Re read this post, and then remember you are on a roleplaying server, and you are the leader of a faction on this roleplaying server, and you are trying to convince DMs to do something you want to do. You are saying that people should make a powerbuild and bossfarm, at the expense of roleplay. You do not suggest, you actually encourage and expect. I am again disappointe din the leader of the 'best RPing faction' on Amia.

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Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

This one, Chris.

And Tormak...please god give it a rest. If I want to RP my ass off like I do 90% of the time I'm logged in, that's my business. And if I want to blow off some steam and run the spires for the 987th time, that's my business too. Don't even think of getting on your snooty elitist hardcore soapbox and tell me I'm some kind of second class RPer for doing it.

I noticed you're back to ad-hom attacks btw, which means I guess you have nothing else to say about the actual issue at hand.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

The fact that you don't think what was quoted is a problem says far more than I ever could.



As a DM, it is my responsibility and duty to nurture roleplay wherever I can. If that means I have to flick people on the nose for encouraging bossfarmers, like your post does, I will do so. Because it is disappointing.

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Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

Quote me where I encouraged bossfarming.

Seriously, you think I need to encourage it? Amia already does.

My entire reason for posting in this topic is to keep you from encouraging it on one hand, and then punishing those who have done it later when you don't like the results of that.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

There is something of a disconnect between boss farming and roleplay though, it is true.

I do wonder why you keep bringing up the "best RP faction on amia" line Tormak. I mean, who said that? I do not think I have heard someone say that about any faction, ever.

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Wyjyn: Loving all of you (and above all Disco) since 11 Jan 2007.

I am not and have never encouraged bossfarming. Amia does not either. You have invented that yourself. I do not know why. Amia has done many things to curtail bossfarming, outside of a straight "you're banned". Which I know you would not like. Too 'hardcore', I think.

You say t is not a problem, which means you feel that it is not bad. And given your other posts on the forums, it is a reasonable conclusion to say that you encourage bossfarming and getting to level 30 quickly, and making powebuilds, even if they do not perfectly firt in roleplay. It has been done before in your faction at your behest.



The Banite faction has often been touted as the best RPers on Amia, frequently receiving accolades in game and on the forums. I would like to agree with it but it is especially disheartening to see their leader say the things he does on the forums that actively contribute to the problems Amia faces.

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Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

This just keeps getting better.

Who put the epic loot system in place? Me?

That's what encourages bossfarming. You must give me a lot of credit if you think anything I say can hold a straw to someone's chance at running out and getting better gear than they can get through DC items even.

I'm "actively contributing to the problems Amia faces?" Are you freaking serious?

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

As much as I love being proclaimed as being correct, I disagree entirely with your contention based upon my words. My point was addressed to Dwagin who was referring to 'adventuring', and it was in no way meant to sound that mindless grinding is better RP then standing around Cordor chatting. If you wished to refer to people getting bored and grinding, you should have quoted her instead I'm afraid.

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2009's Second Most Overall Contributing Player

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Clearly you do not know a good 90% of the high end DC items we approve.

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Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

Yeah, well, another thread dedicated to the whole DC thing really. In my experience, those that can get things through the DC system do end up with better gear and also do not boss farm. Personally, I'd rather spend the night sleeping on the sidewalk than bother to use it though. Very strange system.

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Wyjyn: Loving all of you (and above all Disco) since 11 Jan 2007.

(Having very little insight into the Amian economy, my comments here should be taken with a grain of salt.)

I don't see how anyone can really consider grinding to be "work". Work involves effort, and in my experience, there is no effort in grinding; there is only patience.

Even if grinding were work, there's a difference between a game and reality: everyone has 24/7 to spend in reality, but a PC may only exist in a game for a few hours a day. Thus, the characters of players with the fortune of having a lot of time to play have an inherent OOC advantage over the characters of the players who are not so lucky. That the former group is gaining an IC advantage over the latter due to (often uncontrollable) OOC reasons reeks of a broken system to me. What's to say that my character wouldn't be bossfarming while I'm logged off? Why should my character be punished simply because the mysterious entity that thought him into existence does not have enough time to point and click repeatedly in a video game?

Simply because certain players have much more time than me to play, their characters end up having a lot more gold than my characters... millions more. I think (albeit at level 9) the most gold I've ever had is 5000. That some characters are gaining hundreds of millions of gold seems completely unfair to me, because I will never catch up. There's also no RP justification for it, that I can think of--bossfarming, does that not involve repeatedly reaping rewards from something you've... already done? Mind you, I rarely do "town roleplay"--I do like to stay out in the field and on the road. I don't like to grind, and I don't really like to IM, I like to adventure and progress my character, emotionally and mentally, the way I would progress a character in a story I am writing. My character's not poor because I refuse to let my character adventure, far from it. My character is poor because some players have a lot more time than me to grind. ...I don't think it's incongruous with reason to say that those players with more time are actively a part of the problem.

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"A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did." - Anonymous

If you want to afford the top-end stuff, you don't have to spend all your time attempting to earn gold, nor do you strictly need a powerbuild. You just need to think of it as a long-term goal and have realistic expectations on when you're going to achieve it.

You know how other games handle boss loot? They make it bind to your character so that it can't be sold to other players. As much as that sucks and creates more need to bossfarm (unless there's a token and barter system) it is not healthy for any game economy to have a whole bunch of boss loot trading hands - you have a whole bunch of people who already have the boss loot they want, but now want to make loads of money selling boss loot to others.

That sounds like an interesting idea to me, Selmak.

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2009's Second Most Overall Contributing Player

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Theoretically, there are other options to obtaining the highest end gear. Some that would probably require a good chunk of time, effort and insight.

(Don't nescessarily wanna go into details as always but still.. )

Let me put something into perspective for all of you.

I started the whole question of a broken economy with a big post ages ago asking if anyone wanted to bother doing anything to fix it. The result was majority "yes". Back then, I was really only just beginning to see how it all works out, how players respond and react to the exchange of money, and the hardcore nitty gritty details of money in, money out.

I understand it better now, and in coming to understand it more, I also understand that in the grand scheme of things the economy really doesn't matter.

The amount of gold you have in your inventory will not break your RP. In fact, it never has to have any impact upon it at all. The more broken the economy is, the more devalued money becomes, the less applicable it is going to be. The world will continue to spin, even if a perfect mythal carries a price tag of 10 million gold.

Isolating what really bothers people about the ludicrous inflation (and yes, 762, it is breaking under its own weight) is dependent upon either their aesthetic of a realistic universe, OR, more importantly, the DM reliance upon gold to accomplish things.

With the current money input system we have (gold from killing spawns, a ridiculous and unnecessary amount of magical equipment that drops, bosshunting), the amount of money coming into the player economy is grotesquely imbalanced in favor of two kinds of people: bosshunters, and those who leech off of bosshunters (myself and Al, once upon a time, and more recently Prescia).

There is nothing saying that said bosshunters are not also good RPers. 762 is right about the expenditure of his time. When things are slow, it is kinda fun to explode monsters and bosses like loot pinatas. I personally know the attraction of it. It is the classic gamer's attraction.

But the minute the DMs begin trying to use gold as a vector in determining the direction of RP or module changes, there is a justified outcry. And I agree with them. As a DM, I really want people to lay down cold hard cash to get things done, but I'm aware that the current system presents an imbalance.

Do I consider bosshunting "legitimate work" to earn those riches? Yes and no. Yes, because I've done it, like 762, and in a perfectly realistic sense, it follows the effort + skill = wealth. But mostly no, because I think the overhead value in a bossrun is so bloated between money you get from spawns, money you get from magic equipment dropped like candy, and the injecture of epic loot into the player economy that the only thing that happens in the long run is inflation. A single run through the Spires gets my max Appraise main PC half a million. Half a million, without boss loot.

But my point - this really doesn't matter, so long as someone can stomach the silliness of gold costs and the growing disparagement between the classes (or the gradual shift into an item-for-item market) and so long as DMs hold back the reigns on using gold as a major determining factor in module development.

I bring this up because I see a lot of people taking it way too seriously, and I feel compelled to explain why it isn't a problem that is going to destroy Amia or any faction. But also to explain why it is some people feel vehement about it, nonetheless.

In that first post I made ages ago, I recall pointing out that there is a difference between fixes and adjustments. Pretty much everything being suggested here is an adjustment, not a fix, when a fix is necessary to actually have any noticeable impact. I will have nothing to do with a fix unless the gods from on high, the Admins and Development team who are willing to do some very specific overhauls I've already covered elsewhere, show interest. Because they'll be carrying the brunt of the work, not the DMs or the players.

I'm following this conversation, and it seems like "the money problem" mentioned is several related problems. Is the main issue that rich characters skew the PC market for highest-end items? Is the issue that when characters are so rich, it throws away all semblance of a reasonably scaled world?

(As a tangential point, I think the anti-twinking rule does a good job of insulating lower-level characters against inflationary effects.)



I think that number is not an ideal limit on several levels.

From a gameplay perspective: Given that there are items in stores that cost more than 100k, setting the limit below that doesn't make sense.

A limit this low would start affecting characters far before they reached level 30, which is at odds with the stated purpose of the measure (to combat the effects generated by extremely wealthy high epics).

From a PnP perspective: it's assumed that the gold + equipment + usable items of a level 20 character have a combined value of 760,000. (DMG, page 224.) An increase of 160k per level (the difference between level 19 and level 20) gives you an expected wealth -- again, including items as part of this -- of 2.56 million by level 30.

My back-of-the-envelope guestimate is that a level 30 character has gear worth an average of 100k in each slot, so ten gear slots are about a million. Having a full alternate set of gear doubles this, meaning a further half million in potions and gold would be average.



If you believe this is true, in my opinion the best way to simply impose a "wealth cap," including both inventory value and gold value. No rebalancing or other mechanics needed. (There are two ways to determine what a reasonable value would be. You could work forward, making assumptions about reasonable gear values and adding a small margin. Or, you could just look at the wealth of all level 30 characters and take the bottom 95% of that.)

Well in advance of this though -- like, 6 months in advance -- let people know this is going to happen, so they can divest themselves of their positions however they see fit before the hammer falls.

The fact that Donald Trump owns far more real estate than I could ever hope to in my lifetime does not break the real estate market.

Now if Donald Trump happens to want to own the same plot of land I do? Well, I'm shit out of luck. There's just no way I can compete with him. Nor should I expect to.

Chances are though, Donald Trump is already probably sitting pretty on everything he wants, so his billions of bucks are unlikely to come into play unless I happen to want the same waterfront property in Atlantic City that he does. And if I do want it, I'd better get to work on being a billionare myself, or just get real about ever owning such.

I have heard, recently, that there are a few players with ridiculously obscene amounts of gold. My response to that is, who cares?

Yesterday Gurth bought a perfect mythal for 2.8 million gold. That's about the price it was 2 1/2 years ago when I left Amia.

Yossi's point about DM's using gold to price things among the uber-rich I can understand. But as far as the exchange of magic items, I'm not seeing the so-called inflation. The highest level stuff is usually bartered anyway, as it always has been.

Do I believe there is more gold in the playerbase than there was in the past? Yes. But I've yet to see any effect on player-player commodities trading as a result.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

Unless we change the server to Low magic, money will always be abundant. So, a more drastic change is needed, if things were to change, but I don't think they need to.

A point re: Pricing acts amongst the uber rich , I have an example of a project that is still ongoing in game.

Christophan raised approximately 12.5 million Gold pieces towards the South Cordor reconstruction Project.

If you refer to the Amian Recorder's example of what he was proposing in regards to that project http://www.amiaworld.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=44389, it's a substantial project of urban renewal and improvement of the Commonwealth as a result.

The question that had to be asked, and probably is still being worked out is: Would that 12.5 million be enough to even start the project?

If you look at the post detailing Warrick's proposal, there is a LOT.

In addition to the South Cordor's base proposal Johnathin Leohnard laid out (which is in a nutshell rent controlled housing with rent being solely based on income) , Warrick wants to centralize and organize the healing services' providers of Cordor, create jobs, and retrain the willing petty criminals, establish a publish school amongst other processes in addition to that.

The DMs (Yossarin, especially) Have to ask themselves: How much should all that cost?

*Edited to include the URL for the Amian Recorder thread.

762, Donald Trump is still dependent on demand though. That is the real issue at the core of it, the NPCs will buy from you as though they have unlimited demand. There comes a point where no one needs a product anymore. The NPCs would probably be saying to the amian adventuers "listen, I'd love to buy your blue dragon scale armour from you but even the children in cordor south have multiple sets now". You see, there is no 'real' demand on half the loot of the server but there is real demand for epic loot so what you get is massive inflation due to the illogically gained gold of normal loot against the logical gold cost of epic loot which takes into account the real world difficulty of gaining the former.

I do not really have a solution, but your Donald Trump example is wrong.

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Wyjyn: Loving all of you (and above all Disco) since 11 Jan 2007.

Uber rich PC's on Amia are also dependent on demand. If one of them wants a Fort +5 (the Amia equivalent of waterfront in AC) he has to wait til one comes up for sale, then hope whoever is selling will even take gold for it (exceedingly rare for items of that level).

As far as what the NPC's buy and sell...who cares? There is no way in hell any developer could hope to model a realistic economic system for that. That's one of those abstractions we're all going to have to live with. Because it's ultimately a game, and not a macro-economic simulator for real life.

Once you hit level 30, the NPC economy means squat and always will. I would have though that would have been self apparent to anyone who's sold the same loot to the same NPC more than once.

The only meaningful economy in the PW is what players trade gear with, and what DM's charge for plot related things. Possibly also hiring PC's for services. Gold is completely irrelevant for everything else and always will be.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

He was shooting down your analogy moreso than your point.

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2009's Second Most Overall Contributing Player

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I'm sure he can clarify his own post if he needs to.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

Edit: Can I ask in general what's wrong with removing or even raising the 40k gold cap on death? Surely that will help some.

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2009's Second Most Overall Contributing Player

يمكنني استخدام مترجم جوجل

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)