Petition for More Wards - ITS ABOUT TIME

[Jojoya]

Since instance housing prob will never happen, and apartments that scale in size do not seem to be coming out anytime soon. Within the ward system I do think SE should just double down on the limited resource and raise the prices on plots exponentially. Turn housing into a true gil sink, which is this game largely needs with the upcoming Ishgard housing area. With the price decay if the demand is not high they overtime the plots will land into the affordable range.

Greatly increasing the plot prices doesn't turn housing into a true gil sink, though.

True gil sinks affect a majority of players, slowly draining gil that's in active circulation from the game economy to offset the new gil being generated through game play. The amount being drained doesn't unduly burden less wealthy players or block them from content.

Increase housing prices to an extreme level and you're not draining the gil in active circulation from many players. You're draining inactive gil from a few wealthy players that had been hoarding it, gil that likely would never have made it back into active circulation.

I can think of 2 methods for housing to have effective gil sinks. The first is to move all housing items currently acquired through crafting/loot drops to vendors and sell them for gil only. It's still not a great gil sink because it's dependent on how much a player wants to decorate/redecorate but it doesn't unduly burden less wealthy players since they can choose how much they spend.

The second has been suggested before and gets a lot of hate. Add a monthly property tax. Set the value to a few percent of a house's minimum purchase price, say 2% for smalls, 3% for mediums, 4% for larges. Taxes on the smalls would be affordable for less wealthy players. Taxes on the mediums and larges would still be reasonable for wealthy players who make more gil. FCs running an active workshop shouldn't have a problem paying the tax on any size house.

Such a tax would steady drain gil from a larger portion of the player base like a good gil sink should do.

It has the added benefit of reducing demand for houses, leaving more available for those who would actually be using them. People are a lot more likely to make purchases that have a one time cost than they are to make purchases that involve a recurring fee.

How many players not currently using their house would keep it if they had to pay a monthly tax? How many would demand more medium and large houses if they had to pay 10-40 times more a month in taxes than they would have to pay for a small?

If SE is going to stick to the ward system, a tax would do a far better job of leveling out demand than increasing the one time cost would. Players could go the RMT route to buy what they want if they needed to. They're not likely to go the RMT route to pay a tax since their normal game play (whether running roulettes or selling things on the MB from crafting/treasure maps) would already provide what they need.

[Awha]

Greatly increasing the plot prices doesn't turn housing into a true gil sink, though.
True gil sinks affect a majority of players, slowly draining gil that's in active circulation from the game economy to offset the new gil being generated through game play. The amount being drained doesn't unduly burden less wealthy players or block them from content.

Increase housing prices to an extreme level and you're not draining the gil in active circulation from many players. You're draining inactive gil from a few wealthy players that had been hoarding it, gil that likely would never have made it back into active circulation. Sure a tax route would also be helpful and I brought that up many moons ago but going based off that discussion I did come to realize that the tax route would be sort moot. Since it cannot be too large of a mount cause then it would drive people do go extra lengths to just pay that months taxes, and if it is too low then it serves no purpose.

Removing the means to craft items for one's house removing content away from crafters.

I can think of 2 methods for housing to have effective gil sinks. The first is to move all housing items currently acquired through crafting/loot drops to vendors and sell them for gil only. It's still not a great gil sink because it's dependent on how much a player wants to decorate/redecorate but it doesn't unduly burden less wealthy players since they can choose how much they spend.

The second has been suggested before and gets a lot of hate. Add a monthly property tax. Set the value to a few percent of a house's minimum purchase price, say 2% for smalls, 3% for mediums, 4% for larges. Taxes on the smalls would be affordable for less wealthy players. Taxes on the mediums and larges would still be reasonable for wealthy players who make more gil. FCs running an active workshop shouldn't have a problem paying the tax on any size house.

Such a tax would steady drain gil from a larger portion of the player base like a good gil sink should do.

It has the added benefit of reducing demand for houses, leaving more available for those who would actually be using them. People are a lot more likely to make purchases that have a one time cost than they are to make purchases that involve a recurring fee.

How many players not currently using their house would keep it if they had to pay a monthly tax? How many would demand more medium and large houses if they had to pay 10-40 times more a month in taxes than they would have to pay for a small?

If SE is going to stick to the ward system, a tax would do a far better job of leveling out demand than increasing the one time cost would. Players could go the RMT route to buy what they want if they needed to. They're not likely to go the RMT route to pay a tax since their normal game play (whether running roulettes or selling things on the MB from crafting/treasure maps) would already provide what they need.

I mean the longboy mount in WoW is considsred a gil sink, and it just an astronomically expensive mount. Though a tax system would have the greatest overall impact I agree. Though I have changed my stance since people did bring up fair points that it would be fairly hard to balance.

Make the price too low it becomes irrelevant, make the price too high and you punish the little guy not so much the ones with gil to burn. As it stands when Ishgard comes out I will relocate multiple plots, though if i did not have multiple plots I could easily afford in a theoretical world to buy multiple large plots and still have gil to burn.

Depending on the amount a tax system would deter me from owning many plots but I highly doubt SE would put the taxes at such a rate in the first place. I get things like teleport, and repair costs are gil sinks, but they do very little to remove gil from the game. Though if housing did cost a pretty penny that would maybe have the potential to remove a decent chunk of gil from the game, and could also maybe limit the time frame in which people cod try and compete for a plot since they would either have to have the funds or wait until it devalues to a point at which one could afford it.

I also do not think raising the prices bars people from content since the game has a devalue system in place so overtime if the demand is not high enough sooner or later it will reach a price point that reasonably fits ones budget.

[Penthea]

Such a tax would steady drain gil from a larger portion of the player base like a good gil sink should do.

The idea of tax concerns me because there is a delicate balance to charging a tax that is a legitimate gil sink without forcing players to do stuff they don't want to do in order to fund the tax. This is a game and I don't like the idea of bringing in elements from the real world, such as regularly doing things you hate to get money, just to keep your home. So many people play games to escape that sort of thing.

It also brings up a potentially troubling issue for fcs. Would they need to start charging their members tax fees? Would large fcs be at an incredibly huge advantage due to the enormous pool of players that could make the tax fee stupidly cheap per member? Would it be a fixed price across each member and it's automatically taken from them without their control? Paying tax would certainly make some people wary about joining fcs with a house.

The game is in dire need of gil sinks but I feel these should be optional instead of mandatory, but make them enticing enough that a large amount of players would want to engage in those gil sinks.

I have said many times before that the option to upgrade houses and apartments with things like extra rooms, extra npc slots, option to have retainers indoors, etc, would provide a gil sink that would certainly be very tempting to most players with housing. But of course the issue with this is can the game's often questionable code facilitate this sort of thing? I'm sure it can with some work but whether SE want to put in that work or not is another thing altogether.

Glam, raiding gear, furniture, hairstyles, mounts and minions have proven to work well as optional gil sinks but the issue here is that these things lose value over time because their value is almost entirely player generated. Only incredibly rare items like the mount from PoTD remain super expensive even years after they came to the game. Something with a fixed price such as the above examples of housing upgrades would not lose value over time because players would have zero control over their costs. SE need to bring in legitimate gil sinks that have a fixed price. For example they could have npcs selling extremely expensive goodies such as mounts, instead of how it now with mounts only obtainable from quests, achievements, a drop, the mogstation, in exchange for special currency you can't buy with gil or the marketboard. SE could certainly introduce npcs with super expensive fixed priced items without changing anything about how the game works. We already see this with mgp, so why not gil too?

And of course there is the concern about how any of this would make more players tempted to use RMT, but I think it would be less likely for them to if the gil sinks are optional instead of mandatory. When something is mandatory with a window in which you have a limited time to pay the temptation for RMT rises because some players may not feel they have the time to earn enough money to keep up with the monetary demand or they might just be too lazy to do it. But something optional without a limited time window can be worked for over any length of time without putting any pressure on a player so then the temptation to use RMT would not be as high.

And it is in SE's interests to reduce the incentive for RMT. Not just because it can very negatively affect the market in the game, also because it's not unusual for players who engage in this to get their accounts hacked. And hacked accounts is more work for SE to deal with, which costs them real money to do.

[Jojoya]

I mean the longboy mount in WoW is considsred a gil sink, and it just an astronomically expensive mount. .

Players might have thought of it as one. Blizzard doesn't. Every time every time they've added those extremely expensive mounts and other items to the game they state they aren't intended to be gold sinks. They're just something for wealthy players to spend their gold on.

That's not to say that games shouldn't have extremely expensive items for players to purchase with their hoarded currency. That helps ensure the currency doesn't go back into circulation.

But they doesn't accomplish what gold and gil sinks are supposed to - keeping inflation in check - because they don't affect enough players who are actively buying from and selling to each other.

The idea of tax concerns me because there is a delicate balance to charging a tax that is a legitimate gil sink without forcing players to do stuff they don't want to do in order to fund the tax. This is a game and I don't like the idea of bringing in elements from the real world, such as regularly doing things you hate to get money, just to keep your home. So many people play games to escape that sort of thing.

It also brings up a potentially troubling issue for fcs. Would they need to start charging their members tax fees? Would large fcs be at an incredibly huge advantage due to the enormous pool of players that could make the tax fee stupidly cheap per member? Would it be a fixed price across each member and it's automatically taken from them without their control? Paying tax would certainly make some people wary about joining fcs with a house.

Agreed that it has its own set of problems and shouldn't necessarily be implemented but it one of the few ways you could get a true gil sink out of housing.

As for FCs charging their members fees... why? One 8 bed garden plot growing shards using Grade 3 topsoil can easily earn a million gil a month for a FC. It only takes one person to run a workshop and my FC makes 5-20 million gil a month depending on what the subs and airships bring back. That's really bad management on the part of the FC leadership if they're resorting to asking members for gil donations.

As for RMT, there's no reason why a tax or any other gil sink should encourage RMT. That 40k/month tax I used as an example? Doing 6 MSQ roulettes a month has it covered. Joining a map party for one night a month would more than cover the cost of the medium tax I used as an example. You've still got all the gil from all the other content you do and items you sell to pay for the other things you need or want.

The game is throwing gil at us left and right, it's why gil sinks are needed. There's no need for RMT... unless there are very expensive items to buy and a player wants the item now instead of saving for it.

[Penthea]

As for FCs charging their members fees... why? One 8 bed garden plot growing shards using Grade 3 topsoil can easily earn a million gil a month for a FC. It only takes one person to run a workshop and my FC makes 5-20 million gil a month depending on what the subs and airships bring back. That's really bad management on the part of the FC leadership if they're resorting to asking members for gil donations.

I'm not sure how it's a bad argument given no one (not that I spotted at least) gave any detail on how tax would affect a fc. Maybe some people only want tax for personal houses?

It's really common for fcs to not bother much with gardening. As for the workshop a huge amount of fcs don't regularly engage in that content, my own fc being one of them. We're just not nuts for that feature. You can create some cool stuff with it but we don't use it regularly at all. We only do if we want to craft something we want. This brings me back to my initial point about players doing something they may not necessarily even want to do just so they can pay tax, if the tax is high enough that such a thing could end up being a requirement even for a fc.

As for RMT, there's no reason why a tax or any other gil sink should encourage RMT. That 40k/month tax I used as an example? Doing 6 MSQ roulettes a month has it covered. Joining a map party for one night a month would more than cover the cost of the medium tax I used as an example. You've still got all the gil from all the other content you do and items you sell to pay for the other things you need or want.

My point about RMT and tax was under the assumption that the tax would be high enough that a player would have to actively work towards paying instead of it being low enough that just doing whatever they usually do would still make them easily cover the cost.

The game is throwing gil at us left and right, it's why gil sinks are needed. There's no need for RMT... unless there are very expensive items to buy and a player wants the item now instead of saving for it.

I mostly agree with this. The game is in dire need of gil sinks. However RMT is often used for housing because that is something with a limited time window for purchase save for dead servers, and even then someone could use RMT because they want a very specific plot so they get gil the fastest way they know how so no one else can buy it before them. Even on dead servers mansions and mediums tend to get snapped up pretty fast. Thankfully because literally nothing else in the game has a mechanic like this with such a tiny amount of the item/asset to go around, RMT isn't as big a problem as it could have been.

[Awha]

Players might have thought of it as one. Blizzard doesn't. Every time every time they've added those extremely expensive mounts and other items to the game they state they aren't intended to be gold sinks. They're just something for wealthy players to spend their gold on.

That's not to say that games shouldn't have extremely expensive items for players to purchase with their hoarded currency. That helps ensure the currency doesn't go back into circulation.

But they doesn't accomplish what gold and gil sinks are supposed to - keeping inflation in check - because they don't affect enough players who are actively buying from and selling to each other.


Agreed that it has its own set of problems and shouldn't necessarily be implemented but it one of the few ways you could get a true gil sink out of housing.

As for FCs charging their members fees... why? One 8 bed garden plot growing shards using Grade 3 topsoil can easily earn a million gil a month for a FC. It only takes one person to run a workshop and my FC makes 5-20 million gil a month depending on what the subs and airships bring back. That's really bad management on the part of the FC leadership if they're resorting to asking members for gil donations.

As for RMT, there's no reason why a tax or any other gil sink should encourage RMT. That 40k/month tax I used as an example? Doing 6 MSQ roulettes a month has it covered. Joining a map party for one night a month would more than cover the cost of the medium tax I used as an example. You've still got all the gil from all the other content you do and items you sell to pay for the other things you need or want.

The game is throwing gil at us left and right, it's why gil sinks are needed. There's no need for RMT... unless there are very expensive items to buy and a player wants the item now instead of saving for it.

I get that if my fault for using the word true. While in my time playing WoW I do not recall blizzard ever making that statement, though I do see where you are coming from and it makes sense.

Though isn't the base function of a currency sink to remove money from the game world? I mean sure depending on how it is done it could have different effects on the game economy, though at the core it is simply a method used by developers to remove money from the game, or am I misunderstanding what a currency sink is?

That said my issue with a tax system largely boils down unless the tax is rather large given how easy it is to make vast amounts of gil after one is already established in a market any tax would just negatively impact players with smaller coffers. I get the idea behind it, thought I highly doubt SE will tax players at rate those who have gil to burn and a reliable means of earning gil would bat an eye lash even when it came to owning multiple plots since plots do prove a source of revenue.

[Jojoya]

Though isn't the base function of a currency sink to remove money from the game world?

The point is to get currency out of active circulation so inflation doesn't get out of hand and new players end up priced out of the game.

In a way, many of the wealthiest players are a mini-currency sink. They're using currency as a scoring system to see if they're "winning". They're not about to give up part of their score so it's not contributing to inflation. It's fine to have items that target that wealthy but it's not going to impact inflation.

That said my issue with a tax system largely boils down unless the tax is rather large given how easy it is to make vast amounts of gil after one is already established in a market any tax would just negatively impact players with smaller coffers. I get the idea behind it, thought I highly doubt SE will tax players at rate those who have gil to burn and a reliable means of earning gil would bat an eye lash even when it came to owning multiple plots since plots do prove a source of revenue.

Which is part of why I listed a staggered tax rate based on property size. Players with less wealth are more likely just to have the small houses and the tax could easily be paid with what's earned through normal game play. Players with greater wealth are the one who have the medium and large houses, or multiple houses. They're already going to greater effort to earn the gil and most of it is usually coming through sales to other players, not game play.

The one interesting thing to point out here is that the revenue that comes from housing isn't newly generated gil (with the exception of that which comes from selling salvaged accessories to a vendor). It's all gil already in circulation coming from other players through marketboard sales or direct trade transactions. When that's the revenue being used to pay the tax, the tax ends up an even more effective gil sink since it's using gil already in circulation.

This is all theoretical, of course, based on the idea of using housing as a gil sink and how it would be effective. SE is unlikely to do it.

[Awha]

The point is to get currency out of active circulation so inflation doesn't get out of hand and new players end up priced out of the game.

In a way, many of the wealthiest players are a mini-currency sink. They're using currency as a scoring system to see if they're "winning". They're not about to give up part of their score so it's not contributing to inflation. It's fine to have items that target that wealthy but it's not going to impact inflation.



Which is part of why I listed a staggered tax rate based on property size. Players with less wealth are more likely just to have the small houses and the tax could easily be paid with what's earned through normal game play. Players with greater wealth are the one who have the medium and large houses, or multiple houses. They're already going to greater effort to earn the gil and most of it is usually coming through sales to other players, not game play.

The one interesting thing to point out here is that the revenue that comes from housing isn't newly generated gil (with the exception of that which comes from selling salvaged accessories to a vendor). It's all gil already in circulation coming from other players through marketboard sales or direct trade transactions. When that's the revenue being used to pay the tax, the tax ends up an even more effective gil sink since it's using gil already in circulation.

This is all theoretical, of course, based on the idea of using housing as a gil sink and how it would be effective. SE is unlikely to do it.

That makes sense perosnally my goal was not to impact inflation, just to stagger the access to plots and treat it like the finite resource it is. Learned something new I always thought the core function of a gold sink was to remove the money from the game, and depending on what the sink was added to would have different impacts on the economy. Like in WoW I and many others do consider mounts a gold sink, and many do not even like that mounts are a good sink. Though I do not mind them personally. Though I will admit i never gave the ingame economy much thought.

Granted I was just going based off a wiki page, it seems based off thst page having an impact on the economy does not always have to be the primary goal of a gold sink, but it does make sense since removing gold from the game itself probably does not do much of anything.

Granted your idea makes sense, and I could see it working though I also doubt SE will do anything drastic to changd up housing since they seem to be fans of the status quo. Though I think that is part of the problem. since ad it stands housing has a limited supply but the prices are so readlity accessible it sort of gives people mixed signals.

[Jojoya]

That makes sense perosnally my goal was not to impact inflation, just to stagger the access to plots and treat it like the finite resource it is.

A tax does both, though. It helps to curb inflation and reduces demand for a finite resource.

It's easy to make the choice to buy something when you pay once and it's yours forever. If you don't end up using it not a big deal, it's not costing you any extra to keep it.

It's harder to make that choice if you have to keep paying for it each month. Will you use it enough to make it worth paying the recurring fee? If not, you're better off not buying it and saving the gil to buy other things you will be using.

When the idea of a tax has come up in past discussion, some players objected because they said they wouldn't have bought their house in the first place if there had been a tax they would need to keep paying. That shows a tax would have a positive effect on reducing demand for a limited resource.