Gold sinks from the old forums.

Ssaliss

Blessings bought with gold.

• Different kinds of blessings (more XP, DMP, damage, influence-buff, perhaps custom ambients).
• Duration specified by buyer (a two-hour blessing would cost the same as two one-hour blessings).
• Should probably temporarily go away if someone enters an area controlled by an org they're enemied to (village, ethereal/elemental/cosmic area, etc).

Convert gold to demi-essence.

Renting some artifacts for gold.

Collectibles (curio crates for gold, other collectibles; this would only have a limited effect though).

Investing in villages (more comms produced? Better feelings? Something else?).

Manse upgrades.

• Manse map (owner purchases it and can map the rooms in the manse, which show up on MAP).
• Manse rift (would hold considerably more than a personal rift, but would be usable by owner only).
• Manses have an effect on you personally (better prestige, perhaps?).
• Family-deeded manses provide honour to the family it's deeded to (diminishing returns a'la DMP).
• More manse furnitures that give stat benefits (table for con, jungle-gym for dex, etc).
• Interior decorator (special ambients for the room, some minor benefits in the room).
  

Aetherspace guide (pay a gnomish aethercrew to quickly and automatically take you to an aetherdock. Limited to Prime only, perhaps?).

Aether crews for hire (escalating costs, so no solo aetherbashes unless you're willing to throw down some heavy cash).

Carriage ride (stand at a Nexus and get a quick ride to any village on Prime).

Gold donations that would give you temporary titles/special greetings/etc.

One-shot refill of Endurance and/or Willpower. Would need to be balanced so it would cost more than you'd get bashing down your endurance/willpower again.

Stable hands (give them feeds and they'll feed your beast while it's in the stables, meaning you wouldn't have to get your beast out every four hours).

Rent-an-Eventru (for a large sum of gold, you'd have him follow you around for a day).

The ultimate gold sink.

I hope I got them all... Feel free to post even more suggestions though!

Draylor

People would pay to have Eventru follow them round for a day? o.O

Sounds like something I'd give good gold to avoid.

Alacardael

Yes to village investment!

Soraya

give <all> gold to Soraya.

Excellent gold sink. I can spend in a RL week for you all.

Estarra

Regarding blessings, I'm dubious about adding more buffs outside of karma. However, inspired by an idea on another thread, what if karma blessings cost gold as well as karma? In other words, for each point of karma you need, you must also pay 5,000 gold (or whatever). Maybe you could spend double the gold if you don't have the karma. (Curses, however, would work the same way in preventing blessings but not cost gold to lift.)

Estarra

Blessings bought with gold.

Regarding blessings, I'm dubious about adding more buffs outside of karma. However, inspired by an idea on another thread, what if karma blessings cost gold as well as karma? In other words, for each point of karma you need, you must also pay 5,000 gold (or whatever). Maybe you could spend double the gold if you don't have the karma. (Curses, however, would work the same way in preventing blessings but not cost gold to lift.)

Convert gold to demi-essence.

 Not sure about that. That's basically buying experience with gold. How much would 1 essence cost? 10,000 gold?

Renting some artifacts for gold.

Never been crazy about that.

Collectibles (curio crates for gold, other collectibles; this would only have a limited effect though).

We did that for travel curios!

Investing in villages (more comms produced? Better feelings? Something else?).

Hmm, maybe. Would have to be a limit and be expensive. Maybe like 50,000 per comm to max out that comm?

Manse upgrades.

Manse map (owner purchases it and can map the rooms in the manse, which show up on MAP).

We've investigated that and there are too many issues that it probably isn't feasible.

Manse rift (would hold considerably more than a personal rift, but would be usable by owner only).

Not sure I understand. Isn't that basically a shop store?

Manses have an effect on you personally (better prestige, perhaps?).

Bit vague.

Family-deeded manses provide honour to the family it's deeded to (diminishing returns a'la DMP).

Not sure I understand. You can buy manses already. You want to deed it to a family and get honour for it? Is that gameable?

More manse furnitures that give stat benefits (table for con, jungle-gym for dex, etc).

Don't really like stat benefits (unless you mean they only are in effect while in the manse).

Interior decorator (special ambients for the room, some minor benefits in the room).

I think you can do that already with a manse artifact.

Ssaliss

Hmm. I can't see any immediate drawbacks to it, although 5k might be a bit much. It'd mean 250k gold per blessing, which is a bit steep. Unless you mean upkeep? 5k per hour for the first, 10k for the second, 20k for the third... hrm. Not a bad thought, but it'd remove the soft cap on blessings (so people would run around with all nine blessings during big things, like ascension, even if it would cost 2.555.000 per hour; Xenthos etc. would be able to afford that without a problem after bashing for a few weeks).

EDIT: I might've misunderstood the upkeep cost... I thought it was power-of-two, but reading the helpfile disagrees with that. So instead a single blessing would be 5k, two blessings would be 20k, three blessings would be 45k... That makes it a fair bit harsher, but it'd still make it possible to get a set of nine blessings for very special occasions.

Estarra

Hrm, I can't seem to post the rest of my post!

Estarra

Aetherspace guide (pay a gnomish aethercrew to quickly and automatically take you to an aetherdock. Limited to Prime only, perhaps?).

Not crazy about that.

Aether crews for hire (escalating costs, so no solo aetherbashes unless you're willing to throw down some heavy cash).

Don't believe this is doable.

Estarra

Carriage ride (stand at a Nexus and get a quick ride to any village on Prime).

Only to villages your city/commune controls? Really don't think this would be used unless the cost is so low as to be meaningless. It's not that hard to get to a village except if you're a newbie (in which case you don't have the gold to spend).

Gold donations that would give you temporary titles/special greetings/etc.

We could increase the cost of titles. (Not sure what other titles you mean.) Not sure what special greetings are.

One-shot refill of Endurance and/or Willpower. Would need to be balanced so it would cost more than you'd get bashing down your endurance/willpower again.

I like this. Would have to be a special place you go to. Of course, it'd be expensive!

Stable hands (give them feeds and they'll feed your beast while it's in the stables, meaning you wouldn't have to get your beast out every four hours).

Maybe. Not sure how doable it is.

Rent-an-Eventru (for a large sum of gold, you'd have him follow you around for a day).

Eventru is welcome to hire himself out if he wants!

The ultimate gold sink.

 Increase bashing damage with gold? I don't think that will fly!

 

Ssaliss

Re: "The ultimate gold sink", it's not increasing bashing damage. It's basically throwing money at them to damage them :P

Phudmog

Estarra said:

Regarding blessings, I'm dubious about adding more buffs outside of karma. However, inspired by an idea on another thread, what if karma blessings cost gold as well as karma? In other words, for each point of karma you need, you must also pay 5,000 gold (or whatever). Maybe you could spend double the gold if you don't have the karma. (Curses, however, would work the same way in preventing blessings but not cost gold to lift.)

One comment on this, drawing from a different thread about the cost of initial investment in the game.  One of the best parts about karma is that anyone can get lots of it.  For someone starting out, having a little experience boost or damage boost from blessings is really great.  If you're going to add gold to the cost of blessings straight out, that hurts people with few resources but not so much with those who are already established and have easier access to high-gold bashing grounds, running a shop, etc.

Xenthos

Estarra: you say you "did a gold sink for curios".

My response to that would be that no, you did not.

You made some things available but you priced them so highly that they do not function as a gold sink; they might as well not even exist.

That's something that needs to be considered with any newly implemented sinks as well. If you overcharge, you might as well not even bother putting in the time to code it. Note that "overcharging" is *not* related to how much gold currently exists, but instead to the players' perception of what their gold is worth in comparison to what they are getting.

Pricing it for the few just means that not only won't those few invest, but nobody else can afford to.

Ssaliss

Re: Manse rifts. Aside from not being in a shop, not costing 750cr, not being able to be used by anyone but yourself, then perhaps like shop rifts. A better comparison would be a stationary personal rift that's a bit bigger.

To be frank, it wouldn't even make anything new possible, really. People can already create a personal manse and drop comms there (or at least of the type of comm that doesn't decay, which involves at least herbs and inks). So why would people want it? Because I assume they (like me) don't like seeing massive groups of comms just lying around. Plus, a manse rift would be able to be placed in an open manse where everyone can enter.

Dys

Xenthos said:

Estarra: you say you "did a gold sink for curios".

My response to that would be that no, you did not.

You made some things available but you priced them so highly that they do not function as a gold sink; they might as well not even exist.

I happily spent a lot of gold, much more than I'd ever had. I wouldn't have spent gold on pretty much anything else, so it worked very well for some people.

The travel curios couldn't have been priced much less because of the Wheel. The Wheel can be used as an engine for turning coins into pretty much anything else - truefavours, credits, presents, dingbats, lessons - at varying exchange rates. Curios are the fuel and they can be bought for credits, gold or lessons. Gold is the easiest thing to get without spending real money, so it's sensible that the travel curios are priced at a fair premium over the credit ones. For the biggest packages the prices are 3 credits per curio or 90k gold, so 30k gold per credit equivalent.

You can already get blessings for gold (sort of) with the wheel, truefavours and crit bonuses anyway. Buy curios for gold, rub, spin. Expensive but doable.

Part of the difficulty of trying to reduce credit prices with gold sinks is that they make gold more desirable, so people selling credits will want to sell for higher prices. Not an easy thing to solve, particularly with the vast difference between the ability of a novice to acquire gold and the ability of an arti'd knowledgeable demigod. Both competing for the same resources.

Xenthos

Uh, sure you could sell it for less.

Just reduce the gold generated by the Wheel.

This is even what I suggested back when the Admin raised that as a concern. :P

Lavinya

maybe offering gold for god essence could use a boost? Make gold fall out of your inventory on death (even from packs etc), forcing people to use banks and thus have fees when they want to withdraw? Have your divine withdraw a tithe from your funds once per year which is converted to essence? Just throwing out some more ideas to chew on

Ssaliss

Gold for god essence is pretty good, I think. You get 5 essence per gold, IIRC, which would mean 20 gold per esteem (if one were to make such a comparison); currently, esteem is sold for 10-13 esteem (with a few outliers at 18, 30 and 200). Sure, esteem can be boosted through figurines, but that's another gold sink.

Siam

Estarra said:

Regarding blessings, I'm dubious about adding more buffs outside of karma. However, inspired by an idea on another thread, what if karma blessings cost gold as well as karma? In other words, for each point of karma you need, you must also pay 5,000 gold (or whatever). Maybe you could spend double the gold if you don't have the karma. (Curses, however, would work the same way in preventing blessings but not cost gold to lift.)

• Duration specified by buyer (a two-hour blessing would cost the same as two one-hour blessings).

Combine the two of them, please!

Karlach

Can't say I like the idea of blessings costing gold, sure it works for the cash rich at the endgame level, but for the new kid levelling up and just wanting a Karma blessing, that's 250k they probably won't have.

Eventru

I'm pretty sure (in fact, I'm certain) that most people will do just fine without karma blessings. Especially newbies. Indeed, it might be nice to cut back a little on the buffs, and resolve the situation with people wandering around with 5-6 karma blessings without too much effort outside of offering corpses.

Svorai

Estarra said:

One-shot refill of Endurance and/or Willpower. Would need to be balanced so it would cost more than you'd get bashing down your endurance/willpower again.

I like this. Would have to be a special place you go to. Of course, it'd be expensive!

This sounds like a great idea. But it would have to be ridiculously expensive + take a bit of time (so instead of taking an hour to several hours to regen willpower/endurance, make it be 10 minutes or so), or else the Chessboard wouldn't be as valued. I could see this being used during Great Hunts and Ascension.

Would be awesome if this was a public bathhouse, maybe as an addition to / near the Triple Junction Inn? Might even be a place to go to relax in general. If you can't afford certain treatments that fix your willpower/endurance in 10 mins, then maybe a standard willpower/endurance regen would be in effect in the room.

Ssaliss

Svorai said:

Estarra said:

One-shot refill of Endurance and/or Willpower. Would need to be balanced so it would cost more than you'd get bashing down your endurance/willpower again.

I like this. Would have to be a special place you go to. Of course, it'd be expensive!

This sounds like a great idea. But it would have to be ridiculously expensive + take a bit of time (so instead of taking an hour to several hours to regen willpower/endurance, make it be 10 minutes or so), or else the Chessboard wouldn't be as valued. I could see this being used during Great Hunts and Ascension.

Would be awesome if this was a public bathhouse, maybe as an addition to / near the Triple Junction Inn? Might even be a place to go to relax in general. If you can't afford certain treatments that fix your willpower/endurance in 10 mins, then maybe a standard willpower/endurance regen would be in effect in the room.

Well, if we assume a Demi can bash up 100k per hour, then that's a minimum of what it would have to cost. Double that since it's both endurance and willpower, and then add a little more... Say, 300k per pop? That's about the ballpark that I had imagined, at least. Could be a bit more, perhaps.

However, it can't cost too much. If you put a pricetag of 2m on it, then that means people simply won't use it, meaning it loses all its purpose of being a goldsink.

Svorai

I think in the 300k-600k range would be alright. It puts it in the same sort of gold-to-credit range of kissable lips (not that that's a standard to go by, as it fluctuates). I'd prefer it to be on the lower end of that range, so I could afford it at times, too... not all of us are bashing machines, but then... only those who are bashing/pking/grinding are going to use it.

Dys

Does an arena fight refresh you at the end? Or possibly just killing yourself somewhere friendly?

Kiradawea

Heartstopping has been done within org territory to refresh willpower and endurance yes.

Enyalida

Xenthos said:

Estarra: you say you "did a gold sink for curios". My response to that would be that no, you did not. You made some things available but you priced them so highly that they do not function as a gold sink; they might as well not even exist. That's something that needs to be considered with any newly implemented sinks as well. If you overcharge, you might as well not even bother putting in the time to code it. Note that "overcharging" is *not* related to how much gold currently exists, but instead to the players' perception of what their gold is worth in comparison to what they are getting. Pricing it for the few just means that not only won't those few invest, but nobody else can afford to.

Indeed. The thing to keep in mind here is that you should not be pricing things super high. 

- 250k gold for a blessing means that no one gets blessings (except for the already very rich who are going to get richer via blessings+events), and little gold is taken out of the system. That would have the added side effect of making karma a useless statistic that everyone would walk around with maxed, as karma curses are already quite pointless. (As are several of the blessings.)

EDIT: Also, missing from the list are things that orgs can spend gold for. If the org is spending gold on things, they will hold more fundraisers and sales of various sorts. The gold flows into the org coffers, and out through the org-level gold sinks.

Ssaliss

Well, feel free to post some ideas for org-wide gold drains!

Zvoltz

Enyalida said:

EDIT: Also, missing from the list are things that orgs can spend gold for. If the org is spending gold on things, they will hold more fundraisers and sales of various sorts. The gold flows into the org coffers, and out through the org-level gold sinks.

We are pretty open ended about things orgs can purchase. I don't know that there can be a definitive list since if you ask your org patron for something, in most cases we will try to do it for you if it is possible to do and won't cause balance problems.

Enyalida

We couldn't get a permanent commemorative sacred fire, sniffle. 

Anyways, something more routine, bonus-y, and non-admin-overseen would work a lot better for a goldsink. Something that the players can initiate, go through with, and upkeep (or not) that doesn't add entirely new sections to the nation or anything. Something like:

-Automated org shop directories. This costs per shop you have on, with other restrictions available. At the first, it'd be in an inconvenient place, like the Library. Moved to be more central to the shopping area with a bit more cash input. At first, it would only show which shops have any given item, but not how much they are selling for.

-Potential crafting bonuses to the org facility. These could even be potentially split and limited. So, the Serenwilde alembic could be upgraded to make improved batches of Moonwater, requiring less essence, or something. Or you could get a tattoo speed upgrade to the facilities. These could even be recurring costs, you have to pay your commune/city npc's to maintain the upgraded facilities.

-Improved guard abilities, especially for forests. With more ground to cover, some sort of weaker perimeter alert npc, that is cheaper/doesn't cost power, but has a gold upkeep. You expend gold to equip existing guards with doodads that help. This won't see much use outside of forests, though, as cities only have a few exits to cover and can plant overwhelming guard stacks anyways.

-Improved library cataloging, if the code permits. Some kind of stage upgrade. It would be great to be able to set up temporary stages for performances in different locations, for instance!

-Postal upgrades, like express mail that reaches people off of the Prime plane.

-Org tattoos? 

-Some kind of org aetherspace/aetherflight thing that makes it easier (during flares) for players who simply cannot afford to dump ~$85 dollars on a skillset that is useless to them personally, so that they can participate in the aetherbattle (the one that counts...).

EDIT: -Some kind of travel, subsidized by the org, to common org places. Go from Serenwilde to the Hills (I know it's short, but whatever), or the Peak. Like the carriage on the roads, but managed by the org.

As it is now orgs right now only spend gold on guards, and that's only when they capture a new area (which will turn more profit than the guards cost). That's it, nothing else. As treasurer of Serenwilde I haven't allocated gold TO any ministry for a very long time, and even when we were regularly placing new guards, it was negligible compared to revenues. The way ministries are set up, there really isn't any reason for any of them to be doing anything involving gold at all, right now. It really doesn't feel like a government unless you have things to spend on, and all we've got is revenue. 

Kiradawea

Remind me. Constructs don't cost gold to construct now, do they? Could reintroduce that. Also, theoretically you can research more constructs for gold. That already exists as a potential option.