Taxes: Why all POT's will have them.

So the deed itself carries an overdue tax that must be paid before the deed owner can place it down anywhere else? That would make sense...but I haven't heard anything mentioned about that.

 

I think smack is right about this. The deed definitely carries overdue tax if it's not paid.

 

Well, that's my assumption because Lord Baldrith is right, I don't remember seeing or hearing about having to pay off the tax before you can place it again. The assumption may have been simply "you lose your spot, go find another" and due to the perceived land rush, that penalty of losing a spot was deemed enough. But now with POTs, that penalty can be avoided.

I just double checked the FAQ and it's not mentioned there either. Well, if the devs are reading, they can plan to fix it or leave as is. Otherwise, there's your tax loophole

Which brings up another off-topic thought: will the overdue tax (if there is such a thing) be displayed when selling deeds to another player (perhaps in the tooltip)?

 

You must be a fortune teller.

All these folks that say they will not charge rent will ALL eat their words. The reason I am saying this I can not divulge. However yes Baron your original sentence is 100% correct. ALL towns will charge rent.

 

That's a pretty bold statement. What's your source? Citation needed!

 

You were asleep last night and you missed out, we will chat tonight in TeamSpeak.

 

hmmm i miss that while i was on TS last night.... curious cause i am torn between 2 of our OoV PoTs for where my shop will be....

 

Well if I remember correctly unlocking a lot so you can use a deed on it costs the POT owner $36 each, unless they changed it. Seems the POT owner should be able to recoup at least some of that.

 

Locking and unlocking lots cost the POT owner nothing, except what they paid for the town as a whole, unless I misunderstood something somewhere...

 

This is just me thinking out loud, but I would think that the "repossessing" of the lot would 'take care' of the back taxes owed. That's just my thought on it though...

 

I think that's what Death Knell was trying to say in a round about way.

It's all in the eyes of the beholder. I think the take away is that there's never a free lunch.

 

That works fine if you think of the game as an investment and want to make money back or for a profit. As I see many people are planning. We all have reasons why we joined the game. My reason was to purchase a town for the benefit of the community, and not to pass my debt on to others to pay, as it was my choice to donate to the development knowing that I traded my money for the crossroads I purchased. It is a done deal for me. I will not charge people for rent ever. Just saying. Now the game mechanics might charge rent for the lot if they do not have tax free deeds, but that is not my problem. They should expect this when obtaining the deed.

Start at 41:03

 

Some of us guessed that taxes could be added to the game. Has been in my thread since day one. With the publicly available information there is no way to guarantee that all pots must charge a tax. You can guess, but not prove. Saying so for all towns is arrogant.

If you have non-public information about why Drocis is correct then the rest of us can play the inductive logic game (too) and guess that you might have received new information from the VIP round table. This guess does not necessitate that you were there. We can see the pictures on the main website. I recognise quite a few faces. There are enough clues to suggest it is possible. What I can't do, and this is where Drocis makes a logical fallacy, is prove that. This is pure speculation.

 

Actually, if people read the OP they'd see that I state several times "I believe" meaning that yes of course this is speculation. I also went out of my way to explain that there was no reason CURRENTLY to tax anyone other than "being greedy".

I'm still not entirely sure why anyone is defensive about what I believe. But I suppose we'll see what happens in the future. If I'm wrong in my beliefs I'll be the first to admit it.

 

Edit: Added Video

 

Perhaps it is a framing issue on our part. I.e. a psychological bias against your posts because we frame them as FUD. That's not to say that we always should (bad idea, but we are human - so yes fair criticism against us).


But

In too many threads you assert truths without necessarily checking them. Add to that the use or FUD then it is not surprising that we have a cognitive bias to be defensive.

You assert we are making "naive and dangerous promises", but also ask us not to give you a hard time on such statements. The former is pure FUD. Furthermore, it is an insult because you question our integrity.

Even the statistics are made up. Why not assert 10%? Because obviously that doesn't cause fear or support your hypothesis.

Delete the FUD. Revise your statistics (abolish). Remove any vaguely emotive language and then present your argument.


NB:
I was going to set taxes to zero as a design principle, but in the end I decided not too because I didn't know. What I definitely didn't do was then lambaste all other POT owners for not saying the same thing.

 

I plan on taxing nothing, but primarily because I won't have a POT... unless someone donates one to me. :/

 

Regardless of the future outcome. I want to publicly state the I have nothing but the highest respect for all the town owners (and non-town owners) involved in this discussion. I thank you all for your various points of view and look forward to seeing all of the player towns grow and prosper. With that I'll take my leave of this conversation.

 

Well I went back through the document and they removed the reference to keys costing. So I guess just the school tax remains.

 

It's not what you are trying to communicate it is about how you are saying it.

Your tone is way different when you were in the Community Hangout than you come across when you want to make a singular point on these forums. I fully understand why people would get upset about how you phrase your message in the OP.

Me, I think that you and I for instance sometimes clash in these forums, but I'm certain that if we would have these types of discussion face to face we wouldn't have any problems at all.
For me the biggest issue when you are going for singular points would be all the absolute statements about how other people are supposed to act or feel when people and situations are so much more complex.

If this was another type of forum or subject I'd simply use the scientific method on your statements and show that they are usually false. However since most of your statements are intended in unstated contexts or with unlisted observations which probably feels so clear to you that you don't feel you have to bother with, but which then when read by others become open to interpretation.

Take the tax thingie for instance. From the OP.
"Player Owned Towns will NEED to tax players because they don't want their towns to go dead. "
A very aggressive hypothesis and probably offensive to more people than you realize.
Using the scientific method this hypothesis is easily proven false. This since there are so many different POTs and POT owners so one can easily show cases where this is clearly wrong.
But you also do that yourself, above and below in the post you put in weak caveats. So you know that the statement is false when stating it, so why do you do it?
Well, in that specific case you are really making a good point about activity, while conflating three major issues and some more minor ones at once:
1 IF POTs want stuff that have costs they need income (with sub minor issue that owners might not realize that they want this stuff until later, making them realize they need an income)
2 IF POTs want high activity they need a to get rid of low activity members (with sub minor issue of AWOL/MIA)
3 IF POTs want to attract player traffic they need to have attraction points (with sub minors in 1 and 2 above)
Now if you had raised those issues and wanted to discuss them that would probably have lead to a completely different topic, but you didn't instead you are an analytical guy so you have looked on these three and believe that the most obvious (and best) solution is taxation, you take that thought and compare it to lots of owners stating that they won't tax their residents.
This leads to a feeling that you need to point this out, so you do so publicly stepping on a lot of toes.
This since there are of course lots of other outcomes, which you yourself acknowledges and are aware of.
Some POTs will not care about 1,2,3 or a mix thereof. Other pots have other solutions to 1,2,3 and mixes thereof.
So really if we take your statement above
"Player Owned Towns will NEED to tax players because they don't want their towns to go dead. "
and modify it to fit the complexity of reality better to
"Player Owned Towns which want to be popular and attract players long term will probably NEED income and a way to assure active citizens over time, the easiest way to assure these is taxation/rent so those POTs might want to rethink their position on this. I Drocis think there will be those who will do this, so I only think it is fair to warn players about the possibility now. "
Then you'd pretty much have a non-offensive statement which we all could agree on the premise and discuss from there.

This is why you will get negative feedback from people who has other solutions to 1,2,3 above.
It's not the what part, it's the how part.

Me as you know from our dialog elsewhere have considered all of that and much more and have other solutions which will work so much better with my style, my POTs theme and with my target audience than ever taxation/rent from my POT's residents would. Hence why I have ignored the topic so far, because I get what you are driving at, I might plausibly understand why you are framing the message the way you do, and I'm certain that we would be having a lovely and creative discussion about if we had it in real life, but here in the forums I'd rather skip the inevitable drama.

Happy hunting in R12 everyone.