Wealth Revamp

[Zeita]

I have an idea, that will both a) be a good judge of how much money people have to throw around and b) get money moving through the system. Conspicuous spending.

Your wealth influence isn't based on how much money you have in the bank sitting around doing nothing, no sir. To get influence, you need to spend and spend big, and do it in a way that people can see. If you want to get the lavishly wealthy/big spender bonus, you simply spend more money in a given month than anyone else. For the moderately lavish, we can put up some other requirement; either you have to pass a certain mark, or you have to be amongst those (top 10-15% of active players in the week) that spent the most.

Now, merchants may skew this, as they could theoretically be having a lot of money coming through as they purchase raw materials, with little of it sticking to their hands. So, perhaps it is based on your gpay payments as well as shop purchases? The idea is still ruminating a bit in my mind, but I wanted to get it out there.

Thoughts?

-Hera.

[Geras]

I totally agree Hera. Not sure how it should be implemented though.

Maybe something along this line... let people purchase either modest streams of income and/or bulk amounts of silver/gold for XP, and then let people spend silver/gold for a bump in support? With the top % of spenders on support also getting influence?

That's not quite there yet as an idea... I dunno

[Kinaed]

Hmm, I like the idea of gauging spending, but I have to admit Rabek's understated approach is more in line with my mindset atm. The problem with making influence based on wealth expenditure is that it loses the potential to back it up - I spent 100 silver today, now I have nothing in the bank, but the game finds me influential - I can't get behind that as an effective model be ause the behaviours that come out of that won't be consistent with real behaviours around wealth. The spend of the 100 silver has its own effect too, in namely the player has gained whatever benefit or item they bought. We'd skew the whole system.... though I admit it'd certainly benefit the economy. I might do something similar, but give non-influence rewards for spending.

[Another]

Sounds to me like wealth and the influence it exerts ought to take into account income, expenditure and how much you're sitting on.

[Geras]

Well, if ICly you spent that 100 gold on bribes, then you'd have influence because of it. It'd be using support as a sink for gold.

I like Another's point though...

[Empheba]

Another's suggestion is probably the one that makes most sense game-design-wise - a financially influential person is one who has a steady income, a solid reserve and who uses the money in society. In short, who has a large flow of cash; the derivative of money if you will. Not quite realistic maybe, but anything that enforces spending is good.

Problem with this is that players will have a very hard time predicting this behaviour - simply tracking how much money you have is much easier. Also, the fact remains that there are preciously few things to spend money on.

Hm, interestingly, one person's income could fulfill another one's spending requirement. For gentry interested in keeping this "flow" up, it would make sense to do heavy trade with each other, possibly by automatic transactions.
.
Empheba

[Geras]

I think the devil is in the details here. How would this be implement to prevent people from just passing gold back and forth between them, essentially getting influence from paying themselves? How would it handle people just withdrawing 100 gold and locking it in a chest in their house (though I guess the Thieves would like this). Hmm.

[RabbleRouser]

I'm late at chiming in here, but I'd vote in the 5k to 10k range if it is based on value, but at the same time, I'd argue that it should not be based purely on money in the bank as that mandates they keep their money IN the bank and leaves them a potential victim blacklisting of them by the merchant guild completely leaving them incapacitated in finance, when stashing your wealth in other places would actually be a possibly wise thing to do...

Also, I'd like to point out that not all wealth is liquid... Assets and owned property should also count at least 50% of it's value, or around 100 times it's taxes, toward the owner's effective wealth when determining if they are still wealthy or not... It is their 'estate' and resources and it is from having those assets that some of the means of making real money become possible.

Personally, given a yes/no vote on this I'd vote the whole thing down as a bad idea, and one that will only rob players of XP if they fairly buy Wealth and then lose it purely because they don't have the finds... Can we say 50xp flushed?.. that's 25k that would have gone to a next character, flushed.

I am more opposed to ANYTHING that gives or takes away lots of XP to a character than anything else I can be opposed to, purely for the purpose of balance and fairness, which I feel should come above all else.

[Kinaed]

Thank you for your feedback. In general, I like your points, and I wonder if wealth should instead be a sphere where people spend influence for assets.

This said, one comment I believeu needs reconsidered is:

Personally, given a yes/no vote on this I'd vote the whole thing down as a bad idea, and one that will only rob players of XP if they fairly buy Wealth and then lose it purely because they don't have the finds... Can we say 50xp flushed?.. that's 25k that would have gone to a next character, flushed.

Fundamentally, XP is the currency that TI uses for purchasing character benefits, from skills to advantages, and so on. Thus, XP is only flushed if a player makes a purchase they don't actually want. So, if you don't want something, they generally ought not to buy it.

Past purchases are not guaranteed, though we do tend to refund purchases when costs change orare removed.

This said, there is no mention of an XP cost for wealth, though buying silver costs XP.

[Geras]

Hrm. I think it might be worth everyone putting their thinking caps here for a bit. Influence is basically like a new type of in-game currency, and how the other 2 currencies (xp and silver) interact with it is actually a pretty deep question.