The following comment came from the Credit Market Status thread, and it deserves it's own thread.



Comments? Any idea on how to create that perfect goldsink that would not be for the short or mid term benefit, but the long term?

See also: Gold sinks

I agree with Akui in the previous thread that lack of gold sinks is NOT the issue, but rather, the incredibly high demand for credits (which can only be obtained via promotions or RL money) and the incredibly low supply.

There has been no discernible drop in credit prices yet though, despite the credit bonus currently running.

Credit sale bonuses are merely incentives to increase supply, not actually supply increases. High demand and high supply translates to steady price. You would need to not only increase supply, but drop demand to below the level of supply to reduce prices but any appreciable amount.

The demand can be seen as more or less steady though, while the supply is rather variable. Nothing has changed recently to make people demand more credits as far as I've noticed; no new skills have been released, no new artifacts have been announced that would cause people to hoard.

Which means rather little. I buy a healthy amount of credits. I never put them on market. There are plenty of other people who operate essentially the same way.


A gold sink will only have a meaningful impact on the price of credits if the following elements are true:

The sink is attractive/essential enough to attract lots of interest.
The sink, while maintaining the above, is costly in some way shape or form enough to meaningfully reduce the active gold supply.
The sink, while maintaining above, is attractive/essential enough to convince speculators to take gold they would otherwise use to "buy low, sell high" with and expend it in the sink.

If the sink isn't attractive to begin with, its a non-starter.
If it isn't costly enough, it's completely nominal and at best would be a feel good band aid.
If it doesn't force speculators to actually make an investment in the sink that would otherwise be spent on speculation activity, it will just be background noise.

Any sink potent enough to accomplish these things would be a huge affair. Something that costly would have to be so potent it would almost HAVE to impact game balance, because niche items like manse toys and silly hats simply have no guarantee of the mass appeal required to have the desired effect.

On top of all this, to have any meaning in the long term, it would have to be a continuous and recurring sink. So you put artifacts up for gold. Speculator Jack says, "Yay!" *buy* and at best, their speculation is slowed down in the short term, recovers, and we're right back where we started, except Jack has a Moonlaser artifact gained through speculation profits. Speculator Jill says, "Yay!", has an artifiact, goes right back to it, and only says to the world, "this thing I did that you're tying to combat with a gold sink just got me an artifact."

As much as I would like to see a sparkleberry dispenser, that would take gold clear out of the market rather than reallocating it to a shop owner? I can't in good faith say that I think it would do anything at all to credit prices.


But here's the secret. Gold gain is higher, so credit prices will be higher than they were. The natural function of the market would be fine. The thing to combat is elements that cause market failure- if you can't tell, my guess at this is people speculating and creating an artificial market condition by continually pushing up the floor by keeping credits cycling through the system like a failing fish tank filter. Worse case, it may even be like real life oil speculators- buying up massive quantities of oil and just yanking it off the market so the price goes up, and then entering back in at the higher price that they drove up. The same could easily be done with credits.

So, if you're really interested in fixing the market, if it is in fact broken, a gold sink isn't going to do it. If you made everyone have less gold right now, and reduced all the gold drops, the real economic cost of a credit isn't going to fall, just the number you're looking at. The credits/effort ratio would still be the same. If you want to "fix" things, address speculation directly.

Once speculation is dealt with, you can see what's really going on in the market, and decide if that is the only problem or not.

First of all, I agree with most of what you said. The gold sinks would have to be interesting enough to be used, and not one-shot things. I don't agree that it would have to be balance-changing, at least not in a PvP sense. I'm not sure about the idea of buying artifacts with gold, since that would, in essence, say "This is how much a credit is worth", and I'd imagine the admins would want to stray as far from that as possible.

My personal favorite idea for gold sinks would be various blessings; you pay, say, 20k and you get one extra move per second for an hour. For 30k you'd get, say, +10% damage while bashing for an hour. That sort of thing. Nothing that directly affects PvP, thus nothing that needs immense balancing efforts.

I'd be all for adjusting gold drops though, but not seeing the formula (nor being a basher), I can't say much about it. With people saying they can get 500k an hour, though... it just seems high.

Added here from the Credit Market thread. Additionally, as Akui mentioned, regular credit buyers tend to keep buying even when they have all they need, which means that it shouldn't have a much more noticable impact than FB credits.

The easiest thing to do, of course, is cause a big spike in commodity cost, but people tend to get persnickety whenever I bring that up!

The problem with doing that is that it only hurts the little guy and all the higher tier people just sort of ignore it. I use commodites just about never, and anything that takes a lot, I'm going to get permanent.

EDIT: Startup artisans on the other hand, really get the axe.

Unfortunately, that hits rather unevenly. Currently, high-levelled people have a far far easier time getting gold than low-levelled people, but still have roughly the same needs. By increasing the comm cost (which, to be honest, I didn't think of as a gold sink), you make things much harder for new players, while only creating a somewhat larger annoyance to older players.

I don't think this would actually solve the problem. So long as we receive free comms from holding villages (normal village tithes) the price of commodities overall will still be dictated by the orgs, not the village prices.

I think the actual easiest thing to do is to make mobs drop less gold. It was increased because they became harder to bash, but then we got damage shift and damage boosts (due to the new damage type), which sort of mitigate the issue of making it more difficult. Maybe I see it differently being on the relative high end of stats and critical hits, but I have a lot more gold with the same effort exerted.

I'm not sure how the formula looks, of course, but I would suggest making it directly tied to the health of the mob. Twice the health=twice the time to kill it=twice the gold drops. The "problem" there is that demis kill much quicker than newbies do though (due to criticals), so it might still be imbalanced between lowbie/highbie.

It's tied to xp rewarded, not health. Some mobs we artificially raise health so that wouldn't make sense.

Yeah, that seems problematic. I just think it should be returned to a lower level of gold dropping across the board, but using the same formula as now. That won't solve the issue, but it will slow its getting worse.

How is most of the gold generated? Through drops or through handins? As I said, I'm far from a basher (which is why I hesitated to enter the discussion to start with), but if the bulk of the gold is given through handins, then lowering the drops wouldn't do much.

Penalizing people who make extensive IC efforts to achieve positive goals is never a good answer. And in reply to your question, it depends.

That's... really not even related to the question I asked.

Was editing the reply in still, because I forgot

The first part was more directed at the post above you.