DEED ticket

Those will most likely happen anyway and will be sold for cash in the add-on store.

They would not have the same effect as a gold sink in game because they will only appeal to those who have a lot already and who share the same perception of 'desirable'...

The raffle like most similar real-world state run lotteries is designed to be a tax on the poor while still scaling for the rich.

Tickets have to be priced reasonably low so they are within the reach of pretty much everyone, the current price is probably a bit too high right now, it should be low enough that everyone decides to buy multiple tickets.

The rich will buy more tickets, but the real money sink comes from high numbers of the rest of the population buying multiple tickets rather than a few super-rich buying loads of tickets.

What you can't do, ever, is to try and have a raffle with some sort of artificial concept of 'equality' built in while still trying to achieve the goal of a gold sink.

The nearest you can get to that is the raffles you see at the airports from time to time, where a fixed number of tickets are sold for a high-value car, so you know exactly what the odds of winning are and the real value of the prize.

We should not forget that the 'rich' players of this game have had the past 2 years or more to acquire exactly which lots they wanted through the use of $$, it remains to be seen if they will actually participate in the lottery to any significant degree at all as the $$ route is still there through the bundles for POT lots and it is a 100% certain transaction.

I can see players rich in gold dropping more on the raffle than those without, but I very much doubt it is going to result in any way to monopolize the prizes as long as the rest of the population just participates even at the level of one ticket each...

The secondary market is likely to develop quickly now as well, people come and go from games all the time and will be trading their property for $$, but I don't anticipate seeing many lots change hands for gold as you always have the $$ cost of a bundle acting as a limit on perceived value.

Short answer right now is if you really, really must have a house to make your gaming life complete then figure out how to earn an extra $300 in RL, it will probably take you less time and is a lot more certain than hoping for a lottery win, but never forget, it is that 'hope' that keeps people who really should be spending on food, clothes and rent, buying a Powerball ticket...

 

Major issue I have is this game is constantly criticized as 'Pay To Win'.

People were complaining before the raffle that only the Big Spenders got to own property....the answer to this was 'Don't worry, you'll be able to get housing with in game gold!'

Then it became 'You MIGHT be able to get housing with in Game Gold - if you're lucky'

Now its become 'figure out how to earn an extra $300 in RL' - because all the Raffle tickets have been brought up by the big whales so they can make a killing selling the deeds off for obscene amounts of gold or for RL cash.

Perception is everything. This Raffle gave Port a chance to show to the critics that the little guy with the $45 account does have a good chance of owning his own property someday without having to pay large amounts of RL cash. What have Port done with this chance? squandered it to pander to rich and big guilds under the rather lame excuse- in my eyes- of 'Gold Sink'.

And just to make clear, this is not sour grapes - I'm not a little guy. I've invested a large amount of RL cash into this game and am sitting on 3 Tax Free Lot Deeds myself so this Raffle will not affect my game in the slightest - but I think it may affect the future of this game, as the Perception to outsider will be 'Pay To Win'....and when Episode 2 rolls around we may regret that outside perception - dearly.

 

I miss a great answer. How many will win a lot deed each month?
If few players wins: lot will be placed in npc big towns and Pot will be empty for years. And an incredible amount of gold will sink, beside a possibility to invest that gold in crafting and live economy for the game.
A Pot governator will be very upset for this lottery as he cannot no more invite people in his Pot. Deed had become too precious, and this rarity will be invested in npc town. Only when all npc towns will be fitted, only at that time a player will place deed in Pots. Starting on the Pots close to the npcs town.

I'm afraid this cannot be sustained for a lot of time. Aimho.

 

Lots of assumed doom & gloom there with nothing as yet to back it up...

I said, if you must have a house then the RL route is more certain, I don't think that can be disputed.

However, the raffle is going to put 675 lots into peoples hands this month, do you really imagine that all of those are going to the whales?

How do the big guilds etc. even begin to buy 'all the Raffle tickets'?

It remains to be seen if anyone is going to even try to purchase tickets in huge quantities, in some sort of vain attempt to win everything...

Too much worry about what hasn't yet happened, lets see how this first one goes and then decide if there is a real problem or not...

 

There are 600 PoT lot deeds in the first raffle, they can only be used in PoT so the state of the NPC towns isn't a factor.

There will also be 75 lot deeds that can be placed anywhere so even those could also be used in PoT if people want to...

 

Ok, you have a point there... if the intention is to create a huge gold sink... well, first thing to do is to identify why ppl is getting so much gold... i have played for example like 100 hours and never got more than 4k gold in my char at any time (those 1-30 gp per loot and drop sells equivalent to 1-100 doesnt help - havent played with the public vendor yet btw-) after repairs , training, crafting, etc. If someone can do 20k per hour as i have seen in some forum posts (assuming that they arent using bugs or cheats), good for them. That will not change the fact that the majority of the population cannot do that quantity of gold, and sitting in a huge pile of gold will not have any impact unless they can spend it (unless you sell that gold for real money, and that is another monster).

If you can spend your huge quantities of gold to control lot deeds, that will block the major population from getting deeds, and that also will make ghost towns in the future as i said. Then the vendors in all those places will have inflated prices that only the richests chars can pay (why would you sell items at normal prices if you are your only competition?), and that will have an impact in how the majority of the population experience the game. The newcomers that really want to play with the housing feature will not find anywhere to land unless devs make bigger the instanced maps or create more cities that will end
congesting the world map.

The thing is that if devs know that there is a problem with the gold quantity in game (im speculating only), how giving the rich chars the way to control the map will fix the thing? they can earn again the same (more in my opinion) gold after getting all the deeds, milking gold now also from poor chars with their inflated costs and continue that unless they get bored or another game release, and for that time, you will have a ghost/solo game.

In my personal opinion, the only thing to do is to check the accounts that do too much gold and understand if they are breaking the TOS of the game, and if they are, sanction them the hard way, with real account bans and not xx hours of bans, and of course deletion of all their stuff, and tracking also the items/gold transfered to other accounts to clean them too. Items and gold (dont know if they worked that way here) need to contain a history string that have info of the transfers of the item within xxx time, with that you can easily track them (and for that you can use a 2 key encryption for reduce the amount of space of each string).

And if after that the thing seems unbalanced (gold earning when farming), just make some kind of balance there.

The possibility to go online solo playing, basically give the opportunity to a single char to take on all the mobs/nodes in maps without other player competition. If those mobs (that i havent seen yet) drop a ton of gold in loot and items, they could restrict those maps for multiplayer only (for some periods), that way you can limit the quantity of how much a single char can farming and distribute better the thing.

For the bot problem they can implement a system that check every X random minutes when your char is earning too much of something (whatever is considered too much) and display a pop up message to ask a simple random question, if not responded in x seconds that account earn 1 suspect point, and in x suspect points someone from the dev team can inspect the account manually and do whatever they think is correct.

The fact is that these things in the logical part at least arent difficult to plan and test, more now that the game is in early stage.

 

When you build an MMO these days you will always include analytics and that gives you triggers and warnings both on player and game behavior.

They will know which zones are dropping what and how much gold is being accumulated where, both from player data and NPC merchant data along with economy analytics monitoring the rate at which gold enters and leaves the game.

This is a given.

Right at the start of a game like this though there has to be a certain amount of 'pump priming' and initially larger amounts may accumulate in a few places due to either sub-optimal loot tables/spawn rates/difficulty settings, or exploits.

The exploits will get dealt with and the mobs that need tweaking will get tweaked.

What you need not to do is to over-react.

The world didn't end because some players made a lot more money than they should have, as long as you fix the root cause quickly and punish the clear exploits it all evens out in the long run.

 

Not over reacting friend, if my text looks like im anger or something like that im very sorry, english is not my native language so in some cases the paragraphs may end sounding a bit different of what i was trying to show, im just mentioning some possible future issues with the chooses taken in these days, in fact im very happy with the game as it is right now (also bit worried with this lotto stuff) and its still on early access.... cannot wait to see the finished product.

 

Can someone explain how exactly the system works?

I mean, If i buy 3 tickets, these tickets if I not win will expire at the end of the month, when winners will be declarated?
If Yes, these tickets will be available choices for nexts raffles?
If a rich player will buy 200 tickets: hase he more chances to win a deed? Can he win multiple deeds in a month?

Thanks for your answers, we are building a guild in these days, but this Raffle has stopped a lot of us for playing the game. I really need these informations.

Jocularis
https://fratalea.wordpress.com/

 

They will expire. The next month you will have to buy them again.
The more tickets the more chances to win, yes.
Afaik you can win multiple deeds.

 

It is exaclty what I feared most.

 

Totally quote this, and I would add that this way of doing things (raffle) is totally depressing town owners and people who want to build a community around a POT like my guild!
Also, maybe our calculations are incorrect but, a single ticket gives something like 0.3% of chance to win. This means an average Joe that want a house, has to buy a ticket every month for 10 years to get some chance.

 

Exactly our situation.
I was playing daily with my guildmaster, Nerone, governor of Nido dell'aquila, Pot in front of Kingsport. We were constantly trying to make some money, but our guild is small atm. Just 10 people, only 5 hard players. The days were hard but beautiful, some people mining and selling goods, some other like me doing kobolds for bowscause I am not skilled to male harder mobs. My skills are cooking and tailoring so nothing compared to mining for doing golds,
I dont like to mine minerals, that's Nerone's job. We were collecting money to buy 2 village deed and one town because our Pow is a Holdfast and we can place in exterior only 40 items, too few to have a beautiful city. With 2 village deeds placed in the middle of the town we would like to arrange a great marketplace, with vendors, tents, carpets, all placed on a deed instead that in the exterior Pow items limit.

Then came the RAFFLE. We realized that we cannot buy the deeds we want to improve our small town. Kobolds now don not drop no more bows. Nerone is still mining and selling minerals as this part of the game has not been nerfed.
Atm 6 players on my guild stop playing since there is no goal in deeds with the raffle system. Im not able atm th moment to play 2 hours on mob to collect 400g....not funny.
Cotton and leather have small price. So no gold from this.
No point on playing to build our town, that is condamned to be empty and ugly, with only 40 item to place. Talking to my guild mates none of them, with this raffle system (that I'm completely hating), have the intention to put his lot in a pow. First they will place it on a npc town. So our guild will not grow, people that make a project to improve visually a game like sota now has no point on that. No point on playing together, no point nor fun.

Sota is a game that based his fan base on housing. As all people that kickstarte knows. Dev decides to introduce a Raffle on the most delicate aspect of the game. The bones of the game: housing.
Before confirming a change like this It should be discussed to avoid problems and damage on gameplay. When pledged this game (and Ive never spent so much rl money on a game) I'd never imagine that Devs could take this decision so easily. Im totally disapponted. As all my guild.

Please If my opinion is too bad I would be happy to be refuted, since I loved this game.

 

And as all people that kickstarter knows, a lottery system was always an option since Kickstarter Update 13 Housing and was discusssed many times over and over.

 

Hi senash sure it was an option but not really a good one imo

 

Also you are talking about 3 years ago that sounds like stone age to sota

 

Im not discussing that could be an option.
I would like to have an opinion of all of those that kickstarted if the think that raffle could be a good solution in this moment of the game. Im my experience not only is a bad solution, it just breaking a new guild on playing, and lot of people is selling their deeds for gold, since now deeds are the most precious good.

Quoting from you link:

"So what happens if you don't get a property deed during the crowd-funding phase? There will still be some property deeds made available after the game goes live. We are currently looking at what the most fair method of distribution will be. The three main options currently being considered are:

• Put a deed up per week per area with an opening for a 1 week auction using in game currency. This would obviously be VERY competitive!
• Lottery system. Tickets are sold for a week and then we hold a random drawing to give away a few property deeds. This will ensure that more people have a chance and makes it more exciting for the masses but could frustrate some players.
• Land Rush! We would set a very high but fixed in game price for deeds and let people race to get them. This could be too rewarding for the earliest adopters and also could result in some negative side effects like organized groups or farmers working together to buy property deeds purely for resale reasons."

Lottery system it is the worst option of these. Could frustrate some players???? No I think this will break guilds, expecially small guilds and new players.
C'mon please do not defend what appear to me as a broken system, just brainstorm some better ideas! Aimho.

 

Sorry, but that was, according to my understanding, always the plan and thats the reason why many pledged higher than entry level or bought Add-On Store Deeds.

 

Not completely correct. Before raffle deeds have lower prices. Great lower.

Im an Eldermann pledge, though.

 

Me too and I'm complaining even while I sit in my village lot because my friends who did not have the money for the pledge have a near zero chance of getting a lot. And that is no fun.