The delicate issue of money sinking

[Agog]

Description

Hello to you. I would like to make a modest contribution to the admirable effort of reflection that TDN is making on the subject of money sinking.

Let's talk about what it is. In a server, gold and items tend over time to be abundant, because players farm a lot, and consume little.

The following consequences, among others, result from this:

- The amount of gold owned by the players is constantly increasing.

- Since this technical gold also has an RP value, rich PCs gain a strong RP power over the world. They can for example, bribe NPCs.


Money sinking is the creation of systems to decrease the amount of gold owned by PCs. On TDN, money sinking as I understood it, impacts equally the players. All are subject to the same taxes on buying/selling licenses, and real estate rentals.

The problem with this system that we could put forward, is that it pushes casual players to farm more than they would like, if they want to own things. For a farmer, this increased farming is not a problem. But for a casual, it can be a pain in the ass.

Suggestion

What if the principle of the XP pool system of TDN, was reused for money sinking?

I take the example of the current XP pool system. This system is for me a good example. The small player who has little time to farm, will earn a good amount of XP on one week. The big player won't be able to earn more XP than him, unless he spends a lot of time RPing and thus, getting tickets (and thus, participating in the life of a RP server).

The suggested idea is the following: the money sinking systems, see their maintenance cost increased by slice of wealth of the PC. For example, a PC with 1000 silver coins in his ban account, sees all its license fees, triple. A PC with 10 000 silver coins, sees them quintuple. This would make, say, three brackets: one for the poor, low taxed player, one for the average player and one for the rich player.

There are all sorts of RP reasons for such a system. Murann needs funding, so the city decided to tax the wealthy more than the poors commoners.

The benefits of this system would be to continue to implement money sinking, but without such a system being too burdensome for the more casual players.

 

[JJWF]

Although taxation is a great idea in theory, I feel like it will either require an automated system that sucks up people's cash, which could be a real pain to code and has its own set of drawbacks like people being incentivised to find sneaky ways to keep their cash out of banks and trying to dodge the taxation 'ticks' as well as trying to keep their liquid capital under certain thresholds.

My favourite approach to money sinks would be to just make all high-end crafting and housing very expensive since those are the two major things people will be sinking their money into when they're done with the leveling process. Make scrolls, potions and wands cost far more than usual to craft because the amount of magic that infuses them is now unstable and it takes several attempts to make said magic stick; and even then it's fleeting with an expiry date. Make enchanting/reforging gear for the most powerful effects astronomically expensive due to the binding reagents which must be prepared and handled with such care and expertise that simply their storage and preservation costs a fortune. Make the housing that characters other than civilians wish to buy cost ten times as much as usual to both purchase and upkeep because typically adventurers are well known to have trouble following them around on a regular basis, so nobody wants to rent their property to them and other citizens are scared to live near them. It's just too much of a risk unless they're willing to pay way above the odds for the privilege.

Make these costs a material cost that the crafter has to fit themself as part of the crafting process as a way of simulating both the storage and preparation of the reagents as well the exhausting creation process itself, so they will require that amount from their client along with whatever fee they choose to charge for the service. Although this will not constantly drain money from the economy in intervals like taxation would, this is a much more easily implementable system that will take a big chunk of cash every single time someone crafts something at least moderately impactful or pays the upkeep on their residence. It will also have the added bonus of making these commodities more exclusive and alluring as well as encouraging people to go out and try to make themselves rich so they can be the only person on the server with a +2 Katana of Litheness or a house in the nicest location in Murann or whatever. It's more a carrot approach, rather than a stick approach.

 

[Owlsongs]

Cosmetics like housing stuff would be a good way to do it, but just raising the price of 'end game' items would hurt casual players just as well or even more. And things like automated price or tax adjustments can be easily circumvented by having one's wealth be solely in hoarded items, which can't be taxed. I feel like a solution to this is already in place, which is the current permadeath system. If you are using your massive wealth to start influencing the world around you IC too much, I think you would/may become eligible to be approached and asked to either opt in, or to not use said massive wealth to influence major events. And so long as this wealth doesn't (entirely) stay in closed little cliques, it can be a good thing as well, enabling a PC to hire licensed mercenaries (or dastardly assassins), host tournaments with a cash prize, fund expeditions to places, and all sorts of other things that other PCs can fully participate in, enjoy, and even benefit from. It doesn't make sense, to me, to start limiting those RP possibilities, just out of fear of the inevitability of some PCs becoming very wealthy and doing nothing with it. The world needs rich, fat and lazy nobles too, I guess. It's just an inevitability. That's my two cents.