I don't even own the things, but I've been seeing a lot of this shortsighted mentality in a lot of different places. It's getting rather frustrating. As to the gold offering, would certainly turn into one means of gold sinking....both for essence count, and Shrine raising/defiling. But just opens a can of worms for Orders that's a headache for all save those with the funds already to support it.
One idea would be much what was done with curio packages....there's one, Travel Curios, that can be purchased with gold. Issue is, few see the value of Travel curios over others (despite an increased celerity of one extra room helping a lot more than most are willing to bother thinking about), if the same was offered for other Curio types, you've created one highly viable market for the gold expenditure right there. Can use the same pricing as the Travel Curios as well, maybe reduce the chance of rares from said packages slightly from whatever the current level is (much as I'd hate that, it's one other means, since Curio of Curios cannot replace the Rare items), but try that.
Another, a gnome or Bob himself, gone to for the purpose of trading gold for Aethergoop/dingbats directly. Using some high value per each....100k=1 Aethergoop, 50k=1db. Aimed at the moneybags causing this issue, but also allows a viable in game measure for those unable to afford promotionals to get Dingbats or Aethergoop for some of the items that they may desire, even if just 10 Aethergoops to customize things they purchase with credits. Also would mean the reduction of gold from hunting/influencing can be reversed to stop punishing smaller players for the behavior of others, and have another avenue for that gold stress to flow.
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?
Because undermining the commodity market is part of the problem with the way things are going. Buying comms from villages sucks gold out of the system. Buying comms from players does not. It keeps it in the system.
The current suggestion doesn't mean they can't make a profit on the comms. It just means the comms will be more competitive with village pricing and gold will be sucked out of the system.
If you're not willing to take the necessary steps to fix things because you'll personally be affected, you're being part of the problem and not the solution. Come up with ideas rather than baseless complaints.
I am not someone with tons of gold. As long as I can pay my stable fees and keep my shop alive, I'm set. None of my concerns have been about not wanting to have my gold taken away. I'm all for removing the huge payouts on things and would gladly launch the couple dingbat mines I bought when they were released into the sun if it meant the things stopped existing entirely. It is good to see that the large free commodity payouts from other sources are up for removal. My rift is packed full of thousands of comms, and has been even since it was only once a year from my solstice stocking. It's absurd, and I don't think I've ever said otherwise. I also think that the amount of gold that denizens can accumulate is far too high and should be dialed back considerably.
When it comes to addressing what people already have, I am primarily concerned with being as certain as we can that the majority of the solutions we go with feel like an addition to the game, rather than something that's a burden. While the goal is to remove surplus gold and resources, it should be accomplished in such a way that people feel like they are gaining something and/or participating by parting with their wealth. It should be an exchange, even if the exchange is for something intangible (e.g., the satisfaction of being at the top of the list of gold offerings to your God this cycle) as opposed to something concrete like an item or buff (also valid, but we shouldn't feel limited to these!) It's more work to think of those sorts of solutions than it is to say "just add upkeep costs to everything", but I think it's worthwhile to put in the effort.
The happiness of the playerbase, and the fun that people have in the game, these are very important things to consider. I'm well aware that you can't make everyone happy; some people will complain no matter what, sometimes about things that are silly! But the inevitability of illogical complaints doesn't mean everyone with a concern should be dismissed. Please understand, some negative feedback is given with a positive attitude. I want us to work together to find solutions that make Lusternia a more enjoyable place for everyone.
The % of people with your mindset for expenditure @Xenthos, is relatively smaller than the lot that would be impacted by such an overwhelming change. Cannot produce balance by only looking at the outliers alone, the problem group is a small subsect, so offer alternative means to bleed the issue to a manageable level with something positive in exchange they could make use of to desire it, without overbearing sweeping changes that hit you like antibodies fighting bacteria (i.e. wiping out healthy tissue around the infected to remove the 'problem', and leaving a lot of collateral damage that the body just rolls with, even if it turns fatal from too much)
What does that do to address the commodity availability issue, though? Or are you just stating that we should have an essentially unlimited supply of commodities forevermore?
For the record, I do have dingbats mines (not to the extent of Arimisia) and maps, and genies. These changes will directly affect me and I'm still on board for them.
Because undermining the commodity market is part of the problem with the way things are going. Buying comms from villages sucks gold out of the system. Buying comms from players does not. It keeps it in the system.
The current suggestion doesn't mean they can't make a profit on the comms. It just means the comms will be more competitive with village pricing and gold will be sucked out of the system.
If you're not willing to take the necessary steps to fix things because you'll personally be affected, you're being part of the problem and not the solution. Come up with ideas rather than baseless complaints.
If you read my next post, you'll note I actually wouldn't be personally affected. I hunt a lot already, and have two active trades I actually run services to others for to make money. No need for aethermines when I don't have a manse with the space to hold them, nor patience to bother with upkeeping when I've other things to focus on. This won't affect me personally, but will affect quite a few I know, same as it would for yourself. So try a different approach to discredit, mm?
Because undermining the commodity market is part of the problem with the way things are going. Buying comms from villages sucks gold out of the system. Buying comms from players does not. It keeps it in the system.
The current suggestion doesn't mean they can't make a profit on the comms. It just means the comms will be more competitive with village pricing and gold will be sucked out of the system.
If you're not willing to take the necessary steps to fix things because you'll personally be affected, you're being part of the problem and not the solution. Come up with ideas rather than baseless complaints.
If you read my next post, you'll note I actually wouldn't be personally affected. I hunt a lot already, and have two active trades I actually run services to others for to make money. No need for aethermines when I don't have a manse with the space to hold them, nor patience to bother with upkeeping when I've other things to focus on. This won't affect me personally, but will affect quite a few I know, same as it would for yourself. So try a different approach to discredit, mm?
How about you actually read the post and instead of complaining about it, come up with ideas.
@Arimisia has already made it clear that any kind of change she'll see as 'not worth it' and demand a refund. I'm sure you're just arguing for her sake. The rest of us over here are trying to make smart, helpful, reasonable changes that will help fix the problems.
But fine, I'll cease commenting. Already offered several other ideas that appear to have been overlooked, which is expected. You lot wish to shoot yourselves in the foot, so be it, I've given my opinion on the matter.
Though the 98 days figure is again, assuming the owner doesn't use or keep the comms for themselves or their trade. Realistically the value would be significantly higher, and that's only for one single aethermine in terms of value/reward. Multiply that by however many aethermines are in question.
I don't even own the things, but I've been seeing a lot of this shortsighted mentality in a lot of different places. It's getting rather frustrating. As to the gold offering, would certainly turn into one means of gold sinking....both for essence count, and Shrine raising/defiling. But just opens a can of worms for Orders that's a headache for all save those with the funds already to support it.
One idea would be much what was done with curio packages....there's one, Travel Curios, that can be purchased with gold. Issue is, few see the value of Travel curios over others (despite an increased celerity of one extra room helping a lot more than most are willing to bother thinking about), if the same was offered for other Curio types, you've created one highly viable market for the gold expenditure right there. Can use the same pricing as the Travel Curios as well, maybe reduce the chance of rares from said packages slightly from whatever the current level is (much as I'd hate that, it's one other means, since Curio of Curios cannot replace the Rare items), but try that.
Another, a gnome or Bob himself, gone to for the purpose of trading gold for Aethergoop/dingbats directly. Using some high value per each....100k=1 Aethergoop, 50k=1db. Aimed at the moneybags causing this issue, but also allows a viable in game measure for those unable to afford promotionals to get Dingbats or Aethergoop for some of the items that they may desire, even if just 10 Aethergoops to customize things they purchase with credits. Also would mean the reduction of gold from hunting/influencing can be reversed to stop punishing smaller players for the behavior of others, and have another avenue for that gold stress to flow.
I haven't actually seen anybody who owns dingbat mines defending their continued existence yet.
Arimisia did.
Problem is, the way they are now is broken (just like the maps were, and I railed against those maps for years before they got a look). Sometimes things are Just Too Good, and when it comes to stuff that generates resources it's best to look at how much awesome stuff you got out of them than to complain that they no longer give you as much awesome stuff (while accepting that they still give some!).
It's worth complaining if they get nerfed to the sake of complete uselessness, but not just if they get adjusted to a more balanced state of being, imo.
I'd just like to point out that, from a newer player perspective, the amount of currency already in the game is already confusing. There's:
gold
lessons
lesson pools (unsure how those are different, but I can't spend the pooled ones)
credits
bound credits
dingbats
sticky dingbats
racetrack tickets (haven't found the racetracks yet)
Czigny coins
goop (unsure what this does)
others?
There are also a wide range of consumeable items, on top of all the "basics" like armour, curatives, etc, as well as random org items, quest components, etc. Here are the consumeables I know about:
candies (unsure where to get these beyond the wheel)
consumeable artifacts (eg like golden lips)
curios (I kinda view these in the same boat as credits/artifacts - they aren't a currency, but they are one more thing to track and wade through)
probably almost certainly missing some!
Now, I find it fun figuring out and learning about buffs and I like tracking "stuff" I've accumulated, but I think people forget just how complex this game is as a newcomer. I'm still learning a lot and I've been playing like 2 months. More currencies make this acclimation harder and slower, which doesn't help with retention. I already find curios very annoying and convoluted to deal with. A new form of currency would not only complicate simple tracking of a player's assets, it would also make standard gameplay more tedious - for example, instead of just going to the aetherplex and buying gold tonic when you are buying everything else before bashing, you'd have to gather the new dust/trade for it, find the merchant, buy from there.
Gold devaluing is something I've seen tackled in many games. I've seen some MUDs take more preventative stances on this, with checks on how much gold can be generated, based on how much exists. The MUDs where I've seen that work, however, were all closed-loop economies: gold generated out of a specific fixed reserve (quests sometimes gave 0 gold if they had been done too often), which was refilled by gold sinks, and controlling commodity sources was a PK generator in its own right. It sounds like Lusternia currently suffers from "external" gold/comm sources, though.
Some games, like MOBAs or MMOs, tackle it by periodically introducing new shiny things, like new champions, new skills for certain zones (eg flying), or new expansions (which usually shift a lot of gold around as even hoarders need the new versions of things). Maybe that concept could be applied to Lusternia, but the trouble will be finding a motivating gold sink reward that isn't just a reskinning of existing currency.
In my new to Lusternia, but played many games view, the solution needs to be two-fold: periodic bandaid solutions to attempt to flush out stored gold (eg, exclusive x promo via IG merchants every y RL months), coupled with tinkering behind the scenes. The current gold cap may address the second part of this. It also sounds like most gold is coming into the system via methods which favor certain subsets of players, but I'm not an economist, so I'm not going to dig into that.
I haven't seen a single idea from @Shango to address aethermines
But to your other ones
Gold to goop/dingbats doesn't help anything, it just changes the currency. Changing curio packages to gold is a temporary solution until people have those curios and then, they don't take any more gold out.
@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.
As a note, most artifacts don't pay for themselves ever. My squad item that generates gold, for example, will basically never pay itself off because it only applies to gold drops from squad hunts, and only 5% of that which is dropped. Not only is 90 days, or even a full year, an extraordinarily short period in which an artifact physically generates a profit, it also numbers among the extremely few artifacts that actually serve that function. It's an outlier. The argument that it should be turning a profit easily and quickly is not generally how the artifact system works.
ALSO saying an item that disrupts the game at large for the benefit of a few is not "short sighted." It's literally opposite. Saying that things should remain problematic because they are "as advertised," is a real crap attitude to take. I don't care how much you paid, you aren't the only one playing the game. "I paid for it," is an acceptable excuse for broken mechanics precisely never.
I haven't actually seen anybody who owns dingbat mines defending their continued existence yet.
Arimisia did.
no I didn't - said so long as I was refunded I wouldn't be mad at all an I know another with a lot of mines like myself that is in the same boat.
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."
Honestly, we are addressing the other things that people can buy that spit out huge piles of resources at them, and I don't think the mines need special treatment.
Instead of adding gold upkeep, I'd like to place a hard limit on the amount you can own of each type, and refund people for what they had over that limit. I don't think they'd be a huge deal if you couldn't have so, so many of them, on top of all the free comms other stuff has been giving away for years now. If they're being allowed to stay, they do need to be dialed back quite a bit, and if adding gold upkeep would cause people to ask for refunds anyway...
Except refunds aren't even on the table for negotiation. A hard coded limit on how many you can have would be wonderful, but it wouldn't do anything for the ones in existence already.
I have one mine right now, a gems mine and I honestly ignore it because I'm not interested in upkeeping it every hour. I already gemcut on most hours, and that's more tedium than I want. I wouldn't mind seeing it get some limitations put on it, something to add a drawback for having so many.
Avurekhos says, "Dylara's a PvP menace in my eyes, totes rekting face."
The eye of Dylara materialises in your hands and flings itself around your neck, tightening incomprehensibly until it is irremovable. Perfectly clean, this eyeball has been wrenched from the socket of Dylara. It has been animated by some unusual force, constantly looking around itself as if in shock or fear. It is bathed in a light covering of white flames that roll endlessly over its surface. A single chain of empyreal metal pierces either side of the eye, allowing it to be worn around the neck.
I feel this new resource is a bandaid solution. We've already got too many different measures of value: comms, gold coins, credits/dingbats/aethergoop/crystals, tonics, cookies, the list goes on. So if whatever this new resource is called, when it starts showing up, people will hoard it. But these numbers are tweakable! So is the gold drop. But this resource can be spent on shiny things! So could gold be used for shiny things. I've seen credits traded for tonics, or many other forms of in-game value. What is the difference between people hoarding gold, hoarding tonics, hoarding newstardust, or whatever?
We need to differentiate between gold (as a numeric value) versus buying power. It doesn't matter if a person makes 10k gold or 10m gold for a given hunting spree, excepting where fixed gold prices don't fluctuate to match gold inputs.
Or think of it this way: if everyone in the world suddenly earned 100x what they currently earn, individual buying power and effort-to-benefit ratio would eventually stabilize back where it was once everyone's accounting caught up. The exceptions would be when there are fixed costs that do not likewise receive a 100-fold increase.
So the question is: are we troubled when we see numbers with multiple zeroes behind them? Or are we trying to fix a problem in the typical player's buying power and effort-to-benefit ratio? I see that we're somehow ashamed or troubled by the numbers on the credit market, in some strange notion that those GP values are in any way related to the GP values in other games. But the very easy solution there is to take all the gold existing in the game and multiply it by .01. Take the fixed gold costs and multiply them by .01. Take all gold inputs and multiply them by .01. As soon as everyone's accounting catches up, the credit market should look like 400 per credit. This will magically make a lot of people feel better, while doing absolutely nothing about the economy.
And that might be a worthwhile thing to do, if we seriously feel this will increase the appeal of Lusternia to other IRE players. But it ignores some very real problems that still need to be addressed: economy is about value changing hands, and in Lusternia, that has slowed down tremendously since the game's inception.
I guess the short summary of my post here is: what are we trying to accomplish with this change? I feel like we've got so many different perspectives here about what's wrong with the economy that our goal is nebulous.
@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.
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."
Are refunds a no-go because they're not items that can be handed over simply with the tradein command, and it would be a tricky pain to manage? Might be able to come up with a solution to that. Or is it something else? Understanding why it's not offered as an option would be helpful.
Why wouldn't you be able to set your prices? You still would be able to, and could set them lower than villages would to boot-- you just would have a floor under which selling them would no longer be profitable (the amount spent to harvest them). I mean, before manse comm farms, everyone had to calculate the cost of buying their comms from orgshops / villages.
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.
Fixing the mines is a moot point. The damage is already done and the commodity market is flooded beyond years. This change to the mines would only cause the cheapest places to sell at a higher rate to pay for their mines or to compensate for laziness.
Renting an artifact would be the most efficient way to get gold out of the market. Perhaps have a limited market of renting an artifact like a monthly auction or something? That way the Xenthos' of the world can spend all their gold preventing enemies from getting it.
For the new resource: I thought the Overhaul change was to make the cost of everything easier to get into, and one of the definitions of cost was the overload of knowledge. We don't need another layer, we probably need layers taken away far more than another layer of things to learn.
2014/04/19 01:38:01 - Leolamins drained 2000000 power to raise Silvanus as a Vernal Ascendant.
2014/07/23 05:01:29 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Munsia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:07 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Arimisia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:58 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Lavinya as a Vernal Ascendant.
Gold sinks don't address the problem until the cause of the problem is addressed. Infinite aethermanse costs are not long term. They'll just remove gold now, and in a year we will be having this conversation again. Gotta fix the holes in the boat before we bail it out.
Comments
One idea would be much what was done with curio packages....there's one, Travel Curios, that can be purchased with gold. Issue is, few see the value of Travel curios over others (despite an increased celerity of one extra room helping a lot more than most are willing to bother thinking about), if the same was offered for other Curio types, you've created one highly viable market for the gold expenditure right there. Can use the same pricing as the Travel Curios as well, maybe reduce the chance of rares from said packages slightly from whatever the current level is (much as I'd hate that, it's one other means, since Curio of Curios cannot replace the Rare items), but try that.
Another, a gnome or Bob himself, gone to for the purpose of trading gold for Aethergoop/dingbats directly. Using some high value per each....100k=1 Aethergoop, 50k=1db. Aimed at the moneybags causing this issue, but also allows a viable in game measure for those unable to afford promotionals to get Dingbats or Aethergoop for some of the items that they may desire, even if just 10 Aethergoops to customize things they purchase with credits. Also would mean the reduction of gold from hunting/influencing can be reversed to stop punishing smaller players for the behavior of others, and have another avenue for that gold stress to flow.
Because undermining the commodity market is part of the problem with the way things are going. Buying comms from villages sucks gold out of the system. Buying comms from players does not. It keeps it in the system.
The current suggestion doesn't mean they can't make a profit on the comms. It just means the comms will be more competitive with village pricing and gold will be sucked out of the system.
If you're not willing to take the necessary steps to fix things because you'll personally be affected, you're being part of the problem and not the solution. Come up with ideas rather than baseless complaints.
When it comes to addressing what people already have, I am primarily concerned with being as certain as we can that the majority of the solutions we go with feel like an addition to the game, rather than something that's a burden. While the goal is to remove surplus gold and resources, it should be accomplished in such a way that people feel like they are gaining something and/or participating by parting with their wealth. It should be an exchange, even if the exchange is for something intangible (e.g., the satisfaction of being at the top of the list of gold offerings to your God this cycle) as opposed to something concrete like an item or buff (also valid, but we shouldn't feel limited to these!) It's more work to think of those sorts of solutions than it is to say "just add upkeep costs to everything", but I think it's worthwhile to put in the effort.
The happiness of the playerbase, and the fun that people have in the game, these are very important things to consider. I'm well aware that you can't make everyone happy; some people will complain no matter what, sometimes about things that are silly! But the inevitability of illogical complaints doesn't mean everyone with a concern should be dismissed. Please understand, some negative feedback is given with a positive attitude.
@Arimisia has already made it clear that any kind of change she'll see as 'not worth it' and demand a refund. I'm sure you're just arguing for her sake. The rest of us over here are trying to make smart, helpful, reasonable changes that will help fix the problems.
Though the 98 days figure is again, assuming the owner doesn't use or keep the comms for themselves or their trade. Realistically the value would be significantly higher, and that's only for one single aethermine in terms of value/reward. Multiply that by however many aethermines are in question.
Problem is, the way they are now is broken (just like the maps were, and I railed against those maps for years before they got a look). Sometimes things are Just Too Good, and when it comes to stuff that generates resources it's best to look at how much awesome stuff you got out of them than to complain that they no longer give you as much awesome stuff (while accepting that they still give some!).
It's worth complaining if they get nerfed to the sake of complete uselessness, but not just if they get adjusted to a more balanced state of being, imo.
- gold
- lessons
- lesson pools (unsure how those are different, but I can't spend the pooled ones)
- credits
- bound credits
- dingbats
- sticky dingbats
- racetrack tickets (haven't found the racetracks yet)
- Czigny coins
- goop (unsure what this does)
- others?
There are also a wide range of consumeable items, on top of all the "basics" like armour, curatives, etc, as well as random org items, quest components, etc. Here are the consumeables I know about:- commodities
- cooking buffs (various types, stackable, I don't think I've fully learned this)
- drink buffs (tonic, kiwi punch)
- oil buffs (dragonsblood, etc)
- origami buffs
- cookies
- candies (unsure where to get these beyond the wheel)
- consumeable artifacts (eg like golden lips)
- curios (I kinda view these in the same boat as credits/artifacts - they aren't a currency, but they are one more thing to track and wade through)
- probably almost certainly missing some!
Now, I find it fun figuring out and learning about buffs and I like tracking "stuff" I've accumulated, but I think people forget just how complex this game is as a newcomer. I'm still learning a lot and I've been playing like 2 months. More currencies make this acclimation harder and slower, which doesn't help with retention. I already find curios very annoying and convoluted to deal with. A new form of currency would not only complicate simple tracking of a player's assets, it would also make standard gameplay more tedious - for example, instead of just going to the aetherplex and buying gold tonic when you are buying everything else before bashing, you'd have to gather the new dust/trade for it, find the merchant, buy from there.Gold devaluing is something I've seen tackled in many games. I've seen some MUDs take more preventative stances on this, with checks on how much gold can be generated, based on how much exists. The MUDs where I've seen that work, however, were all closed-loop economies: gold generated out of a specific fixed reserve (quests sometimes gave 0 gold if they had been done too often), which was refilled by gold sinks, and controlling commodity sources was a PK generator in its own right. It sounds like Lusternia currently suffers from "external" gold/comm sources, though.
Some games, like MOBAs or MMOs, tackle it by periodically introducing new shiny things, like new champions, new skills for certain zones (eg flying), or new expansions (which usually shift a lot of gold around as even hoarders need the new versions of things). Maybe that concept could be applied to Lusternia, but the trouble will be finding a motivating gold sink reward that isn't just a reskinning of existing currency.
In my new to Lusternia, but played many games view, the solution needs to be two-fold: periodic bandaid solutions to attempt to flush out stored gold (eg, exclusive x promo via IG merchants every y RL months), coupled with tinkering behind the scenes. The current gold cap may address the second part of this. It also sounds like most gold is coming into the system via methods which favor certain subsets of players, but I'm not an economist, so I'm not going to dig into that.
But to your other ones
Gold to goop/dingbats doesn't help anything, it just changes the currency. Changing curio packages to gold is a temporary solution until people have those curios and then, they don't take any more gold out.
@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.
Instead of adding gold upkeep, I'd like to place a hard limit on the amount you can own of each type, and refund people for what they had over that limit. I don't think they'd be a huge deal if you couldn't have so, so many of them, on top of all the free comms other stuff has been giving away for years now. If they're being allowed to stay, they do need to be dialed back quite a bit, and if adding gold upkeep would cause people to ask for refunds anyway...
I just don't see why refunds are off the table.
I have one mine right now, a gems mine and I honestly ignore it because I'm not interested in upkeeping it every hour. I already gemcut on most hours, and that's more tedium than I want. I wouldn't mind seeing it get some limitations put on it, something to add a drawback for having so many.
The eye of Dylara materialises in your hands and flings itself around your neck, tightening incomprehensibly until it is irremovable.
Perfectly clean, this eyeball has been wrenched from the socket of Dylara. It has been animated by some unusual force, constantly looking around itself as if in shock or fear. It is bathed in a light covering of white flames that roll endlessly over its surface. A single chain of empyreal metal pierces either side of the eye, allowing it to be worn around the neck.
We need to differentiate between gold (as a numeric value) versus buying power. It doesn't matter if a person makes 10k gold or 10m gold for a given hunting spree, excepting where fixed gold prices don't fluctuate to match gold inputs.
Or think of it this way: if everyone in the world suddenly earned 100x what they currently earn, individual buying power and effort-to-benefit ratio would eventually stabilize back where it was once everyone's accounting caught up. The exceptions would be when there are fixed costs that do not likewise receive a 100-fold increase.
So the question is: are we troubled when we see numbers with multiple zeroes behind them? Or are we trying to fix a problem in the typical player's buying power and effort-to-benefit ratio? I see that we're somehow ashamed or troubled by the numbers on the credit market, in some strange notion that those GP values are in any way related to the GP values in other games. But the very easy solution there is to take all the gold existing in the game and multiply it by .01. Take the fixed gold costs and multiply them by .01. Take all gold inputs and multiply them by .01. As soon as everyone's accounting catches up, the credit market should look like 400 per credit. This will magically make a lot of people feel better, while doing absolutely nothing about the economy.
And that might be a worthwhile thing to do, if we seriously feel this will increase the appeal of Lusternia to other IRE players. But it ignores some very real problems that still need to be addressed: economy is about value changing hands, and in Lusternia, that has slowed down tremendously since the game's inception.
I guess the short summary of my post here is: what are we trying to accomplish with this change? I feel like we've got so many different perspectives here about what's wrong with the economy that our goal is nebulous.
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.
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.
Everyone can acquire it via trading aetherbeast particles, no?
Edit: Plus it fits the theme of aether feeding aetherspace mines.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
Renting an artifact would be the most efficient way to get gold out of the market. Perhaps have a limited market of renting an artifact like a monthly auction or something? That way the Xenthos' of the world can spend all their gold preventing enemies from getting it.
For the new resource: I thought the Overhaul change was to make the cost of everything easier to get into, and one of the definitions of cost was the overload of knowledge. We don't need another layer, we probably need layers taken away far more than another layer of things to learn.