In regards to housing...

We look at taxes as the number of hours a player has to play to pay their rent. Looking at the past 24 hours of play, there were 857 people who reached 1000+ gold per hour earn rate. Some spend more than others to earn that gold but almost all players who going adventuring and are above level 40 can make enough in under an hour to pay for 1 or more days on a row or village. The top 75 players in the past 24 hours make enough to pay for a city lot in under an hour.

We're really not trying to make this something player must spend money on. The above numbers and strategy for tax rate match up pretty closely with what we've been saying all along and I still believe it is a fair tactic. I don't believe that the tax rates are the problem but rather the imbalance of yields from scenes and the rapid pendulum swings we've introduced in trying to balance this stuff quickly. We'll continue to improve it.


Boy I sure must be doing something STUPID wrong as a lvl 61, due to the pet nerfing, I was fully invested in the taming tree, and now I'm just squishy I must be doing something wrong. I was farming things like silver and selling it, now that's mostly gone due to the mines being infested, etc etc. >.< I would appreciate a clue as to what to farm/mine/sell to be able to afford to spit in a bucket

 

easy there cowboy, I was just trying to point out that being unfair can be a two way street, you went a bit overboard there.

 

I dont understand the problem with tax. If you Have Time you can grind enough to pay and If you re like me a casual player you can use coto to pay your tax and help to pay the development of the game. Perhaps It s a cultural pb with tax. Im french so tax we Know irl...

 

I elected to not place my taxable row house because the taxes would chew me up. I have only gotten to level 35 or so since the wipe, and that is playing a few hours a day and I need the cash for skill ups. And frankly I am having more fun tinkering combat and crafting. Paying rent, do that enough in RL. Besides Brittany alley's are all full up. Maybe after a few people can't pay the rent I can slot in then. ;-)

 

Well I was just putting out ideas. I was grinding yesterday and raising skills, and I the table of goods received from trees, cotton, animals is low at a low level. I am pretty low level right now so I can't speak personally for higher levels. So all of our constructive ideas are what will help to shape our world. They will listen to us if we show them from these threads. Darkstarr just posted merchant prices are get an improvement. *cheers* I hope this helps you and others to grind less.

 

The tax goal they wanted for people were 1 hour a week to pay a week of row taxes... So 1 hour a day to pay for a day of city taxes... At the current rate taxes should be like...

• Row: 75 gold per day
• Village: 150 gold per day
• Town: 300 gold per day
• City: 900 gold per day

"Property Tax Rates: The following are the current Property Tax Rates for Taxable Lot Deeds. These are balanced to be based on about one hour of effort per week to maintain a Row Lot on one end and about one hour of effort per day to maintain a City Lot at the top end. We want the Tax Rates to be easily achievable by single players for the smaller lots, but require more determined play for the larger lots. For reference, we based these values on observing players making about 3500 - 7500 gold per hour at median levels with decent crafted gear (some determined players were making as much as 20K per hour!). As players first establish themselves and level up their characters in the first few weeks these rates will be challenging, but we calculate that they are very achievable in the long run. With that said, we will carefully monitor these values and adjust them if average play times do not match these goals."

• Row: 500 gold per day
• Village: 1000 gold per day
• Town: 2000 gold per day
• City: 3500 gold per day

 

I like that SOTA sets a high bar for player ability, but at the same time I do not want to spend all my time farming gold just to keep my house up.

If we want to have any level of casual player base, folks who play 10 or less hours a week, it needs to be easy to get enough gold in 1hr of farming for an entire week, or MORE. And I am talking an median player, not your top 100 people. Keeping a house tax paid should be easy, not the main gold black-hole of the game.

That is in no way possible right now, add up the pet nerf, the item drop changes, mine scene difficulty changes, the node spawn reductions in some zones, the vendor buy price changes, the vendor sell changes, and how high the rents were set, average players who play less than 10 hrs a week are going to have to spend 30-40% of their time farming gold just for their house. You know what those sorts of people are going to do right, just say no thank you and walk away from the game.

I know myself and many others are avoiding placing anything on a vendor because the player market is on such shaky footing.

I understand you do not want people rolling in millions of gold, but you also need to look at how people are earning what you are seeing. It may be those specific methods you want to review and not global changes like you have done thus far.

I know I heard of people earning 200k+ gold an hour from one particular scene. Sure you needed a 70+ lvl group of 8 people to do it and the 200k is across all 8 people, even then,thats an lot of gold going out.

 

Don't panic. It will all be adjusted. @Chris You might want to look at the respawn rate in [one of the mines]. At my level (AL 64) the [creatures] are a minor (miner?) inconvenience, and I can go 'round and 'round in circles on the top level mining respawning [mineral] until I get dizzy and fall over. I stopped doing it because it feels like an exploit. An occasional visit from something terrifying would make it interesting.

EDIT: Censored in case it is considered an exploit.

 

Maybe you can divulge where people are earning that rate of income? I'd love to know where I could even earn 1k/hour (at adventure level 15).

Edit: I think part of the problem is throwing out the people who make under 100gph. If that is a large portion of your player base, it should be a sign and not dismissed.

 

Who is your target demographic?

These players that are cranking out 3k per hour or more... what are they doing? Are they grinding? Are they ganking? Are they crafting? I'm also curious to know if your average player that's earning 3k per hour is a home owner. Do you have metrics specific to folks that do not own property, folks that have placed tax-free deeds, and folks that have placed add-on taxable deeds? Do you know how much a person that is already paying taxes earns per hour?

I have great faith in you guys... but when you jumble us all into a lump of the median players, it kinda freaks me out a little.

Could you guys give us some greater detail on how you identify the average player (that will be paying taxes)?

 

Id love to learn how to make 3k and hour, please sign me up for that class.

 

Thank you for the response Chris. Its awesome to hear about the vendor roll back! That will help A LOT! Still I consider myself a decently skilled player and the only time I was able to make more than 1k an hour was if I was farming with my guild and being a loot hog (gotta grab them longbows!).
As a solo player I have never seen great income..I don't count resources I have to sell on a public or commissioned vendor as hourly income.

 

Just buy COTOs from the public vendors for around 1500 gold or whatever they're going for now. That equates to 214 gold per day for a Row lot and 429 gold per day for a village lot. Those rates don't seem bad to me at all tbh.

 

Um that opportunity has already passed, most Coto's listed for less than 2k are instantly bought up, it won't be long before the 3ks are bought too. As more people acquire gear that needs Coto repair, and more people start paying rent, as more potions are valued the price will continue to rise.

 

I literally just saw some for around 1500 gold on the Ardoris public vendor yesterday. So IDK what you're talking about unless they just changed drastically over night.

 

Grats, buy them up, they will be gone in minutes.

 

I have a few thoughts on this subject that I'd like to share

1) With the limited number of lots available, I see a need to make sure that taxes are high enough that home owners are active players. I do not want to see a lot of abandoned houses that never go away because the owner logs in for an hour a month to earn rent.
2) My completely unscientific analysis of this game's population leads me to think that we're mostly older gamers here, busy with family, job, and other real life commitments. The tax rate needs to be targeted to that demographic. An hour a day just to pay taxes on a village lot seems incredibly demanding for that audience.
3) On an unrelated subject that I'm going to relate to this, player owned towns don't have much incentive to be visited. Why not let town owners set their tax rate lower than the NPC government in order to attract more people to those towns?
4) Since the NPC government was brought up by me, how about implementing a political system? Players could support different noblemen who influence the court's decisions on such things as NPC city tax rates. Some noblemen might raise property taxes but in return players earn more experience when working on melee skills (spend 20xp from your pool, get 1xp bonus to that skill), another faction might put a tax on reagents for better improvement in magic skills, others might make towns more or less susceptible to sieges. There is endless potential here that would create another sandbox element (this worked VERY well in Meridian59)

 

I think 4 sounds intriguingly fantastic

 

Can you explain what the sampling method is for creating the player pool that these numbers are based on? Also, what conditions must be met in order for those players to be on the clock in those calculations?