Talk:Gold

The main issue with the whole gold fiasco is... people can't spend as fast as they can make it. Which basically makes for a stagnant economy. It used to be such that gold was a great equalizer - it was the basis of our economy and allowed for new and old players alike to trade equipment around with a relative idea to value and cost. A newer player could probably save up enough to buy the item that they had no chance of loading, and an older player could slightly overpay for an item they didn't feel like loading...

The main reason that there's so much gold in the game is two-fold. There's just too much of it with not much to realistically spend it on, and there's too much equipment already in the game so that trading is less frequent than gift giving.

It used to be that virtually every item had some form of gold value among the player base, now it's either traded for other needed items, donated, blindly stored, or given away.

Housing is a great money-pit, however it has it's limit -- namely when people have enough housing for what they could possibly need. There is a definitive end to that means. Not to mention, the players that need the gold to afford the housing can't sell their items to older players - simply put because they probably already have a half dozen of the item to begin with.

Getting back to the main issue - what can we do about it... There needs to be some way of removing gold from the game. Removing it in large chunks at a time (housing, black market (yeah right!), etc) can only be looked at as temporary fixes, as sooner or later, the supply catches up with the demand, and we're in the same boat. There needs to be a method to steadily remove gold from the game at a pace at or close to the rate that it enters the game.

We need to look at what people already spend money on, and think about increasing those costs, or possibly add ways for them to spend money in such a way that it's not tooo obvious that we're trying to cut the gold down by too much.

A few ideas I have floating around are:

• Increase the cost of blank scrolls - one of the main things people spend money on is making scrolls of 'pigho' (haste). Currently the scrolls run about 3k each, which at that cost, and the rate that they can be created, basically everyone in the game can have an extra attack for the cost of about 10 minutes of leveling. Increase the cost of blank scrolls to 20-30k?

• Have a few special "pay to play" zones. Similar to the arena from Final Fantasy X, we could have a mob arena where people could pay large prices to face some tough mobs (maybe with % chances of loading items, etc - maybe to be worked into the quest/title/etc system).

• Make granted spells/skills purchasable for large sums of gold. Have there be a limit to the maximum number of grants you could purchase. For example, a warrior could purchase a maximum of 5 grants of "restore" for 2 million gold each grant. (maybe that's too high - just an example). Could have a limit of which classes could get which spells, could have a grant store with an actualized list, so that people couldn't just buy anything...

• Depending on which direction we go with the runes idea, we could have the empty socketed items that runewords are to be placed purchasable by shop only. (restrict to not allow players to have in their own personal shops).

• Allow players to attempt to "purchase" enchanted items. Have an enchanted shop sell rhinestone earrings, and other normally enchanted items. Put a price on them of 100k to 250k per, and give them roughly the same % chance of getting a perm effect as an enchanting wizard. (I'm not sure if this is easily codeable or not)

I think that's it for now. I'm sure I'll have more later on...

--Gargamel 13:47, 7 November 2005 (PST)

• Some Other Ideas (We talked about these Last Night BZ)

• Blank Scrolls for Level Spells over level 30 sold at exorbitant prices.

• Potions that cast spells not used in the game like the Inspire ones that used to load randomly.

• A guide that wanders certain roads that would be paid by players to "take" them to zones that they cant easily find (like Valley) for an exorbitant price.

--Nyn

A couple of quick ideas on gold:

• In times past, super stores were what did the most as far as taking cash out of the game. The Black market was one, later on the inset shop was another. In a manner of speaking this can become the rich getting richer, but it's worth an idea.

• to coincide with the inset store, make more items customizeable with insets. So say we sell a sanctuary gem for 100 million. Maybe we make floating eq and other item slot items have multiple slots in them. That makes pieces of equipment much more customizeable, which could generate sales.

• ability to pay for immortal enchants and insets?

• pay to create clan items, which might add something to clans. We'd have to discuss the cost, but that would be good. Pay to create then pay to purchase?

• Maybe to take advantage of Kahlans zone, which loads actual guns you have to buy ammo for them? And offer a range of ammo?

-- Fire