Runes of Magic US / AU

Quoted from "midknight129;504268"

Selling Megas won't work because there are already established "unofficial" world chat private channels set up. I was unaware of that, but even then with the massive number of people who use WC regardless (At least on the server I play in) it'd be a way to sink gold into the shopkeeper till like you mention further down. It'll absorb marginal gold at best. Simply taxing players with over a certain amount of gold also has to be carefully done because they'll just create a number of mules. Instead of gold per character, gold per account, that way each time someone logs on and off their gold is recorded and their accounts are drained accordingly. The biggest problem are the "gold hoarders" who accumulate gold for themselves and hold on to it. It's more of a problem if they quit the game with a large amount of gold in their pocket as that money will likely never re-enter the economy. This is true, but the Inactive Account tax you proposed would prevent that. What would be needed are the following:

1) A "set" amount of gold per server, possibly sub-divided into each area. Shopkeepers will have a "till" and if they have no money in the till, they can't buy items. When a shopkeeper is low on money, they'll charge more for their wares; when they have lots of cash on hand, the prices will drop somewhat. I don't personally think that limiting servers to a "set" amount of gold is a good idea, it'd discourage new players and even then there are still just a few people who would horde most of the gold. Instead of a Server wide gold pool, just keep the shopkeepers with large tills that get refilled every few days (think of it like a gold delivery)

2) "Operational taxes" such as Auction House surcharges, Production training fees, Elite Skill training fees, etc. will be regularly cycled into shopkeeper tills to simulate the NPC economic movement. There already are Auction house taxes which are fair i think. As for Production training fee's it already costs a ton of money to level up professions and all of the crafting professions require gold to make items.

3) Diamond Purchases will have a "gold tax" amended to them. So, for example, if the tax is 100 gold per diamond, a cash shop item costing 9 diamonds would also require 900 gold. This is just a bad idea period in my opinion. If we put a cash tax on Diamonds, people won't want to buy diamonds anymore and the game will just die. I guarantee you if there is a Gold tax on diamonds, players would rage harder than when they incorporated a % mana cost to EVERY spell.

4) Players inactive for a certain period of time will incur a gold tax in which a certain amount of their funds will be cycled back into the economy until it falls to a predetermined threshold. I like the idea, i think an inactivity period of 3 months starts draining a minor amount of gold and the amount increases every 3 months to a maximum of 12 months where it caps out how much it takes out every so often.

5) Gold sent through the mail will incur a percentage tax. IE. if the tax is 2%, and you send 1,000 gold, it will cost an extra 10 gold to send it. The actual percentage used would be marginal for "normal" business transactions but substantial when people try to send very large gold amounts. Yes, gold sent through mail by itself should be taxed, but items, COD and things like that shouldn't get a tax along with them.

6) When large amounts of gold are being "hoarded", the game will compensate by flowing "extra" money into the economy. When the hoarded gold starts becoming available again, the extra money will be re-absorbed by simply not going into shop tills. With the idea's you've suggested it seems to me that the only way a gold hoarder would be able to horde gold would simply be to not buy Diamonds, play frequently, never send things over mail, never train professions or sell things on the AH. Which a lot of players do as it is, which is why i suggested the 50K rent a week for players over 20M on their account. It wouldn't be per character, but per house (6 characters, 50K for all the houses) This way new players won't have to worry about their gold dissipating over a week off and players who have 1 house have an advantage over players with 6.

The values I gave out are based on what I've seen on my server, so it is likely they would have to be adjusted by server. Even if it caused mass migration to other servers, players would still have to start over.

Free advice is seldom cheap. -Rule of Acquisition, #59