Unpaid rent rage

In regards to the original post, the simplest fix would be to remove rent. With prestige houses available to use, no one really has to pay rent these days unless they specifically want a non-prestige house for some reason (nostalgia, they like the looks, they want to decorate it).

Or give us the option to pay a flat "buy home" fee of five plat for a small home and fifty plat for a large city home, and after that's it's yours forever, no rent needed again.

There is always the 4 Treasure Hoard method of reducing the coin rent to 0. That plus enough rent status reduction through house items can reduce the entire rent to 0. The treasure hoards can be purchased on the Loyalty Token vendor. So if a person really wants to make sales from home visits they can easily make it happen without having to purchase a prestige home.

I do this, yup, lol, you taught me this trick and I <3 it.

There's an item that the loyalty merchant sells...some sort of treasure chest...that reduces rent by 25%. Put 4 in your house....it's rent free.

I haven't tested that because I've been too lazy to unpublish my houses. Getting them back onto the HoF again may or may not be easy.

Edit: Like Rotherian says!

Amen! I've tried that method, but I gotta say, it does take a LOT of Loyalty Tokens...

Uwk
father of dozens :-/

Forty loyalty points for me as I'm a junior varsity member in terms of newness to eq2. I don't have the claim chest yet. This week is my one year anniversary as a eq2 player though!

Grats! Happy anniversary!

Uwk

Forty total if you don't yet have the 4-year vet reward; thirty if you do. That isn't really that much, given that the most time it would take to amass that is still less than a month and a half - provided that one logs in every day and at least does the things to earn the tokens.

True, but I've got 46 toons on my Gold account alone, and each has at least 3 houses...fortunately, they also all have a 7-Year Mistmoore, and I've been slowly moving everyone's sales crates there (except for Uwk himself, who has a rent-free New Halas, which rocks [pardon the expression]). ;->

Uwk
who has, indeed, tried the 4 chest method, as an experiment; not bad!

I forget what I paid for my Bixie Snow Globe. I don't think it was thousands, but it was close. And no, I couldn't just buy from someone else - those things don't grown on trees.

Personally, I think the easiest fix would be to let anyone pay the rent at the door - if I'm spending hundreds of plat, I'll gladly spring for the 5 silver to open the place up again. The downside of that is all the customer service calls from people who paid rent on the wrong house because they weren't paying attention.

Honestly I'd just as soon see trades which avoid broker fees go away. It's one of the few steady gold sinks in the game - SOE seems to have been on a mission to remove them all, with the inflation we've seen as the very predictable result.

We didn't have broker fees paid by the buyer in WoW at the Auction House (their version of the Broker), but by the seller (a deposit for the privilege of putting something up for sale)...that was one of their many in-game economy nightmares. X-P

Uwk

in lotro the seller pays- not the buyer. in eq1, no one pays unless you use the new system to buy from anywhere and let the seller mail it to you- then there is a fee for a transition certificate you have to buy from the marketplace. but if you just make the run to the bazaar on one of your toons, you only pay what the price is- and the other person doesn't have a penalty either. personally, i don't see why there should be gold sinks in any game. like in eq1, you don't pay for mail- which goes ot an ingame email you can access from anywhere. you don't pay to send or receive packages from the postal guys. and they recently lowered the costs of mercs, housing and land. the only real gold sinks there are those and food and drink. you don't even pay for equipment repairs because nothing "breaks" there. btw, the most expensive game in terms of gold sinks is by far LOTRO. your armor and weapons and tradeskill tools break from use so you are constantly paying to fix them and you also have to pay every stable master for rides - the prices vary depending on if you are a paying customer and the distance you are going (no flying there)

if there were no gold sinks, there wouldn't be so much worrying about owning a lot of plat- because the only reason to use it is to pay between players for goods and services. after all, this is a fantasy. we pay for it when we pay our subs. why should we pay ingame? it's not like there is really a cost to those things. they are pixels. shouldn't all the "paying" end with the sub? I really and truly don't see the reason for it. you can say "inflation" all you want, but sorry that simply doesn't make sense to me. maybe it should, but it doesn't.

Ok, here's the answer in a nutshell. Let's say you can farm 1 plat in an hour killing things and taking their stuff (picking an easy number) and none of it gets taken out.

As the days and weeks go by, more and more plat pours into the economy, which means everyone (or a lot of people) have more of it. Those people are willing to spend a lot more - so a sword that started out selling at the broker for 2 plat now sells for 20 plat (what do they care? They've still got plenty left over). But someone new coming in to the game can still only farm for 1 plat/hour (since mob drops haven't changed), which means they're pretty much screwed.

Yes, it's more complicated than that, but the essence of a faucet/drain economy (which is what MMO's have) is this: Money is created through various means - killing mobs, quest rewards, selling items to vendors. Money is removed from the economy through other means - Buying items from vendors, rent, brokerage fees, travel fees.You want the money faucets to bring in a bit more money than the sinks take out, so the players all feel they're "getting somewhere", but not so much to cause rampant inflation (and mudflation) and lock the newbies out of the game.

You'll notice SOE has done away with travel fees (you used to have to pay the harbor master to get anywhere), most broker fees thanks to 'home visit shopping', and now even rent with the 'stick four hoards in a closet'. Write down the market price of twenty things selling on the broker (check for a couple days to be sure it's not an anomaly). Then check the same items a month from now and see what's happened.

All of which is true. The prices have gotten crazy, and even with as many alts as I have on Gold (46), we can only do so much to get Bags of Platinum (most plat in one go), since we only get 2 Loyalty Tokens a day, max., throughout the entire account, and 75 Plat/5 Tokens is a drain on the Tokens. May seem like a lot of plat, but if everything beyond Tier 2 is costing dozens/hundreds of gold->dozens of plat, it gets worked through pretty fast. :-/

Since there are less and less money sinks in-game, it seems everyone on the Broker has taken it into their own hands to provide it. Why, I'm not sure, since the only stuff left to really spend coin on is Broker stuff...vicious circle. :-/

Uwk
who doesn't even wanna get STARTED on Advanced crafter Volumes...some are silver, others are dozens of plat...

but it seems to me that unless a number of people are selling an item, the price goes through the roof anyhow. like certain recipes that seldom drop - sometimes only one person has one and he wants over 100 plat for it. the only items that are cheap are the ones that everyone has several copies of. they sometimes get so cheap that you can buy them on the broker for less than you can sell them to a vendor.

i don't think it is so much having a lot of plat (i am lucky to have 1k spread out among over 40 toons) as it is greed. the thing that promotes the greed is not how much plat a person has, but whether an item is rare and if a lot of others are selling it or not. some people will always be reasonable in their pricing. some will never be. and i really don't think inflation has much to do with a person's greed. supply and demand rules it but if the demand is high and the supply is small, there will always be price gouging going on. if there were a way to buy like the level 60 - 69 recipe books even with faction, the demand would be less. but there isn't any way for that level of recipe book so people go crazy on pricing. the same with the level 85 - 89 recipes. the faction for those takes a while to get so people try for dropped ones. some of those don't drop often so you can tell instantly which ones are rare- they are usually priced between 75 to 150 plat each. so no, i don't buy the rhetoric that we need money sinks to keep the economy stable. what we need for that is more frequency on drops of certain items that are now extremely rare and some way to make crafted items more desirable.

just as i don't see taxation as a money sink to keep inflation down ( they aren't - they are the way we keep the government running but there is no government that needs money in the game) i don't see prices on housing, land, mail, etc keeping our economy stable. the best way to do that is consumer goods. buying stuff on vendors helps and are an ok money sink. however when even sending mail ingame is costly and when free players can't even use that (in eq1 they can) that is not a good money sink. that is just greed and i am not sure what motivates it. it doesn't cost much- just enough to be aggravating to a new player who doesn't have much plat. there have been several times i forgot to give a new alt any money and they couldn't send a simple item in the mail. if there were things we wanted to pay plat for in the game - stuff that actually cost plat like dislodgers (they are missing a good market by keeping unattuners in the marketplace instead of available ingame) that would make way more sense than nickle and diming us at every turn for every little thing.

The price is a function of both demand and available currency. If the "average" level 95 only has 1500p in the bank, then no one will charge 1k for a spell. However, if those 95s have 150,000p in the bank, then charging 1k is likely less than you can get for it and still be considered" inexpensive". This is where the idea of money sinks in MMOs come in. The influx of money is infinite - over time players will continue to get money from "nowhere" - meaning creatures they kill and quests they complete. There is no upper bound on the amount of coin that can be in circulation. Therefore, over time, the price of items will climb forever unless there is something draining out that "infinite" money. Consumer goods only move money from one human to another. That money remains "in play", and can then be spent again elsewhere. Money spent into a sink is "out of play" and is removed from circulation forever.
In the real world, there is a limit of how much money there is. This is controlled by the governments and certain banks. There is not an infinite supply of $US, for example. It is theoretically (not practically) possible for one entity to obtain ALL of it. In a case like that, a seller could not get one cent for a loaf of bread from anyone, except that one entity, because they don't have it. So the prices of items are controlled by the general availability of the currency. In the game, however, that limit doesn't exist, so there is ALWAYS more money to be found by going out and killing for a few hours. Without having some way of removing that money from the system, it becomes in time utterly worthless to anyone except newcomers, and the prices on items become meaningless and enormous because there is jsut that much cash to be found. That's why a consumer model for controlling prices and currency cannot work - it doesn't create an "upper bound" for the mount of money in the system. The only alternative is to put an upper bound on the amount of plat that can be in the game at one time, and given the bounds of greed that would very quickly turn into a complete and utter disaster. Thus, the idea of money sinks instead.
As for things like sending in-game mail... those prices were once a fair amount of money... 10 years ago. If they were to keep up with the influx of money into the game (and that which is held by players that are still active - let's pretend that money which isn't doesn't exist), I think you would still find that you'd have to pay a large sum to send any mail in game. Probably something like 100x what the price is now. Broker fees would also need to go up. Prices on all vendors would need to go up. Yet none have, no in-game pricing has changed to match the cash influx. Inflation doesn't exist in the game because the game is a static system, in essence, with only new content charging more for things (and only because they are generally higher level and scale farther than the old items did).

Adds her 2 coppers.. er plat... inflation has hit!

Some are getting off topic in this thread. It is about "Unpaid Rent" not the price of recipes (farm your own to avoid this) or dislodgers (you can make your own) or using "real world" economics

Back to topic: The O.P. claimed they took time to switch to a character of the same alignment and the rent wasn't paid. Well for one, unless the character is too low to safely enter an opposing city, there really is no reason to do that. All one has to do is be in the same "zone" as the home and use /house to bring up the housing UI and on the visit tab, click "query" (this will refresh the list of owners that allow visitors) and type in the name of the house owner in the "filter"window and enter. There is no need to find which door on your map anymore.

The address is not listed by default if the rent is unpaid and if you try to set to "no visitors" (choice is actually "None") while you have sale crates down, you are denied that ability with a message: "You cannot set that access level while vendors are placed in the house."

So the dilemma might be the O.P. misspelled the house owner's name (note some sellers are selling from a home other than the one they own) or they may have been in the wrong part of the city? Such as in the case of Qeynos, some housing is Qeynos Province District which is the harbor area and Qeynos Capitol District, which is north and south qeynos. Or they simply noted the wrong name while at a market board.

If they indeed believe a home listed a seller WITH an address and were truly unable to enter a broker-listed home, I suggest putting a bug report in with as much info as possible so the issue can be looked at.

Really?? Cool! I had no idea! Thanks.

It's nice that Antonica and The Commonlands now count as the "zone" for housing in their respective cities! Doesn't work for Neriak and the surrounding countryside there, though (it should...). :-/

That's apparently the true crux of the topic, actually; that this bug (and I agree; it's just gone on waaay too long without being squashed) shows an address of where to get the item that doesn't actually have access due to unpaid rent. I've run across that, too; it's really annoying. I, too, wish we could just do a "pay rent for 1 week" thing (perhaps 1 week only, so we don't wind up paying rent continually for negligent folks), or, hey, just not have the address show on the Broker if we can't get in. /shrug

Uwk
who likes simple solutions, being a simple kitteh ;->

If a person uses regular boxes/packs then there will be no broker discount if you go to their house. Same if they don't put their display cases on the floor.