good ideas, but i see a big problem

all it does is tax the average player. the ultra rich guy wont even blink at that type of expense

we need something to address the ultra rich players- the ones that deflate the value of the credit - like super-expensive elite housing or something. something that takes their money and makes it go 'poof'

i think graduated housing costs or income tax or a credit cap - something that doesnt punish the average player

I find this to be pretty much the same discussion i hear about money in the US. The poor want the rich to pay for everything even though the rich are the ones who bust butt to make their money. I dont think i can find a single example of someone who is stinking rich that didnt work for it (that i actually consider a human being, people like Paris Hilton are only rich because of daddy, but guess what daddy worked his butt off to get rich). I will straight up say that ive been marked as a Fiscal Conservative and i think if people work for their money they shouldnt have to pay more than the average person. This pertains to SWG in the same way... if i go out and hunt and collect resources and sell it to make money i dont want to have to get stuck with a huge income tax or more tax on my house just because i know how to make money. Yeah its "unfair" to the average guy who doesnt make tons of money but its also "unfair" to punish the people who know how to make money, spend it wisely and so on. I was always an average guy with only around 20 million credits ever to my name (later on in the game) but i never had problems getting gear, i had guildies, i had friends, i had connections, so i dont see why punishing the rich is the right answer... Guess its just my 2 cents.

its funny. the most major credit Sink in the game (ie the one that was used the most) was destroyed when JTL was implimented. theres been polls and game ideas about it before. but by taking out instant travel Via Ship terms. the amount of credits spent on Starports and shuttle crafts is huge when you think that nearly the whole server will be using a starport at the VERY least once a day...most people will use a star port numerous amounts a day..from there if the economy started to get out of hand..you could impliment other sinks.

as for what Broken said..its inevitiable (sp?), of course some players will be more well off then others. but they tend to be the minority. and they still dont set the economy, i'll use broken as an example. he was a merchant with a billion credits..but he could only set his prices at a competitive price. otherwise people would go else where.. people will only spend huge amounts of credits if the it was the right value for money.

on the other hand..if you wish to impliment a Sink system that doesn't punish the average player. then add VAT...we'll use 10% for an example

player A puts an item on vendor for 100 credits... it shows to the rest of the universe as 110 credits on the bazzar and who ever looks on that vendor..

PLayer B buys the item and thats 10 credits going out of the server. (credit sink)..

i know its not fool proof. but its one of those K.I.S.S0 ideas, doesn't really punish the average player all that much. but it will if you were to buy into high priced items.. (hey 10% of 10mill is still a mill)....

a ten percent sales tax? no thank you. i dont think thats a very good idea because like you said. once people start buying things for high prices the chunk that goes byebye will just get bigger and bigger.... i know that the system can be shut off and turned on as needed... but it still kind of stinks.

ill use my biggest purchase in the game as an exampe... after i hit master pilot, i was going to buy a YT-1300 chassis. at the time, the cheapest (good quality) chassis i could find cost 2 mill... now since i was not super rich on the game i talked the seller down to 3/4 of a million for the chassis as long as i promised to buy the ships main components from him as well.. 750K creds was still nothing to sneeze at, and was the most i ever spent in game on one item.

under the 10% tax system 75K of my 750K would have disappeared.. that would have been an incredible loss to my character who was not a crafter and didnt have alot of money. i think 11 or 12 million was my highest bankroll. so no i dont think 10% tax is a good idea.

im not that well versed in online games myself and i still dont quite understand the whole credit sink thing. i know it has something to do with keeping inflation down but if everytime you buy something a large chunk of it goes nowhere, that might actually discourage people from buying things. which maybe is the point? i dont know for sure.

i do like some of the other ideas tho that make sense within the story of the game. like ship refueling and rent for apartments in cities. maintenence costs on houses.. stuff like that. but being taxed for nothing doesnt make sense for me. if the money we were taxed by buying things actually benefited us somehow like real taxes do, then maybe i could tolerate it, but just as a cred sink it doesnt make too much sense to me. especially since itll be a long time for any of us to be uber rich in this game anyway.

i have to say tho. that if you are rich. and you buy things like special houses. (big mansions or something that the game might implement.. who knows) something more expensive than the average player can buy, something the rich guys buy just to show off. you should pay more for it and continue to pay more for it in maintenence. more expensive ships should cost more to refuel. bigger apartments in cities should cost a hell of alot more than the regular ones because "space would be limited" so if you are rich and want luxury items so to speak... you should have to pay more than the regular joe. thats just how it should be. in RL and in the game. whether you worked your butt off to get it or not.

WOW! This post started out about weapon and armor repair and has gone onto fundemental economics..... I love it! Mr. X made a great point "Communism should not exsist in this game." (or anywhere else for that matter) The economy in the game should stay the way it was created and inteneded, a "Free Market" or "Capitalism" if you will. The economy should be driven by supply and demand. The amount of credits any one player has is not what drives up inflation. It is the greed of the seller and the desperation of the buyer. My shipwright was my wealthiest character, not because I was greedy but, because I enjoyed crafting and interacting with customers. I did not try to "get rich quick" off of high priced items, instead I sold them for a nominal fee and made up for it in massive volume. Everyone wanted to buy my stuff because it was great quality and low priced. As far as "credit sinks" go, I think a sales tax would be a very bad idea for the same reasons Senlusan stated. Which is why I'm against the "Fair Tax" or the "Un-Fair Tax" as I call it. An income or "Flat Tax" is the only way to be fair across the board. I can see an Imperial Property Tax or something of the like. I mean they are a dictatorial government, any planet or system they control is going to have some sort of tax levied to their citizens, just like the anchient Roman Empire did throughout history. Biblically speaking, a government taking 10% or more tax is tyrannical (I Sam 8:1-22), so it shouldn't be more then 5%. Then again they are The Empire and not biblical lol.

honestly, this is kinda rediculous. in-game inflation wasnt nearly as bad as some people are making it seem. i remember on valcyn late pre-cu prices started to actually deflate, at a healthy rate. the value of the credit was at its best mid to late pre-cu, on that server at least. besides, we need a small amount of inflation over time as the server grows in population. otherwise, youd see huge deflation which would be worse than inflation.

and btw, i never had more than 1.5 million credits at any one time and i was still able to buy high quality weapons, armor, etc... i couldnt buy uber l33t mind fire pikes to lolz at jedi, but if i wanted to i couldve gone out and earned enough to buy it.

lol i didn't say that the vat was particullarly a good idea :P just a K.I.S.S idea everyone gets bad ideas now and then and remember i only used 10% as an example.then again even at 1% it'd be huge depending on what you buy, the end idea was to take cash out of the game, not to stop people from buying. and to keep the value of the credit to a decent point.. response in red..



things like VAT would only seriously hurt if you were to go into the several of millions. but then again your VAT would also entirely depend on the amount of credits in the game. and the value of said credits... if buying the same ship only cost you 20k instead of 750k. because everyone had to work harder for their credits...10% would be rediculous. and far to high..or maybe not? its all just an idea.

It was difficult for new players on Kauri... if you didn't have any mates to help you, you were force to join a good guild (and try multiple guilds until you get one that was willing to help new players). Because low and mid "level" equipment were somewhat quasi inexistant and "higher level" were too expensive for newbies (between 500 000 and 1 000 000 credits for a good set of compo). Of course a price like that for a good compo was affordable if you managed to be involved in trade somewhat after mastering your professions, or being lucky enough to be able to kill "low level" mobs that their meat was of good quality and make a little fortune out of it... but if not it was very hard to get equipment.

well in real life mono the taxes we all pay on the things we buy actually goes somewhere and in a perfect world is used to benefit the people that are paying it. like road work and bridges and paying for the military and blah blah blah. im no economist but having a tax system in the game doesnt make sense because its not going to benefit anyone. all that money is just going to disappear. thats all i was saying. if the system was in place where that money taken out in tax actually helped the player base in some way, maybe more people could get behind it.

also, like cable stated (i played on valcyn as well) some servers didnt need many credit sinks and the ones built right into the game worked well enough.

i know that we arent talking about putting this right into the game right off the bat but 10% still sounds drastic to me and should only be inplimented when it is definately needed because nothing else will work. maybe if we only taxed things that cost above a certain amount?

i say keep the game as close to the way it was economy-wise, because with all the fluctuations and price hunting a player had to go through made it all much more fun. not to mention realistic..even if you are buying fantastical things like hyperdrives.. i kind of liked going to a place to buy some widget i needed only to find it too expensive there so i looked and looked and haggled to find one that was the same quality but much cheaper.

the players shouldnt be the ones punished because people are selling things at too high a price. it should be the vendors who are punished by players who go somewhere else to buy their goods. so dont punish the players who buy with a tax that doesnt go anywhere

besides, if you think about it. the richest people on the game were the people selling things not buying things. so why punish the people who buy when the people who sell are the ones making all of the money. hehehe. i know the vendors pay for maintenence on their harvesters and pay for raw materials, but the turn around when they sell their products is so dramatic that it hardly makes a difference.

im not saying this idea sucks.. it doesnt. because it does work in real life. but this is a game and i think the main point im trying to make is that if we all start paying sales tax on all purchases, it would make more sense if those taxes went somewhere and did something. thats all.

Warning! Off-topic coming up!

Reading Sensulans post I just thought of something that might be fun to add in SWG. (Actually more of a RP element)

He mentioned taxes that benefit us in ways like "roads", and that got me thinking, why not have a kind of road that connect the mayor cities? There wouldn't be many roads, just f.e. between the 4 starporst NPC cities on corrilia. The benefit of using these roads would be that your vehicle/mount goes a bit faster on them than when it rides over "rough" terrain, and that their would be "bridges" over those cracks ect. in the terrain. Then we could also add NPC's, such as Stormtroopers, that patrol these roads to keep them "safe". Then eventually we could possibly have roads lead to the biggest player cities. Many more possibilities are possible...

Altough you could point out that with Shuttleporst and Starports is kind of makes them pointless.

Any thoughts on this?

P.S.: Am I correct when I remember flying your swoop over water made it go slower than flying over land?

yeah swoops and all vehicles went a bit slower when you were on water. thats a good idea for roads zerve but its probably for another topic. same thing with the tax discussion. sorry about that

A few new ideas:

An option to do an extra tax in player cities, the mayor can issue it. it goes only for a specific credit income/ownership

Make a mansion type house, super expensive

i fear that we are going ot

anyway let's reaturn on the main topic, do we have decided something? it seems that we don't want that an item is always repaired at 100%, or at least with some kind of decay right?

i propose the "old, good daoc" style (as i writed before), with some modifications:

an item has 3 stats, quality, condition and durability (ok, daoc had magic too... but we don't need it, at least if we don't consider force imbued iperrare items)

quality: (along with other stats) reflect an item... quality^^, it depends from the weapon damage, rof, ... if this is a weapon, from the armor tougthness and resistance if it is a weapon etc
a better crafter item is easyer to repair, and has overall better stats
durability: we can call this stat as "how much hp remains to the item"
condition: how many times the item could be effective repaired, it fepends from the item itself and its quality

I was an armorsmith in cu. The last thing I want is adk'd armor/weapons. Crafters need credits too. Can't put paper in harvesters and expect them to work. . In pre-cu I was a swordsman, purchasing armor wasn't that bad. I'm sure at first the cost of armor/weapons will be high until competition rolls in then the price will stabilize.

Funny thing is my bh had to support my crafter cause he was broke...until I had the mins and mastered then he finally was able to support himself. Eventually he became fairly rich (in mins not in credits...lol). On the other hand my masta swords/masta doc pre-cu, yeah.....he was rich. Gotta love masta doc

This is an over-simplified view of things. Of course there are people who work hard and are rich, b ut there are also people who work hard and are poor. Some would say that the wage structure is ridiculously skewed, and that we need a balancing measure (sliding tax scale) to address this.
Let me give you an example.

Person A is a nurse. They are on roughly minimum wage.
Person B is a financial trader. They get a salary of about 500k and annual bonuses of up to 3 million.

Do both people work hard? Yes!
Are both jobs neccesary? Well the nurse's certainly is. FTs are debatably neccesary, but hey that's a moot point!

"Give up nursing and go and become a financial trader!", you say. Well i'll leave you to figure out where we'd be if all the nurses became FTs!

Here's another example:

You are offered two jobs (which you will be doing for life):
Surgeon
Toilet cleaner.

Both pay the same amount. Which job will you take?
Clearly the surgeon's job. But someone has to clean the toilets, don't they?

It is because salaries are so skewed that we need a sliding tax scale.
At the risk of sounding like a communist (in fact i do think communism as a concept is a good one, but it has generally been poorly implemented - as has capitalism in many cases), i would say that all salaries should be brought more closely together. After all, people should become surgeons because they have a passion for medicine, and toilet cleaners should be rewarded for doing a crappy job which no-one else wants to do.

If this were the case, there would be no need for vastly differing tax scales, and poorer people (who do actually work hard) would feel less hard-done-by.



Our royal family springs to mind.