Gold sinks, the solution to inflation.

There is a problem with the economy in the game as it is now.
That problem is that gold is created at a much greater rate than it is destroyed at.
This causes inflation, a decrease in the value of gold.

The way to counter inflation is to even out the creation/destruction ratio of gold.
One very good way of increasing the gold destruction rate is the implementation of gold sinks.
Gold sinks are things that cost gold, but do not give in return something that can be re-sold for the same or more gold.

The purpose of this thread is to collect ideas for gold sinks that could be implemented in the game and thus save the economy from the ruin that continual inflation will inevitably cause.

Here are some ideas I have though of or come across.
More will be added as they are suggested.

Hairdressing:
Players pay gold to change their hairstyle and colour. Some styles and colours could be available only through this method and not in character creation.
Hair colour could be changed, but it would fade over time, causing the players to spend more money renewing it.

Cosmetic customisation of armour and weapons:
Players pay gold to change the look of their armour and weapons. This could be different models or additional colours, glows, sparkles and so on. These effects could be time-limited, so say you buy them for a day, a week, a month, whatever and have to buy them again after that. Also, if new customisations were released periodically the players would continue to pay for them because they were new and exciting.

Armour cosmetic maintainence:
Armour could also become dirty over time, causing it to lose it's shine and the colours to become dull. Players could then pay to have it cleaned, or pay even more to have it polished to a level of shine greater than it originally had.
This might be considered a hinderance to some, but if you think about it, it doesn't change the gameplay at all, you don't need shiny clean armour, so people aren't forced to pay lots of gold every few days to keep it clean, but many would want to.

Rethink the dye system:
Currently dye drops from monsters and is sold between players for ridiculous amounts of gold. This in no way benefits the economoy since it merely transferes wealth from one player to another.
If dye was treated the same way that weapon customisation currently is, it could be turned into a gold sink.
Players pay to have their armour dyed by a merchant. Mixing of colours could still be done, but it would all be done in a merchant window and not with physical, resellable inventory items.

Rethink the XP scroll system:
Similar to the dye suggestion above.
Instead of XP scrolls being items that are resellable, they should be available as an effect that is bought from an NPC.
Players pay gold to an NPC to be 'blessed' with 2x experience for the next few minutes or however long those scrolls last.
Maybe you could pay more for longer duration or higher multiplier.

Gambling:
"The house always wins"
Any properly run gambling institute takes more money than it gives out, thus creating a gold sink.

Personal housing and furniture for houses and guild halls:
Just like the way guilds can buy Guild Halls, players would be able to buy personal houses. Furniture could be bought to decorate these spaces. Extra storage might also be included in these houses.

Taxidermy and other forms of tropies:
Players could pay to have a monster that they had defeated turned into a statue to be displayed at their house or guild hall.
This would deteriorate (Rot, get dusty, etc.) over time and require an upkeep in gold to keep it in good condition.

Guild Hall expansion:
Various additions to the guild hall could be bought for large amounts of gold, or perhaps rented for a lesser amount per day/week/month whatever.
Additions could include Guild practice PVP arenas, storage, etc. See long posts further down the thread for details.

Persistent message boards:
Plays pay gold to post messages on a message board of some sort in town. These messages have a limited lifespan (24 hours was suggested) to reduce congestion.
Multiple boards could exist in each town. One for trading, one for guild information, etc.

Dancing Lessons:
Players pay gold to learn the dances of other professions, or entirely new dances. They have a limited number of dance lots so that learning a new dance would usually replace an old dance. This means that if they wanted their old dance back they would have to spend money again.

Pay per View PvP:
With observer mode on the horizon, another good gold sink could be paying to watch PvP and GvG matches.

(Closed to prevent random thread resurrection. Please PM a mod if you wish to open this thread.)

The hair dressing would be intersting, but how great are these new ones that people will spend money on it?

I like the armor thing as it would finally give some distinction between players other than the color of their armor

Gambling i don't like because I would likely go poor if they implemented it

The housing thing is interesting and I'm sure one way or another they could make it work


I remeber one game i played required you to repair your weapons upon use. THe price wasn't extreme but it help you from getting ridiculously rich

Even if the hairstyles weren't that amazing I've heard people saying they would pay to have their hair style change because after 100 hours of playing they'd just like a bit of a change.
The whole IDEA of gambling is to make you poor, it takes gold out of the economy.

Yes, many games have had weapon degradation and repair, but that's more an element of the game mechanic than purely a gold sink. With the theme of Guild Wars being that everything most annoying about other games is avoided in this one, weapon repair would probably cause more trouble than it wopuld provide in gold sink benefit.

Yes, that kind of things tends to just be very anoying for players to keep track of ... next thing we know there is the need to eat, drink and rest or having some penalty because we failed to it within a time frame.

Real gold sinks end up being cosmetic reasons, like a house decoration and furniture or a character own looks and clothing and right now Guild Wars only have diferent looking guild halls.

Even the guild halls don't have that much differentiation. There are only a certain number of halls and no customization to your hall. I'd pay an extra fee to have a Xunlai agent, an armorer and a merchant in my hall. An armorer? Yes. It would give your PvE players an advantage to be able to get higher armor level at lower character levels. This would be one advantage of guild membership.

Good idea! But it doesn't create that much of a gold sink as you would only pay the fee once to aquire the merchant.

I want a gold sink so I can paint my guild hall purple

j/k. Although it'd be fun in GvG to attack an enemy guild hall in rainbow colours

I would love to have the armor customization; makes everyone a bit more unique and respected (the good looks would cost alot or something so if you can afford the coolest glow or sparks or whatever people would know you can afford it). It would work best if you customized each PART of your armor seperately.

Some GREAT ideas in this thread! The only thing I would not add is the armorer to the guild hall; that causes an unfair balance for the low level players if you can afford better armor.

Whatabout some consumables? Stuff like food that gives certain bonuses. This would obviously have to be ballanced and handled so one doesn't run into the annoying parts of this but stuff like a 5-10% speed buff or food that takes away death penalty would be cool. Something else fun might be something sorta like how beer and wine worked in EQ would be fun.

Perhaps an announcement board where you can pay some amount (say 100 gold) and have a message put up. This way, people could put something up to sell things, recruit for guilds, etc., which would reduce spam in towns, and it would mean they had to spend a little money. Just have messages removed after 24 hours or something...

Umbra and Flame, excelent ideas both of you!

Consumables that reduce death penalty would I'm sure be viable, especially when you constider that you can already pay 100g to get +2% from any statue while you have favour. I'm sure other effects could be created that were equally useful but still balanced.

Announcement board is an excelent idea! People always have things they want to say, so this is a very viable gold sink.

They had gambling... it was called /roll... they got rid of it.

Hairdressing: Taken from Runescape. :P Anyway, I like the idea of player-houses, I would really like a place to call home. Perhaps you might have to collect 6000 wood or granite slabs or something to build it. That would raise the price of those "useless" materials and also serve the purpose of a gold sink.

Also, have healing potions (stackable) for if you go somewhere and you don't want to take a monk if you are a class with no healing skill or if your skill bar is full.

I've always wanted to play an MMORPG with player owned houses, it would be awesome to be able to own one and be able to upgrade it as you go along, from wood to stone to brick, etc.

The /roll was meant for things other than gambling I'm sure, and it's not gone, just removed from towns. I'm talking about proper gambling, run by NPCs, not scams run by players.

Healing Potions: I'm not so sure about this. I think I heard once that ArenaNet had a very good reason why they didn't want to include healing potions in the game.

The idea of using crafting materials to build/upgrade your house sounds very good!

I reference once more to Runescape when I say that they are introducing Player-Owned houses, although it is only for paying members.

I would LOVE all those kind of things, gold sinks ... I mean it won't disadvantage you in pvp which is good, but it'll make you feel different, I definitly think that would be the best addition to keep players from getting bored of the game : customisation and minigames.

HOWEVER i'm totally againt the Consumables idea, it would make the pvp pointless and simply destroy the game (yeah you know ... auto potion scripts etc + the pvp is balanced, why unbalance it ?)

An addition to the player-owned housing concept:

Perhaps have these houses as an addition to the Guild Hall? As in, you get your sigil to buy a Guild Hall, then the guild leader can pay some arbitrary amount of gold to "add" land to the Guild Hall island which can later be used as a housing development for the guild members. This could, essentially, combine two gold sinks into one, seeing as the extra land could be used not just for housing but also for extra additions to the Guild Hall, like a storage facility (Xunlai or guild-centered), a practice arena, or even a drinking hall, all of which costs the guild money and acts as a very large gold sink.

But then again, maybe I'm just a town builder.


Edit: Of course, the extra extensions will not appear in GvG battles; it would just load the basic model for your Guild Hall.

Well, the ale is a good start. It's certainly not going to fix the economy on its own, but it's a good start.

It's doing pretty well now... walking into any city with a dwarven mechant and you'll instantly be in a party similar to the ones I went to at UMR when i was there

Don't see it going that strong forever though.

As I said, it would have to be balanced carefully.
If you're worried about PVP then maybe they should only be usable in PVE.

I have but one thing to say, Age of Empires.

EDIT: I like the idea though, perhaps an armoury too?

Great ideas dude. plastic surgery woot woot

Yes, total character model respec, not just hair!
I dunno, seems sort of wrong to be able to do like Michael Jackson and change from black to white, or tall to short. Change sex too?

I posted about this a while ago.

Let players buy items such as statues of themselves placed in prominant places that go up in price the larger they are.

Monuments, buying special emotes, anythign like that will pull money out of the game.

I will try to find my longer post on the subject and past it here.

Pop

A long while back in the BWE's, I had suggested consumables - food & drink, medicines, bandages, etc.. that were one-time use, and would apply TEMPORARY stat boots (extra +20 health, or instant heal of +50). The temporary enchantments would last for only 30 seconds, but good if you are solo and don't have someone or the skill to cast on yourself.

People didn't seem to like the idea, but I guess now that we need money sinks, who knows? I like the idea of consumables. Even in FFXI, I would craft up foods & buy foods just because they were cool to have, not even because I needed them -- like this sugar cake thing. I didn't need it at all, but it was pretty to look at, lol.

Cossacks works better.

Make TRAVEL STONES... which cost a small 20-50 fee to charge up using a NPC in major cities... using the travel stone you can teleport to towns, which costs a single use!

All they need to do is add a travel stone circle in towns where teleport in... that way at least it make sense! Plus 20-50 gold for being able to travel insantly from any place in the world to another is a good pay off.

Stones like these are often called "Recall stones"... but teleport Stone is more fitting.

Gold sink ideas:
1.) Offer expendables for combat: scrolls, potions, and salves - that give temporary benefits to the user. GW has a good handle on how to balance this in regards to duration, effect, and reuse timers.

2.) More eye candy for sale: Players love anything that allows them to distinguish themselves from others; offer additional items that give no additional beneficial effects other than a unique look. Including; mounts, boats, helm ornamentation, special effects (glows, sparks, smoke, etc.) exotic pets (not ranger pets) and perhaps even the ability to have NPCs do certain emotes upon greeting you - "Hail Prince Rurik" (as the merchant kneels before him)

3.) Allow Guild hall customization; furniture, banners, pennons, flags, and trophies from named monsters defeated! What's a guildhall without a full sized skull of Glint adorning the entry hallway?


May your skills prevail,

Talesin

They could just charge some gold when people teleports themselves from one area to another. The farer the other town/outpost is, the much it could cost!

I posted this in another gold sink thread, and a lot of it repeats Talesin's ideas... I won't think of it as repetition, but rather support of good ideas (the OP ideas for player customization were pretty sweet too)

Tax the rich.

Every day calculate a each players total assets for all their chars, and tax them based on a scaling system, so that the super wealthy are taxed highly and newbies are not taxed at all.

Also consumables are good, but they need not give a real game advantage adn shift balace. People would pay tons of money for "bragging" items, like statues that they can make bigger and bigger (the larger the statue, the larger the cost). More ability to customize---change hair, etc. Monuments. Fireworks displays. I am sure people would drop LOTS of money to collect new emotes. All these things are very easy to add and would let a lot of the money back out of the game.

I have suggested this about a dozen times. I don't know why the programmers have not picked up on it.

POp

won't work well enough. It would be a real burden to the poor players and nothing to the wealthy ones. Also it will not allow for that much money to escape the game.

Give the players some things that they can spend as much money as they want on. Guilds would compete to see who can build the biggest statue or monument? Who puts their signs up in the choice areas. And so forth.

Since the monuments can constantly grow there is no real limit as to how much money people can spend on these and still get the benefit of making their statues or monuments bigger. Price should increase by volume.


Pop

It seems we are thinking along similar lines. I have some concerns about #1 for game balance reasons, but the developers should not miss the point that players will spend all kinds of money for things are are just fun but give no pvp or pve advantage.

Let people play for dancing lessons to learn the dances of other professions, or entirely new emotes.

I LOVE the idea of collecting trophies for named mobs.

Let people throw firework shows in their guilds honor.

I think my idea of increasingly large statues is a good idea as well. Also the materials they are made out of could vary in price. The top 7 best monuments could be called the wonders of the world and change periodically as people are outdone.

Let people by exotic dyes for their hair that fade out over time.

Many of these things would take VERY little programming to introduce, very few new graphics, and have no balance issues that the devs need to think through. Nobody becomes more powerful because they have a larger statue or more trophy bosses in their "wax museum" (or whatever) to show off.

Heck, even let guilds bid to place a message of the day that people see when they log on. They could brag in them, or advertise for more members, or whatever---and if people are bidding against each other the price for this every day could get quite high.

All with no balance issues at all.

Poppinjay

I would love the idea to be able to upgrade a guild halls items with craft goods. IE Build a storage area with granite slabs, and wood planks. The only I see wrong with the guild add ons with materials required is that I think it will actually promote farming instead of actually being a gold sink. People want the items as bragging rights, but this will drive up the cost for materials if its done that way. Even if it is a gold only purchase, people would farm to get the gold to buy these items. It looks like ArenaNet is trying very hard to get people away from farming so this might not be a viable gold 'sink'.

You want something like the Ale for the people end game to just splurge extra money on. Fairly inexpensive to not promote farming at end game, with no effect on gameplay cept to make people a little happier.

Consumables sound interesting, but I don't think it really has a place here in GW. The lack of it promotes teamplay, and not depending on just yourself or your items. For pvp I think it would unabalance it pretty much. Right now there is a counter to pretty much any skill set/combo. What is there to combat consumables? I think maybe more general skills like rez signet maybe a better solution? 1 time per map consumable use, general access by anyone. However since it's a skill its affected by in game countermeasures. Maybe even put a price on it that is similar to capture signet. That way lower levels pay less to use it, and end game pvpers who have money pay more for it. (capture signet price goes up each purchase, but only because the amount of skills that you accumulated goes up. If its consumable, then you will 'lose' one skill so the price to buy it again should be the same. Also if you buy more than one it will go up for each consumable skill (but only by 5-10 each))

I like the eye candy idea a lot. This would be a nice option to have, and I think it's a great idea.

Trophies I think are a fun idea as well. Maybe even a list of named mobs that have been slayed.

I would love a spectator section in the arena accessable via a small admission fee. Though I can see how it can be abused by people giving off party locations via TS/Vent.

Player Entrance fees to a 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, gvg tournament map. Small entrance fee with a Pot for top 3 placers. This would be kinda fun too

I have noted many excellent ideas in this thread but one of the objections was that once enhancements/cosmetics are bought, they cease to be a gold sink. I, for one, fear in-game inflation and like the gold-sink idea. Therefore, have some things, like traders, guild vault, etc, RENTED rather than bought. The long-term cost would likely exceed the various costs suggested above.

In addition to the anti-inflationary aspect, this concept forces guilds to evaluate whether such an addition to their guild hall is worth the pay out. Player model cosmetic changes would almost have to be purchase rather than rent.

Hey do yous guys think the ale was a result of this thread??

I believe consumables that give buffs has been discussed a few times before and the PvP crowd had a very compelling argument against it. Any consumable in PvP can completely alter the gameplay, as I remember. You can get the +3 regen off statues in PvE, but you can't get them in PvP. Most of what needs to be thought of needs to be done with both PvE and PvP in mind. And this is coming from a PvE person...

Don't forget the dyes already in the game. I mean, obviously it isn't much of a gold sink, becuase we're discussing others, but someday once I get rich (which'll probably be never, but I can still dream, no?) I'm going to try and get a ton of dyes and give my armor (whatever it is I decide on) some kickass color to differentiate myself from everyone else.

That's cosmetic, if you use it. Though, the fact the dye bottles can be sold kinda gets rid of a lot of the possible money sink. But it's still a sink, if not a very small one.

Nope, I started this thread after the ale appeared.

Bergrom, if new cosmetic enhancements were periodically made available it would continue to be a gold sink, but I see your point, it is somewhat limited.

Planswalker, dye, as it currently stands is actually an anti-sink. It drops for free and is sold for huge amounts of money. The way it really needs to be is that it is only available from an NPC merchant, and it can't be re-sold. Maybe the merchant would dye your armour for you...


Travel Stones, I don't quite understand the idea there. We can already instantly teleport to any town we want. Do you mean maybe something like Mark and Recal? So we could mark a position on the map (say, in the middle of an explorable area) and then teleport to there for a fee?

Poppinjay, Hair dye that fades, that's brilliant! Perfect dynamic for a gold sink!