Things Glom can do in-forest for gold: -Oozes to Rowena (~850g per pustule, 4 pustules per respawn) -Roses/Feathers to Fangleaf (25g per; feathers funge against Glom power quest) -Bats/Wasps/Beetles to Fangleaf (34g per, lots of these) -Spinnerets to Fangleaf (34g per, but compare 87 from village handin) -Logs to villages (about 121g per) -Eggs to Swampghast (87g per)
Things that don't give gold, but maybe should: -Glom Power Quest? (maybe 50gp?)
The fixed min cap is making it better for me to go and bash the hell out of weak stuff I can kill in a hit and get 20 gold a hit than it is for me to go and bash harder stuff that is giving me me basically the same gold.
I'm more curious how this will affect divine offerings. As more corpses go to turn-ins and people focus more on farm for turn-ins, how much will corpse offerings drop? But I guess that's a very different sort of economy and not necessary to discussion here.
I like that bashing isn't the end all be all of grinding activities with more of a focus on turn ins/questing. In other words, if it tanks divine offerings because you're turning in all your corpses for gold, you're making the choice between offerings and gold instead of getting loads of gold from drops (and xp) in addition to offering.
Xenthos, your problem is you see it from the side of the wealthy. The problem is exactly that you have 35 million frozen. That needs to be in a bank being reduced by interest charges so it disappears. The argument of 100K "active" is spurious - you can always replenish from the well. The problem is your 35 million. Gold needs to be spent or lost. This is economics 100 - people stockpiling their gold and not having it in circulation doing things is always bad.
All this change will do is penalise new players coming to the game who can't possibly compete with the uber-wealthy who had the luxury of the high gold drops for more than a decade. This isn't wealthy-bashing, my character is from beta times and has millions stashed away - I even forgot the millions I had stashed in a couple of bank accounts until I rediscovered "bank accounts". The solution is to target the wealthy - make them put money in bank accounts and tax it, charge land tax for their private havens (ok mine only has 10 rooms so I won't feel that too much I confess), require people with fancy titles to upkeep them and charge vastly more than is current for them - you must tax what people want. In your argument you also don't extend the timeframe long enough to look at the economics. Initially there will be a dry up of credits - probably at hugely inflated prices as supply can't meet demand and the wealthy get worried their money will disappear. Then the massive money disappears through tax/theives/fees and charges. What then happens to credit prices? They will come back down into the realm of the achievable for newer players because the large amounts of gold will not be there inflating the market. Right now the credit market is simply a convenience for those who can't be bothered to bash or quest money up and to allow the super rich not to have to spend real money on the game. The latter is not good for the long-term viability of lusternia. Having flitted in and out for a few months every year it is very obvious to me this has become a game with little new blood and a couple of handfuls of the ancient super rich. If you want to reinvigorate the game you need to make the super rich go back out to to work for a living.
Given the wealthy probably have tens to hundreds of millions collectively stashed away, I would take major issue with wealth stockpiling not being the primary issue. The key to a fun game is not miserly gold drops. It is HUGE gold drops but HUGE costs to maintain your preferred life style. Vibrancy is large amounts of gold zipping about the game. What is more fun - killing a a bone shark pack of 5 and seeing them drop 40 gold, or seeing them drop 4000 gold? No brainer. The problem is not wealth generation. It is lack of expenses to make that amount of gold drop necessary. How does a Federal Government stimulate the economy? They print more money. The problem in Lusternia is too much wealth in the elderly doyens and not enough ways to take it off them and put it back into useful circulation.
Other ideas? Create a new skill set that makes something useful but make it so that once you turn a certain age (?50) you can't do it anymore because you're too old. Find ways to chanel the money from the rich to the poor.
So, reduce the bashing money if you must, whether I can be bothered is my issue. However if the aim is really to fix the economy, you must tax the super rich back down to the realm of mere mortals - which means taking away the millions.
Jolanthe, my character has gone from 150K gold per hour including a couple of drink breaks to about 25K. That is not a small change. Part of the fun of finding a manifestation on astral is you knew the minute or so to kill it was going to be worthwhile gold wise. No longer. A bunch of 4 garwights and a couple of garghouls - always worth jumping in and throwing the broadswords about because you can watch the gold fly as they crumple and who cares how much health potion and healing scroll you use. In short, if this was just simple global deflation it wouldn't be a problem, but everything else remains as expensive so time per gold is much worse.
TLDR version of this change is stop just bashing mobs for gold. The real money is in hand ins. You need to bash mobs that you can hand into someone for a gold rewards. If you do that the gold generation doesnt really feel that big of a difference from before.
Jolanthe, my character has gone from 150K gold per hour including a couple of drink breaks to about 25K. That is not a small change. Part of the fun of finding a manifestation on astral is you knew the minute or so to kill it was going to be worthwhile gold wise. No longer. A bunch of 4 garwights and a couple of garghouls - always worth jumping in and throwing the broadswords about because you can watch the gold fly as they crumple and who cares how much health potion and healing scroll you use. In short, if this was just simple global deflation it wouldn't be a problem, but everything else remains as expensive so time per gold is much worse.
You can go bash/hand in for roughly the same gold levels now without hitting the cap so you can keep on doing it.
EDIT:
I like the overall change because I didn't really like the cap, I don't like restrictions on how you play time wise, especially for folks who cant play every day but perhaps can play for many hours on their days off this is a great change.
As to the economy the change wont really change anything much I guess. Folks can get farm stacks of gold and trade skills are still pretty useless for making gold compared to bashing.
Xenthos, your problem is you see it from the side of the wealthy. The problem is exactly that you have 35 million frozen. That needs to be in a bank being reduced by interest charges so it disappears. The argument of 100K "active" is spurious - you can always replenish from the well. The problem is your 35 million. Gold needs to be spent or lost. This is economics 100 - people stockpiling their gold and not having it in circulation doing things is always bad.
All this change will do is penalise new players coming to the game who can't possibly compete with the uber-wealthy who had the luxury of the high gold drops for more than a decade. This isn't wealthy-bashing, my character is from beta times and has millions stashed away - I even forgot the millions I had stashed in a couple of bank accounts until I rediscovered "bank accounts". The solution is to target the wealthy - make them put money in bank accounts and tax it, charge land tax for their private havens (ok mine only has 10 rooms so I won't feel that too much I confess), require people with fancy titles to upkeep them and charge vastly more than is current for them - you must tax what people want. In your argument you also don't extend the timeframe long enough to look at the economics. Initially there will be a dry up of credits - probably at hugely inflated prices as supply can't meet demand and the wealthy get worried their money will disappear. Then the massive money disappears through tax/theives/fees and charges. What then happens to credit prices? They will come back down into the realm of the achievable for newer players because the large amounts of gold will not be there inflating the market. Right now the credit market is simply a convenience for those who can't be bothered to bash or quest money up and to allow the super rich not to have to spend real money on the game. The latter is not good for the long-term viability of lusternia. Having flitted in and out for a few months every year it is very obvious to me this has become a game with little new blood and a couple of handfuls of the ancient super rich. If you want to reinvigorate the game you need to make the super rich go back out to to work for a living.
Given the wealthy probably have tens to hundreds of millions collectively stashed away, I would take major issue with wealth stockpiling not being the primary issue. The key to a fun game is not miserly gold drops. It is HUGE gold drops but HUGE costs to maintain your preferred life style. Vibrancy is large amounts of gold zipping about the game. What is more fun - killing a a bone shark pack of 5 and seeing them drop 40 gold, or seeing them drop 4000 gold? No brainer. The problem is not wealth generation. It is lack of expenses to make that amount of gold drop necessary. How does a Federal Government stimulate the economy? They print more money. The problem in Lusternia is too much wealth in the elderly doyens and not enough ways to take it off them and put it back into useful circulation.
Other ideas? Create a new skill set that makes something useful but make it so that once you turn a certain age (?50) you can't do it anymore because you're too old. Find ways to chanel the money from the rich to the poor.
So, reduce the bashing money if you must, whether I can be bothered is my issue. However if the aim is really to fix the economy, you must tax the super rich back down to the realm of mere mortals - which means taking away the millions.
Jolanthe, my character has gone from 150K gold per hour including a couple of drink breaks to about 25K. That is not a small change. Part of the fun of finding a manifestation on astral is you knew the minute or so to kill it was going to be worthwhile gold wise. No longer. A bunch of 4 garwights and a couple of garghouls - always worth jumping in and throwing the broadswords about because you can watch the gold fly as they crumple and who cares how much health potion and healing scroll you use. In short, if this was just simple global deflation it wouldn't be a problem, but everything else remains as expensive so time per gold is much worse.
Lusternia's economy is not equivalent to a real-world economy so "Economy 101" has absolutely zero bearing here. In the real world, more money flowing around means more investment, more jobs, etc; there is almost no outflow in Lusternia. You can't take your gold and invest it in a project, expecting a rate of return. Banks don't give you money when you deposit in them. I don't even know why you're trying to compare the two.
Players taking money out of the game themselves is the largest gold sink there is. By making gold toxic, you're pushing all that gold back into a system with little natural outflow. Having lots of gold in circulation is the problem, not the solution. All the economy threads have been discussing better ways to get rid of it / dump it out of the game (note that this is another difference from real world economies: The dollars don't just cease to exist once invested).
You assert that credit prices would stabilize, but how do you arrive at that conclusion? Instead, I see the following scenario: Player A goes out and hunts 100,000 gold, and realizes that gold is toxic. This player must divest themselves of this gold easily, so they go to the credit market. Players B-Y all realize that gold is toxic, so why would they ever bother selling credits? They have not listed any on the market. Player Z wants to buy some things, and has listed 1 credit on the market at 65535 gold (the maximum). This being the only credit on the market, Player A buys it, and the market is now empty of credits.
People already tend to not fill the market up with credits as-is, and you're slapping a major disincentive on that. People will only put 1-2 credits up at a time to avoid penalties.
Further, why would you want to sell things in your shops for gold? Gold is now toxic to hold, and you're getting penalized for making things for others. You might as well not do that, and just go out and kill things when you need a bit for your own use.
I totally get your frustration with the 'easy' gold income (from just killing things) dropping so precipitously and expenses being the same. I think that is a completely reasonable frustration. To me, the best solution then is to come up with ways to make both killing things & questing profitable, while keeping an eye on overall total generation. I think that there are more tweaks in the work that should (I hope) get us to a decent middle ground between the two; then the people making the most gold will be those who take advantage of both drops and questing together.
But attempting to apply real-world economic theory to a game that does not have a fully complete & complex economic system is not the way to go here. The net effect of applying that sort of theory to the game is negative, because you're just making it so nobody wants gold (either buyers or sellers).
The real world analog of Lusternian gold isn't currency, or even gold. It's beaver pelts. You go out into the wilderness and you extract [pelts|gold] from [beavers|NPCs], which you then trade to other [trappers|PCs] in exchange for [beaver traps|credits] which they bought for [real money|real money] in order to improve their ability to [catch beavers|bash NPCs]. There isn't actually much use for [pelts|gold] outside of [fur hats|aethergoop transfers], meaning that you have to fork out a LOT of [beaver pelts|gold] before anyone will give you anything in return. Worse yet, the market is gradually getting glutted with [beaver pelts|gold], because once it enters the economy, it doesn't really leave it, except by going into [some rich dude's closet|Xenthos's bank account] where they let it sit without ever looking at it again.
In order for the gold economy to not be beaver pelts, the primary way to get gold can't be bashing OR questing. It has to be trade. Village commodity trading, trade between players, NPC trade caravans between allied villages for players to raid, etc. Quests and bashing can still give out gold, but the gold they give out has to *come* from somewhere. When the Illithoid in the Undervault give you gold for kephera, that gold should be paid out of Mag/Glom/Gaudi's guard payments for monk guards and out of taxes paid from Ixthiaxa to the Prison. If the Tosha Monks don't have any source of income, and only grow food for their own use, they shouldn't have any possessions for you to beg off of them. If Celest wants to give foreign aid to the Nyalia Encampment in order to bolster their defenses and puff chest during a proxy war against Magnagora, that would be an interesting player-driven source of conflict. If Celest is bankrupt and Nyalia is forced to rely exclusively on their produce sales in the Inner Sea region, that would give a tangible way for one org to 'win' a fight without it being a grindy slog of raiding and CTOFF.
Would this be a quick change? Obviously not. It would be a huge change, on the scale of releasing Icewynd or the Undervault. But you could do it gradually. Start by looking at village commodity trading. Add in caravans between villages. (If Glomdoring owns Acknor and Angkrag, there should be caravans going through the Blasted Lands that Magnagora can raid to disrupt Glomdoring's trade!) Changing quest payouts to be based on payins can be done one area at a time, starting with voluntary payments from players who want to support their organization/get a statue raised of them by the NPCs and adding in NPC-to-NPC trades as time allows. We already know a sweeping change isn't going to fix the economy, so let's not try for a sweeping change that we know isn't going to work.
TLDR version of this change is stop just bashing mobs for gold. The real money is in hand ins. You need to bash mobs that you can hand into someone for a gold rewards. If you do that the gold generation doesnt really feel that big of a difference from before.
The real world analog of Lusternian gold isn't currency, or even gold. It's beaver pelts. You go out into the wilderness and you extract [pelts|gold] from [beavers|NPCs], which you then trade to other [trappers|PCs] in exchange for [beaver traps|credits] which they bought for [real money|real money] in order to improve their ability to [catch beavers|bash NPCs]. There isn't actually much use for [pelts|gold] outside of [fur hats|aethergoop transfers], meaning that you have to fork out a LOT of [beaver pelts|gold] before anyone will give you anything in return. Worse yet, the market is gradually getting glutted with [beaver pelts|gold], because once it enters the economy, it doesn't really leave it, except by going into [some rich dude's closet|Xenthos's bank account] where they let it sit without ever looking at it again.
In order for the gold economy to not be beaver pelts, the primary way to get gold can't be bashing OR questing. It has to be trade. Village commodity trading, trade between players, NPC trade caravans between allied villages for players to raid, etc. Quests and bashing can still give out gold, but the gold they give out has to *come* from somewhere. When the Illithoid in the Undervault give you gold for kephera, that gold should be paid out of Mag/Glom/Gaudi's guard payments for monk guards and out of taxes paid from Ixthiaxa to the Prison. If the Tosha Monks don't have any source of income, and only grow food for their own use, they shouldn't have any possessions for you to beg off of them. If Celest wants to give foreign aid to the Nyalia Encampment in order to bolster their defenses and puff chest during a proxy war against Magnagora, that would be an interesting player-driven source of conflict. If Celest is bankrupt and Nyalia is forced to rely exclusively on their produce sales in the Inner Sea region, that would give a tangible way for one org to 'win' a fight without it being a grindy slog of raiding and CTOFF.
Would this be a quick change? Obviously not. It would be a huge change, on the scale of releasing Icewynd or the Undervault. But you could do it gradually. Start by looking at village commodity trading. Add in caravans between villages. (If Glomdoring owns Acknor and Angkrag, there should be caravans going through the Blasted Lands that Magnagora can raid to disrupt Glomdoring's trade!) Changing quest payouts to be based on payins can be done one area at a time, starting with voluntary payments from players who want to support their organization/get a statue raised of them by the NPCs and adding in NPC-to-NPC trades as time allows. We already know a sweeping change isn't going to fix the economy, so let's not try for a sweeping change that we know isn't going to work.
I elaborated a bit on your idea of investing in an area. What if the orgs invested in an area, and the traffic of the area (economy) is returned in power. For example, Serenwilde invests into Kephera. The more Illithoid turned in then Kephera provides power to the Serenwilde Nexus (IG yearly or monthly?). The amount of invested gold could increase the number and strength of guards. The power payout could be a ratio based on how many Illithoids we're turned in versus Kephera. This could be scored and each city could have a economic score much like a culture score. Higher economic scores could give boosts to village influencing.
For the above example, let's say every 100k gold invest is turned into x power. Celest invests 10 million, Serenwilde invests 20 million, and Hallifax invests 20 million. On the other side, let's say Magnagora invests 20 million into the Illithoid, Glomdoring invests 20 million, and Gaudiguch invests 10 million. A total investment of 100 million. Let's say each mob would get a score for turn in. Scores could vary based on mobs. At the end of the time period, Illithoid score is 70,000 and Kephera score is 30,000. If 100 million equates to x power. The x power could be handed out based on investment in the Illithoid would get a return based on this method: Magnagora would get (X*.7)*.4, Gaudiguch would get (X *.7)*.2, Celest would get (X*.3)*.2, etc.
Now, let's add trades. Forgers can create weapons and armor to donate to each side, alchemist can donate potions, cooks can donate food, etc which would all increase the score. The tradesperson could get special marks or rewards that could be exchanged for things like special honours line or something like a title such as Smith of the Kephera.
Furthermore, you could have investment or trades ranked like xp or exploration.
I was thinking of something a considerably less interleaved with every other mechanic in the game:
Each denizen organization that gives enemy status also gets a linked bank account. (It's not a literal bank account, it's just an abstraction for the internal economy of that organization. But mechanically, it works like a bank account, so I'm going to call it that for this post.) Initially, gold goes into the account in four ways:
o Unenemying Fees. If you pay 100k to Ladantine to get unenemied to the Sea of Despair, Ladantine suddenly has 100k more gold to use for Ladantine-related purposes. Like paying adventurers to kill dolphins, cause he's a jerk like that.
o Donations. A new command is added, DONATE <gold> TO <leader> which directly transfers gold from your inventory to the org. Must be done at the org leader. If done in a village, this can boost village loyalty up to the first level of positive loyalty (the rest require quests/influencing).
o Shop Payments. If a denizen organization has a shop, the gold players pay to that shop gets added to the parent organization's accounts. If you buy steel in Rockholm, Rockholm villagers will have more money. If you buy a wyvern beast in Zoaka, that gold starts circulating in the Zoaka economy. (Ideally, we'd start adding more NPC shops selling beasts and fireworks and fancy teas and the like to NPC orgs, but that's the sort of thing that can be added in modularly.)
o Temporary Gold Generation. Right now, the above methods won't outpace the rate at which denizen organizations lose gold. So, as a patch until the more complicated trade changes go in, all denizen orgs would get X gold added to their accounts each month, in order to make sure bashing/questing gold doesn't dry up completely. This would be reduced/removed as the rest of the system gets added.
Periodically, this gold gets put toward a number of uses:
o Denizen Inventories. At any given time, denizen organizations have 10% of their gold in the inventories of their loyal denizens. This is the gold you can get by killing/begging from the loyal denizens. Whenever gold totals are recalculated, the existing gold in the denizen inventories gets scooped up into the organizational pool - gold doesn't accumulate in a denizen's inventory over time. For example, if the Castellan has 50k gold, 5k of that gets split among all of the Krokani in the Grey Moors, to be looted/begged away.
o Quest Rewards. Whenever a loyal denizen gives a player gold as part of a quest reward, that gold is taken from their loyal organization's account. Furthermore, the amount of the reward is based in part on the size of the organizational account. For example, the Krokani Cook's payouts might be (25 + castellan_gold/1000), so if the Castellan (again) has 50k, you would get 75 gold and the Castellan would have 75 less. If the Castellan doesn't have at least 25 gold to give out, he doesn't pay anyone.
o Guard Pools. Every denizen organization with guards (think kephera warders, Ladantine's boneghasts, i'Xiia orderlies, etc.) has the availability of their guards be based on their total organizational gold. This doesn't cost the organization any gold (guard wages are abstracted) and is instead a pure function of the size of their bank account. The richer an organization is, the more likely its guards are to respond to their loyals being attacked and the more likely they are to have multiple guards respond to any given attack.
Later on, changes to village shops go in. Currently, villages tithe one commodity of the appropriate type whenever someone goes a commodity quest, and an amount equal to a fraction (25% iirc?) of their commodity stockpile to the village's controller on the first of every month. This doesn't lower the number of commodities in the village, it just produces them out of nowhere for the controlling org. The next step would be changing how this works:
Villages would still generate commodities, but instead of having them tithed, organizations would have to purchase them at a discount. The more despotic your organization is (remember that mechanic?), the higher the discount. The Minister of Trade would set the minimum price at which the city/commune would be willing to buy each commodity (CITY/COMMUNE VILLAGE BUY <comm> FOR <amount>?) and, if a village had the commodity available at that price (after considering the discount), trade caravans would periodically depart from the village to the controlling org with ten of each of the agreed upon commodities onboard. These caravans would be org-loyal and can be attacked without getting enemied to the village; lore-wise, they're merchants from the organization rather than from the village.
Each caravan starts at a village commodity shop, where it removes ten of each commodity to be purchased from the village stockpile and adds it to their inventory. At the same time, it makes a transfer of gold from the Ministry of Trade account to the village account. It would then move through the world (where the commodities can be stolen) until it gets to the city/commune commodity shop and delivers the commodities. If an organization doesn't want caravans (possibly because they keep getting raided), they can set all of their buy prices to 0 and have the Minister of Trade do transfers personally at the cost of not getting the benefit of the organizational discount.
Other organizations would (again) get shops of their own where you can buy non-commodity goods for gold, and these would go into the accounts of those organizations. Beasts, flowers, flavour items, etc. Stuff that's pretty, but has little mechanical impact (but bolsters the organization you buy it from and serves as a symbol that your character is associated with/is on good terms with that group of denizens). In the end, there would still be a certain amount of gold flowing into the economy - as there should be, to offset manse purchases and people going inactive. But it would be a known amount that would be easily altered, instead of ten thousand different drops and quest turn-ins.
TLDR version of this change is stop just bashing mobs for gold. The real money is in hand ins. You need to bash mobs that you can hand into someone for a gold rewards. If you do that the gold generation doesnt really feel that big of a difference from before.
I went from 100k per hour to 30/40k per hour.
You went from 100k Per Weave, once you hit that 100k that was it, if you were lucky you might generate another 10k over the course of a few more hours.
To
30k to 40k per hour for as many hours in a Weave as you like.
TLDR version of this change is stop just bashing mobs for gold. The real money is in hand ins. You need to bash mobs that you can hand into someone for a gold rewards. If you do that the gold generation doesnt really feel that big of a difference from before.
I went from 100k per hour to 30/40k per hour.
You went from 100k Per Weave, once you hit that 100k that was it, if you were lucky you might generate another 10k over the course of a few more hours.
To
30k to 40k per hour for as many hours in a Weave as you like.
Only if I'm willing to invest more than an hr for something that is literally a chore in game. I will never invest 3+ hours to accomplish what I did in an hour.
TLDR version of this change is stop just bashing mobs for gold. The real money is in hand ins. You need to bash mobs that you can hand into someone for a gold rewards. If you do that the gold generation doesnt really feel that big of a difference from before.
I went from 100k per hour to 30/40k per hour.
You went from 100k Per Weave, once you hit that 100k that was it, if you were lucky you might generate another 10k over the course of a few more hours.
To
30k to 40k per hour for as many hours in a Weave as you like.
Just to clarify, I understand the difference in your use of per weave. While my word choice may have been poor, the post did suggest I wasn't trying to get more than 100,000 gold in a weave. The quicker gold production at the cost of being able to produce a larger amount with greater time investment was something I preferred and still prefer.
Comments
-Oozes to Rowena (~850g per pustule, 4 pustules per respawn)
-Roses/Feathers to Fangleaf (25g per; feathers funge against Glom power quest)
-Bats/Wasps/Beetles to Fangleaf (34g per, lots of these)
-Spinnerets to Fangleaf (34g per, but compare 87 from village handin)
-Logs to villages (about 121g per)
-Eggs to Swampghast (87g per)
Things that don't give gold, but maybe should:
-Glom Power Quest? (maybe 50gp?)
I'm half drunk clearing the kephera hives very slowly due to it and I made 50k from bashing and handing in the corpses. Took about 40mins.
Considering I could hit the gold cap previously in 1-2hrs of casual bashing this honestly doesnt feel that different to me.
All this change will do is penalise new players coming to the game who can't possibly compete with the uber-wealthy who had the luxury of the high gold drops for more than a decade. This isn't wealthy-bashing, my character is from beta times and has millions stashed away - I even forgot the millions I had stashed in a couple of bank accounts until I rediscovered "bank accounts". The solution is to target the wealthy - make them put money in bank accounts and tax it, charge land tax for their private havens (ok mine only has 10 rooms so I won't feel that too much I confess), require people with fancy titles to upkeep them and charge vastly more than is current for them - you must tax what people want. In your argument you also don't extend the timeframe long enough to look at the economics. Initially there will be a dry up of credits - probably at hugely inflated prices as supply can't meet demand and the wealthy get worried their money will disappear. Then the massive money disappears through tax/theives/fees and charges. What then happens to credit prices? They will come back down into the realm of the achievable for newer players because the large amounts of gold will not be there inflating the market. Right now the credit market is simply a convenience for those who can't be bothered to bash or quest money up and to allow the super rich not to have to spend real money on the game. The latter is not good for the long-term viability of lusternia. Having flitted in and out for a few months every year it is very obvious to me this has become a game with little new blood and a couple of handfuls of the ancient super rich. If you want to reinvigorate the game you need to make the super rich go back out to to work for a living.
Given the wealthy probably have tens to hundreds of millions collectively stashed away, I would take major issue with wealth stockpiling not being the primary issue. The key to a fun game is not miserly gold drops. It is HUGE gold drops but HUGE costs to maintain your preferred life style. Vibrancy is large amounts of gold zipping about the game. What is more fun - killing a a bone shark pack of 5 and seeing them drop 40 gold, or seeing them drop 4000 gold? No brainer. The problem is not wealth generation. It is lack of expenses to make that amount of gold drop necessary. How does a Federal Government stimulate the economy? They print more money. The problem in Lusternia is too much wealth in the elderly doyens and not enough ways to take it off them and put it back into useful circulation.
Other ideas? Create a new skill set that makes something useful but make it so that once you turn a certain age (?50) you can't do it anymore because you're too old. Find ways to chanel the money from the rich to the poor.
So, reduce the bashing money if you must, whether I can be bothered is my issue. However if the aim is really to fix the economy, you must tax the super rich back down to the realm of mere mortals - which means taking away the millions.
Jolanthe, my character has gone from 150K gold per hour including a couple of drink breaks to about 25K. That is not a small change. Part of the fun of finding a manifestation on astral is you knew the minute or so to kill it was going to be worthwhile gold wise. No longer. A bunch of 4 garwights and a couple of garghouls - always worth jumping in and throwing the broadswords about because you can watch the gold fly as they crumple and who cares how much health potion and healing scroll you use. In short, if this was just simple global deflation it wouldn't be a problem, but everything else remains as expensive so time per gold is much worse.
Players taking money out of the game themselves is the largest gold sink there is. By making gold toxic, you're pushing all that gold back into a system with little natural outflow. Having lots of gold in circulation is the problem, not the solution. All the economy threads have been discussing better ways to get rid of it / dump it out of the game (note that this is another difference from real world economies: The dollars don't just cease to exist once invested).
You assert that credit prices would stabilize, but how do you arrive at that conclusion? Instead, I see the following scenario: Player A goes out and hunts 100,000 gold, and realizes that gold is toxic. This player must divest themselves of this gold easily, so they go to the credit market. Players B-Y all realize that gold is toxic, so why would they ever bother selling credits? They have not listed any on the market. Player Z wants to buy some things, and has listed 1 credit on the market at 65535 gold (the maximum). This being the only credit on the market, Player A buys it, and the market is now empty of credits.
People already tend to not fill the market up with credits as-is, and you're slapping a major disincentive on that. People will only put 1-2 credits up at a time to avoid penalties.
Further, why would you want to sell things in your shops for gold? Gold is now toxic to hold, and you're getting penalized for making things for others. You might as well not do that, and just go out and kill things when you need a bit for your own use.
I totally get your frustration with the 'easy' gold income (from just killing things) dropping so precipitously and expenses being the same. I think that is a completely reasonable frustration. To me, the best solution then is to come up with ways to make both killing things & questing profitable, while keeping an eye on overall total generation. I think that there are more tweaks in the work that should (I hope) get us to a decent middle ground between the two; then the people making the most gold will be those who take advantage of both drops and questing together.
But attempting to apply real-world economic theory to a game that does not have a fully complete & complex economic system is not the way to go here. The net effect of applying that sort of theory to the game is negative, because you're just making it so nobody wants gold (either buyers or sellers).
In order for the gold economy to not be beaver pelts, the primary way to get gold can't be bashing OR questing. It has to be trade. Village commodity trading, trade between players, NPC trade caravans between allied villages for players to raid, etc. Quests and bashing can still give out gold, but the gold they give out has to *come* from somewhere. When the Illithoid in the Undervault give you gold for kephera, that gold should be paid out of Mag/Glom/Gaudi's guard payments for monk guards and out of taxes paid from Ixthiaxa to the Prison. If the Tosha Monks don't have any source of income, and only grow food for their own use, they shouldn't have any possessions for you to beg off of them. If Celest wants to give foreign aid to the Nyalia Encampment in order to bolster their defenses and puff chest during a proxy war against Magnagora, that would be an interesting player-driven source of conflict. If Celest is bankrupt and Nyalia is forced to rely exclusively on their produce sales in the Inner Sea region, that would give a tangible way for one org to 'win' a fight without it being a grindy slog of raiding and CTOFF.
Would this be a quick change? Obviously not. It would be a huge change, on the scale of releasing Icewynd or the Undervault. But you could do it gradually. Start by looking at village commodity trading. Add in caravans between villages. (If Glomdoring owns Acknor and Angkrag, there should be caravans going through the Blasted Lands that Magnagora can raid to disrupt Glomdoring's trade!) Changing quest payouts to be based on payins can be done one area at a time, starting with voluntary payments from players who want to support their organization/get a statue raised of them by the NPCs and adding in NPC-to-NPC trades as time allows. We already know a sweeping change isn't going to fix the economy, so let's not try for a sweeping change that we know isn't going to work.
For the above example, let's say every 100k gold invest is turned into x power. Celest invests 10 million, Serenwilde invests 20 million, and Hallifax invests 20 million. On the other side, let's say Magnagora invests 20 million into the Illithoid, Glomdoring invests 20 million, and Gaudiguch invests 10 million. A total investment of 100 million. Let's say each mob would get a score for turn in. Scores could vary based on mobs. At the end of the time period, Illithoid score is 70,000 and Kephera score is 30,000. If 100 million equates to x power. The x power could be handed out based on investment in the Illithoid would get a return based on this method: Magnagora would get (X*.7)*.4, Gaudiguch would get (X *.7)*.2, Celest would get (X*.3)*.2, etc.
Now, let's add trades. Forgers can create weapons and armor to donate to each side, alchemist can donate potions, cooks can donate food, etc which would all increase the score. The tradesperson could get special marks or rewards that could be exchanged for things like special honours line or something like a title such as Smith of the Kephera.
Furthermore, you could have investment or trades ranked like xp or exploration.
Each denizen organization that gives enemy status also gets a linked bank account. (It's not a literal bank account, it's just an abstraction for the internal economy of that organization. But mechanically, it works like a bank account, so I'm going to call it that for this post.) Initially, gold goes into the account in four ways:
o Unenemying Fees. If you pay 100k to Ladantine to get unenemied to the Sea of Despair, Ladantine suddenly has 100k more gold to use for Ladantine-related purposes. Like paying adventurers to kill dolphins, cause he's a jerk like that.
o Donations. A new command is added, DONATE <gold> TO <leader> which directly transfers gold from your inventory to the org. Must be done at the org leader. If done in a village, this can boost village loyalty up to the first level of positive loyalty (the rest require quests/influencing).
o Shop Payments. If a denizen organization has a shop, the gold players pay to that shop gets added to the parent organization's accounts. If you buy steel in Rockholm, Rockholm villagers will have more money. If you buy a wyvern beast in Zoaka, that gold starts circulating in the Zoaka economy. (Ideally, we'd start adding more NPC shops selling beasts and fireworks and fancy teas and the like to NPC orgs, but that's the sort of thing that can be added in modularly.)
o Temporary Gold Generation. Right now, the above methods won't outpace the rate at which denizen organizations lose gold. So, as a patch until the more complicated trade changes go in, all denizen orgs would get X gold added to their accounts each month, in order to make sure bashing/questing gold doesn't dry up completely. This would be reduced/removed as the rest of the system gets added.
Periodically, this gold gets put toward a number of uses:
o Denizen Inventories. At any given time, denizen organizations have 10% of their gold in the inventories of their loyal denizens. This is the gold you can get by killing/begging from the loyal denizens. Whenever gold totals are recalculated, the existing gold in the denizen inventories gets scooped up into the organizational pool - gold doesn't accumulate in a denizen's inventory over time. For example, if the Castellan has 50k gold, 5k of that gets split among all of the Krokani in the Grey Moors, to be looted/begged away.
o Quest Rewards. Whenever a loyal denizen gives a player gold as part of a quest reward, that gold is taken from their loyal organization's account. Furthermore, the amount of the reward is based in part on the size of the organizational account. For example, the Krokani Cook's payouts might be (25 + castellan_gold/1000), so if the Castellan (again) has 50k, you would get 75 gold and the Castellan would have 75 less. If the Castellan doesn't have at least 25 gold to give out, he doesn't pay anyone.
o Guard Pools. Every denizen organization with guards (think kephera warders, Ladantine's boneghasts, i'Xiia orderlies, etc.) has the availability of their guards be based on their total organizational gold. This doesn't cost the organization any gold (guard wages are abstracted) and is instead a pure function of the size of their bank account. The richer an organization is, the more likely its guards are to respond to their loyals being attacked and the more likely they are to have multiple guards respond to any given attack.
Later on, changes to village shops go in. Currently, villages tithe one commodity of the appropriate type whenever someone goes a commodity quest, and an amount equal to a fraction (25% iirc?) of their commodity stockpile to the village's controller on the first of every month. This doesn't lower the number of commodities in the village, it just produces them out of nowhere for the controlling org. The next step would be changing how this works:
Villages would still generate commodities, but instead of having them tithed, organizations would have to purchase them at a discount. The more despotic your organization is (remember that mechanic?), the higher the discount. The Minister of Trade would set the minimum price at which the city/commune would be willing to buy each commodity (CITY/COMMUNE VILLAGE BUY <comm> FOR <amount>?) and, if a village had the commodity available at that price (after considering the discount), trade caravans would periodically depart from the village to the controlling org with ten of each of the agreed upon commodities onboard. These caravans would be org-loyal and can be attacked without getting enemied to the village; lore-wise, they're merchants from the organization rather than from the village.
Each caravan starts at a village commodity shop, where it removes ten of each commodity to be purchased from the village stockpile and adds it to their inventory. At the same time, it makes a transfer of gold from the Ministry of Trade account to the village account. It would then move through the world (where the commodities can be stolen) until it gets to the city/commune commodity shop and delivers the commodities. If an organization doesn't want caravans (possibly because they keep getting raided), they can set all of their buy prices to 0 and have the Minister of Trade do transfers personally at the cost of not getting the benefit of the organizational discount.
Other organizations would (again) get shops of their own where you can buy non-commodity goods for gold, and these would go into the accounts of those organizations. Beasts, flowers, flavour items, etc. Stuff that's pretty, but has little mechanical impact (but bolsters the organization you buy it from and serves as a symbol that your character is associated with/is on good terms with that group of denizens). In the end, there would still be a certain amount of gold flowing into the economy - as there should be, to offset manse purchases and people going inactive. But it would be a known amount that would be easily altered, instead of ten thousand different drops and quest turn-ins.
You went from 100k Per Weave, once you hit that 100k that was it, if you were lucky you might generate another 10k over the course of a few more hours.
To
30k to 40k per hour for as many hours in a Weave as you like.