@Phoebus - Arimisia has said that a gold upkeep change to dingbat mines will make it not worth it to her and she would demand a refund. She (or Shango for that matter) has yet to say why that would be a bad thing. A gold upkeep doesn't preclude making a profit from selling comms, it just makes them more comparable to village comms.
why this is a bad thing - because we no longer get to set our prices. A good business person passes that cost off to the consumer thus the admin get the set the price of something we get to sell, the only thing we get to decide is how much 10 hours or however much you put into sticking around to upkeep is worth.
I have given ideas and you just do not care to acknowledge them. I mentioned making commodities more valuable (and I do not mean forced), making them worth something more than in just crafting. I mentioned in our discussion that this "dust" maybe could be bought is an amount of a specific comm to a specific NPC looking for it. I mentioned building projects, being able to create you own aetherroom boxes for manses with a limit - there are any number of things.
You still get to set your prices
It doesn't take 10 hours to upkeep mines, it takes me 1-2 mins to upkeep 61 mines. So at most, it likely takes you 10 mins total to upkeep once (and that's probably on the high side), so you're look at <2 hours a day to fully upkeep them.
You have not given ideas on how to adjust dingbat mines to make them not just essentially free commodities, which is what was asked for.
The other ideas fall into the same pool as 'gold for shrine, constructs costing more comms, org/guild/order additions costing more comms'
None of those address the problem of dingbats mines.
Just as an aside, I believe I said that I would prefer not to get rid of items without something new available as a replacement. Removing and refunding items are absolutely a last resort.
To further complicate matters, upgrades to aetherships and manses have always been non-refundable. As aethermanse upgrades create a loophole whereby you can transfer artifacts to another at no charge, our compromise thinking was, well, okay, so you just would never be able to trade in manse/ship artifacts. Indeed, in many cases (like the mines) there are not physical objects to track (rather they're room flags) and we do not really have a way of tracking who actually purchased mines.
Therefore, if we are forced to remove mines for game stability/fairness/whatever, we are looking at not giving refunds which while covered in the TOS really does make it something I would really rather not do.
Yeah, true, that's a tricky one. They're definitely a problem as it stands, but I don't know how to fix it without refunds/removal being an option. As Falmiis brought up, while a gold cost on upkeep would make it so people can't sell commodities for pennies anymore, if it was low enough that they'd still be undercutting villages and orgs with their sales, it wouldn't actually solve anything. People would just have to give the mine owners more money for the comms. If it was too high and people couldn't sell commodities for profit anymore, I don't think the people with just a few mines for personal use would mind too too much, but it'd be invalidating a huge investment that the big miners made. So...I dunno. It's hard. There probably isn't a perfect solution. Might have to figure out which one is the least bad.
And I kind of agree with the people who aren't too crazy about the new resource. If I have to work with it I will, but I do think it'd probably be best to just make things cost gold directly.
Just a thought for gold buffs, particularly in regards to golden cookies. How about making them give gold as if the gold throttle is a % higher than it normally would be. Maybe this % can be half the value of current gold buffs. So with ten cookies, it'd calculate my gold gains as if my throttle was at 150k instead of 100k. This will give value back to golden cookies without just straight up doubling the amount of gold you get.
I'm totally confused by the credit transfer tax. This would just make me hoard what I have more than I already do and make me less inclined to share what I got (unless there is no tax for buying people artifacts, then that'd still be okay).
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I'm totally confused by the credit transfer tax. This would just make me hoard what I have more than I already do and make me less inclined to share what I got (unless there is no tax for buying people artifacts, then that'd still be okay).
Same. Every so often I toss credits at a newbie to help them earn some skill. A gold tax would be rough for a player like me who doesn't generally carry much gold at any one time (right now I'm running on about 100,000 gold).
"Oh yeah, you're a naughty mayor, aren't you? Misfile that Form MA631-D. Comptroller Shevat's got a nice gemstone disc for you, but yer gonna have to beg for it."
Have the dingbat mines produce raw commodities instead of usable commodities -- things that can be turned in at villages in exchange for gold, and then the villages will process the raw comms into saleable comms. (Lumber instead of wood, marble blocks instead of marble, etc.)
Work this into the supply/demand price adjusting that already exists in each village and implement a system of diminishing returns that also accounts for the usable commodities that are bought directly from the village. (This will be necessary to avoid situations where someone is dumping 1000 raw_gems into a village, buying back 950 of them at 1gp per, and then having the village also tithe 1000 gems to the controlling org.)
This would encourage people to spread their surplus comms around AND put more of the direct comms output into the hands of organizations, where it can be better tracked and accounted for.
It does afford people with dingbat mines some guaranteed revenue, but these numbers will also be subject to control by the admin and the whole process will require additional work on the part of the mine-owners to cash in.
I'm totally confused by the credit transfer tax. This would just make me hoard what I have more than I already do and make me less inclined to share what I got (unless there is no tax for buying people artifacts, then that'd still be okay).
Same. Every so often I toss credits at a newbie to help them earn some skill. A gold tax would be rough for a player like me who doesn't generally carry much gold at any one time (right now I'm running on about 100,000 gold).
That's pretty much where I live, too-- when I do something that generates lots of gold, like bashing in high-level zones, it pretty much always gets spent on something or other.
Jadice, the Frost Queen says to you, "Constant vigilance."
Have the dingbat mines produce raw commodities instead of usable commodities -- things that can be turned in at villages in exchange for gold, and then the villages will process the raw comms into saleable comms. (Lumber instead of wood, marble blocks instead of marble, etc.)
Work this into the supply/demand price adjusting that already exists in each village and implement a system of diminishing returns that also accounts for the usable commodities that are bought directly from the village. (This will be necessary to avoid situations where someone is dumping 1000 raw_gems into a village, buying back 950 of them at 1gp per, and then having the village also tithe 1000 gems to the controlling org.)
This would encourage people to spread their surplus comms around AND put more of the direct comms output into the hands of organizations, where it can be better tracked and accounted for.
It does afford people with dingbat mines some guaranteed revenue, but these numbers will also be subject to control by the admin and the whole process will require additional work on the part of the mine-owners to cash in.
With the gold throttle this isn't actually a bad idea.
Alright, first off, commodity mines do not generate gold (except the gold mine, but Bob is super finicky about it being minted before he'll accept it as payment). What they do is devalue commodities, and move gold from one player's hands to anothers. Inevitably, someone will argue that I don't have a cost on this production aside from a bit of time - and yes, my maintenance costs are basically non-existant (it takes me less than five minutes to maintain all my commodity mines each day, of which I have a total of 125).
However. This 125 commodity mines cost me a grand total of 6,250 dingbats, plus another 350 for my coveralls, for a total of 6,600 dingbats. Let's pretend that I got all my dingbats for one credit each (I didn't, but let's pretend). The credit market at the time I got the majority of these was around 25k each. This means my farm is a total value of 165,000,000 gold, based on those numbers.
Now, my most profitable commodity is sold at 50 gold per, assuming you aren't getting any bulk, or organizational discounts. With my overalls on, I seem to get an average of about 40 commodities per day, per mine. Pretending again that all my commodities are the most valuable (they aren't - fish sells for 2 gold per individually, coal sells for 3, but I'm a big fan of make-believe, so let's keep with it), it means my mines will be generating an average of 5000 commodities a day, with a value of 250,000 gold. That means, if every one of my commodities was my most valuable, and actually sold daily instead of being stockpiled forever like it actually is, that it would take me 660 days, or almost two RL years for those mines to pay for themselves.
Realistically speaking, people do not buy commodities one at a time, they tend to buy bulk, on which I offer discounts (bringing my most valuable commodity from 50 gold down to 36 gold). Furthermore, not all my commodities are my most valuable ones (fish as noted earlier, sells at 2 gold per without any discounts, and rarely moves even with the bulk discount of 1 gold per). So every single commodity mine that is producing fish is generating an average of 40 gold per day, assuming it sells at all - at 50 dingbats worth 25k gold each, that's a mere 31,250 days for that single mine to pay for itself. Or, in other words, over 85 years.
I have not, and frankly, will never recover my costs on the mines. Adding any kind of cost to maintaining them is flat out stupid, and I'm in complete agreement with Arimisia on expecting a refund if that is the route that is taken. Having a gold cost on harvesting would actually make some mines cost me money. As in, I would become poorer for using them, even if the commodities sold (which they won't).
That said, commodity mines are now, and have always been a terrible, terrible idea. If they were done at all (which they shouldn't have been), it should have been a limited time promotional item to keep their numbers down. Deleting the damn things is the best course of action, but that won't happen, because...reasons?
I don't actually have a good solution other than that. But nothing I've read so far has been even remotely a good idea. I really don't see the issue with just saying, "Hey, I made a mistake. For the health of the game, I need to undo this - here is a refund, but I'm going to remove these items now."
As for gold production, this problem existed once before (admittedly, not on quite as large a scale). Once upon a time, astral dropped obscene amounts of gold, and that was solved almost overnight by removing gold drops from node-spawned astral mobs.
Do something similar. Get rid of the "mobs have bonus gold if they aren't killed for a long time" thing. Get rid of most of the gold buffs. Stop making persistent items that give free stuff (maps, genies, commodity mines, etc.). Maybe even cut the base gold of all existing mobs in half. Have some event where an absurd amount of gold is required to resolve it (or simply have an event where the basin is flooded with bandits, and your stockroom gets robbed, and your pockets picked).
No matter what you come up with as a gold sink, short of forcing the gold away from players, there's always going to be some that won't buy into whatever you're trying to sell. There's already a massive gold sink in manses/aetherships. But people don't spend the money to buy a fleet of small ships (partially because there's not enough people to pilot them, partially because the fleets are already built). And people don't spend the money to buy a big ship to compete with other big ships - they just whine about how the people who did build big ships shouldn't benefit from the money they've spent.
The game doesn't need more pseudo-currencies, that will only add to the existing problems - one of which is there is already too many stupid currencies which are completely unnecessary.
The idea of putting a 'soft cap' on the amount of gold you can generate a day is just bad. It was a bad idea for demigod essence, and it's a bad idea now. When it was done for demigod essence, all it did was stop anyone from competing for XP Rank 1. The way to get rank 1 now is hope that Ixion gets shrubbed. And that Krellan doesn't come back. And that Munsia doesn't get unshrubbed. There is a lack of incentive to work for high essence counts, because you can't actually overtake the top people anymore. Your brilliant plan is to do the same thing with gold?
Yeah, because newbies want to play a game where there is zero hope of coming out on top, no matter how hard they work.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the soft cap will solve all of the problems. It is, however, a start to limit the influx of gold. On top of that we will, obviously, need to have some proper gold sinks. Manses won't work; they're a very niche idea, and far from everyone wants to have a large manse. Curios don't work; aside from the fact that plenty of people simply aren't interested, they're also finite: Once you have all the curios, that's it, no more gold sunk. What we need is something repeatable that is as all-encompassing as possible to make it attractive to as many people as possible.
There is also a distinct difference between the gold soft cap and the essence soft cap. The essence soft cap essentially turns into a hard cap once you're past 176m essence, at which point you only get one essence per kill. There's simply no way to get past that point; the people above 180m are essentially untouchable until they start spending essence (which there are no real incentives to do at this point, but that's an entirely different matter). The gold soft cap simply levels the playing field a little bit; you won't have super-artied-basher A who makes 2m gold per hour. Will A still come out on top? Yes, because they will definitely reach the cap every day. They will not be the miles ahead that they were in the past, however, and people will be able to catch up to them unless they work to keep their top position in gold (if that position even matters in the end is an entirely different discussion).
TLDR: Yes, essence dust (or motes, or sparks, or grains, or whatever they're called) won't fix the problems. They will, however, reduce the amount of gold coming in, which is needed for the final solution. Also, the gold cap and the essence cap aren't even remotely the same.
Since when do artifacts have to pay for themselves? They should be for people who craft and want to craft a lot. I was under the impression that this was the intent of the artifact. You shouldn't be buying an artifact for a profit, you should be buying it for the service and that's what it provides, tax or not.
I don't buy a superior rune of fitness with the expectation of it ever paying back a single coin .
(I'm the mom of Hallifax btw, so if you are in Hallifax please call me mom.)
== Professional Girl Gamer == Yes I play games Yes I'm a girl get over it
At most you had people making a few hundred thousand for an hour and then seeing this rate go down significantly as they ran out of things to bash.
The problem was with gold accumulation on mobs and not with how much people were bashing. In fact, I think most of the people making the most gold wouldn't have bashed that many hours in a day at all. Honestly, we just needed to lower the ceiling significantly and raise the floor slightly and we would have seen a huge improvement without necessary telling people that they can only do so much so much bashing each day before their efforts are for naught.
TLDR: Yes, essence dust (or motes, or sparks, or grains, or whatever they're called) won't fix the problems. They will, however, reduce the amount of gold coming in, which is needed for the final solution. Also, the gold cap and the essence cap aren't even remotely the same.
It'd be good if the essence dust was something you could buy though, maybe I missed it but it seems something that you can only random into.
Also I would disagree with the "Manses won't work assessment", manses entirely would work for a specific subset of the population and that is great. What we should be focusing on isn't creating "a" gold sink but creating a variety that target various aspects of the game which then would get more players spending their gold as well as giving them far more things to spend said gold on.
Well, yes; I meant that manses don't work as a general gold sink, since I would imagine the majority of the population doesn't really care that much about them. For that small subset, they work as a gold sink, however that doesn't really help the game in general that much. As for the general gold sink suggestion, my idea is (and has always been) a gold-for-buffs thing. 20k would get you a one-hour 4/10 health buff, or a 4/10 mana buff, or a x/x regen buff, or an XP boost, or a balance/eq buff, etc etc etc. You'd be able to combine them freely, but with the 100k a day limit, you'd hit your limit relatively quickly. Obviously, these numbers are for demonstrative purposes only, and could (and probably should) be tweaked.
Re: deleting mines/map/etc. for the good of the game
This is just like the latest loot bag promotion that got pulled. Unexpected consequences followed a very flawed idea to put them on the game. They were removed and replaced. I don't see why the same logic cannot be applied to the freebie artifacts like comm mines, maps, cornucopia, etc.
Every MMO eventually faces an inflation problem because of the differences between and irreproducible factors between virtual vs real life economies. Lusteria has cracked that up full steam with the many, many additional sources of wealth. It needs to be pulled back.
As has been said many times before, gold sinks already exist in various forms but like Ixchilgal says, unless you forcefully make people buy into them there will be people who don't buy them and continue to hoard. None of these buffs will be useful for the majority of people who have all of this gold hoarded. They either already have enough buffs from arties and other things to bring them to max or they're just not the type of player who cares about buffs at all.
Manses -can- be a sink. There are huge manses and ships out there that would have cost millions of gold. But like all other gold sinks, it's not for everyone.
I have to agree with the idea that comm generating artifacts in no way need to pay for themselves. I bought a bookbinder quill, not once thinking that double vellum production and free magic ink was ever going to be worth 300 credits.
I'm not sure I see what the problem is with changing mines from "upkeep every hour for 10 hours and get free comms" to "pay your gnome workforce x amount of gold and get y amount of comms back (up to a cap per month)". They'd still have value (I'd buy one, probably), as long as x was less than org comm shops. It would still introduce comms to the economy from a non village source, I guess, but would also sink some gold out at the same time.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
@Ssaliss you could also use your suggestion to make people invest in manses, if the buffs are generated by dwellers that require a unique manse room and only provide them to the person that hired them then you have an initial investment plus gold over time. (Can be minimized if they can be in any manse as long as the room is unique)
Some people would just invest enough to get their buffs, others might build up the manse even further with that as a consideration (staff quarters, houses for those really into it). You could also look at other services the denizens could provide (furniture maintenance, mine automation at an appropriate cost). You could also expand it into guild/org specific versions at a higher cost with the money going to the guilds/orgs to help fund the higher costs for expansion and the like.
While I wouldn't exactly say no to that, I think it'd see more use as an outside system rather than tied to manses. But yeah, if that's the way it would go, then sure, that'd work as well.
Because it's non-constructive, dismissive, and insulting to people trying to take part in the conversation.
If you consider that insulting then I find the bar to be pretty low. As I said, there have been a ton of comments that essentially devolve into NIMBY. And this is a problem. These comments distract the conversation and makes it difficult to focus on solutions to the problem. When everyone agrees that the Lusternian economy is broken, then everyone should have to accept that they'll have to shoulder some of the burden. Especially in this case where a proper solution needs to hit everyone's backyard. We need multiple minor sources where gold can disappear to start draining out of the economy, and there needs to be gold output points that hit everyone so that no one person can avoid the use of gold for benefits. Only then will there be a value on the gold. When everyone agrees that there needs to be reintroduced a value then everyone will have to pay the price. Arguments that devolve solely down to NIMBY can and should be dismissed out of hand as adding no value to the discussion.
I am terrible with acronyms. No idea what NIMBY means.
"Not In My Back Yard". The term refers to individuals/arguments that hold in agreement that a given goal is good, but also refuse to sacrifice anything themselves individually to see that good fulfilled. Originally used for arguments against new land developments within the near vincinity of ones home, it's since evolved to encapsulate more general socioeconomic proposals. Hence NIMBY.
And I know you didn't ask about the other two, but for those curious.
"Who will bell the cat" is a short story about mice who has the brilliant idea to put a bell on the cat so they'll all be safer since they will be able to hear when the cat approaches. Unfortunately, no one is willing to run the risk of actually tying the bell around the cat, and so the cat goes unbelled. Essentially NIMBY in a story format.
"Tragedy of the commons" is an economic thought experiment about the dangers/problems about how individual use of shared resources for the benefit of the self ruin things for the masses. It's... not really directly relatable to the complaint about people resisting the proposed changes. I mostly put it in to see if anyone knew enough economic theory to recognize that and call me out on it.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
I'm totally confused by the credit transfer tax. This would just make me hoard what I have more than I already do and make me less inclined to share what I got (unless there is no tax for buying people artifacts, then that'd still be okay).
Same. Every so often I toss credits at a newbie to help them earn some skill. A gold tax would be rough for a player like me who doesn't generally carry much gold at any one time (right now I'm running on about 100,000 gold).
Would it really be such a big problem though? Even keeping the flat rate initially suggested and making it have effect for every single trade would mean that you'd just have to sell one credit at the current ongoing rate in order to recoup any losses such gifts would cost you. It's only a 2% tax currently.
Not that I don't agree with you. I don't think a Tobin tax is practical between private trades. I will maintain that it should be implemented for the credit market though, to prevent the buying up of credits and then reselling them at marked up prices. This helps afford stability in the market.
Now, if the Tobin tax ends up being relevant for private trades as well, it should certainly end up being a percentage rather than a flat rate. If so, it will not hit gifts, since 2% of 0 gold is still 0.
Lastly, even if implemented as is, I don't see this hitting the purchase of artifacts for others. The proposal was for the trade of credits, not the trade of artifacts after all.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
@Ssaliss True, though the reasons I'd expect would be... well manses(not ships) really don't actually offer too much right now. Sure you can put a shop in there and maybe some gear in furniture there to reduce decay timers but that's about it, leaving them as an almost entirely a rp device. And not putting it in a manse obviously would be cheaper due to not having the manse investment.
The latter can be minimised by families, guilds, and orgs offering spaces. Guilds and Orgs specifically might organise a small selection of rooms to enable younger members to access xp buffs with the expectation that you'd eventually move into a family or personal manse.
The former though can only really be improved by actually giving manses something, a tangible benefit from owning them. I'm also imagining hiring aethercrews through the system which I believe was another suggestion and any real reason to go to your manse makes prized a little bit nicer of a trans skill.
@Estarra why make the solution more complex than the problem? Adding a new currency just makes the game ever more feature bloated.
Gold is inflating because there is almost nothing taking gold out of circulation, and gold is being harvested from mobs/maps/etc. in huge amounts. (Simple problem)
1 - Decrease how quickly gold can be harvested from mobs (turn down gold accumulation on mobs/turn down map gold/etc.). 2 - Create a fixed value for gold by having Bob sell bound credits OR lessons at X per (recommend 30-40k per cred)
This creates a gold sink that people will want to use, and you can control how fast people can generate credit income by tuning the amount of gold that mobs produce. If you really want to dissuade people from bashing for credits and not buying them, you can keep the gold cap in place. (However, encouraging people to play your game to generate wealth is good for keeping a population around)
Next: The comm market is insane because of commodity generating items.
Remove these from the game, give a warning period where any contest of ownership can be arbitrated. If no agreement can be reached then they get no refund. Refund the rest of the owners, and give them the option to switch their dingbats to credits.
Look! You've addressed major problems and haven't had to add a bunch of features that will create their own problems! The comm market will stabilize, and you'll see gold starting to leave circulation. You can further tweak credit prices and gold generation to reach a point of stability that you would like to see.
Comments
It doesn't take 10 hours to upkeep mines, it takes me 1-2 mins to upkeep 61 mines. So at most, it likely takes you 10 mins total to upkeep once (and that's probably on the high side), so you're look at <2 hours a day to fully upkeep them.
You have not given ideas on how to adjust dingbat mines to make them not just essentially free commodities, which is what was asked for.
The other ideas fall into the same pool as 'gold for shrine, constructs costing more comms, org/guild/order additions costing more comms'
None of those address the problem of dingbats mines.
And I kind of agree with the people who aren't too crazy about the new resource. If I have to work with it I will, but I do think it'd probably be best to just make things cost gold directly.
Vote no on new resources. We can do it without introducing new shinies.
Work this into the supply/demand price adjusting that already exists in each village and implement a system of diminishing returns that also accounts for the usable commodities that are bought directly from the village. (This will be necessary to avoid situations where someone is dumping 1000 raw_gems into a village, buying back 950 of them at 1gp per, and then having the village also tithe 1000 gems to the controlling org.)
This would encourage people to spread their surplus comms around AND put more of the direct comms output into the hands of organizations, where it can be better tracked and accounted for.
It does afford people with dingbat mines some guaranteed revenue, but these numbers will also be subject to control by the admin and the whole process will require additional work on the part of the mine-owners to cash in.
Vive l'apostrophe!
Alright, first off, commodity mines do not generate gold (except the gold mine, but Bob is super finicky about it being minted before he'll accept it as payment). What they do is devalue commodities, and move gold from one player's hands to anothers. Inevitably, someone will argue that I don't have a cost on this production aside from a bit of time - and yes, my maintenance costs are basically non-existant (it takes me less than five minutes to maintain all my commodity mines each day, of which I have a total of 125).
However. This 125 commodity mines cost me a grand total of 6,250 dingbats, plus another 350 for my coveralls, for a total of 6,600 dingbats. Let's pretend that I got all my dingbats for one credit each (I didn't, but let's pretend). The credit market at the time I got the majority of these was around 25k each. This means my farm is a total value of 165,000,000 gold, based on those numbers.
Now, my most profitable commodity is sold at 50 gold per, assuming you aren't getting any bulk, or organizational discounts. With my overalls on, I seem to get an average of about 40 commodities per day, per mine. Pretending again that all my commodities are the most valuable (they aren't - fish sells for 2 gold per individually, coal sells for 3, but I'm a big fan of make-believe, so let's keep with it), it means my mines will be generating an average of 5000 commodities a day, with a value of 250,000 gold. That means, if every one of my commodities was my most valuable, and actually sold daily instead of being stockpiled forever like it actually is, that it would take me 660 days, or almost two RL years for those mines to pay for themselves.
Realistically speaking, people do not buy commodities one at a time, they tend to buy bulk, on which I offer discounts (bringing my most valuable commodity from 50 gold down to 36 gold). Furthermore, not all my commodities are my most valuable ones (fish as noted earlier, sells at 2 gold per without any discounts, and rarely moves even with the bulk discount of 1 gold per). So every single commodity mine that is producing fish is generating an average of 40 gold per day, assuming it sells at all - at 50 dingbats worth 25k gold each, that's a mere 31,250 days for that single mine to pay for itself. Or, in other words, over 85 years.
I have not, and frankly, will never recover my costs on the mines. Adding any kind of cost to maintaining them is flat out stupid, and I'm in complete agreement with Arimisia on expecting a refund if that is the route that is taken. Having a gold cost on harvesting would actually make some mines cost me money. As in, I would become poorer for using them, even if the commodities sold (which they won't).
That said, commodity mines are now, and have always been a terrible, terrible idea. If they were done at all (which they shouldn't have been), it should have been a limited time promotional item to keep their numbers down. Deleting the damn things is the best course of action, but that won't happen, because...reasons?
I don't actually have a good solution other than that. But nothing I've read so far has been even remotely a good idea. I really don't see the issue with just saying, "Hey, I made a mistake. For the health of the game, I need to undo this - here is a refund, but I'm going to remove these items now."
As for gold production, this problem existed once before (admittedly, not on quite as large a scale). Once upon a time, astral dropped obscene amounts of gold, and that was solved almost overnight by removing gold drops from node-spawned astral mobs.
Do something similar. Get rid of the "mobs have bonus gold if they aren't killed for a long time" thing. Get rid of most of the gold buffs. Stop making persistent items that give free stuff (maps, genies, commodity mines, etc.). Maybe even cut the base gold of all existing mobs in half. Have some event where an absurd amount of gold is required to resolve it (or simply have an event where the basin is flooded with bandits, and your stockroom gets robbed, and your pockets picked).
No matter what you come up with as a gold sink, short of forcing the gold away from players, there's always going to be some that won't buy into whatever you're trying to sell. There's already a massive gold sink in manses/aetherships. But people don't spend the money to buy a fleet of small ships (partially because there's not enough people to pilot them, partially because the fleets are already built). And people don't spend the money to buy a big ship to compete with other big ships - they just whine about how the people who did build big ships shouldn't benefit from the money they've spent.
The game doesn't need more pseudo-currencies, that will only add to the existing problems - one of which is there is already too many stupid currencies which are completely unnecessary.
The idea of putting a 'soft cap' on the amount of gold you can generate a day is just bad. It was a bad idea for demigod essence, and it's a bad idea now. When it was done for demigod essence, all it did was stop anyone from competing for XP Rank 1. The way to get rank 1 now is hope that Ixion gets shrubbed. And that Krellan doesn't come back. And that Munsia doesn't get unshrubbed. There is a lack of incentive to work for high essence counts, because you can't actually overtake the top people anymore. Your brilliant plan is to do the same thing with gold?
Yeah, because newbies want to play a game where there is zero hope of coming out on top, no matter how hard they work.
There is also a distinct difference between the gold soft cap and the essence soft cap. The essence soft cap essentially turns into a hard cap once you're past 176m essence, at which point you only get one essence per kill. There's simply no way to get past that point; the people above 180m are essentially untouchable until they start spending essence (which there are no real incentives to do at this point, but that's an entirely different matter). The gold soft cap simply levels the playing field a little bit; you won't have super-artied-basher A who makes 2m gold per hour. Will A still come out on top? Yes, because they will definitely reach the cap every day. They will not be the miles ahead that they were in the past, however, and people will be able to catch up to them unless they work to keep their top position in gold (if that position even matters in the end is an entirely different discussion).
TLDR: Yes, essence dust (or motes, or sparks, or grains, or whatever they're called) won't fix the problems. They will, however, reduce the amount of gold coming in, which is needed for the final solution. Also, the gold cap and the essence cap aren't even remotely the same.
They should be for people who craft and want to craft a lot. I was under the impression that this was the intent of the artifact.
You shouldn't be buying an artifact for a profit, you should be buying it for the service and that's what it provides, tax or not.
I don't buy a superior rune of fitness with the expectation of it ever paying back a single coin .
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
At most you had people making a few hundred thousand for an hour and then seeing this rate go down significantly as they ran out of things to bash.
The problem was with gold accumulation on mobs and not with how much people were bashing. In fact, I think most of the people making the most gold wouldn't have bashed that many hours in a day at all. Honestly, we just needed to lower the ceiling significantly and raise the floor slightly and we would have seen a huge improvement without necessary telling people that they can only do so much so much bashing each day before their efforts are for naught.
It'd be good if the essence dust was something you could buy though, maybe I missed it but it seems something that you can only random into.
Also I would disagree with the "Manses won't work assessment", manses entirely would work for a specific subset of the population and that is great. What we should be focusing on isn't creating "a" gold sink but creating a variety that target various aspects of the game which then would get more players spending their gold as well as giving them far more things to spend said gold on.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
This is just like the latest loot bag promotion that got pulled. Unexpected consequences followed a very flawed idea to put them on the game. They were removed and replaced. I don't see why the same logic cannot be applied to the freebie artifacts like comm mines, maps, cornucopia, etc.
Every MMO eventually faces an inflation problem because of the differences between and irreproducible factors between virtual vs real life economies. Lusteria has cracked that up full steam with the many, many additional sources of wealth. It needs to be pulled back.
Manses -can- be a sink. There are huge manses and ships out there that would have cost millions of gold. But like all other gold sinks, it's not for everyone.
I'm not sure I see what the problem is with changing mines from "upkeep every hour for 10 hours and get free comms" to "pay your gnome workforce x amount of gold and get y amount of comms back (up to a cap per month)". They'd still have value (I'd buy one, probably), as long as x was less than org comm shops. It would still introduce comms to the economy from a non village source, I guess, but would also sink some gold out at the same time.
Some people would just invest enough to get their buffs, others might build up the manse even further with that as a consideration (staff quarters, houses for those really into it). You could also look at other services the denizens could provide (furniture maintenance, mine automation at an appropriate cost). You could also expand it into guild/org specific versions at a higher cost with the money going to the guilds/orgs to help fund the higher costs for expansion and the like.
"Not In My Back Yard". The term refers to individuals/arguments that hold in agreement that a given goal is good, but also refuse to sacrifice anything themselves individually to see that good fulfilled. Originally used for arguments against new land developments within the near vincinity of ones home, it's since evolved to encapsulate more general socioeconomic proposals. Hence NIMBY.
And I know you didn't ask about the other two, but for those curious.
"Who will bell the cat" is a short story about mice who has the brilliant idea to put a bell on the cat so they'll all be safer since they will be able to hear when the cat approaches. Unfortunately, no one is willing to run the risk of actually tying the bell around the cat, and so the cat goes unbelled. Essentially NIMBY in a story format.
"Tragedy of the commons" is an economic thought experiment about the dangers/problems about how individual use of shared resources for the benefit of the self ruin things for the masses. It's... not really directly relatable to the complaint about people resisting the proposed changes. I mostly put it in to see if anyone knew enough economic theory to recognize that and call me out on it.
Not that I don't agree with you. I don't think a Tobin tax is practical between private trades. I will maintain that it should be implemented for the credit market though, to prevent the buying up of credits and then reselling them at marked up prices. This helps afford stability in the market.
Now, if the Tobin tax ends up being relevant for private trades as well, it should certainly end up being a percentage rather than a flat rate. If so, it will not hit gifts, since 2% of 0 gold is still 0.
Lastly, even if implemented as is, I don't see this hitting the purchase of artifacts for others. The proposal was for the trade of credits, not the trade of artifacts after all.
The latter can be minimised by families, guilds, and orgs offering spaces. Guilds and Orgs specifically might organise a small selection of rooms to enable younger members to access xp buffs with the expectation that you'd eventually move into a family or personal manse.
The former though can only really be improved by actually giving manses something, a tangible benefit from owning them. I'm also imagining hiring aethercrews through the system which I believe was another suggestion and any real reason to go to your manse makes prized a little bit nicer of a trans skill.
Gold is inflating because there is almost nothing taking gold out of circulation, and gold is being harvested from mobs/maps/etc. in huge amounts. (Simple problem)
1 - Decrease how quickly gold can be harvested from mobs (turn down gold accumulation on mobs/turn down map gold/etc.).
2 - Create a fixed value for gold by having Bob sell bound credits OR lessons at X per (recommend 30-40k per cred)
This creates a gold sink that people will want to use, and you can control how fast people can generate credit income by tuning the amount of gold that mobs produce. If you really want to dissuade people from bashing for credits and not buying them, you can keep the gold cap in place. (However, encouraging people to play your game to generate wealth is good for keeping a population around)
Next: The comm market is insane because of commodity generating items.
Remove these from the game, give a warning period where any contest of ownership can be arbitrated. If no agreement can be reached then they get no refund. Refund the rest of the owners, and give them the option to switch their dingbats to credits.
Look! You've addressed major problems and haven't had to add a bunch of features that will create their own problems! The comm market will stabilize, and you'll see gold starting to leave circulation. You can further tweak credit prices and gold generation to reach a point of stability that you would like to see.