Welcome to Gaia! :: Ideas for gold sinks.

Recently, as I'm sure you are all aware, there was a massive influx of gold through the cash shop item "bag of win". In less then two days time enough gold was generated to significantly raise inflation on nearly every single item in the market place.

Rising prices have not leveled off from this either as this gold continues to circulate with only the tiny 2% tax heroically waging a sort of guerrilla warfare with each new purchase.

Between this recent poorly thought out cash shop item and the continued war being raged against the ever present threat of botting I suggest aggressive counter measure be put into place to counteract the decreasing value of gold.

In other words, WE NEED MORE PLACES TO SPEND GOLD!

Idea 1:

The big grand daddy of all money munchers, a lottery.

If the bag of win fiasco proved anything its that the majority of Gaia users want to get rich and get rich quick. No matter how foolish the means of getting there might be.

Thus a lottery becomes a superb plan.

There are two ways to do this.

The set lottery Would involve offering a set prize of a substantial amount. Such as 1 million. Then offering tickets at a small amount, lets say 1,000 about the same as if you were to gamble putting an entry in one of Gaia's previously established gold sinks arenas.

This can be a bit of a gamble on Gaia's part as well, however, since the jack pot could conceivably be worth more then the gold spent on participation.

Which is what makes the second way of doing this attractive.

The scaling lottery. Here Gaia has no direct risks. The grand prize scales according to the number of tickets bought, and consequently the cost of participation could be set anywhere.

Simply increase the total jackpot by a set percentage of gold spent on participation. For instance if you made every lottery ticket cost 10 gold you would increase the lottery by 9 gold for every ticket bought.

Once that particular lottery is over offer some of the accrued gold from the last lottery as a prize until the number of bought tickets catch up and then begin increasing the jack pot once more.

I'm sure there are other ways to do this as well, but the point is to get people to spend more gold in smaller amounts then they stand to win in that one large sum.

Idea 2:

More nongold generating or even gold consuming games and/or events

You could have made Pinball cost 25gold a game and had only the items as prizes. Why did you opt against this?

There are MILLIONS of ways you could get Gaians to WILLINGLY spend gold on minigames, quests, and events. Why does Gaia seem to constantly neglect this in favor of handing out it's currency in copious amounts there-by raising inflation to insane levels leaving the newbies who join in a constant state of dismay and hopelessness as their dream avatar's total cost seems to raise so much faster then they can earn the gold to buy it?

Perhaps it was time the situation was handled more conservatively?

Perhaps its time you start thinking about a Gaia minigame that involves buying randomly generated collectible items from gold consuming vending machines. Perhaps a game involving digital versions of trade-able cards or some such.

Give thought to having consumable potions in the upcoming MMO cost more then the gold players stand to generate in monster drops.

Or more events that involve spending gold to obtain a new quest or event item.

Idea 3:

Raise the market place tax.

There is no intelligent argument against the market place tax.

The amount of inflation that it was supposed to cause as vendors raised prices to cover the sales tax is non existent and the leveling off and even a DECREASE in various limited edition and collectibles has been self evident.

~Prior to the recent release of the "bag of win" of course.

Raising the tax by another 2 or 3 percent will help dramatically, I'm sure, and the only consequence is increased baseless, ignorant whining.

In the end the question is, how much does Gaia care about it's non paying customers? If they really give a damn about all their users, cash shop patrons or not, wouldn't they make every effort towards increasing the value of the common currency?

Number two is the most obvious gold sink that they keep hinting at though never follow through with.

Bollocks really.

Give out an exclusive item as a prize and Gaians will spend willingly.

A higher tax would cause too many people to get all butthurt though, a lot of BAWWWWWWing and preparation H. I'm for it though the reception would suck.

Beginning of post: "Rising prices have not leveled off from this either as this gold continues to circulate with only the tiny 2% tax heroically waging a sort of guerrilla warfare with each new purchase."

End of post: "There is no intelligent argument against the market place tax.

The amount of inflation that it was supposed to cause as vendors raised prices to cover the sales tax is non existent and the leveling off and even DECREASE in various limited edition and collectibles has been self evident."

Pick one, please.

It may or may not be taken well. Some will blindly accept it while others will catch on to it.

But the shear immenseness of the stupid majority may easily drown out the few naysayers. It's all about getting them to spend their gold on something that they think will get them something without getting wise to it being a gold sink.

The Bag of win was probably the most horrible execution of a lottery though did do a good in educating us as to how many people will spend to get a rare prize.

The bag of win taught us that the winning lottery ticket would probably be worth more on the market place then the actual gold prize.

....Throw in some sort of "I won the lottery!" trophy or some such and suddenly you can pump twice as much out of your fellow gaians then you would just claiming your prize.

Yep

Though I do expect they would do something awfully unwise and release older MC's as prizes.

If they ran the lotteries only once every so often on a set amount that probably wouldn't be so bad.

Offer 500,000 gold and a random past MC, run the lottery for a month at 500 gold a ticket (allowing single users to buy multiple tickets of course) and you could probably watch huge amounts of gold disappear forever.

lol but I am with you. Its really not cool re-releasing old MCs at all.