Money

[aiwass777]

Hello,

Anyone who has any familiarity with the RK1 Exchange forums may have noticed a disturbing trend in the amounts of money some people are willing to pay for certain items.

The economy is broken. There is no argument there, it's simple for anyone to notice. But there is little that can be done to combat the gross inflation in the RK1 market. There are no money-sinks in the game.

What can be done?

a) Nothing. Not really an option. The situation is disturbing and needs to be fixed.

b) Create high level money-sinks. High-level quests or vendors that pull resources from overly-rich players. An attractive option, but one that requires a lot of planning and work from the development team.

c) Nerf money. No one like this idea, but it's the best plan there is.
Don't remove the means to make money, but do lower the maximum amount of money a person can have. I believe that it it currently at 999 million. Lower it to 200 or 250 million and delete any overflow cash.

What?

Yes, there will be a few who will be upset because they price-gouged the economy or used some exploit to amass a large quantity of credits... but this change would alter the economy by lowering the hard cap on what rare loot will sell for on the open market.

~Hoopspro

[______________Luxxan]

If the money limit was lower people would be more likely to just spread money out accross multiple alts or fill the org bank. The problem isn't limiting how much money people have, it's creating incentive to spend your money.

Someone else commented in another thread that at every moment of the day, the game is spewing more credits and items into the economy. This is the problem. At the high levels it's easier than ever to make money but there are no stores that sell items you're interested in. This means you have a lot of money and nothing you need to spend it on. Many spend it on rare items or worse, give it to alts, which then inflate the low level economy to absurd levels, shutting out real low level players. This, combined with ClickSaver, which means -only- the rares have any worth, since anything else can be found in a few minutes of searching, and you have an economy which just continues to accrue more and more and more money.

So, the simplest and best solution is to create high level money sinks. Put something in the game for high levels which requires them to destroy a lot of money by giving it back to the game.

1) Make "uber" items buyable in hard-to-reach stores (not everything needs to be acquired by killing, after all).

2) Put in those dandy xp pills which allow you to "emergency" save and make them outrageously expensive.

3) Put in "rentable" or "buyable" apartment space in cool areas, like Lush Fields Resort.

4) Open guild housing and charge fees for the space.


Just do anything that interests the high levels enough that they want to -spend- their money instead of trade it around, and the problem will go away.

[______________Nediar]

I totally agree that something needs to be done to suck up all these credits. Could you imagine what things would be like in the real world if all a person had to do was kill a small animal for $5,000? Hell, a can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti & Meatballs would cost over $120,000.

Wouldn't it be nice to go to a 100% supression shop deep in Medusa territory and click on Tarasque Booth, or more realistically, Clan/Omni Uber Item Booth. Click on it and it has the following items:

Emergency Insurance Terminal Pill - 25.000.000 credits
Shades of Lucubration - 50.000.000 credits
NanoCrystal (Summon Grid Armor Mk IV) - 100.000.000 credits
IQ Ring 7% - 50.000.000 credits
NanoCrystal (Nullity Sphere Mk II) - 100.000.000 credits
Custom-Made Enforcer Ring of Bashing - 20.000.000 credits
etc. etc..

This is just an idea I quickly came up with off the top of my head, a booth that sells uber items to suck up all these Ebay credits. And NO, Funcom.. do NOT make this booth de-spawn for 18 hours when someone buys something

[aiwass777]

Nice ideas.

The problem with money sinks is that there can never be enough of them...

Eventually everyone will have Yalmahas of every imaginable color, apartments and guild houses in every city on Rubi-ka, and every shop-sold uber item in the game. They will eventually (or instantly) recover and go back to destroying the economy. Deleting all the money in the game accomplishes exactly the same thing. I am by no means a power-player (or price-gouger)and 100 million in a week is probably an attainable goal for me.

Lowering the maximum amount of money combats this problem to some extent. Yes, it can be gotten around by the use of mules, but that would cause a bit of risk in dealing items above the money cap.

~Hoopspro

[ethernal3]

There needs to be money sinks, but lowering the maximum number of credits a person can have it not the way to do it. The way to do it would to be adding real-estate.


It would take a lot of work, but you could buy a nice little plot of land out there in SFH... Maybe, cost ya know, 100 mill for a 250x250 meter plot of land. Make it a guild thing for those rich guilds like Storm.. add an apartment complex (make 'em work) which you can design (lol, this is a daydream here). Add rooms of different sizes (custom, lol, or at least pre-fabbed). For example, for that new member that just joined, give 'em this teeny-tiny room with the guild-rules on a refrencable tablet. For the guild president/high members, make big halls, maybe including mini-games. Have an upkeep cost (i.e. property tax). For the guild thing, you could also have a large confrence hall to meet up in. Want a grid-access? (special grid beacons, like the fixer grid)... Well, hacking into the grid is expensive. 1 billion. What about some landscaping.. well, you get the idea.


Want a Suppresion Gas Changer? Expensive, too. So, maybe 500,000,000 there. Want some guards to protect your base? Well, 500k for the level 100 ones, 1 mill for the level 150 ones, and 2 mill for the level 200 ones. Of course, they need an upkeep cost (10% of their cost per day). ... just some thoughts.
~Chris

[________________Wigz]

One quick money sink would be post-125 stores. Especially supply and implant wise. Implants are always in demand and imho would be a quick money sink. ( then again it could be argued that with better implants.. you could just make money more easily... )

I think 125 implants are 60k+ or so each, so a full set would be like a mil or so... imagine ql200 implants, a couple mil.

[_____________Swahili]

Truly. Imagine if your respective government printed more cash every day, regardless of what was happening in the real world. Slowly, each piece of currency would become worth less and less, right?

Well, that's what is happening in AO. Unfortunately, you also have these artificial forces that are acting on the economy, notably shops with static prices and a continual influx of lowbie people for whom those prices have to be kept low. Afterall, how much would it suck if you had to pay 50k credits for 10 bullets?

Unfortunately, even the best minds in the MMORPG industry admit that there really is no clear answer on what to do about this. Real economies are efficient (read: non-inflationary) only when there are no artifical floors, ceilings and other forces acting on them. In a game such as AO, there are a multitude of forces acting on your game credits. Fortunately for many, those are in place for a single reason -- to keep the game fun. I mean, would you want to play AO if it had these constrainst in it...?

* It costs you 10m credits to get an education just so you can become a soldier, NT, fixer, whatever?

* What if you had to pay 10k credits a night so that you had some place to log?

* "Oh, sure, as soon as you come up with the credits I'll sell you this food so that you can get strong and keep fighting leets in the backyard to make more money. Until then -- NO SOUP FOR YOU!"

It would suck and most of would have quit early on. But that's what real life is, no?

At any rate, there really aren't any good answers. It's the nature of the beast. You can read more here... It's geared towards UO and is a couple years old, but the points are still emminently valid.

[nipsnaps]

How about adding "IPR shop terminal" to somewhere.

Sells a "Memory rewriting tool" for 500mil.

Memory rewriting tool:

This tool is connected to your brain via direct injection. It results in being able to format an area of your brain to a blank, enabling you to learn new skills. To avoid damage to the brain, the drastic measure is near instantenous. Unfortunately, the speed also totally burns out the nanocircuitry in the tool, destroying it completely after one use.

Effect:
IPR points +1

[____________Acretion]

If any of you have played AC youll probably recognize some of this. Anyway, in AC they sort of made a money sink by they way they handled items, and their inherent magical properties. Its a little hard to translate into AO terms but it would bo something like this.

Say for intsance you have some obtru ribbed armor, doesnt matter what peice, you just have it. In AO it always has its stated armor value except if you go OE. Say for instance it gives 300 to every armor value for simplicities sake. The same armor using the AC method would be something like this. The armor would have a base armor value, lets say 100, again totally arbitrary.

Ok now this is where i get to make stuff up since items dont share the same properties between AC and AO. This new armor would have a certain nano value, say 0/600. This peice of armor would also have a decay rate, say it uses 1 nano point every 10 seconds it is worn. Ok hope i havent lost you yet, this nano or whatever you want to call it would power a nanoprogram like one of the engineers AC buffs, giving the armor +200 to all acs, thereby ending up with the same value in the end (300) except that in 6000 seconds you end up with 100 ac again.

AC did this with every magical (nano) item in the game. Now these items are rechargable with these battery like things (i think they were called mana stones) that you could buy in the store. Now, these battery things were pretty expensive so you always had to be spending money to keep stuff working.

So, to summarize: In AO items work as intended unless you over equip them. In AC every item acted like an OE'ed item unless you fed it some real expensive batteries every now and then. It was an iteresting way to try and make a money sink, however what ended up happening was it just made the low levels even tougher because you couldnt afford to keep stuff running. Eventually, at high enough level, you could easily afford to keep you equipment fed and make a lot of money at the same time (however i believe part of this problem was that stores bought equipment at a price up to an even over their true value in some cases)

Ac also made you pay for spell(nano) components, another money sink, but just as annoying as the equipment one. In the end, the money sinks failed in my opinion, for a couple of reasons

1. They were frustrating, really frustrating and they created a lot of downtime. A good part of my day consited of standing in front of an NPC buying 100 of each of the 100 different components for spells.

2. They were only money sinks for low lvl players. This is actually the exact opposite of what mmorpg's need.


For money sinks to work in AO or any other game, they need to avoid these 2, and possibly other problems. I sort of doubt the items in AO are built to enable such a change anyway, but its something to think about. Perhaps we could use more items like the hacked tank armor that is a better item, but goes bye bye in 2 hours. Maybe mission generation fees could be on more exponential scae tan a linear one such as we have now. Perhaps a percentage fee for use of the reclaim terminal. Ex: you die, costs 10% of whatever you have on you to rebuild you. As an aside Asherons call did the same thing, you lost half you money when you died, but it was only your actually change money, not your big huge bank notes, and no one really carried around a lot of real money because it actually weighed something. Perhaps there could be a fee for using the whompas, or the grid, something that was a lot steeper the higher level you achieved. Maybe we coul implement bribes, so that clanners can buy off guards to move freely about omni territory for a time, and vise versa of course. Maybe we could have blister packs of useful spells in the stores for outrageous prices. (Im still kind of a newb in AO so i dont know if these exist or not) Maybe surgery clinics int he stores could charge level^2 for their use.

Hopefully in the near future we'll have a solution to this nagging problem that has impeded the whole genre from reaching its full potential. It is my dearest wish that we do. (ok maybe not my dearest, but it sure would be nice

Acretion





Sorry i dont have a witty sig or anything.

[Resetgun]

If there would be possibility to buy XP (education/training) with your credits, would that be good money sink? XP/Credit cost might be level based: for example at level 1, 1 xp would cost 1 credit - at level 100 1 xp would cost 10 credits.

That would give faster way to raise your alts to higher levels and also tradeskills would be more usefull (you can convert your money income to experience). Ofcourse, there would be problems: stupid ebay and evil cheaters. But I think that it would be great money sink

[Darkbane]

Err, that wasn't a serious suggestion I hope...

High level money sinks are liable to be things with only status value, rather than game-play effects. Anything else would break the game unless built into the mechanics at a most basic level, and we're probably a little late for that sort of thing in AO.

Designer Yalms, designer clothes, high status housing, stuff like that.

Sure, everyone would eventually have the cash to afford these themselves, but then you introduce new sinks every patch, create fashion trends, stuff like that...

[skybert]

one word: S h o p - o f - F o r t u n e !

FunCom, I know you have a masterplan behind it.
I suspect it is one of the moneysinks many people has wanted.
Any info on when we can expect it?

Nevermind. You wouldn't answer anyway.

[__________Maxtor 1-7]

I had a post months ago about org. houses, but some people flammed it because they didn't want any extra abilities and just thought everything they spent billions of credits for should be destroyed every time they are attacked... the bunch of idiots..

Well, I said that you cna have a choice of 'frames' for the house, then some more stuff that you can buy which is added to the estate. Stuff like: barracks, training area, guard posts, ect.
I also suggusted the option of hiring guards with an hourly charge, but it would take them one hour to arrive so you couldn't exploit them in an attack. The Mk cannons are also needed, high damage but low HP helps.

I even added a PvP practice arena in the org house, which had balconies and an anouncement booth around it, like an ARENA SHOULD BE.


Org. housing is one of the best money sinks that can be offered for high-lvl people in orgs, and better individual housing is good for un-guilded high lvl people. The ability to buy xp is in making implants, otherwise exploiters would get to lvl 200 in one day, because many of them were able to compile sets of Dragon Armor when each peice costed them 500 million credits.


The only high-lvl money sink is in nano and health packs, ammo costs almost nothing compared to the 50k you can spend easily to cover a few missions of casting nanos.


Still, don't suck in too many credits because MMORPGs are made to be a better version of RL, in the 'Net Force' setting atleast. Money should be sucked in to lower inflation rates, but not criple the economy.

[Resetgun]

Originally posted by Darkbane
Err, that wasn't a serious suggestion I hope...

High level money sinks are liable to be things with only status value, rather than game-play effects. Anything else would break the game unless built into the mechanics at a most basic level, and we're probably a little late for that sort of thing in AO.

Designer Yalms, designer clothes, high status housing, stuff like that.

Sure, everyone would eventually have the cash to afford these themselves, but then you introduce new sinks every patch, create fashion trends, stuff like that...

Half serious

But truth is that there seems to be basicly two kinds people playing this game: social people and killers. (Ofcourse, this is only my opinion.)

- "Social people" are intrested from social things: fashion, houses, car colors, etc.

- "Killers" want to get XP fastes way possible (=killing mobs so fast as possible). They are more likely intrested from weapons, armors and other things that allows them to get XP faster (or allows them to kill other players faster).

If there is money sink for social people, it doesn't solve problem, because "killers" are not intrested social things (like building huge house and keeping parties there). It might actually make things worse for social people, because they are using most of their money to social status sinks, when killers are saving money to armors and weapons.

If we want money sinks for killers, we must make things like better armors, weapons or things that allow them to tune up their characters for faster killing (better implants, buffs etc). Currently this seems to be going on:
1) FC has release almost in every patch better armors and weapons.
2) There seems to be also coming "updatable money sink items" like: Kevlar Wool Balaclava Helmet.
3) There are item with decay rates: Overtuned High-Quality Heavy Tank Armor .

Ofcourse adding better and better items will cause balance problem - soon players can walk easily very hard missions with minimal risk. So you need to make missions harder or create artificial boundaries, like nano level requirements.

Making missions harder would cause another serious problem. Social people can't afford to use social money sinks, because they need to use their money to "killer money sinks" to stay alive in missions. So you need to use artificial boundaries...

I think that possibility to buy XP with credits would be easier to balance, than trying to balance 1000+ items after every patch. It might be really huge change in game's rules... and it might very likely broke game (especially, if there still is money exploits - as it seems to be). But it would also give players to possibility to get XP other ways than doing those DAMN BORING MISSIONS! ... And it would allow developers to use some creative time to social items...

[Darkbane]

Hmm, good points. I still think money->xp would break the game beyond repair, but I see what you mean.

Hmm, the "killer" money sinks don't need to be a lot better than normal stuff then, the "killer" type of player would pay megabucks for a small %... so it needn't be that unbalancing.

And to be honest, it's the "social" type of player who are likely to still be playing down the line, the "killer" type of player gets bored more easily.

[______________Luxxan]

I think that the "killers" aren't actually a problem, because typically they're so focused on leveling that they can barely afford to keep themselves arrayed in up-to-date equipment. This was a common problem early in the game as people raced through levels and had to upgrade before they'd even broken some of their stuff in.

This isn't the case so much anymore because Funcom has done a few things to appease the whining which had unfortunate economic backlashes. One was increasing the QL of loot in missions. Back in the day, the stuff you'd get in missions was so far below your level, it was trash to you. However, now that everything is much higher QL this translates to much better monetary return when you dump it all to the store. Second, chests are almost never empty. The empty rate on chests used to be well over 50%, now I'd say it's 10% or less. This means more loot which means more money from each mission. Finally, everyone and their cousin has a yalm these days, and the missions are't nearly as far away as they used to be. This means more missions in a shorter period of time.

However, I still think that the "killers" are ultimately going to have very little money to throw around compared to the players who focus on the economy and manage their money. What will happen is the "social" players will have just as much money as the "killers" but they'll have lots of neat little status symbols that make them happy. "Social" players won't want to sit on their money and "killers" can't afford to sit on their money, so everything should, in theory, work out in the end.

[____________Intrepid]

Items like the agents balaclava are another good way to sink money. require upgrade costs

Another way is have items decay. After a certain period of use they become less efficient for example.

[newarival]

Intrepid you are correct sir(or maam).....the problem with this money sink is that its ugly, um i mean its profession specific.

[charleyd]

If anyone cares about my two cents:

I'm 100% behind item decay; imagine having a current ql on all your items, and a maximum ql.

Add a booth in stores called "the repair booth".

tada! Every 2000 bullets you shoot, your gun drops 1 point in ql. After every mission, you have to waste money repairing your gun. Or you'll need a backup gun, to switch to for the next mission, and at the end of the day you have to repair them all. Same goes for armour. You get hit 100 times, a random piece of armour looses a ql point.

This will also have an effect on OE'd characters and twinks. Your twinking has a costly maintenance. At level 100 you can put on a ql 200 beam with help, but it won't stay 200 for long - you'll have to have it fixed and reequiped soon. You won't want to keep using a ql 200 beam because it will be too expensive.

Tada!

Any idea which does not include decay only means it will take longer for a character to start generating lots of money he doesn't need; it won't stop the money generation.

[______________Luxxan]

One thing AO does not need is more tedious unrewarding work. Which is exactly what equipment maintenance would be. The best way to create money sinks would be to let people do things "fun" with their money which don't unbalance the game for others.