Some More Suggestion

I have another improvement to a suggestion regarding the rares vendor. Orifinally i was of course against this, but i think this could be use to introduce items that were done during the clean up britannia times and also other things in demand like: potted plants, item bless deed (main price), name change deed etc.

My suggestion would be this NPC would be publically available. But it would not directly sell rares but rather act like the well known lottery vendors people had at their house back in the days, meaning you do not buy rares or the like but rather tickets.

These tickets could be worth say 50-100k a piece and could have several things on it. As an example:

For bigger rares:
Potted plant deed coupon 3/7 - so you would actually need the other 6 coupons to get the reward.

For small rares: A coupon for a tall candle

Any maybe spawn one ticket per month that will win a main price which changes every month.

And of course there are also tickets that win nothing or minor things like say a bunch of regs, forti powder or whatnot.

Me too. Well thought out, Gideon.

It seems ever-so-popular to throw around terms like "gold sink" without understanding what they are or how they are used. A gold sink removes gold from the system in order to combat inflation. Wear and tear on weapons/armor, taxidermy, player turnover and housing decay are all examples of gold sinks. If your pet idea doesn't remove gold and combat inflation, then it's not a gold sink.

Here on UO Ren, the idea of additional gold sinks is a solution in search of a problem.

Inflation does not exist here. The prices for basic commodities like ingots, cloth and regs are constant. Even though the amount of gold is going up, this is largely in anticipation of the next land rush.

Inflation is unlikely to ever exist here. Other shards like UOSA have been wracked by virtual duping (aka Tela's ingenious scroll macros), mass afk gathering and staff corruption. These problems can't happen here. The virtual economy pages serve as a check on corruption as anyone can easily see when new items are introduced into the game (there are no random castle deeds spawning) and the brilliant automated anti-afk system mean there's never going to be a glut of ingots.

Also, what people are missing is that the existing housing system is a massive gold sink. Want proof? See this example.

Lastly, the idea of giving away rares just for logging in every couple week strikes me as Trammelish as does auctioning off IDOCS.

So many of these pet projects seem designed to fix things that don't really need fixing or re-engineering the wheel to suit one individual play style.

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Gideon, I agree. You said most of what I was thinking while I was looking at my screen and eating lunch.

If we have to explain exactly what will be affected by inflation, it's housing, rare items, and the highest-end magic equipment. Not necessarily all housing, but large houses and prime locations start going for ridiculous amounts of gold (because people have ridiculous amounts laying around, because of a lack of gold sinks). The price on true rares and things like supremely acc vanq kats also goes through the roof because people with untold millions can drive prices sky high in ridiculous bidding wars. [If I've left out any affected items, please feel free to correct me] Regularly spawning rares, even really good weapons and armor, and resources will only go down in price over time no matter how much gold there is in the world, because there will be more and more of them available - and unlike sales in the real world, price in UO tends to be based on availability and not what people can afford to pay, with the aforementioned exceptions.

To imagine that people will not still build vast amounts of gold very quickly with amazing macros or hardcore PvM grinding is indeed naive. It's my understanding that the A^T guild was able to generate nearly 2 million gold in the first five hours that the server was live, and it's my guess that people have only gotten better at it since then. If that gold isn't leaving the world somehow, there's your broken economy. It may not bother some people at all that castles start selling for the price of two or more castles and true rares for 5 - 10 million or more but that only means that they have no interest in those things, not that it isn't truly a problem.

P.S. I think Caly's suggestion of a lottery system is excellent, no matter what the exact details are.

Yes, in my first week with a character i still havent finished yet, i managed to make 800k. So there you go with why we need a freakin gold sink.

Also yeah in regards to the whole trammel thing, Gideon said it well. Talking for myself here, sure i hated Trammel because it brought a new concept to the world which I did not like. But that doesnt mean I play UO for PvP only or even mainly for PvP.

I like the risk, coz the reward feels greater. I do like what you call "Trammy" things alot. In fact those "Trammy" things in many cases are what keeps shards populated. Coz the PvP people come and go, if things get old on this server, well its easy to join a new one and find new enemies, but the "Trammy's" that build up their wealth and rares, their player villages, their friendships, their decorated houses and whatnot over time, they will stay to enjoy what they build themselfes. Whether you personally like that playstyle or not, is completely irrelevant u see.

In my opinion what made and makes Ultima so great is the vast amount of thigns you can do in this game, plus the risk etc that comes with not having trammel/trammel rules.

Not related to the ideas & suggestions being made in this thread, however related to the main subject of gold-sinks, we have a few things that will be available in the near future which will serve primarily as gold-sinks. The upcoming land-rush (removal of global house placement restrictions across the entire map) will also serve as a large factor in early stage gold-sinks.

I just wanted to add a little insight to the concerns about possible gold-sinks, while not directly getting involved with this thread & the players/ideas that have been made. There are some interesting ideas & concepts in this thread already, and information like this (in general) helps with future development going forward.

Nice random speculation/rumor, but inaccurate to say the least.

I was lurking in IRC during those hours after the server went live. As I remember it wasn't very many hours into it before a member of A^T said they were ready to drop a fortress. There were a lot of comments about that, the one I remember most was Gharik saying that you all 'got shit done'. Since I never saw anyone take back the statement and fortresses cost close to 2 million gold, this rumor was born. But you should know best, so I'll take your word on it. If I misunderstood, exaggerated, or dreamed up those events, forgive me.

Heh, well, we do tend to get shit done when we put our minds to it, but I'm fairly certain that was in jest. Although Ganyon is a bit of a madman with the money making, I don't think we were quite that ready and that was likely sarcasm.

I could be mistaken, but I do know that we dropped at least 2m worth of homes on the first big land rush.