular - gold sink system would be one that cleverly used maintenance/upkeep fees, taxes, and so on. It would create no jealousy and apply to everyone in proportion to their wealth/possessions/prestige/whatever. Let's make it clear than no system can (or should) ever stop players from becoming rich and there will always be haves and have-nots, but you might be able to keep endless gold influx from being a rushing avalanche of a problem.

I actually I agree with you. I think you made good points.

In regards to the gold sink concept i want to add another idea to the pool which might or might not be unpopular...

First of all, one thing i did not like is that we can all basically have ten houses. But be that as it may, i guess the majority likes it, I believe one thing that would be a gold sink is to not let them decay due to inactivity anymore but instead have people pay like a property tax which is dependant of course on the size of the property.

A player can go to vacation for ten weeks if he wants to and as long as he got sufficient gold in his bank. On the other hand, if you want to have ten houses, make sure you can afford paying the upkeep etc.

Or maybe have one primary house that follows current rules and have additional houses cost upkeep. This way u dont piss people off that dont wanna farm constantly, one house in the end should quite suffice to the casual player.

Thanks and I agree with you also. Good post! Property tax seems like an easy and common sense one to implement. I hadn't thought out details about it but I like the plan where a first house is tax free and each subsequent one on an account starts having an upkeep cost based on the size of the house. I also think that the prices should increase as the total number of houses increase, with a potential fifth and final account house having the highest price scale.

This thread started out with one very good idea and rapidly degenerated.

Carpentry BODS--great idea. We need better furniture and using the BOD system is a good way to introduce it. Right now most everyone ends up with a single unsightly wall of chests because there aren't any viable alternatives. The armoirs looks good, but they don't have much space when opened. Backpacks and pouches are functional but ugly. I'd love to see something like these:




Specialty vendor--craptacular idea. Rare items ought to involve risk and effort.

Gold sinks--utterly irrelevant. Gold sinks are used to combat runaway inflation; we don't have that. Inflation on OSI was the result of 3 things: duping, afk macroing and selling gold for RL dollars; we have none of those. Want proof? There's already one gold sink up and running here: taxidermy. How many mounted heads do you see?

Long refreshes on housing--lousy idea. Until we have hundreds of people online all the time most housing is just going to be ghost towns. The last thing we need is to encourage people to take weeks off. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing it work the opposite way--shorten the max refresh from 14 to 7 days.

Lastly, this notion of UO socialism needs to be killed and a stake driven through it's heart. There is absolutely no place for "haves" and "have nots" in UO (much like the real world). If you don't "have", then get off your ass and stop being a "have not". There's no need to create some arbitrary tax just to avoid creating jealousy and there's no reason why everyone ought to have proportional wealth. While I agree that this game rewards those who put in the most time, that's the way it ought to be; no reason to discourage people from playing. Anyone advocating these foolish ideas is basically saying "I don't want to bother with creating a solid character to do some farming and make some gold, so I don't want anyone else to be able to either".

Wow! so many truly good ideas.

I'd like to add some additional comments. First, although I do love houses, I feel the number of them one
person owns should be less than 10, as is now the case. Right now it is not an issue, plenty of land to place compared to population of the shard. But in times to come, the population of shard will increase and at that
time, with us now having less houses; would leave more opportunities for new players to place a house.

Property tax. I think your largest home should be the one taxed, if powers that be put in the tax, and the
tax based on size of home. This way players wouldn't place a small as their first house to get away from paying a higher tax on the largest.

Rares. I like the idea of a npc vendor carrying rares, and it showing up in unusual/ random places. Lets
face it, people love rares to decorate houses. I can still see this as a gold sink. and unlike EA, I can never see
our staff giving out vet rewards, than few years later putting those same reward items on sale for real life gold, making the items fairly valueless which players dedicated a large portion of time on shard to earn.

One of my personal favorites is being able to change the building material of your home, brick to sandstone, etc. for a very large amount of cash. I see this as a fun gold sink.

I do like the idea of carpentry having bod rewards. But if this is too difficult to script in, perhaps LJ could
get a deed for special furniture, randomly from hack down trees. lol

I also agree, that UO gold wise is unbalanced. Always has been. Players who have played awhile, will naturally have far more gold than a player who just started. But the new player has the opportunity to earn fortunes. If everything comes too easy, people get bored, earning gold, rising skills, are all goals for players,
as well as making new friends and having tons of fun.

And thank you all for posting on this thread. So, so many good ideas

A pleasure Westra.

Carpentry BoDs or at least additions to the Carpentry list of items to be crafted, is definitely a good idea. Decoration is a huge factor in UO and expanding that without pushing into a bunch of neon madness, would be fantastic. Due to the lack of quality factors on Carpentry items, I don't think it's really fitting for BoD, but if they can work it, right on. Random chance of special item deed on LJ would be cool IF that character had Carpentry, maybe. Or perhaps Carpenters could get BoDs for items crafted from Oak Boards (hence the difficulty factor) then they don't have to do LJ and can get a line of business going with the warriors.

Property tax I'm kind of split on. I would much prefer a 1 house per account limit than a property tax. Either/or, I would still be fine with, but I agree it's a non-issue at this current stage of shard life.

Also, the point I was making about wandering random vendors is what puts the risk factor/difficulty in place. If they spawned somewhere at least somewhat dangerous, where people don't often wander, it would mitigate farming of the items. Also the idea is not to have them constantly and all over, but more like ONE spawns every month or two at most and a new one won't spawn until the last one has sold it's wares and left the lands. Perhaps to make it even more challenging, put in a percentage risk for it being a trap, wherein on purchase, your party is waylaid by the travelling salesman's brigand party.

As for balance in finance, this is a time=money game. If you have the time, you can be more wealthy than most others because you can. There should be nothing in place that provides financial balance for those who can play all day and those who can't.

These are just thoughts, so there's no right or wrong. Totally loving the flow of ideas in this thread.

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Upgrayedd - you simply misunderstood a lot of what was said, ignored the rest of it, and overreacted with off-the-mark replies.

As far as the BOD carpentry rewards, I'm totally in support of that idea.

As far as gold sinks, I'll probably come close to repeating myself here but try to phrase what I said a little differently. Anything that is a one-time expense is not really an effective gold sink. There are only two possibilities with this system - either the super-rich eventually acquire all rare 'gold sink' items available and then start hoarding untold millions just as they would have if the gold sink system never even existed, or new super-expensive rares are constantly being created and offered to players which would get ridiculous before long and cause all the problems I previously talked about. In order to be effective, a gold sink has to be constantly removing gold from the economy. And this has nothing to do with creating any false balance between rich players and poor ones; no one ever said that was a goal. In fact, I said that economic inequality was an unavoidable reality no matter what you do. It's about combatting the inflation problem inherent in a UO economy which, if you don't understand it, maybe someone else can explain to you in detail. In view of those facts this is an irrelevant point but Blaise - there is nowhere and nothing in this Ultima world that a tamer with a nightmare and a couple of dragons has to fear, so putting things in 'dangerous' spots is just even more of an elitist idea than any already mentioned.

I think that housing upgrade taxes are a good idea. Not as a one-time fee (for reasons already mentioned) but as an even higher priced tier that players would probably take advantage of. Any system such as property tax would have to apply to all houses except the first and not just houses over a certain size, because players would simply place more small houses just to avoid taxes.

I meant rather somewhere with some spawn that a crafter couldn't just walk into, not 1 to 20 balrons and other things that would require a tamer. I understand danger is relative (I don't have a tamer to speak of) but the idea wasn't meant to be like that. Just something obscure that only spawns very seldom. If it were to include some boss spawn that would make it even more fun when discovered.

The size of the gameworld is rather vast if you consider where people DON'T go. Perhaps manually spawned group of mobs in the middle of wilderness that are protecting the vendor. Once the spawn is discovered by a player, a group of players would be needed to get access to the vendor.

I love Gideons suggestion. Its well thought out.