Ways to spend earned gold.

[Birne]

Heyho Folks …

I just made my thoughts about a problem in other MMOs: The economy of a hard currency in the game. In many other MMOs I realized that the worth of coins is getting smaller and smaller over time and in some of them there was no end of this deceasing. For example in Guild Wars there were Items that were traded in prices higher in gold/platin than any character can carry in his inventory. So why not find ways to work against this evolution of a currency in Oort by planting some “money eaters”? 😉 …

– What would you think about units of crafting material, which cost gold?

– What’s with a price in gold for repairing items?

– How would be hireable NPCs like vendors or feeders for your cattle that cost coins as a rent or to build a house in the area of a big town. What’s with the pricing of ingame mail delivering?

Don’t missunderstand me. I don’t want to empty the purse of all players, but there has to be a need for spending money to counter the effect of inflation.

[Kuma]

Right at this moment I had an other idea which may be a little bit extreme. How about a set amount of money in all of the worlds? (globally) Every monster or monster type would have a set amount of gold which they could drop and if they dropped all of that there would be nothing to get anymore. Same principle with the items that way there won’t be any inflation too.
Now if a (most likely higher tier) monster kills player they’ll drop all or a percentage of their money and maybe items and the monster gets it as loot from them to lose in further battles. And if a monster accumulates enough money it shares it with the monster type which has the least amount of gold left to lose.
With this the low level monster won’t “dry out” and if then the players had to go to the higher level monster and might lose so the lower level monster would have gold and maybe items again.
It seems a little bit extreme but I’d imagine it would be a rather good thing if implemented correctly. What do you think about it?

I also like the ideas of your money eaters^^
Either way we need something to stop game dependend inflation or deflation.

[Thorbjorn]

I really like the idea of hire able npc’s for tasks that way you could make a lot of life in the cities and farms. 🙂

[Birne]

The idea of money of dead ppl shared by the monsters is cool 🙂 … May be there should be a standard rate of losing gold on death which is always put into the pool for creatures (not a pool for each creature). That will be easier to program and will do it’s job too. But with the dropped items … FANTASTIC ;D

• This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by Birne.

[Kuma]

Well it might do the job to yes but then it would be possible to empty the pool with just killing the lowest level of monster. Which eliminates the need (in this system) to go and kill stronger monster. At least for gold^^ I mean there will be other drops which you can only get from certain monsters but still.

[Havok40k]

While I’m not sure of the practicality of it to begin with, the simplest solution to kuma’s point is to set monsters to have either diminishing returns on gold drops or drop gold based on monster level, where tougher monsters drop a higher percent of gold than low monsters.

[Kuma]

diminishing drops would fit good into my concept but that tougher monsters drop more gold is almost a given. Of course if you want fast money you go for the higher level monster but I just don’t like the fact that it would be possible to empty the whole stock of money the monsters have with low level monster.

[Karko]

I think a better solution would be siphon off the money in high end game play. This way casual players don’t see it happening but still contribute to the economy. Gold could be required to purchase fuel, and this fuel powers the beacons, thus the more land you claim and control the more money it would require to maintain your empire. another benefit of this would be that it would provide a mechanism of clean up of abandoned bases.

[Kuma]

And a good reason to take taxes from people who build or live on your beacon land^^

[Havok40k]

Karko is right. Give players at the highest level of play the heaviest gold sink, and make beacons cost gold to keep up, per beacon. Could even cost 10% more PER beacon placed. Another measure to combat inflation would be to remove gold drops from mobs entirely. Let temples and gold mining be the only source of gold in the game, so that trade can be based on global gold reserves, like in real life.

[Kuma]

Yea it never made sense for me how a spider could drop coins anyway xD

[Karko]

My personal favorite was grinding Orcs in Everquest trying to get an orc scalp. Thinking to myself the how the *** does every orc not have a scalp?

[Kuma]

yea things like that drive me crazy. I hope they find a way to avoid that.

[Havok40k]

Yeah, forget monster grinding, that’s no fun.

[Kuma]

It can be but mostly isn’t yes

[Birne]

Or at least let there be monsters who can drop gold, but only when there is a sense in droping gold for them. Like rational beings (Goblins or other NPC/enemy tribe folks, pirates, highwaymen or inhabitants of an evil city).

[Kuma]

yea if there aren’t too many of them it could be balanced out with the tax on beacons or other things you mentioned.

[Thorbjorn]

Continued from:
http://oortonline.com/forums/topic/npcs/#post-6162

I don’t think that gold lost on character death would be a good enough gold sink mostly because people are keeping their money somewhere safe if they can be lost or people will just avoid dying even more.

Also i think actual use for the money are a great way to create a gold sink because it makes the money become worth something else than their use to buy and sell stuff from other players.

[Patfor333]

What sort of uses can you imagine for gold? What if the currency was something you can use as a power source, a crafting material, or to upgrade items? If it were a power source it could be souls, then you use souls to power certain items like a jetpack, energy sword, or a special shield. Higher tier items would take more souls (maybe you craft fuel cells or they would take souls per second). If it were a crafting material maybe you can make special conductive material, a decorative block, or somehow used in making portals and beacons. If you could upgrade items, maybe you can turn a giant 2h warhammer into a gravity hammer with a new design, a pickaxe into an even faster one, or your armor into having a higher defense against physical/range/magic damage. Higher tier items would take more money.

Maybe you can even use money to enchant things.

But if it has any uses, where’s the line between currency and item?

[Thorbjorn]

As an answer to your last question: There isn’t really any difference between currency and items, but the importance of finding a way to use currency is that else the amount of money in the game would keep raising and a currencies value is quite much defined by its rarity.

If everybody had 1.000.000 gold and the only thing they could use it for was to buy stuff from other players nobody would really want it.

[Trollacoaster]

Why not just have Villiages with some NPCs in them? But unlike minecraft they could actually be useful, such as repairing items or buying new ones, or some upgrades if this could be available.

[Thorbjorn]

The problem is that this is jobs players should be able to learn quite easily.

[Grey]

You could make the NPC’s more useful and make them have even more complex jobs that the players could hire them for. Also I like the idea that you could use currency for other stuff like if it was gold you could turn it into gold blocks for building or use it for something else. This would make the currency have more value rather then just currency so it would make the players have to think on what they want to use it on and how important it is to them.

I also like when games over then just one type of currency like instead of just gold you would have gold, silver, and copper. Like in real life we have pennies and dimes I just think it adds to the game a little.

Last part was just a side note.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by Grey.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by Grey.

[Thorbjorn]

Define more complex jobs. If it is things like gathering materials i am against it as that should be things only the player should be able to do.

[Grey]

Wow, should of did this when I remembered what I was trying to put a across lol
Like NPC’s could be:
guards to watch over your stuff like privet security or to protect towns rioting NPC’s XD
transproting goods?
I forgot what I was going to say -.-

[Trollacoaster]

I don’t think the NPCS should be able to do complex jobs that the Player could easily do. The NPCS should just repair items and such. There could be specially generated NPCS that will give unique items or can help the player by selling rare or difficult items with an in-game currency.

[Thorbjorn]

Repairing is a job the players should quite easily be able to perform. I feel that Npc’s should only do jobs players wouldn’t want to do because they are really boring like standing guard outside a door all day or standing in a shop selling materials and such.

Also i am fully against anything where the Npc’s bring new items into play as that will work against the player driven Rpg concept.

[Author]

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