Can we have a (possibly toggleable?) option to receive weekly mail summaries of our bank transactions? Specifically payments coming in and out as listed on pay list.
This is likely most useful for merchants and guild leaders who want to keep track of commissions or where guild money is going. (With embarrassing frequency, I have to request help confirming whether a payment to or from myself has gone through after rollover clears my pay list information.)
I was thinking it would work a bit like the auto-mails you receive from your NPC shopkeepers every month if you don't manually request sales reports, only they'd happen weekly.
A possible con would be taxing the game's resources by sending these all out at the same time? I've noticed some long pauses when the weekly rollover happens. So maybe instead of something automatic, you could manually request a summary of your account while in the bank (if toggling this service off and on couldn't be an option).
Bank Account Summaries
I think it'd make people's lives easier, but I sort of feel like the banking system is too perfect for an IC game as it is, and this is the extreme opposite of someone else's suggestion that we remove banks completely and make people lug around a whole bunch of gold/silver or horde it in chests.
Mind, I think that's an extreme I'm not interested in going to, but I'm not sure why we'd want to head in this direction either.
Mind, I think that's an extreme I'm not interested in going to, but I'm not sure why we'd want to head in this direction either.
I agree with you, Kinaed. I've stated elsewhere that the banking system seems like it's built for OOC convenience at the expense of IC realism -- i.e. suffers from some of the same problems as gnotes. However, I also like Inertia's idea because it takes ephemeral banking information and makes it a physical part of the game that can be lost, found, spied upon, forwarded, tracked, etc. in a very "real" way.
Here's my suggestion for making the banking system seem less perfect while also accommodating Inertia's idea:
Instead of allowing players to check their bank statements from anywhere (which is the way the system currently works -- you don't even have to be at a bank to get a real-time idea of what's going in and out of your account), make it so that you have to be physically PRESENT at a bank in order to use PAY LIST. You already have to be present to use the other pay commands, so this makes sense to me. PAY LIST represents information that has been registered at the bank itself. Thus, you should have to be at a bank in order to review that information in real-time. As an extension to this, you could also restrict the banking output from the worth command, so that it only displays when you're actually at a bank and therefore able to check your real-time balance.
Then, to balance this out (pun unintended), make printed statements an option, so that those balances become part of the game world in a real way. For example, while at the bank, I would like to be able to type 'receive statement' to receive my weekly statement in physical form, so that I can take it with me and refer to it as needed, keep records, etc. Basically, as Inertia suggests, except I'd like to see these statements include actual account balances, such as what you might get when you type "worth." Paying a quarterly fee to receive these statements by mail seems like a reasonable step from there. The biggest hurdle for me conceptually is that right now, PAY LIST prints information using OOC terms, such as "weekly" and "monthly."
Players might not want to give up these instant-access-anywhere conveniences, but personally, I think these are reasonable trade-offs. If you're going to make information less OOCly accessible, then that information should at least be made more ICly accessible, through physical bank statements and the like. Since most guilds already have their own banks, as do the various foreign quarters, taking away the OOC convenience might not be as terrible as folks might assume. Ultimately, I think these changes would not only give banks and record keeping more importance but create a more balanced, IC-focused system. It might also open up opportunities for coverts/shady types, as well.
If the above seems like too much work to code, however, or if the pbase would prefer to keep the system as-is in favor of OOC convenience, then instead of sending out a weekly IC mail as Inertia suggests, it might be easier to simply keep things OOC and add a daemon to post a personal note with a snapshot of pay list information at weekly rollover for characters who were active that week (and opted-in?). This would help ensure that players don't miss anything important because they were busy or distracted with RL that week, etc. -- and if they're active, it means they're focused on the important part, which is RP itself.
Here's my suggestion for making the banking system seem less perfect while also accommodating Inertia's idea:
Instead of allowing players to check their bank statements from anywhere (which is the way the system currently works -- you don't even have to be at a bank to get a real-time idea of what's going in and out of your account), make it so that you have to be physically PRESENT at a bank in order to use PAY LIST. You already have to be present to use the other pay commands, so this makes sense to me. PAY LIST represents information that has been registered at the bank itself. Thus, you should have to be at a bank in order to review that information in real-time. As an extension to this, you could also restrict the banking output from the worth command, so that it only displays when you're actually at a bank and therefore able to check your real-time balance.
Then, to balance this out (pun unintended), make printed statements an option, so that those balances become part of the game world in a real way. For example, while at the bank, I would like to be able to type 'receive statement' to receive my weekly statement in physical form, so that I can take it with me and refer to it as needed, keep records, etc. Basically, as Inertia suggests, except I'd like to see these statements include actual account balances, such as what you might get when you type "worth." Paying a quarterly fee to receive these statements by mail seems like a reasonable step from there. The biggest hurdle for me conceptually is that right now, PAY LIST prints information using OOC terms, such as "weekly" and "monthly."
Players might not want to give up these instant-access-anywhere conveniences, but personally, I think these are reasonable trade-offs. If you're going to make information less OOCly accessible, then that information should at least be made more ICly accessible, through physical bank statements and the like. Since most guilds already have their own banks, as do the various foreign quarters, taking away the OOC convenience might not be as terrible as folks might assume. Ultimately, I think these changes would not only give banks and record keeping more importance but create a more balanced, IC-focused system. It might also open up opportunities for coverts/shady types, as well.
If the above seems like too much work to code, however, or if the pbase would prefer to keep the system as-is in favor of OOC convenience, then instead of sending out a weekly IC mail as Inertia suggests, it might be easier to simply keep things OOC and add a daemon to post a personal note with a snapshot of pay list information at weekly rollover for characters who were active that week (and opted-in?). This would help ensure that players don't miss anything important because they were busy or distracted with RL that week, etc. -- and if they're active, it means they're focused on the important part, which is RP itself.
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Haley Rose
+1 for Andruid's suggestion. Making things more ic than ooc is a trade off I'd not mind at all.
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