Curse

spiritofcat · Jun 08, 2005, 11:50 PM // 23:50

There is a problem with the economy in the game as it is now.
That problem is that gold is created at a much greater rate than it is destroyed at.
This causes inflation, a decrease in the value of gold.

The way to counter inflation is to even out the creation/destruction ratio of gold.
One very good way of increasing the gold destruction rate is the implementation of gold sinks.
Gold sinks are things that cost gold, but do not give in return something that can be re-sold for the same or more gold.

The purpose of this thread is to collect ideas for gold sinks that could be implemented in the game and thus save the economy from the ruin that continual inflation will inevitably cause.

Here are some ideas I have though of or come across.
More will be added as they are suggested.

Hairdressing:
Players pay gold to change their hairstyle and colour. Some styles and colours could be available only through this method and not in character creation.
Hair colour could be changed, but it would fade over time, causing the players to spend more money renewing it.

Cosmetic customisation of armour and weapons:
Players pay gold to change the look of their armour and weapons. This could be different models or additional colours, glows, sparkles and so on. These effects could be time-limited, so say you buy them for a day, a week, a month, whatever and have to buy them again after that. Also, if new customisations were released periodically the players would continue to pay for them because they were new and exciting.

Armour cosmetic maintainence:
Armour could also become dirty over time, causing it to lose it's shine and the colours to become dull. Players could then pay to have it cleaned, or pay even more to have it polished to a level of shine greater than it originally had.
This might be considered a hinderance to some, but if you think about it, it doesn't change the gameplay at all, you don't need shiny clean armour, so people aren't forced to pay lots of gold every few days to keep it clean, but many would want to.

Rethink the dye system:
Currently dye drops from monsters and is sold between players for ridiculous amounts of gold. This in no way benefits the economoy since it merely transferes wealth from one player to another.
If dye was treated the same way that weapon customisation currently is, it could be turned into a gold sink.
Players pay to have their armour dyed by a merchant. Mixing of colours could still be done, but it would all be done in a merchant window and not with physical, resellable inventory items.

Rethink the XP scroll system:
Similar to the dye suggestion above.
Instead of XP scrolls being items that are resellable, they should be available as an effect that is bought from an NPC.
Players pay gold to an NPC to be 'blessed' with 2x experience for the next few minutes or however long those scrolls last.
Maybe you could pay more for longer duration or higher multiplier.

Gambling:
"The house always wins"
Any properly run gambling institute takes more money than it gives out, thus creating a gold sink.

Personal housing and furniture for houses and guild halls:
Just like the way guilds can buy Guild Halls, players would be able to buy personal houses. Furniture could be bought to decorate these spaces. Extra storage might also be included in these houses.

Taxidermy and other forms of tropies:
Players could pay to have a monster that they had defeated turned into a statue to be displayed at their house or guild hall.
This would deteriorate (Rot, get dusty, etc.) over time and require an upkeep in gold to keep it in good condition.

Guild Hall expansion:
Various additions to the guild hall could be bought for large amounts of gold, or perhaps rented for a lesser amount per day/week/month whatever.
Additions could include Guild practice PVP arenas, storage, etc. See long posts further down the thread for details.

Persistent message boards:
Plays pay gold to post messages on a message board of some sort in town. These messages have a limited lifespan (24 hours was suggested) to reduce congestion.
Multiple boards could exist in each town. One for trading, one for guild information, etc.

Dancing Lessons:
Players pay gold to learn the dances of other professions, or entirely new dances. They have a limited number of dance lots so that learning a new dance would usually replace an old dance. This means that if they wanted their old dance back they would have to spend money again.

Pay per View PvP:
With observer mode on the horizon, another good gold sink could be paying to watch PvP and GvG matches.

(Closed to prevent random thread resurrection. Please PM a mod if you wish to open this thread.)

zim3031 · Jun 08, 2005, 11:55 PM // 23:55

The hair dressing would be intersting, but how great are these new ones that people will spend money on it?

I like the armor thing as it would finally give some distinction between players other than the color of their armor

Gambling i don't like because I would likely go poor if they implemented it

The housing thing is interesting and I'm sure one way or another they could make it work

I remeber one game i played required you to repair your weapons upon use. THe price wasn't extreme but it help you from getting ridiculously rich

spiritofcat · Jun 09, 2005, 12:07 AM // 00:07

Even if the hairstyles weren't that amazing I've heard people saying they would pay to have their hair style change because after 100 hours of playing they'd just like a bit of a change.
The whole IDEA of gambling is to make you poor, it takes gold out of the economy.

Yes, many games have had weapon degradation and repair, but that's more an element of the game mechanic than purely a gold sink. With the theme of Guild Wars being that everything most annoying about other games is avoided in this one, weapon repair would probably cause more trouble than it wopuld provide in gold sink benefit.

Drakron · Jun 09, 2005, 12:13 AM // 00:13

Yes, that kind of things tends to just be very anoying for players to keep track of ... next thing we know there is the need to eat, drink and rest or having some penalty because we failed to it within a time frame.

Real gold sinks end up being cosmetic reasons, like a house decoration and furniture or a character own looks and clothing and right now Guild Wars only have diferent looking guild halls.

dansamy · Jun 09, 2005, 12:19 AM // 00:19

Even the guild halls don't have that much differentiation. There are only a certain number of halls and no customization to your hall. I'd pay an extra fee to have a Xunlai agent, an armorer and a merchant in my hall. An armorer? Yes. It would give your PvE players an advantage to be able to get higher armor level at lower character levels. This would be one advantage of guild membership.

spiritofcat · Jun 09, 2005, 12:26 AM // 00:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by dansamy

Even the guild halls don't have that much differentiation. There are only a certain number of halls and no customization to your hall. I'd pay an extra fee to have a Xunlai agent, an armorer and a merchant in my hall. An armorer? Yes. It would give your PvE players an advantage to be able to get higher armor level at lower character levels. This would be one advantage of guild membership.

Good idea! But it doesn't create that much of a gold sink as you would only pay the fee once to aquire the merchant.

Elythor · Jun 09, 2005, 12:31 AM // 00:31

I want a gold sink so I can paint my guild hall purple

j/k. Although it'd be fun in GvG to attack an enemy guild hall in rainbow colours

squakMix · Jun 09, 2005, 12:31 AM // 00:31

I would love to have the armor customization; makes everyone a bit more unique and respected (the good looks would cost alot or something so if you can afford the coolest glow or sparks or whatever people would know you can afford it). It would work best if you customized each PART of your armor seperately.

Some GREAT ideas in this thread! The only thing I would not add is the armorer to the guild hall; that causes an unfair balance for the low level players if you can afford better armor.

Umbra · Jun 09, 2005, 12:54 AM // 00:54

Whatabout some consumables? Stuff like food that gives certain bonuses. This would obviously have to be ballanced and handled so one doesn't run into the annoying parts of this but stuff like a 5-10% speed buff or food that takes away death penalty would be cool. Something else fun might be something sorta like how beer and wine worked in EQ would be fun.

Flame · Jun 09, 2005, 01:25 AM // 01:25

Perhaps an announcement board where you can pay some amount (say 100 gold) and have a message put up. This way, people could put something up to sell things, recruit for guilds, etc., which would reduce spam in towns, and it would mean they had to spend a little money. Just have messages removed after 24 hours or something...

spiritofcat · Jun 09, 2005, 01:36 AM // 01:36

Umbra and Flame, excelent ideas both of you!

Consumables that reduce death penalty would I'm sure be viable, especially when you constider that you can already pay 100g to get +2% from any statue while you have favour. I'm sure other effects could be created that were equally useful but still balanced.

Announcement board is an excelent idea! People always have things they want to say, so this is a very viable gold sink.

Syuveil · Jun 09, 2005, 02:28 AM // 02:28

They had gambling... it was called /roll... they got rid of it.

Mo/R9 · Jun 09, 2005, 02:33 AM // 02:33

Hairdressing: Taken from Runescape. :P Anyway, I like the idea of player-houses, I would really like a place to call home. Perhaps you might have to collect 6000 wood or granite slabs or something to build it. That would raise the price of those "useless" materials and also serve the purpose of a gold sink.

Also, have healing potions (stackable) for if you go somewhere and you don't want to take a monk if you are a class with no healing skill or if your skill bar is full.

Evan montegarde · Jun 09, 2005, 02:36 AM // 02:36

I've always wanted to play an MMORPG with player owned houses, it would be awesome to be able to own one and be able to upgrade it as you go along, from wood to stone to brick, etc.

spiritofcat · Jun 09, 2005, 02:40 AM // 02:40

The /roll was meant for things other than gambling I'm sure, and it's not gone, just removed from towns. I'm talking about proper gambling, run by NPCs, not scams run by players.

Healing Potions: I'm not so sure about this. I think I heard once that ArenaNet had a very good reason why they didn't want to include healing potions in the game.

The idea of using crafting materials to build/upgrade your house sounds very good!

Mo/R9 · Jun 09, 2005, 02:56 AM // 02:56

I reference once more to Runescape when I say that they are introducing Player-Owned houses, although it is only for paying members.

stengah · Jun 09, 2005, 03:15 AM // 03:15

I would LOVE all those kind of things, gold sinks ... I mean it won't disadvantage you in pvp which is good, but it'll make you feel different, I definitly think that would be the best addition to keep players from getting bored of the game : customisation and minigames.

HOWEVER i'm totally againt the Consumables idea, it would make the pvp pointless and simply destroy the game (yeah you know ... auto potion scripts etc + the pvp is balanced, why unbalance it ?)

Khift · Jun 09, 2005, 03:19 AM // 03:19

An addition to the player-owned housing concept:

Perhaps have these houses as an addition to the Guild Hall? As in, you get your sigil to buy a Guild Hall, then the guild leader can pay some arbitrary amount of gold to "add" land to the Guild Hall island which can later be used as a housing development for the guild members. This could, essentially, combine two gold sinks into one, seeing as the extra land could be used not just for housing but also for extra additions to the Guild Hall, like a storage facility (Xunlai or guild-centered), a practice arena, or even a drinking hall, all of which costs the guild money and acts as a very large gold sink.

But then again, maybe I'm just a town builder.

Edit: Of course, the extra extensions will not appear in GvG battles; it would just load the basic model for your Guild Hall.

joeljermon · Jun 09, 2005, 03:26 AM // 03:26

Well, the ale is a good start. It's certainly not going to fix the economy on its own, but it's a good start.

Padre · Jun 09, 2005, 04:01 AM // 04:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by joeljermon

Well, the ale is a good start. It's certainly not going to fix the economy on its own, but it's a good start.

It's doing pretty well now... walking into any city with a dwarven mechant and you'll instantly be in a party similar to the ones I went to at UMR when i was there

Don't see it going that strong forever though.