Inflation is rampant, and there are no "big" plat sinks in EQ2. Nothing that will remove hundreds of thousands of plat all at once. Potentially, this idea could do that. Or a lot less. The basics of the idea is to create an auction system, and then offer special items/access from the auctions. My first suggestion would be to create a premium Raid Zone and then offer up for auction an item that grants the owner access to the raid zone for 7 days from the moment the auction is won. Let the top 3 people in the auction win, so that at most there are 3 people who can access the raid at any one time. A few conditions. The person who owns the zone has to remain in the instance. If they move to a different zone anyone in the raid instance gets kicked to a different zone. Anyone that is in a raid with the owner can enter, the owner does not need to zone them in. The zone doesn't kick people if they aren't grouped with the owner, just in case the owner goes LD. As long as the owner doesn't go to a different zone, players in the premium zone should be ok to finish. Also give the premium raid zone a fast refresh timer. Something like it can be reset every 24-48 hours. Letting people clear it 3-7 times before they loose access seems fair, though only be able to clear it once per week would keep the zone more desirable to top guilds for longer. As a plat sink, I think it won't matter either way. The premium raid zone needs to offer a mix of items to sustain its desirability. I think some appearance items would be welcome, but there also needs to be some top end items in there as well. Maybe a set of Ancient spells unique to the zone, or some best in slot gear. Maybe instead of "best in slot" a set of unique and useful procs or activated abilities might be better. For an idea maybe offer a "Shard of Greed" zone that people who win an auction can access for a week. The "Shard of Greed" could be a re-vamped Protector's Realm with a lot of gold coins, treasure chests, and gems scattered about. Skip the trash because this is a premium raid zone, don't waste people's time! Bosses could be a named mimic, a blinged out golem, an entire room full of aggressive repair bots, some bankers and finally the demigod of greed himself who instead of dying bribes the raid with loot. Alternatively instead of a premium raid zone offer something like a 72 hour guild wide buff, or even a "free" super merc that guild members can use for a week before it disappears. Like the Ethernaughts all show up in the winning guild hall and offer their services as mercs. Oh, and make a robust auction system. Something where you can put in an auction and a reserve incase anyone tries to snipe your bid. Like you can say "bid 1,000p, reserve 1,000,000p" so that 1,001,000p gets removed from your character and at the end of the auction whatever is left of your total bid is returned to you.
That requires participation. Any truly effective "plat sink" is going to be mandatory. City taxes, for example -- based on your character's level & city status, so higher level, higher status players pay large amounts of taxes, which amounts are removed from your money -- whether on your character or in your bank -- every Monday. This tax, of course, applies to every character on your account. Skyrocketing rents on personal houses & guild halls. Much higher prices on hiring & maintaining mercenaries. Upkeep costs for your mounts. These all hit players right where it hurts, because most players want those features. So, if you want those features, pay more for the privilege of having them. Much higher broker fees. I'm sure there are other ideas as well -- you could, for example, apply a fee every time a player uses a Mariner's Bell, a Wizard Spire, or a Druid Circle, with the fee scaling to match the player's level & personal status. I'm not going to claim that any of these would be "easy" changes, because I've no idea how or even whether they'd affect anything else in the game, but I do think these are all good places for DBG to begin lightening our character's money supply. Regardless, Meirill deserves credit for coming up with an idea.
I don't like mandatory new taxes that hit everybody. The people who complain the most that they can't make plat will be hurt the most. The people who are actually spending plat aren't the problem, its the people who accumulate huge amounts of it and don't want to buy 99% of what is available are the problem. When they want something the people that just collect plat don't mind spending enough to drive the prices out of reach. Also any change is going to have its share of people that say "I quit because something changed and I don't like it". Even my idea will get some people to quit, but not nearly as many as a new "tax" would. Plat sinks are amazingly unpopular unless they are disguised as something benefiting you instead of a pure cost. That is why I want a carrot dispensing system implemented with a strangle hold on how many carrots are offered each week. If the carrot looks tasty enough I can see the first few carrots selling for well over 100k.
Making content even more exclusive is a terrible idea. Daybreak is already having difficulties putting out an adequate quantity of content. Selling exclusive items for plat is a fine idea, but it should not be access to content. It should be something visible in the major cities, like a public guildhall or having the guild's banner flown in the city. Also, they could offer plat-only versions of the high end mounts that cost much more.
Cause I have nothing better to do than stand in a raid zone for 7 days. Nobody wants to pay taxes, not in RL, not in game. The new armor upgrade system in ToT is enough of a plat sink, 20ish items per character, and a dozen toons. Yeah, that will be fun.
Neither do I. This isn't about you, or me, or any other individual. The fact is that mandatory taxes imposed upon all characters is a plat sink that nobody could escape, which would drain good sums of money out of the economy. If you can escape the plat sink ... it's not a plat sink.
Maybe SOE missed the boat with making so many prestige houses that do not require rent, or even not requiring rent whether we use the house or not. In RL you owe tax whether you live in it or not, and if you don't pay the rent (tax) it gets repossessed and/or sold to pay the tax. That would be a start. Maybe a luxury tax for anything sold over 100p on the broker (and these days, nearly anything worthwhile costs at least that much!). Try to evade the tax by buying direct? They could make it so that anything not sold by the broker becomes "locked" until an unlocker is applied. That should not apply to things transferred via the shared bank to alts, but transferring between two accounts that you own would still be subject to the tax (there would be too many loopholes otherwise). Yes, taxes suck. Yes, inflation sucks. And only the consumer pays taxes.
any plat sinks they add should be optional. have done plat sinks good recently. i am reminded of what the SWG did to help inflation they added optional millionaire and billionaire titles which required you to pay those amounts. pretty much anyone could get a few million together if they played right and a small few could get the billionaire title. I would suggest adding optional sinks such as pay X plat to get 1 'send mail' token, pay Y plat to get 5 'send mail' tokens and add some titles paid for with plat, some for small amounts of plat, some for moderate amounts of plat and 1-2 for the super rich. If they wanted to keep on going i'd suggest some new houses with high coin rent costs and having to buy the deed for plat. people could get around the rent with treasure hoards but the buy-in for the deed at least insures some plat leaves the system. the rare gear dude on wanderer's dock is a good one too. i'd make one for each expansion, have a limited number of 'cheap' items on the vendor for each class type at the start of an expansion (with the conversion item to bundle the tokens in a 1K token to buy the gear) then near the end of an expansion i'd add a bunch more rare items to encourage more plat to leave the system. 'cheap' being defined as the total cost of the cheapest rare item you can buy off the rare merchant (2000ferrin and 600p total including token conversion cost)
What happens when there is a greater amount of incoming currency than outgoing currency? That's right, it increases the net amount of currency in the system. What happens to prices when there is a net surplus of currency? That's right, they increase. This is because it causes an upward shift in the equilibrium point (the point where, when the supply curve and the demand curve are superimposed upon each other, the two curves intersect). An efficient plat sink removes plat at a rate that is at least somewhat comparable to the rate at which plat enters the system (I'm not saying equal to, because that would require a dynamic plat sink, just a significant percentage of the influx rate). This, in turn, slows inflation (it doesn't stop it, because that would require plat sinks that were as efficient as the plat faucets).
While I don't think this is a bad idea, I don't think it will appeal to the high-end players that do SLR groups and have a natural tendency to collect a lot of plat. If there isn't some more tangible reward than stroking ego I don't think fluff will have much staying power as a plat sink. As I said this idea will work as long as whatever is up for auction is very limited in quantity and desirable. Temp buffs that work for an entire guild would be fine. Whatever it is just needs to be good enough that people are willing to fight over it.
Inflation is a natural thing in any MMO. Mainly because the designers never put in adequate currency sinks and over time increase the amount of coin entering the economy. The big question is how much inflation is acceptable? Right now EQ2 is averaging 300% inflation for the last 4 years. 2 years ago I spent my plat to buy Krono for 3k each and took a break from EQ2 for a few months. When I came back Krono shot up to 8k. Now I'm hearing numbers that put Krono around the 40-50k price range. While its possible that the supply of Krono are to blame for the price increase, I can't help but think that its just following what seems to be the inflation that I predicted months ago. Some really significant plat sinks could slow down the inflation. I think trying to get the economy to be something close to stable would be beneficial to all players. Otherwise your an idiot to keep plat, whenever you can afford to buy a Krono you should just to keep up with inflation. And just incase you want to ask "why krono" its because krono and plat are the only measures of value that will have a constant value over a year. A krono gives you as much as it did when it was first introduced, and will give you the same benefit a year from now. The best raid weapon today will be greatly devalued with every expansion that is released, and even BIS gear fluxuates in relative value based on how difficult it is to obtain. Krono is the best commodity to measure inflation in EQ2.
I'm not sure the OP has ever tried to keep a raid zone open by "not leaving the instance." Because that works...never. Invariably, you will get booted, or there will be an announced server shutdown, or an unannounced one, or you lose connectivity for whatever reason. So the people who buy this zone will lose it because of that? Historically bad idea. Instead of asking plat for BIS items or raid items; let's instead tax houses. For each house in which you have an item or have claimed, you pay 20,000 plat per year. That would be a great plat sink. Or a tradeskill guild tax - you can join a tradeskill guild for access to special recipes or faster-working crafting stations, but there is a 20% tax on each item crafted. And a 10% tax on unguilded crafters because the guilds are sticklers for quality. Or a tax, like the veteran bonus, based upon the number of toons on your account. Upset at the notion that someone would expend neural bandwidth to come up with ways to tax decorators, tradeskillers, and alt-aholics? Good! Now you know what it is like when a non-raider comes up with "big plat sinks" that he or she will never deal with! Great thinking! Are you a member of Congress, because your "tax the living bejeezus out of everyone but me" certainly sounds like the prevailing thought process on Capitol Hill? Why in the Flying Spaghetti Monster's name would you want to import RL issues that no one likes, into a video game? Taxes?!?!?! Really? Moreover, import aspects of a communist/socialist system, including its ideology, that have failed miserably in RL? And caused the ultimate failures of those systems to adopt a more Western, free-market-type system? C'mon! No way man! Murica! Laissez-faire toutes les temps! OP - you wouldn't happen to be a toon that rhymes with Bulliana, would you? Because this sounds just like that's toons' knee-jerk, uneducated musings in level chat.
YIKES! You know, not all players are rich. That tax right there would wipe me out to nothing, on house #2... and I have waaaay more houses than that. I'm all for plat sinks... OPTIONAL... plat sinks Please don't confuse us all with Daddy Warbucks.
As in real life, a very small percentage of players control the majority of the wealth in the game. Kronos, and the people who manipulate them, have unbalanced the economy and there is no fixing that. Make as many plat sinks as you want, it's not going to affect them. It will hurt the average player, who is just scraping by.
Dead simple, make a new one highest could be 1 adamantium which is 1000 platin and cut the coppers off (no one needs them)
They put in a Plat sink with the new xpack. The gear upgrade feature if you watched on live stream is gonna cost a ton. I saw that you had a 25% chance to upgrade stats of an item with the plat price going up for each try. On the live stream they had terrible luck showing it and it was costing a ton to upgrade that one item. Depending on what comes out as finished it looked like it was gonna run from 300-1K plat per item if you were really unlucky. I'm not knocking anyones idea I'm just saying don't ask for a bigger hit to our plat wallets before you see the final cost of the gear upgrade features.
