[UPDATED 4.10.2019 15:54UTC] Silver Sink Adjustments Coming Soon

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    • Hey @TSkebee, I like some of your Ideas, really, I like to give my thoughts too

      TSkebee wrote:

      1) Make Premium the only thing that can be purchased with gold. You have F2P players buying gold for their premium and then suddenly the gold price spikes because rich players suddenly need to buy a lot of gold to buy a new skin or mount. It does not remove fluctuations from speculation in gold, but you will not have rich players competing with poor players for gold every time you bring out a new skin or mount.

      This won’t help at all, there need to be more things that you can buy with gold so the gold is removed from the game (at the moment there is nothing that removes gold and silver, other than the skins), real high value items or other things you can buy, other offers than flipping gold to silver and getting richer.

      I think one Option to reduce gold/silver speculation is to introduce Silver to Gold exchange fees (it is 10s fix at the moment) based on the price and the offers of gold in the market.
      The fee for gold to silver sales should still be fixed like now.
      For Silver to Gold fees, the Tax should vary, if there is a high gold price (fewer offers), the tax should fall, if there is a low gold price (many offers) the tax should rise.
      This way you could have a little chance to stop manipulating the gold price cause this tax would massively reduce the spread of speculators.

      TSkebee wrote:

      2) Introduce a tradeable Progression Token that is the only way to buy vanity items. Every time you gain a 10th level in something, you get a Progression Token, but maximum 3 tokens per day. If a new mount costs, say 300 tokens, then a player can decide to wait 100 days or to buy the tokens on the AH. This is primarily a redistribution mechanic, that gives newer players something very valuable to sell to rich players. The tokens come from nothing, shift silver, and disappear when a vanity item is bought.
      In addition to making it easier for new players to make money it also increases the supply of gold (and drives prices down) as gold hoarders have a reason to sell off some of their gold and "instant gratification kids" with deep pockes will add to the supply of gold when they buy it for RL money to sell for silver in order to buy tokens to get a fancy mount or skin.

      I think this would skyrocket the prices for vanity items, it sounds like a good idea, if done right, but if done for all skins no one but rich players could afford one.
      But it may be that I just do not get your idea right.

      TSkebee wrote:

      4) Introduce a differentiated tax on selling stuff on the AHs. 3% for a T3 items/mats, 4% for a T4 items/mats etc. This is a silver sink that hits everybody according to the size of their pockets (and the tax will be included in prices anyway). The other day, one of my very rich guild mates mentioned buying a T8 item for 100 million and selling it for 125 million - whether he makes a 23 million profit or "only" 15 million makes little difference; it is still a couple of months of premium he can make with one trade while the rest of us have to spend days or weeks just to earn one month of premium.

      My thoughts on this would be that the fixed Percentages here are a Problem.

      The System should set the Tax Percentages based on the Supply, a fixed Percentage and a fluctuating Percentage which is set by the supply of items on that market, would be perfect.

      The Fixed Percentage shouldn't be very high (like the percentage now) and the fluctuating percentage should vary.
      A Sales Tax should grow if there are lesser items in the Markets and go less if there are many items in market (the sum of items for the tax should be calculated by ALL markets to prevent easy manipulation).
      This way the System would take bigger taxes on rare items.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by FNORD ().

    • FNORD wrote:

      Hey @TSkebee, I like some of your Ideas, really, I like to give my thoughts too

      TSkebee wrote:

      1) Make Premium the only thing that can be purchased with gold. You have F2P players buying gold for their premium and then suddenly the gold price spikes because rich players suddenly need to buy a lot of gold to buy a new skin or mount. It does not remove fluctuations from speculation in gold, but you will not have rich players competing with poor players for gold every time you bring out a new skin or mount.
      This won’t help at all, there need to be more things that you can buy with gold so the gold is removed from the game (at the moment there is nothing that removes gold and silver, other than the skins), real high value items or other things you can buy, other offers than flipping gold to silver and getting richer.

      I think one Option to reduce gold/silver speculation is to introduce Silver to Gold exchange fees (it is 10s fix at the moment) based on the price and the offers of gold in the market.
      The fee for gold to silver sales should still be fixed like now.
      For Silver to Gold fees, the Tax should vary, if there is a high gold price (fewer offers), the tax should fall, if there is a low gold price (many offers) the tax should rise.
      This way you could have a little chance to stop manipulating the gold price cause this tax would massively reduce the spread of speculators.

      TSkebee wrote:

      2) Introduce a tradeable Progression Token that is the only way to buy vanity items. Every time you gain a 10th level in something, you get a Progression Token, but maximum 3 tokens per day. If a new mount costs, say 300 tokens, then a player can decide to wait 100 days or to buy the tokens on the AH. This is primarily a redistribution mechanic, that gives newer players something very valuable to sell to rich players. The tokens come from nothing, shift silver, and disappear when a vanity item is bought.
      In addition to making it easier for new players to make money it also increases the supply of gold (and drives prices down) as gold hoarders have a reason to sell off some of their gold and "instant gratification kids" with deep pockes will add to the supply of gold when they buy it for RL money to sell for silver in order to buy tokens to get a fancy mount or skin.
      I think this would skyrocket the prices for vanity items, it sounds like a good idea, if done right, but if done for all skins no one but rich players could afford one.
      But it may be that I just do not get your idea right.

      TSkebee wrote:

      4) Introduce a differentiated tax on selling stuff on the AHs. 3% for a T3 items/mats, 4% for a T4 items/mats etc. This is a silver sink that hits everybody according to the size of their pockets (and the tax will be included in prices anyway). The other day, one of my very rich guild mates mentioned buying a T8 item for 100 million and selling it for 125 million - whether he makes a 23 million profit or "only" 15 million makes little difference; it is still a couple of months of premium he can make with one trade while the rest of us have to spend days or weeks just to earn one month of premium.
      My thoughts on this would be that the fixed Percentages here are a Problem.

      The System should set the Tax Percentages based on the Supply, a fixed Percentage and a fluctuating Percentage which is set by the supply of items on that market, would be perfect.

      The Fixed Percentage shouldn't be very high (like the percentage now) and the fluctuating percentage should vary.
      A Sales Tax should grow if there are lesser items in the Markets and go less if there are many items in market (the sum of items for the tax should be calculated by ALL markets to prevent easy manipulation).
      This way the System would take bigger taxes on rare items.

      1) This is not correct from an economic perspective. You buy premium with gold and that gold leaves the game. The problem is that there is much higher demand for gold than supply (new gold infused or hoarders selling from their stock), so increasing the number of things you can buy with gold would raise gold prices by increasing demand while doing nothing to the supply side.

      2) The number of progression tokens for vanity items can be adjusted by SBI, so in a way they can influence the prices. Right now, you have rich players creating ghost accounts to get referral skins and gifts. So you already have items that can easily be acquired by rich players while the cost of millions of silver prevents poor players from circumventing the system the same way.
      TBH, I do not see a problem in fancy skins and other vanity items that can only be afforded by whales. The main purpose is a "Robin Hood mechanic" that shifts some of the silver from the rich to the poor, because that is a lot easier than completely reorganizing the economy..
      The only reasonable way to soak up a lot of the wealth that is otherwise used to abuse new players (e.g. price fixing all crafting stations to keep new players poor) is to let them spend it voluntarily on something that either shifts or sinks their silver. If SBI caps the amount of gold and silver you can hold or introduce wealth taxes, that is effectively stealing from the long-time players - some of them probably deserve it, but most don't.

      4) It is another way to do it. I think it might be a bit over-complicated as it put players in the situation that they can never estimate how much their item sale will be taxed before they are at the AH and are ready to post it.

    • rhiyuki wrote:

      most of the suggestions sbi is thinking about to solve inflation has merits but can negatively affect new player from catching up and "growing" in game. the issue is not just silver to be honest, its also resources.

      if you think about it, any resource like food, potions, ores, and even weapons and armors are technically "unconverted silvers". if you really want to have a good money sink, you have to target the ones with tons of it and make it a point that they actually want to spend it. heres my idea:

      add an incrementing maintenance fee to owning multiple territories payable every day. you can even add in the tier of territory to increase the maintenance price.

      heres a rough sample computation:

      sample 1
      lets say you own 1 territory (farm, resource, whatever). daily maintenance cost to it will be 50k.
      if you own 2 territories you need to pay 150k (50K for 1st territory + 100k (50k x2) for 2nd territory = 150k).
      3 territories will be 50k + 100k(50k x2) + 150k (50k x3) = 200k
      4 territories will be 50k + 100k(50k x2) + 150k (50k x3) + 200k (50k x4) = 400k and so on...

      OR

      sample 2
      every territory's initial maintenance fee is tied to the tier of the map its in and increases the more territory you own and payable individually.

      lets say t5 terri is 50k, t6 terri is 75k, t7 terri is 100k, t8 terri is 150k.
      then owning additional territories adds a certain % to the value of the territory. for the purposes of this sample, lets say it will increase 50% for every additional territories.

      so if you own 1 t5 territory = 50k.
      if you own 1 t5 and 1 t7, then t5 territory cost is 50k + 25k (50% of 50k) = 75k and t7 territory cost is 100k + 50k (50% of 100k) = 150k
      if you own 2 t5 and 1 t7, then each t5 territory cost is 50k + 50k (100% of 50k) = 100k and t7 territory cost is 100k + 100k (100% of 100k) = 200k

      this will then be taken out of the guild banks account everyday or payable in advance on the territory itself. IF they cant pay it, they lose that territory. this will not just sink tons on silver. it will also make guilds and alliances think twice about taking and maintaining it. territories dont just provide resources, they also provide protection or safe haven specially in black zones. so making a guild pay to maintain it is a cost a guild will be willing to pay for the perks it provides. a system like this also opens up a scenario where guilds will have to chose which territory to take and maintain rather than just to try to grab all possible territories they can bully themselves into opening up the "not-so-great-territories" for weaker guilds/alliances to take. it will also force alliances to "spread" ownership of territories among their ally guild and not hoard them all since that will eat up a lot of silver.

      this is just a rough idea with rough computation but you see what i mean? this is a sink people will be willing to pay due to the perks it can provide. feel free to add and edit stuff to make this suggestion better.
      im quoting myself to add more ideas/details....

      so here goes...

      if a guild cant pay the fee for the territory, they will lose it, another guild may "takeover it" by paying the maintenance fee multiplied by a certain amount (lets say times 5 so a t5 terri takeover will cost 250k).

      once a territory is taken. the existing buildings/structures in it cant be used by the new owner. they either have to destroy it 1st and then create a new one to replace it OR pay silver based on the market value of the materials needed to rebuild it. so for instance, a t8 cook station has a market cost of 5m to build from scratch, for a person to take over it immediately without destroying it and making a new one, he has to pay twice that amount to officially take over it which would be 10m. this is basically paying for convenience of not travelling to and fro to bring supplies to manually build it. this will make sure that silver and materials like stone will constantly be used up every time a terri is taken.

      if a territory has a shared guild storage of sorts, items inside it will be destroyed IF he cant take the territory back for a period of time, lets say 30days. for instance, guild1 stores lots of stuff on terri bank, guild1 loses the terri to guild2, if guild1 is unable to take the territory back for 30days, all items stored in that terri bank by guild1 will be destroyed. this will create an incentive to take back the territory. if its a player house with chest, that chest can be looted by the "new owner" of the house.

      a territory can be sold much like a deed. of course the sale will include a tax. so for instance. guild1 loses a territory to guild2. guild2 can sell the terri to any guild for any price he wish. most likely, guild2 will sell it to an ally guild or the previous owner can offer up huge amount of money to get it back.

      all in all, the idea here is to take out not just silver but items out of the system...

    • TSkebee wrote:

      1) This is not correct from an economic perspective. You buy premium with gold and that gold leaves the game. The problem is that there is much higher demand for gold than supply (new gold infused or hoarders selling from their stock), so increasing the number of things you can buy with gold would raise gold prices by increasing demand while doing nothing to the supply side.
      I believe that the influence of buying Premium with Silver is not that big as you think.
      If you count it up it is 10.000.000k Silver or 2500 Gold for buying Premium (at a rate of 4k Silver / Gold).
      Someone who think about buying premium with real money would buy Premium directly and not over an exchange to Gold.
      There is often a volume of ~100k gold and more for the actual price of Silver on the Market so to have an influence on the Market there is a minimum of 40 Players needed that buy Premium to get the Silver Price ~10 silver down.
      To influence the Market from 4000 to 3000 as it happened it needs more than ~20.000 Players that buy Premium in Silver on that day.
      I would love for SBI that this would happen, but i really think this is not what happens here.
      What I think is happening here is, that Players with a big pile of Silver and Gold are Surfing the Gold Market.
      (BTW: I would say that this is a mix of both influences, buying premium and Surfing the Market, maybe there are more influences that i won't see.)

      Gold Market Trading is so easy in this Game, the Tax to do Trades in any direction is fixed, that's why i think making it easy to buy silver with gold (Fixed Tax to do Trades to Silver) should be the direction and buying gold with silver should be taxed to fit the Market price of Gold.
      That way the Speculators will have to "not hurt" the Market, else the Trading Taxes will go up, and they lose their profit.

    • lol. all these players complaining about respec & repair costs... these adjustments are needed and the changes aren't that dramatic at all.

      There is NOTHING stopping anybody from spending 100k to create a new guild then farming 100k keys to gain 300 siphoned energy and selling that for 2m silver. You can easily do this once per week, some people can do it twice a week and it will easily gain you 8m+ silver per month for just playing the game normally. No extra effort required at all. If you don't do it already it will easily cover the extra silver needed in the upcoming changes.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Deviator ().

    • FNORD wrote:

      TSkebee wrote:

      1) This is not correct from an economic perspective. You buy premium with gold and that gold leaves the game. The problem is that there is much higher demand for gold than supply (new gold infused or hoarders selling from their stock), so increasing the number of things you can buy with gold would raise gold prices by increasing demand while doing nothing to the supply side.
      I believe that the influence of buying Premium with Silver is not that big as you think.If you count it up it is 10.000.000k Silver or 2500 Gold for buying Premium (at a rate of 4k Silver / Gold).
      Someone who think about buying premium with real money would buy Premium directly and not over an exchange to Gold.
      There is often a volume of ~100k gold and more for the actual price of Silver on the Market so to have an influence on the Market there is a minimum of 40 Players needed that buy Premium to get the Silver Price ~10 silver down.
      To influence the Market from 4000 to 3000 as it happened it needs more than ~20.000 Players that buy Premium in Silver on that day.
      I would love for SBI that this would happen, but i really think this is not what happens here.
      What I think is happening here is, that Players with a big pile of Silver and Gold are Surfing the Gold Market.
      (BTW: I would say that this is a mix of both influences, buying premium and Surfing the Market, maybe there are more influences that i won't see.)

      Gold Market Trading is so easy in this Game, the Tax to do Trades in any direction is fixed, that's why i think making it easy to buy silver with gold (Fixed Tax to do Trades to Silver) should be the direction and buying gold with silver should be taxed to fit the Market price of Gold.
      That way the Speculators will have to "not hurt" the Market, else the Trading Taxes will go up, and they lose their profit.

      I am not talking about buying Premium with silver at all. Maybe I am naive and have too much faith in humanity, because for most players, buying Premium with silver would be stupid.
      The price of Premium is tied to gold and the price of gold has been going up consistently and since most players are not rich enough that they can buy Premium with the silver they earn in one day, it would make the most sense for them to save up for Premium in gold (there are no transaction fees).
      Neither of us have information about the purchasing pattern of the Albion population, but my assumption is that a majority are smart enough to save 4-5% or more on their Premium by buying gold over time until they can pay for a month or a three-month Premium with gold.
      Speculators have made a lot of silver on the gold market, but we can only guess how much influence they have. My gut feeling says that it is primarily the high demand for gold that has given a relatively steady and consistent increase in the exchange rate; if speculators had the power, then you would have seen a lot more volatility in the exchange rate and I doubt they would have been able to create such a steady increase consistently.
      Maybe it would be an idea to tax traders who sell gold, but placing a tax on buying gold is a bad idea, because then you also tax the players saving up for Premium by buying gold and make their Premium more expensive. Edit: Actually, the tax would then punish those buying gold on the website to sell it for silver...I think I am against a tax on gold trading no matter if it is selling or buying.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by TSkebee ().

    • Deviator wrote:

      lol. all these players complaining about respec & repair costs... these adjustments are needed and the changes aren't that dramatic at all.

      There is NOTHING stopping anybody from spending 100k to create a new guild then farming 100k keys to gain 300 siphoned energy and selling that for 2m silver. You can easily do this once per week, some people can do it twice a week and it will easily gain you 8m+ silver per month for just playing the game normally. No extra effort required at all. If you don't do it already it will easily cover the extra silver needed in the upcoming changes.

      are you braindead? solo guild energy farming is a exploit that will be fixed. what you'll do when they put the sinks and make so that guilds levels only give energy lvl 6 +?

      it goes against the basic game design to create guilds for this, destroying what they wanted to help, minor guilds that can t compete with guild energy farming. in fact if you are exploiting this and posted about it here you are even more braindead than expected

      you can t make new player economy dependent on a exploit

      The post was edited 2 times, last by ARandomPlayer ().

    • ARandomPlayer wrote:

      Deviator wrote:

      lol. all these players complaining about respec & repair costs... these adjustments are needed and the changes aren't that dramatic at all.

      There is NOTHING stopping anybody from spending 100k to create a new guild then farming 100k keys to gain 300 siphoned energy and selling that for 2m silver. You can easily do this once per week, some people can do it twice a week and it will easily gain you 8m+ silver per month for just playing the game normally. No extra effort required at all. If you don't do it already it will easily cover the extra silver needed in the upcoming changes.
      are you braindead? solo guild energy farming is a exploit that will be fixed. what you'll do when they put the sinks and make so that guilds levels only give energy lvl 6 +?

      it goes against the basic game design to create guilds for this, destroying what they wanted to help, minor guilds that can t compete with guild energy farming. in fact if you are exploiting this and posted about it here you are even more braindead than expected

      you can t make new player economy dependent on a exploit
      No I am not braindead, I know the difference between an "exploit" and "abuse".

    • DildoSwaggings wrote:

      Doing me a confuse here Korn; PvP knockdowns barely happen, so... its gonna be more expensive to repair the gear I loot from someone or someone loots from me, basically?
      That's correct. Repairing gear obtained from PvP kills will be more expensive, though compared to the overall value of the gear, the cost is still small. And in general, this is a cost that will largely be apply to wealthier players as it's those players who obtain a lot of loot from GvG and due to the fact that repair costs scale strongly with tier and level, hence are extremely top heavy.

      PvE knockdowns however will not change at all now with the proposed changes. While repair cost will double, the durability loss from a PvE knockdown will be cut in half. Hence getting knocked down in PvE costs exactly the same as before. While the cost to repair the durability loss that comes from just using the gear will increases, that cost overall is extremely small so it will not have a significant impact.

    • These... are extremely low quality forms of silver-sinking.

      Just making things more expensive? You have the ability to implement actual sinks for silver into this game. Mounts, cosmetics, gambling in the city, other RP-based elements that could be added to this game.

      I am really hoping for more things to do in the city than craft and duel.
      Albion Online IGN: WipeHype
      Laborer Taskmaster and Mount Enthusiast

    • The prices of high-end resources are capped, so you do not need to fork open-world anymore, what's the point?
      I do not understand the approach.
      Now anyone with silver safe can get all the resources he wants.
      And on top leather , iron all have so far different prices now we have uniformity ...

    • Xanthirius wrote:

      These... are extremely low quality forms of silver-sinking.

      Just making things more expensive? You have the ability to implement actual sinks for silver into this game. Mounts, cosmetics, gambling in the city, other RP-based elements that could be added to this game.

      I am really hoping for more things to do in the city than craft and duel.
      It’s a start I guess, there’s a lot of sand in this game, but not many tools to build with it...

    • UPDATE 4.10.2019 - Changes to the above

      Hey everyone,

      thanks for the feedback! We've sifted through it and found lots of valuable input. In response to your suggestions, we'll be making two important changes:

      1. We will not increase the price of re-rolling quality at this time, due to a risk of it sinking less silver than it currently is.

      ---

      Re-rolling should be MINUS 50% of what the current price is now, that way re-rolling would be used more often and actually worth it... more people using it to re-roll equals mass amounts of silver being sunk.