Petition for More Wards - ITS ABOUT TIME

[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.