Petition for More Wards - ITS ABOUT TIME

[KayRadley]

That is pretty irrelevant especially since it has been months already. I don't want to be the person to bring in conspiracy facts on the table here, but most "Covid deaths" are not due to the virus anyway. The hype is a unnecessary scare.

Oh great. A Karen. I'm done.

[Kenky]

That is pretty irrelevant especially since it has been months already. I don't want to be the person to bring in conspiracy facts on the table here, but most "Covid deaths" are not due to the virus anyway. The hype is a unnecessary scare.

While deaths from covid are indeed low, that doesn't mean the pandemic should be ignored or the people suffering to be neglected. There is a pretty good reason why deaths from covid alone are so low and that's because, by itself, it's mortality is low. However the damage it does to your body makes other infections far more lethal and far more life-threatening.

So I feel I should re-iterate here. Just because you aren't affected by it doesn't mean it's fine and dandy world-wide. Be considerate to others and be patient and not slam your foot with demands that even you know won't get met.

And lastly, to anyone reading this who still believe this "pandemic" is a hoax or some other stupid fabrication. Go ahead and go to the families who have lost people to this pandemic. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear how YOU think they lost their family and friends to a "hoax". Or go volunteer at your local Hospitals infection / Crisis wards and see for yourself just how bad it can get behind closed doors. Maybe then you'll understand.

[Penthea]

While deaths from covid are indeed low, that doesn't mean the pandemic should be ignored or the people suffering to be neglected. There is a pretty good reason why deaths from covid alone are so low and that's because, by itself, it's mortality is low. However the damage it does to your body makes other infections far more lethal and far more life-threatening.

I recently read a frightening statistic. Around 30% of people who get hospitalised due to covid-19 are left with long term issues afterwards. Some people are still so unwell they can't get back to work despite the virus no longer being in their system. For some it's that the cough and breathing issues persist for many weeks or months afterwards but for others it's as bad as permanent lung or heart damage.

I really wish people would stop looking at only deaths. Just because you didn't die from a health condition doesn't mean you are 100% fine when the cause of said condition is no longer active in your body.

But the news is hugely to blame for this because they generally only report confirmed cases of infection and deaths. Not enough focus is being put on the experiences of those who survived the infection.

[Awha]

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.

[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.

[Penthea]

I just realised I misread something and responded to said misread thing in my previous post but I'm in bed on my phone, about to go to sleep, and I can't edit my post on mobile (SE really need to change this). Oh well.

So yea if some stuff in my response to Jojoya looks off, that's why. Apologies for this. Sleep deprivation is an annoying beast.