The answer to comms is to make it so people are no longer getting them essentially for free. The easy answer to add an upkeep cost to dingbats mines per comm they generate. This will keep the comms gathered from the dingbat mines competitive with the village comms.
This could be implemented upon harvesting, when you try to harvest, it compares the village prices and charges you the average of the village comm prices. If you want to lower the prices, you can then do the commodity quests to lower prices to bring them down or just pay the upfront cost which won't be the cheapest, but it won't be the most expensive.
re:gold costs for shrines. I think shrines can be more involved answers. I don't understand the argument against this. Orgs shouldn't be paying for shrines, Orders should be. Why would a shrine be 'free' inside your own territory and not outside your territory? I don't feel like 'others can put their shrines at smobs' is really a valid argument. Yes, there are inherent imbalances between planes in that regard. It's not a reason to dismiss shrines in general having a gold cost to raise.
I mean, it really isn't in my backyard. I have sufficient artifacts that increases in commodity costs for essentials won't really impact me due to doubling sips and smokes (and I've suggested dramatically nerfing that artifact anyways), I'm not a tradesperson, I don't use comms for anything but Wildewood once in a blue moon, and I am neither a hoarder of gold nor a participant in the credit market.
In other words, I stand nothing to lose personally from deleting gold and comms out of the game. It's still not a great stand alone option, or even one in any significant sense paired with other solutions. There will come a point at which some gold and comms will need to be pulled out by fiat, but from orgs not individual players.
So why argue as if the comment is aimed at you? There's been plenty other NIMBY comments that the comment is better aimed at than your argument. And the fact that it isn't aimed at you doesn't change the fact that there's been plenty instances of the NIMBY effect in this thread.
Because it's non-constructive, dismissive, and insulting to people trying to take part in the conversation.
The answer to comms is to make it so people are no longer getting them essentially for free. The easy answer to add an upkeep cost to dingbats mines per comm they generate. This will keep the comms gathered from the dingbat mines competitive with the village comms.
This could be implemented upon harvesting, when you try to harvest, it compares the village prices and charges you the average of the village comm prices. If you want to lower the prices, you can then do the commodity quests to lower prices to bring them down or just pay the upfront cost which won't be the cheapest, but it won't be the most expensive.
re:gold costs for shrines. I think shrines can be more involved answers. I don't understand the argument against this. Orgs shouldn't be paying for shrines, Orders should be. Why would a shrine be 'free' inside your own territory and not outside your territory? I don't feel like 'others can put their shrines at smobs' is really a valid argument. Yes, there are inherent imbalances between planes in that regard. It's not a reason to dismiss shrines in general having a gold cost to raise.
I'm fine with an upkeep cost for mines; it will provide a "floor" for them. I do think that the upkeep cost should be scaled based on comm type instead of a flat rate (because 50g for a piece of meat or a fish is an awful lot). Apparently Glom sells fish for 2 gold per, and the same for rope.
As far as the shrines go, I am more talking about what I expect to happen vs. what one might reasonably think. Should orders pay for shrine powers? Yes. Will they? When used for org defense, I don't think so. I fully expect organizations to fund it as a defensive strategy.
Also: Why can you make a War shrine in your territory and not outside? The exact same reasoning can be used for a gold cost, and it's not dismissing "shrines in general" from having one (as I said, I'd be willing to do a compromise in the middle on this). Neutral territory is balanced, it doesn't give anyone inherent advantages/disadvantages, and I can see it actually being useful as a drain (long-term, I suspect all neutral territory shrines will be dead / mostly stay dead, but would still sink gold out over time when someone puts one up for whatever purpose and that would not be paid for by organizations in general).
Adding large gold costs that primarily hit orgs probably won't help much, as all orgs have enormous gold stockpiles that are, counterintuitively, not really a problem, because they don't move. Gold that ends up in org coffers is gold that by and large isn't contributing to the inflation problem. The same applies to gold costs that would primarily hit personal stockpilers. Ideally, gold sinks should be available and attractive to as many individuals as possible.
Comm sinks, on the other hand, make a lot of sense to hit orgs, since theoretically they're tithed comms from villages and players can always sell comms to orgs. I'm not sure how well this would counterbalance the enormous glut of comms flooding in from mines and the like, but it would hopefully help at least. One problem I can imagine is, facing comm deficits, orgs up the amount of gold they buy commodities for, encouraging private commodity suppliers to sell comms to their org. But now the huge stockpiles I mentioned above are entering play, and now more gold is getting dropped into the economy.
A certain amount of gold cost would push orgs to actually try and actively soak up player gold. You're right in that the huge stockpiles of orgs aren't directly issues in terms of the economy as that gold is already sunk, but they are issues in that they do not give orgs incentives to in turn give their players incentives to participate in good economic practice.
1. Put all currently existing manses/homesteads in stasis - while in stasis, nothing will generate from mines/ships can't fly/can't put upgrades in the manse/containers won't open/etc. This can be a gnafia event.
2. Make players/orgs pay to have manses unfrozen out of stasis with gold. This is going to be either a per room or per manse basis. Make sure the price roughly corresponds to how much a manse is worth in gold. Orgs will be fine. SOL on deepnight.
3. Make all future manse-related items be purchasable with gold only. No more cr/dbs/etc. if manse = gold only.
This solves the following things: retros manses to be a goldsink, makes a sustainable future goldsink, takes gold out of the game by having players pay to have their manses restored to normal, doesn't add any new shiny to the game, and punishes/renders current mines/generators temporarily unusable until they're nerfed.
I dunno, considering how valuable aetherships are and how people are really fond of their e-housing, I feel that they're way more popular than curios or tonics or whatever you guys think of.
I mean, do we really need more new e-currency right now.
Tbh, I was thinking of curios, but manses are more widely appealing. If you want a goldsink, you want something you're going to be generally interested in improving, not something that you "finish" and then stop putting effort into (like curios).
The problems with that are 1) Org gold is currently not really a problem, 2) It's a one-time 'sink' that feels more than a little underhanded, 3) It causes no ongoing drain on gold nor incentive to spend after the first burst, 4) It makes the somewhat difficult to obtain manses even harder to start and expand than they already are for anyone the gold throttling wasn't already introduced to address.
Uh, the ongoing gold drain is implied in future manse upgrades. Pretty sure the game's just going to keep adding stuff for manses and there are those who just want to continue adding rooms to their houses for RP/aethership pursposes.
Kind of frustrating to see most everybody agree that we need less gold, less comms, and then strongly disagree on any solution to get rid of them that doesn't involve them getting more free stuff.
This is what I found really odd during the latest Sun event when Arthar'rt got destroyed. People got to give up their gold to take part in the event and presumably save places that might be of meaning to their characters but all I heard OOCly were complaints about having to give up gold.
Re: Aethermines. As deleting them is out of the question, how about nerfing them, or changing them to not require upkeep but only generating maybe a quarter as much as they currently do with full upkeep? I know some people paid a lot of dingbats for these, but the reality is that if we want commodities to mean something again without drastically increasing the amount of commodities required for crafting something has to give.
I don't think villages generating commodities is a problem at all. It's actually a small amount and organisations actually need to win revolts to get the benefits.
Similar to aethermines, unfortunately maps, traps, genies and poteens are all just rich get richer schemes. I really think there should be a limit on maps especially. Let's say you can only get the benefit from 5 or 10 maps per weave. Further reads will always return with nothing. Again, yes, people paid for these things but if we're so worried about what the haves have we will never be able to fix anything.
Um, my understanding is that the Paladins (an org) paid a lot of gold to protect various places. They were even paying to protect the Presidio for some reason until I stepped in to switch it to Scorpion Caverns.
Also, the Nekotai paid me back what I spent on Scorpion Caverns in gratitude for it not going explodey.
Not sure who was complaining about it (but that's also part of what fuels my assertion that orgs will pay for org-related things).
Um, my understanding is that the Paladins (an org) paid a lot of gold to protect various places. They were even paying to protect the Presidio for some reason until I stepped in to switch it to Scorpion Caverns.
Also, the Nekotai paid me back what I spent on Scorpion Caverns in gratitude for it not going explodey.
Not sure who was complaining about it (but that's also part of what fuels my assertion that orgs will pay for org-related things).
The fact that orgs were the ones who ended up paying for most of it just proves my point. I heard a lot of players in various clans I was in complaining about it.
Could make a way to build upon guild halls. That's already a huge gold sink, but the process to do it is super unwieldy because it requires so much patron input and approval so no one ever does it. I know I wanted to add to SD guildhall but the effort required just made me MEH and forget about it.
The only thing I complained about, and Calor and I paid out of personal gold and did not see a dime of gold refunded (I even informed the Serenwilde leadership about it), was that 30 people were in the room until it was said "You have to give us gold" then 8 people were in the room. The rest were all - "Oh... spend gold you say? Well... oh look a revolt!"
I wanted to pay for expansions to the Ebonguard guildhall, I was told that I could speak to my org patron since the guild patron doesn't really exist, but the org patron at the time kind of stopped responding. At that point it had already been a fair bit of time involved, so I just shrugged and went on with other things.
A streamlined process would definitely be nice.
At the same time, though, that's still just absorbing org-gold (unless people go so gung-ho at it that they end up needing to do gold-drives, I guess).
Could make a way to build upon guild halls. That's already a huge gold sink, but the process to do it is super unwieldy because it requires so much patron input and approval so no one ever does it. I know I wanted to add to SD guildhall but the effort required just made me MEH and forget about it.
With the guild overhaul in the works I don't think this will be the immediate solution that we're looking for. It's definitely something I'd like to see once the overhaul is complete though.
Honestly, putting a cost on harvesting the aethermines or "drastically" reducing the production would get an outcry enough that would probably force a refund because I know I for one would not continue down that road. The moment the game makes my mines useless in my eyes is the moment they need to compensate for it, it is not what I bought and not what I would buy if that is how it was when it first came out.
The soft, hollow voice of Nocht, the Silent resounds within your mind as His words echo through the aether, "Congratulations, Arimisia. Your mastery of vermin cannot be disputed."
I am terrible with acronyms. No idea what NIMBY means.
I'm ok with the 'dust' ideas. Please also keep the option to get goop - gold could always ultimately be turned into credits and thus artifacts, I don't see why 'dust' couldn't also have that ultimate ability to work towards something (else) we can't get any other way.
I really really don't like the idea of taxing dingbat/credit transfers. How many people use banks for personal use? No one wants the extra gold loss for no reason. I can only see taxing transfers further increasing prices on credits/dingbats as people account for it in their prices, or discouraging trade.
I still think it would be more productive to give incentives for spending gold - outright buying tonics/candies, make it easier to offer to divine, limited or one-off use artifacts (like the one way bubblix idea I had and I am totally fine with making it so no one can follow) or one time access to planar fulcrux, and even the ability to convert gold to the new essence. I'm sure there are other ideas that have been thrown around too. Like the older manse/ship artifacts perhaps being available for gold.
tl;dr encourage spending, not taxes for the sake of taxes.
1. Put all currently existing manses/homesteads in stasis - while in stasis, nothing will generate from mines/ships can't fly/can't put upgrades in the manse/containers won't open/etc. This can be a gnafia event.
2. Make players/orgs pay to have manses unfrozen out of stasis with gold. This is going to be either a per room or per manse basis. Make sure the price roughly corresponds to how much a manse is worth in gold. Orgs will be fine. SOL on deepnight.
3. Make all future manse-related items be purchasable with gold only. No more cr/dbs/etc. if manse = gold only.
This solves the following things: retros manses to be a goldsink, makes a sustainable future goldsink, takes gold out of the game by having players pay to have their manses restored to normal, doesn't add any new shiny to the game, and punishes/renders current mines/generators temporarily unusable until they're nerfed.
I know this is probably going to be unpopular, but this is the type of solution that we need. I know it sucks to have to lose value on things you bought in the past, but the point is unless we take extreme measures like these we're never going to fix the problem.
The question is do we actually want to fix the problem or are we just going to take half-measures that don't make a dent on the economy and walk away patting ourselves on the back calling it a job well done?
It's going to be super unpopular, but it's also the simplest solution and doesn't require building entirely new systems or making crazy taxes on credit transfers.
People already want manses. People will continue to want manses. make them pay gold for it.
The issue was finding a way to make this applicable to past purchases and my solution addresses that.
Honestly, putting a cost on harvesting the aethermines or "drastically" reducing the production would get an outcry enough that would probably force a refund because I know I for one would not continue down that road. The moment the game makes my mines useless in my eyes is the moment they need to compensate for it, it is not what I bought and not what I would buy if that is how it was when it first came out.
As long as you're getting comms essentially for free, dingbat mines remain a problem. Feel free to outcry, but I don' t think it's unreasonable to expect dingbat mine commodities to have competitive pricing with village commodities.
Is there a particular reason why you would be against this other than 'it makes my life harder'?
Bottom line is they need to be changed, and you're going to be effected if they are. You can continue to complain, or you can come up with ideas that keep them useful, but not a problem.
Could make a way to build upon guild halls. That's already a huge gold sink, but the process to do it is super unwieldy because it requires so much patron input and approval so no one ever does it. I know I wanted to add to SD guildhall but the effort required just made me MEH and forget about it.
I agree, introducing an automated purchasing and upgrade system for org buildings and faction halls is a really great idea.
RE:Aethermanses, I've always had 100% the opposite impression, that aethermanses were not particularly attractive beyond a small handful of rooms (if more than one, and if that) to the majority of players.
0
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
That's unfortunately the problem. We have a broken pipe that's flooding the house with water. The easiest thing to do is to fix the broken pipe, then clean out the water. Instead, we're trying to design fancy Rube Goldberg machines to come up with ingenious ways to try to soak up the water, but without doing anything about the broken pipe.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
What game are you playing lol. Have you seen how many shops and ships exist in the game.
Even if people only buy 1 room manses, those manses add up, especially if those 1 room manses have things like stasis orbs. You're still going to collect money on them even if it's only a pittance compared to huge org ships like Ilosia.
Yes, there is a weird undercurrent where quite a few posts in this thread (and the last) seem to just be requests for a new shiny for the game. That doesn't really address the problem.
Tbh, this is the most palatable version of my manse idea, haha.
Ilosia is not huge. Nyx is huge. Ilosia is just right.
0
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
Oops, replies came in before my post. It was addressing the fact that we can't remove/drastically overhaul aethermines.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
Definitely agree with increasing the 'cap' that one can offer gold-wise at any one time - I understand that it was likely put in so that someone didn't accidentally offer their life savings in one go, given that it automatically offers everything in your 'hands', but 1000 gold is a very small amount these days - heck, if you find a denizen that has not been killed/begged in some time, you can easily get 1000+ gold from that single denizen.
No idea how easy/hard it would be to do, but the command really should be changed to a variable command so you can OFFER X GOLD rather than just OFFER GOLD and having to put what you don't want to offer in a backpack.
Kiss of the Enchantress hisses eerily, "Let them fear, and despair."
Gold to harvest aethermines. That you have to purchase with an inordinate number of dingbats. That you have to upkeep once an hour, for 10 hours, every 'weave'/day in order to prove at all worthwhile...because that much cost to get them for 1-3 pieces of something for people who actually HAVE LIVES outside the game and cannot be playing most of the day, even one day a week, but spread out their activity over multiple days with short stints in game, totally reasonable....changed to require the expenditure of gold to harvest.
Aethermines. Something they pay far in excess of value for, 50bs. At 1:1 (if you're exceedingly lucky), 50cr per. Cheapest price of credits on the market currently ICily is 41499g. Or 2,074,950g. Per single mine. For the mine itself, no harvesting right away. THEN, upkeeping said mine, once an hour/IC day, for 10d. 30-40 or so comms it nets I believe., if FULLY upkept, far less if you only managed enough activity for a few upkeeps, or just one/none.
Let's say said comm is one of the more expensive, and can be sold for 100g per...don't know of any off hand at that price, but hugely inflated to make a point doesn't hurt. 30 comms as baseline per RL day, and assume the person has no life/can afford to somehow live in Lusternia without a RL job, friends, family etc to upkeep each and every day. 3,000gx7days=21,000g. 98+ days to break even, or breaking into 4 RL months later. Presuming you're also not KEEPING any of it, or using for your own trades, but selling for profit purposes.
Now you want to add an additional gold cost to harvest the thing? How is this a good idea in anyone's mind?
^-- That's 500 consecutive days of gathering things. Players can (and do!) buy things for the long haul, believe it or not. I don't think that argument is valid. As far as an ongoing MMO goes, 98 days is actually pretty quick-- we only get 1 shot at a wondercrystal every 12 days from a wondercornucopia, after all, yet lots of us made one!
Now, other arguments can be valid, such as how much effort it takes to upkeep them. I can see adjusting that, if they are made to have a gold cost instead (after all, part of the reason for the time-cost is because they are otherwise "free").
That doesn't mean we shouldn't address them at all, though.
Comments
This could be implemented upon harvesting, when you try to harvest, it compares the village prices and charges you the average of the village comm prices. If you want to lower the prices, you can then do the commodity quests to lower prices to bring them down or just pay the upfront cost which won't be the cheapest, but it won't be the most expensive.
re:gold costs for shrines. I think shrines can be more involved answers. I don't understand the argument against this. Orgs shouldn't be paying for shrines, Orders should be. Why would a shrine be 'free' inside your own territory and not outside your territory? I don't feel like 'others can put their shrines at smobs' is really a valid argument. Yes, there are inherent imbalances between planes in that regard. It's not a reason to dismiss shrines in general having a gold cost to raise.
As far as the shrines go, I am more talking about what I expect to happen vs. what one might reasonably think. Should orders pay for shrine powers? Yes. Will they? When used for org defense, I don't think so. I fully expect organizations to fund it as a defensive strategy.
Also: Why can you make a War shrine in your territory and not outside? The exact same reasoning can be used for a gold cost, and it's not dismissing "shrines in general" from having one (as I said, I'd be willing to do a compromise in the middle on this). Neutral territory is balanced, it doesn't give anyone inherent advantages/disadvantages, and I can see it actually being useful as a drain (long-term, I suspect all neutral territory shrines will be dead / mostly stay dead, but would still sink gold out over time when someone puts one up for whatever purpose and that would not be paid for by organizations in general).
A certain amount of gold cost would push orgs to actually try and actively soak up player gold. You're right in that the huge stockpiles of orgs aren't directly issues in terms of the economy as that gold is already sunk, but they are issues in that they do not give orgs incentives to in turn give their players incentives to participate in good economic practice.
Villages need to stop tithing comms for nothing.
1. Put all currently existing manses/homesteads in stasis - while in stasis, nothing will generate from mines/ships can't fly/can't put upgrades in the manse/containers won't open/etc. This can be a gnafia event.
2. Make players/orgs pay to have manses unfrozen out of stasis with gold. This is going to be either a per room or per manse basis. Make sure the price roughly corresponds to how much a manse is worth in gold. Orgs will be fine. SOL on deepnight.
3. Make all future manse-related items be purchasable with gold only. No more cr/dbs/etc. if manse = gold only.
This solves the following things: retros manses to be a goldsink, makes a sustainable future goldsink, takes gold out of the game by having players pay to have their manses restored to normal, doesn't add any new shiny to the game, and punishes/renders current mines/generators temporarily unusable until they're nerfed.
I mean, do we really need more new e-currency right now.
Tbh, I was thinking of curios, but manses are more widely appealing. If you want a goldsink, you want something you're going to be generally interested in improving, not something that you "finish" and then stop putting effort into (like curios).
#4 isn't a real problem, lol.
Re: Aethermines. As deleting them is out of the question, how about nerfing them, or changing them to not require upkeep but only generating maybe a quarter as much as they currently do with full upkeep? I know some people paid a lot of dingbats for these, but the reality is that if we want commodities to mean something again without drastically increasing the amount of commodities required for crafting something has to give.
I don't think villages generating commodities is a problem at all. It's actually a small amount and organisations actually need to win revolts to get the benefits.
Similar to aethermines, unfortunately maps, traps, genies and poteens are all just rich get richer schemes. I really think there should be a limit on maps especially. Let's say you can only get the benefit from 5 or 10 maps per weave. Further reads will always return with nothing. Again, yes, people paid for these things but if we're so worried about what the haves have we will never be able to fix anything.
Also, the Nekotai paid me back what I spent on Scorpion Caverns in gratitude for it not going explodey.
Not sure who was complaining about it (but that's also part of what fuels my assertion that orgs will pay for org-related things).
A streamlined process would definitely be nice.
At the same time, though, that's still just absorbing org-gold (unless people go so gung-ho at it that they end up needing to do gold-drives, I guess).
I'm ok with the 'dust' ideas. Please also keep the option to get goop - gold could always ultimately be turned into credits and thus artifacts, I don't see why 'dust' couldn't also have that ultimate ability to work towards something (else) we can't get any other way.
I really really don't like the idea of taxing dingbat/credit transfers. How many people use banks for personal use? No one wants the extra gold loss for no reason. I can only see taxing transfers further increasing prices on credits/dingbats as people account for it in their prices, or discouraging trade.
I still think it would be more productive to give incentives for spending gold - outright buying tonics/candies, make it easier to offer to divine, limited or one-off use artifacts (like the one way bubblix idea I had and I am totally fine with making it so no one can follow) or one time access to planar fulcrux, and even the ability to convert gold to the new essence. I'm sure there are other ideas that have been thrown around too. Like the older manse/ship artifacts perhaps being available for gold.
tl;dr encourage spending, not taxes for the sake of taxes.
I know this is probably going to be unpopular, but this is the type of solution that we need. I know it sucks to have to lose value on things you bought in the past, but the point is unless we take extreme measures like these we're never going to fix the problem.
The question is do we actually want to fix the problem or are we just going to take half-measures that don't make a dent on the economy and walk away patting ourselves on the back calling it a job well done?
People already want manses. People will continue to want manses. make them pay gold for it.
The issue was finding a way to make this applicable to past purchases and my solution addresses that.
Is there a particular reason why you would be against this other than 'it makes my life harder'?
Bottom line is they need to be changed, and you're going to be effected if they are. You can continue to complain, or you can come up with ideas that keep them useful, but not a problem.
RE:Aethermanses, I've always had 100% the opposite impression, that aethermanses were not particularly attractive beyond a small handful of rooms (if more than one, and if that) to the majority of players.
Even if people only buy 1 room manses, those manses add up, especially if those 1 room manses have things like stasis orbs. You're still going to collect money on them even if it's only a pittance compared to huge org ships like Ilosia.
Yes, there is a weird undercurrent where quite a few posts in this thread (and the last) seem to just be requests for a new shiny for the game. That doesn't really address the problem.
Tbh, this is the most palatable version of my manse idea, haha.
No idea how easy/hard it would be to do, but the command really should be changed to a variable command so you can OFFER X GOLD rather than just OFFER GOLD and having to put what you don't want to offer in a backpack.
Aethermines. Something they pay far in excess of value for, 50bs. At 1:1 (if you're exceedingly lucky), 50cr per. Cheapest price of credits on the market currently ICily is 41499g. Or 2,074,950g. Per single mine. For the mine itself, no harvesting right away. THEN, upkeeping said mine, once an hour/IC day, for 10d. 30-40 or so comms it nets I believe., if FULLY upkept, far less if you only managed enough activity for a few upkeeps, or just one/none.
Let's say said comm is one of the more expensive, and can be sold for 100g per...don't know of any off hand at that price, but hugely inflated to make a point doesn't hurt. 30 comms as baseline per RL day, and assume the person has no life/can afford to somehow live in Lusternia without a RL job, friends, family etc to upkeep each and every day. 3,000gx7days=21,000g. 98+ days to break even, or breaking into 4 RL months later. Presuming you're also not KEEPING any of it, or using for your own trades, but selling for profit purposes.
Now you want to add an additional gold cost to harvest the thing? How is this a good idea in anyone's mind?
Pilgrim completions: 100 (Today: 0/3, Streak: 0/5)
Bard completions: 100 (Today: 0/3, Streak: 0/5)
Scholar completions: 100 (Today: 0/3, Streak: 0/5)
Power completions: 100 (Today: 0/3, Streak: 0/5)
^-- That's 500 consecutive days of gathering things. Players can (and do!) buy things for the long haul, believe it or not. I don't think that argument is valid. As far as an ongoing MMO goes, 98 days is actually pretty quick-- we only get 1 shot at a wondercrystal every 12 days from a wondercornucopia, after all, yet lots of us made one!
Now, other arguments can be valid, such as how much effort it takes to upkeep them. I can see adjusting that, if they are made to have a gold cost instead (after all, part of the reason for the time-cost is because they are otherwise "free").
That doesn't mean we shouldn't address them at all, though.