SotA Economy - Gold Sink Brainstorming

Scholars have found a large stash of recall and teleport scrolls.. sold on NPC merchants while supplies last.

Lot of great ideas folks! I'll get to compiling what we have so far today.

 

Wow that's some list you all came up with.. there's a few ideas I'm particularly fond of! I've finished compiling the list of ideas so far. If it looks like I missed anything it may be that I feel a particular idea was already covered (there were a couple of those).. and I did paraphrase a bit to keep some ideas short.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far!

 

Is inflation suddenly out of control? Why do we need more gold sinks?

 

That is a discussion I'd prefer take place in one of the many other economy threads. This is intended to collect ideas for them.. not to debate the need or lack thereof.

 

I've long felt that the problem isn't that there are too few gold sinks (honestly, I think there are too many) but that they are all on the crafting side - completing one's recipe book, especially with the "find it in a bandit's pocket system" forces a crafter to spend potentially millions in gold just for this. Even discounting those, hundreds of thousands just buying the npc recipes. Fuel costs are exorbitant and, since the game (by design) ensures that it is impossible to make a profit from the faucet by crafting (ie, buy materials, make something, sell for profit to npc is intentionally not a thing), and because there is no work order system or similar, crafters bear all the costs.

Not trying to get into a discussion about it here, honestly, I think this is a pretty well known issue anyway. My point is that the 'faucet' by which gold enters the economy is adventuring, and the drain is crafting. If you don't craft, you experience no sinks at all. If I put my mortar & pestle away, I can play happily for weeks/months at a time without spending a single gold piece on anything except the occasional reagents which adventuring money covers. Money accumulates, and eventually I'll have a couple million which I'll blow on real estate. But this just transfers it to another player, it doesn't remove it from the economy.

I'd suggest that if we do need more "sinks" that they should be universal sinks, applicable to all players and not to the crafting subset, who are already in a not-for-profit situation (aside from deco items and consumables, which have extremely low demand).

So, what should we spend money on?

1. Cosmetic Clothing
There's only a handful of craftable clothing/costume/etc but there's a lot of potential here. Consider the fancy merchant outfit for example that uses a purchaseable 'symbol' - expanding 'fluff' recipes that have a for-cash-only component would help.

2. Decoration Options that east money
There are assets in game that look like 'piles of gold'. I'd spend some in game gold to craft a pile of gold to decorate a 'vault' type room, or for sheer decadence sake. It would be a one-off, but, it would take some money out for sure. Also as above, new deco recipes that utilize an additional 'shop' component would be possible. Consider retexturing some of the old yucky bookshelves, wardrobe, dresser and creating a new recipes that uses same base materials + "item" (like, lacquer or something).

The downside is that more craftable/igg options means less pressure to buy the fancy coto clothes/deco.

3. Skill Training
It always baffled me how cheap this was. I get the early tiers being cheap but once you get down to 3rd/4th tier skills they could do with costing considerably more. This wont break anyone's bank as they are one offs but its something to consider.

4. Titles Titles Titles
I know its been mentioned, but this is one that would get a lot of money out of me.
Come up with a title for each skill tree. Once a player grandmasters an entire tree, have a 100k gold purchaseable title they can display.
Purchaseable titles could be linked into the new quest system as well, ie once you complete certain objectives etc. these could be earned/bought from the relevant npcs.

Many games also link titles to small, minimal buff effects you get while displaying said title. Doing something like this would really add appeal as well as pressure to players to buy/collect as many titles as possible for different scenarios. Like, lets say there's an Archdruid title for mastering the entire earth magic tree. If you display this title, you get +5 attunement. I'd certainly pay for and use this. You could even take it a step further and add titles with multiple tree requirements with higher costs/better bonuses.

Consider a merchant title, that costs a million gold, but when displayed, gives a 5% buy/sell 'barter' skill effect to npc prices. How long would it take for ROI on something like that? A while. But its something players could work for if you're thinking long-term. I'd certainly buy it cause I plan to be here long enough for it to matter. And there's the whole prestige thing as well.

5. Guild Stuff
Huge potential thing here. IGG guild-feature unlocks priced/targetted to be addressed by large groups of players.
What guild features? Anything! Consider a 'guild bank' accessible from the bank, or ability to send guild-wide mail, or guild 'titles' bestowable by the guild leaders, each of these features could cost some amount of igg to unlock and could be group efforts.

6. Moar space
I know you can currently upgrade bank slots, dungeon sizes with IGG, but the costs scale up pretty quickly you reach a point where it is pointless to continue. Consider dialing this back a bit and people will spend more in game money on it. Consider adding a modification to chest/trunk/bag/backpack recipes that gives greater capacity but with the addition of an additional ingredient that costs igg. Or perhaps even an upgrade recipe: Crafted Chest plus magical rune of holding (1000g) = box that now holds 500 items instead of 300. I can understand not affecting player carry capacity as that creates balance issues and such but house storage...?

7. Progression Related
Players could incrementally work toward unlocking/paying for access to content. Lets say there's a huge tier 5 cottonfield or pine forest or silver mine or whatever but its off limits until you've paid your dues in some way. These areas would have to be lucrative enough to entice players to spend of course, but not so lucrative that it would dismiss other scenes. Maybe a difficult thing to implement.

8. NPC guilds
Membership (with joining costs and perhaps quest requirements....?) could unlock various perks.
Example: Blacksmith's Guild. Costs 2500g to join, gives some sort of badge of membership. As you work through a series of quests, you reach higher and higher tiers within the guild, with a cash-gate that gets higher and higher to unlock the next level. As you work through you could 'earn' various rewards, badges (that you could display in your house for example, like the founder plaque sized things) The highest tier could have a title, access to consolidated recipe merchants with all of the non-drop stuff in one place perhaps in the guild headquarters, and perhaps a special merchant with discount coal. This could be done for anything you can think of. It isn't just adding a simple cash sink, but a time sink as well and a progression-to-achieve. It could be done with non-crafting things as well - consider a Hunter's Guild whose echelon of perks is daily monster bounty quests but only once you've worked your way there. Or a Thieves' guild whose secret headquarters sells flasks just a little bit cheaper for poison making. (The recipes are now so unprofitable there's plenty of wiggle room to ensure that players would still not be able to make money from crafting, since that's a no-no.). The Thieves guild could also pay a premium for 'questionable goods' - and questionable goods could be found anywhere, like those letters you take off corpses for example >.< The Farmer's Co-operative could do something similar for agriculturists. And so on.

Completionism is a powerful driving force. I can think of several players who would work through ALL of it for sheer completionism's sake. And that's a lot of money into the metaphorical drain over a long period of time. Its a long term goal, sure, but long-term goals are good things they keep players around to achieve them.

 

I don't have any specific ideas at the moment, but if gold sinks are needed, I like ones that give players that already have it all something worthwhile to spend a lot on. Stuff that helps with the everyday grind can pull in a lot of gold, but it doesn't really pull from anyone in particular and isn't much different than just lowering gold drops.

 

Pay to remove attenuation buff (debuff?)

 

Make both a gold sink (increases gold sink) and an in game trash sink (decreases gold faucet) in one.

Have apprentice crafting quests, have to craft X items and hand in with donated Y gold to get Z producer XP.

Have adventure training quests, collect X trash loot drops and Y gold to remove current attenuation. Note the amount of items needs to be the at least the amount you can collect in no less than an hour.

This will increase gold sink. Make demand for players to farm, and not sell trash loot to the vendor. Make a player market for the trash loot.

All you are giving is XP, so not a gold faucet. XP has diminishing returns so the more you do this the less the gain is.

OR

if you are not happy with Z being XP invent a new currency for a new vendor that sells dungeon blueprints or other rare drops as an alternative way to get these things without the RNG farm grind. So you can grind for hours for something get unlucky and it never drop, but all that trash plus some gold you got trying to get the drop you can exchange for the new currency and get the item. It allows the designers to price the item at what they think the amount of time grinding should be plus say 50%. If you don't get it in 150% of the designed time you should have enough trash to buy it.

Regards
Spung

 

NPC thieves with high stealth and pickpocketing skills, that prey on wealthy avatars. (Especially ones that are AFK in a big city at night)

 

I disagree: removing gold does not increase it's value... Pricing and Value are two different animals, ever hear of "one person's trash, is another person's riches" and "one person's riches, is another person's trash"... Gold, only gives you Power because now, pricing makes little or no difference to the person who has the gold, the gold has not changed in Value at all...

If you want to worry about Pricing, then you need a system where the price is set, and can not be altered by the person putting the price on it... Then it's Fair to everyone who wants to buy the item, there is a goal that person needs to achieve and they already know what is needed, and that can not be changed...

Some would say: but if it's "rare" then it needs to be expensive... Says you... But who determines that price? Some ask another person for a "price check" and then take their advice, well whoever said they are right?

Economy 101 says: supply and demand...

That's a tough one, because there is no way to determine those two factors, unless you have a Global marketplace to check for all sales that are happening at any given time, then the task would be easy, just do a search for a given item, and have all sales available show on one chart... Players could easily see when an item is over prices or under priced... and buy accordingly... sellers could also see what other offering are out in the market, and price their sales accordingly too...

Having a Global marketplace IS NOT an Auction house style system, but merely a searchable sales bulletin board showing all sales on player vendors at any given moment... One would still need to travel to the location to purchase the items and return home... Of course they could mail it to themselves if they wish to spend the gold...

I think this would stimulate the economy greatly...

But if you want to talk about Faucets, Sink, and Drains then:

-the "Sink" is the amount of total gold in the game, it is either empty or full or somewhere in between...
-Faucets are sources for gold, killing critters is one source, and it's endlessly putting gold into the sink, the sink is filled...
-Drains are Taxes, fuels, etc that get burned up after use, so the sink is emptied...

I think SotA is doing a good job at keeping the Sink about half full, but do think it could also turn back some of it's Faucets and allow it to drain to 1/4 full and it wouldn't hurt anything...

 

This thread is for ideas for gold sinks. Lets move all debate about gold sinks, the economy, etc, and any commentating back over to the thread that spawned this one.

Thanks.

 

Why do you wish to attack this problem from the wrong end, more Gold Drains is NOT the solution of this problem, but rather too many Gold Faucets turned on full... I was online last night and every critter (humanoids) had Gold as part of the loot... Along with weapons, armor and other goodies such as obsidian chips, reagents... Plus jars, spoons, pots & pans, all these items can be sold to any Merchant vendor for Gold... So my question is: why include Gold as part of the loot? When all the other items are more valuable, they can be converted to Gold if you wish, they can be scraped to reduce your crafting resources or sold as a 1st level item to crafters at a higher price than what a merchant would offer you...

Here's an idea: Diminishing return on everything that is in your inventory...
-if you have more than 10000 iron ores (insert resource here), then when you mine the nodes give no ores or less meticulous collection... Since you seem to be overstocked, why do you want more iron ore, the game should stop hoarding in its tracks... Why should the game give you more of what you already have, and are not using?
-if you have more than a million in Gold just sitting in your bank doing nothing, then the game shuts down Gold as a drop for you as loot... Game merchants stop buying looted items from you... Since you have plenty of Gold, why don't you spend it?

Thanks to Vladamir Begemot, I was able to read the other thread and I must say: the 1st few answers are way off base:
-Crafters do NOT buy all their resources... Maybe if you want to GM in a single week end, they do...
-Equipment does not wear out fast, just to force players to make purchases from other players (this is the dumbest suggestion that continues to be brought up-equipment needs to wear out fast)...
-Players become self sufficient and that's bad for the economy (there are other reasons a player crafts their own equipment-#1 is other players have their stuff price out of the sky, so no one can afford to buy from them, it's simply cheaper to craft their own equipment)...

I could go on, but I won't, lets just say I think the OPO players think they out number the SPO players and that's simply not true... Most play by themselves until they're competitive... The economy sux because you won't let UO die in peace and follow the simple rules of a Supply/Demand economics...

#1- players need a way to advertise their stuff for sale... On a Global network would be the most efficient and cast the widest net... and of course it should cost, based on your pricing... the higher your price, the more it will cost you...

#2- if #1 fails over and over, then lower your price...

#3- if #2 fails over and over, then your item is in low demand, sell it to a game merchant or scrap it or try selling it at game suggested retail...

 

Some valid points and ideas but this isn't the real world, there are too many outside implications on the game world, people with excess time, people spending real world cash on gold, COTO's, etc. Creating a situation where a number of people can force up resource prices for everyone, upsetting the economy, leading to people are charging too much for crafted goods. So it isn't as simple as supply and demand. I'm not sure what out there you can craft and sell for more than you would get just selling the raw materials. Precious few things that aren't top end but even then you need to take into account costs of getting there in the first place before you luckily craft that item.
That is why I suggested control of resource process through a NPC vendor, that would remove gold, make craftable items more affordable/realistically priced. It's a simple fix.

 

Could you guys take the economy discussion back to the economy thread please? If it isn't specifically an idea for a gold sink, it's off topic.

 

Buy cotos with gold. That would be the greatest gold sink. It would be feasible with the changes coming to cotos.

 

Dude, seriously? IMO, you can't talk one without talking about the other, so get off the soap box please...

@Nevyn Waldail the idea of having resources on NPCs has long been debated and I agree... If iron ore (insert resource here) were available at a game set price, in endless quantities that would control the price of iron ore... You can see it now with reagents, I can go to any alchemist and buy as many reagents as I need, just close the buy window and reopen it for another round of purchases... The price never varies, and you won't see anyone selling reagents at a markup price on their vendor, they're too common and sold everywhere...

The problem is not having enough gold sinks, because that has been debated forever too and nobody wants what's been suggested, for example: Treasure room decos... This is a great idea to sink millions of gold into a chest deco that looks like millions in gold... IMO, it's more valid now because of play made dungeons...

I guess we shouldn't talk about the economy in this thread, but that's exactly what this video is showing: the ups/downs of developing a player economy... Sure they call it an MMO, but if there is no economy, why give gold in the first place? A game developed around crafting could do, take that rusty sword and remove the rust, send it back through the forge, add more materials, replace the handle, overpower it with enchants... You wouldn't need any gold at all, just resources...

And I have never heard the devs say: we need more sinks... They've explained what sinks are, and why we need them, but not that there are too few of them... Players have screamed "We want more loot", but this is so general it could mean anything... What they "want" IMO, is better equipment (insert artifact here) to use so they are God like, comparatively speaking... To other players, which the devs won't do because they want an even field...

The problem as I see it is: players trying to Monopolize a free market to eliminate competition and never having to follow the rules of supply/demand when they set pricing of anything being sold on player vendors... They want a uniform price and that's called "price fixing"... Price check , please... Oh it's worth 10,000 gold, who am I to question that... Mmmm, I wonder why it's not selling, I checked the price, so what's up? Mmm, maybe the buyer said: "screw that", I'll just go get one myself...

To debate the faucets/drains in a game is pointless... Shutting off the faucets (loot) will be just as effective as putting more drains (sinks) in the game... But all you want to talk about is sinks... Give me more things to spend my money on... Any sink ideas you come up with will hurt the average player and be Bad for the game as a whole...

I just checked, it's around 530k, but I just bought 1000 curing salt (that was 8k) to do some leather... Mainly from the sales of Gold COTOs, I buy a membership and get 9 per month... FYI, this is NOT creating new Gold, but taking old Gold... as Players buy them... I sell them at a good discount, so I imagine someone resells them cus the same player buys all I have each time I list them or maybe they just buy stuff off the coto vendor, there's some pretty expensive stuff on those vendors...

 

Yes seriously. There are more than enough threads to debate in. The purpose of this thread is ONLY to collect ideas to present to Devs.. By debating and getting sidetracked it makes it harder to sift through it all. If you specifically made a point to ask people to stay on topic in a thread you started.. wouldn't you think it rude if someone blatantly ignored you and went out of their way not to do so?

Well I know you read my post about OPTIONAL sinks.. that's.. more stuff for you to spend your money on. Anything that removes gold from the system is a sink.. not just mandatory stuff like taxes.

So.. if you have ideas for more things for you to spend your money on.. by all means.. this is the place.

If you just want to tell people how stupid it is to debate this or that or how wrong they are and how stupid an idea is.. please do take it elsewhere..

 

I'll take a risk here but....

Having been around since R9 or so, I have watched what the players did at the start of the game and in a few ways I was one of them trying to get in early to be in a position to capitalize on a market. Namely renting to other players in my POT. I changed my position after a while and now I let new players in for nothing and.... I'm happier with that.

Anyway I've had my concerns about people controlling the markets in Novia and I have asked myself the same question. What makes what worth a certain price. Early players were crafting items and from the very start the prices IMO were set incredibly high. Why? People want those millions. Is it in their right to do so? YES. Absolutely.

The problem? We don't have enough players in the game to make a good market base. Entrepreneurs are trying to sell to entrepreneurs and I think we are stagnating.

We all have the ability to have all the skills and we have the ability to become self sufficient. Then nothing sells because we can get it all unless we get lazy and don't want to hunt for it.

One of the greatest examples in Novia was some of the players wanting a player controlled economy. We go it. One form of player domination over another.

The players wanted regional economies. We had it, sort of when the control points were closed but then the players wanted a mailing system and recalls and those things contradicted the previous.

There was little control on the devs part to shape the game.... They gave us everything we have asked for from a forum of people who were asking for things from their desire and not having a control group/forum to design a balanced game. Only recently have the Devs come through to to undo somethings to not have so many contradictions and plae a bit of balance in Novia.

I've said this many times and I will say it again. The devs did a great thing. They listened to the players aand on the other hand the devs did a bad thing. They listened to the players. lol

The devs I think need to continue listening to the players and as an example @Chris in the last livestream said that we could design our own dungeon rooms and if they were good enough he would add them into the game and give us as the designers 5 copies. These devs are so great for letting us do things in this game that no other games I have played would have done for the players and some of the games I have played I just don't believe they even listened.

However in the future the Devs need to have more control over game mechanics and let us know when one idea would work against or contradict another.


Let the flame begin lol


SO to stay on topic. I don't think we really need a gold sink as much as we need more players.

 

Sorry Bowen I was typing madly while you were responding.

 

Here is a gold sink idea.

Let us melt down gold coins or even Gold COTOs to make gold ingots with so we can craft with them.

A few years ago there was talk of letting us mint our own coins.

Let us use gold coins or cotos for that.

Thinking about it that way. Cotos are so low in value based on some players speculation that crafting with them might be worth more than their U.S. Value. lol