One character per person at a time

[sora_barzahd]

..You mean like Platinum coins? It would give them a use >

[hussam]

How about making NPCs buy flowers and titanium ore for less?

[Gilrain]

No, its all wrong. It wont solve the problem. And it will harm the wrong people.

And you can circumvent it easily.

 

Lets find another solution, but maybe in another thread, cause i cant read fast enough here.

 

regards

[HereticEast]

Anyway, just so that you know, I do not think that modifying the rules to have only 1 char at a time will solve the problem. There are only a few ways that would solve the problem:

1. Do what Obama does, and 'print' more money, and sell gold from the shop.

 

this is different from selling rostos and EFEs? how?

Because when a player buys rosto/efe and sells it, the gc they receive comes out of the existing in-game gc pool.

 

i think the pool get increased indirectly if you increase demand for it.

i think players kill more ogres etc than they normally would have

to pay for new value that enters the game. i kill unarmed orcs and

armed skeletons just for the gc because it doesn't weigh anything.

you might also be less likely to sink it as well.

[korrode]

Anyway, just so that you know, I do not think that modifying the rules to have only 1 char at a time will solve the problem. There are only a few ways that would solve the problem:

1. Do what Obama does, and 'print' more money, and sell gold from the shop.

 

this is different from selling rostos and EFEs? how?

Because when a player buys rosto/efe and sells it, the gc they receive comes out of the existing in-game gc pool.

 

i think the pool get increased indirectly if you increase demand for it.

i think players kill more ogres etc than they normally would have

to pay for new value that enters the game. i kill unarmed orcs and

armed skeletons just for the gc because it doesn't weigh anything.

you might also be less likely to sink it as well.

Well one of the key issues of why all this has been brought up is inflation.

 

The pool wont increase indirectly through people doing more than their previous gc generating because people will be paying less for rostos/EFE's, as there'd be more of them in-game if people were buying those from the shop to sell for gc, rather than just buying straight gc from farmers.

[Peach]

jay sold my char, LOL

[EgomAerl]

I read many, but not all of this thread, and saw many good and interesting opinions.

 

I'm confused about several things, for example how alts hurt other characters.

 

EL is a game that I play to pass the time and chat with ppl.

 

Someone might hurt me by saying something mean, steal from me, or scam me, which are not illegal.

 

The only thing that bad ppl playing alts may do to me, is slow response time, as far as I can reason,

 

I harvest for gc, to buy books and armor. However, I train and mix for XP. For example, I made 2500 aug leather pants for manu XP. Selling them for a profit is nearly impossible, because of oversupply as far as I can tell.

 

I plan to level in manu for a long time by making things that don't require enriched essences and stones, swords to harvest hydro for example.

 

Making a ti short sword gives 160 xp and costs time to harvest and mix FEs. Making a ti long sword cost 8000k gc for an EFE, and time to harvest and make FEs, However, a ti long gives only 180 XP and sells for about 750 gc.

 

To get from my current level 37 to 38 takes about 75k XP which would be 75k/180 = 416.67 ti long swords, which would flood the market and drive the price down more. The only reason to make one is for personal use, afaik.

 

I'd vote to eliminate alts to assure better response time for all players. If it also fixes the economy, good!

[Arnieman]

I voted NO.

 

I have one main and 2 alts, plus whatever "alts" I have run to assist in contests. Should this rule pass, without exception, contest "alts" become a thing of the past - who'd wanna sacrifice time with their main for as much as 3-4 hours, for a contest?

 

I would live with the rule, if it came to pass, but I respectfully disagree with either its necessity or "definition".

 

I agree with what was stated early in the thread that the spirit of the no-multi rule (#5) should cover the same thing this rule presumes to, without the negative implications... AFAIK, NO BENEFIT means NONE.

[guinevereanne]

Personally, I have an alt. I don't play her very often.

 

Mostly I afkish havrest and study. But sometimes, when I've finished all of my work, I'll afk havrest on one and activly play the other char. It's a great way to restock AND enjoy the fun bits of EL. I know of several people who do this.

 

I understand that there are problems with goldminer's and all that. But at the same time I see this as hurting legit players.

 

I know that EL is without classes. But depending on how one builds their characters, sometimes you want to change, or have a change. Perhaps your main is a fighter, but sometimes you want to have a change. And sometimes its too hard to combine that with a your main. Particularly when you get to a high level (100+ oa)

[Elf_Ninja]

Firstly I'll say this poll was worded very poorly and very bias.

 

Secondly I voted No, I don't think that this solves the problem it's like putting a band-aid on a arm that just got cut off by a jagged saber.

[Doggy_board]

I voted yes, because i really agree with the main concern raised by your poll ... but i must say i strongly disagree about the bot training suggestions you made asgnny ... IMO, having capability to train a bot is a requirement, and having a time limit for that purpose is really a bad thing since we don't all play EL the same way, and for example, raising p/c to 48/48 might take 1 month to player A, while it will require 3 months to player B.

 

I think bot training time must be unlimited, while perhaps restricted (bot training declared on the forum for example ?)

 

my 2c ...

[HereticEast]

this is just using 2 or more characters at the same time. i think the most it will accomplish

is to slow down the gc farming a bit. this will have no effect if using one character to farm.

[Shujral]

I voted no, but not for the reasons listed in the poll. Many players have alts simply for the fun of it. The fact that inflation is a problem should be addressed in other ways, not by outlawing multiple characters.

[Zamirah]

Make some auto log off if the char go afk.

[MagpieLee]

then set the afk time to 999mins?

[RunTime]

I voted no, because I like having more than one char. Atm I have 2 main characters, ones a fighter that I spent about 2 years working on and a pure mixer I spend most of my time on now. I do have other alts for different reasons, mostly to try out different things. I dont use any of them to farm gold, I would hate not to be able to have alts to try different things I may not want to do on my alt because of Pick Points.

[Ateh]

voted yes

 

if it will go some way to helping the fundamentals of the EL shop and therefore rare item availability in game then of course its a good thing

 

however im sure a much faster solution ( if the problem really is gold farming/selling ) would be to ban GC selling alltogether

[popeye]

I voted no.

 

 

 

P.S. Offtopic:

 

I see Ateh...........

[Usl]

Also I would like too see proof that bringing more of an item into the game would cause the price to go up rather than down. Basic knowledge, from what I understand, tells you that the higher amount of an item in the game would actually cause said items to drop in price not increase.

 

PaulB, the higher amount of an item in the game would actually cause said items to drop in value, not price. If the item in question is the currency, i.e. the gold coin, the value of the gold coin decreases. This means the price of everything else increases (i.e., you need more gcs to sum up the value of an item).

[DHT]

then set the afk time to 999mins?

 

Set it to 0 and your char will never go afk

[Puntif]

I have alts but I don't use them to harvest money to sell. Each of them has their own needs. For example, one is primarily a ranger so she needs thousands of gc to get the arrows needed to earn a ranging level. Another is trying some summoning and needs gc for life essence (I decided it would be faster and more fun to buy the LE than to read the books and waste the pickpoints to make my own LE). I would rather be able to play 2 chars at once but if it'll really help the economy issues I can change my play style and play a different game on the laptop while my EL char is mapwalking or harvesting or whatever. I sometimes do that anyway but EL really holds my interest better than the other free games I've tried. I have not voted in this poll.

[FeaRM]

First of all, I don't think that each person should be allowed only one char at a time. Yes, there are gold farmers but most people use their alts in many other ways which dont damage the economy so why should they be punished? Like many people have said before me in this thread, the core of the problem needs to be addressed, which is gold farming.

 

For people that said that gold farmers should be banned, I agree with the principle but you and I both know this is impossible. Runescape tried it and failed miserably. Let's say that uneven trades (like 1 person give 1 mill gc and gets nothing in return in the game) get outlawed and you get banned from doing it, the the same thing that happened in Runescape will happen here. The gc seller will farm flowers, sell to npc for a week, make 300k and will buy bd set. then the buyer who agrees to buy 300k worth of gc will go in a pk map with the seller, pk him and take the bd set, selling it on the market and making back the 300k. How are you to distinguish between someone doing that and someone who decided to harvest for a week to make enough gc to buy himself a bd set and go pk for fun, and forgets to wear rosto when going to a pk area.....if he loses his stuff, will u ban him too? even if he didn't lose the items on purpose, he just forgot to take a rosto (and dont give me bs about how nobody forgets rosto when wearing nice items, i hear people saying it every day). So what then? Ban pk? Yay what a great idea, why dont we just train on the same monsters for months and months, make nice clothes and armors and just live peacefully? Maybe change the name to Runescape 2? Because this is where it's heading.

 

Radu, I really think that your best choice is to compete against the gold farmers by lowering the prices in the shop. Think about it, buying a rosto from shop now is 5$ and is worth around 24k in game. Now a player could buy them from u for 5$ or he could go buy 24k for 3$ from farmers (8k:1$ rate is common now) and get himself a rosto in game. If you keep the rosto prices at 5$, people will use the second option because it's almost half the price and you will sell very few from shop. On the other hand, if you were to lower the price to 2$/rosto from the shop, people would start buying from you. Even people that dont need rostos but buy gc from farmers for other purposes will still buy rosots from you and sell them in game to get a better ratio that they get from the farmers. This will cause the price of rostos to go back down and will also force the farmers to increase the rate at which they sell, maybe to 10k:1$ or even 15k:1$ making this so unprofitable that some people might not think it worthwhile. The rate of 8k:1$ is already high, making it hard to even make half of minimum wage for most us/ca/eu players so making that rate double would make it extremely unprofitable. One last point: this will also not affect people like Garnoo that decided to sell some gc in order to buy stuff from the shop. Although he will need to provide more gc for each dollar if the rate hits 15k:1$ (or whatever) he will not need that many dollars since prices will be lower in the shop, so it evens out. Therefore, this will only affect the gold farmers that inject gc in the game and trade them for RL money which they don't invest back in the game, profit that should be going to you.

 

Anyways, sorry for the long post, I really hope at least some people read it, just my 2 cents

Edited April 2, 2009 by FeaRM

[popeye]

I get it, this must be an April Fool's day post, right?

[The_Piper]

There are several other options to make goldfarmers life a hell instead of forbidding afk harvesting alts.

 

Forbidding harvesting alts is just another stupid rule, which is not properly enforceable, but perfectly useable to pick on players and talk BS to them.

 

Not the best business model in the world, IMO.

 

The basic problem of EL economy is that gold coins are unlimited available, every resource, flower or ore or animal fur is endless. Flowers and ores never run out and animals just respawn unlimited. All you need to invest is time.

First idea:

 

Lets make gathering resources harder by having running out resources. Like, you have a deposit of silver ore, which contains 1000 ores. After the ores are harvested, this resource is empty and:

 

a) is filled up again with 1000 ores after a given amount of time

 

or

 

b ) has several respawn points and respawns at a randomly chosen respawn point with 1000 ores again. This might be in MM cave, CC, or whereever else silver ore is located, for example. You must go exploring and find the latest respawn point of the ore. Then you can harvest again.

 

This would end the just so easy afk harvesting by just going to MM cave, sit down near the silver, click and harvest, click and harvest, click and harvest. Same with flowers.

 

For animals, just make the respawn areas bigger, so that you cant see always, when a creature respawns, because the respawn area is bigger than the area the client shows.

 

Second idea:

 

The problem of the EL economy is, that gold coins are used to store a value. So people hord them and gold farmers sell them in bulk, because they represent a value. (and not only the problem of the EL economy, but thats a different story )

 

You can simply get rid of that feature of gold coins and force ppl to invest their money and not keep it in storage for months and years (and later sell it in bulk to players for real $$$).

 

How that?

 

Freigeld (free money) is the solution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld

 

Before you start to read all theories of Silvio Gesell, Freigeld basically means, to force ppl to invest money and buy items to power up the economy instead of hoarding money and let the econonomy go to hell.

 

After a given period of time, you must pay a fee to *keep alive* your money. If you dont pay that fee, your money loses its value.

 

So, since people dont want to pay that fee, they try to get rid of their money and buy stuff and invest it or whatever. At least, they won't keep their money at home (=in their storage) and let it catch dust.

 

In EL terms spoken, lets say, every week the server automatically charges a fee of all money in inventory and storage of 1%.

 

So, if you dont want to pay that fee, get rid of your money and buy stuff. If you're hoarding gold coins, expect to lose EVERY WEEK 1% OF THEM! So it's a little bit harder to make much profit by collecting goldcoins from power afk harvesting, because every week you must pay a fee for all your money.

 

Third idea:

 

Just limit the amount of gold coins, which can be traded between 2 players in a single trade and during one hour.

 

Lets say, you can trade 1000 gc in one trade and 10.000 gc every hour with a player.

 

If you want to trade more gc, you have to do that using a tax collector NPC, which will charge 10% of the gc as a trading tax.

 

So it's not that easy to exchange large amounts of gold coins, or, if you use the NPC, you have to pay a tax, which brings money out of the game.

 

Piper

 

Edit:

 

One important thing about Freigeld: Money keeps the feature that you can exchange it for goods, so you can use money to buy your essies, armors, whatever and dont have to find that person which trades one ti chain mail for 5000 earth essences or 20 dead herrings, that feature of money, you can sell goods for money and then buy other goods for money still exists, so money is still demanded. But its not good to save values (because of the fee), so better get rid of it and dont hoard it!

 

That is the difference, if you hoard Freigeld, you lose money because of the fee and the profit of gold farmers is less.

Edited April 2, 2009 by The_Piper

[Entropy]

Your idea with depleting the resources for a while is a good one, and I came up with it long time ago. I discussed it with some of the players a month or so ago, and most of them were like: "omfg, the end of the world, ruin the game, quit, etc"

 

The limit gc trades idea is not a good one because:

1. Some high end items require lots of coins (thermals, NMTs, etc.)

2. People can use the bags to trade, or trade over multiple hours, use items to trade, etc.

 

Thanks everyone for your feedback, as I was saying, I do not like this idea, but wanted to see how many people would support it. I am going to lock this thread for now, I'll make another one with some different ideas soon.