Over the last 2 years one person has paid for a new account for every single 18x18 idoc plot on Atlantic and raised the price of 18x18s from 20-40m to 400m+, and recently moved on to snatching all max storage plots. There's something incredibly flawed when one person can throw a relatively small amount of IRL money to control one of the core game systems.
Relatively small amount of irl money, relative to what or who?
If it's all 18x18 on Atlantic, then it's a super huge sum relative to what I can afford.
LOL and some people are foolish enough to believe that the gold sellers/scripters/cheaters don't hurt them, or affect their play!
You know maybe some of the player base could migrate from Atlantic to other shards? Hearing about the housing situation is why I didn't play on Atlantic despite that being where I played back in the 1990s.
Let me put it to you this way, everyone I've met on Chesapeake has been either very quiet or very friendly. I was able to get an 18 x 18 house for under 1 million gold that a friend I made gave me to help out. They even helped me find a plot. Over the last few days that I've been back I've gone running around exploring and I will just say if you want it there is tons of space for all kinds of houses. Sure, like you'd expect in a game this old there are castles and manors everywhere, but there is still space. I'm sure it's like this on a lot of other shards as well.... just saying, everyone doesn't need to cram into one shard.
As far as gear prices I'm not a good judge, but I will say in running around rummaging through vendors (I have trouble with vendor search because I don't know the names of what I'm looking for), I've found a lot of empty/abandoned vendors, but I've also found a lot of them with what seem to be great deals. Every time I make a few thousand gold I find something I think is a ridiculous steal. I believe a platinum is 1 billion gold, and I don't think I've ever seen anything priced that high, though I have seen some items in the 10s of millions.
Not trying to be a "peanut gallery" just saying, I see no real reason why you have to put up with that kind of a situation on that one shard if it's as bad as all that.
with discord, icq, and ingame chat, its hard not to find someone to play with, even on "dead shards", that being said, most people love their stuff, and shard history
Too much money circulating is supposed to be inflationary - including printing (or duping?) money.
Source: Investopedia
But in the UO sense, it could mean someone with lots of dupe gold and deep wallet can buy UP to push up the price of houses, etc. They are so rich they can buy up all the hard to get items and monopolise the market.
Too much supply of products (including duped?) will cause it to get cheaper. This should mean deflationary.
This is why Shard Bound is an inflationary crap if it is hard to get like all the past ToT event that was a result of low supply.
There is no need to cheat to cause UO inflation. Killing a rat creates 30 gold, a boss will pump 500k gold into the market from the fountain alone. Granted that's not much per incidence but how many are killed in any week?
The more gold in the game the less it is worth and the more it takes to buy anything.
And no I don't have any solutions it's just the way it is.
All MMOs with an infinite amount of currency that is minted from respawning mobs deal with crazy amounts of inflation. The longer an MMORPG goes on, the higher the prices get, and it's inevitable that new players get priced out of the economy. The situation here doesn't shock me given the amount of time UO has been operating. Duping and such have little to do with the basic problem as it exists in all games of this type.
That said I have long felt that GMs need to take action against players who play the in game markets to control and expand costs, set up monopolies of high demand items, and similar things. This happens in almost all MMOs as well, and not once have I seen action taken even when a handful of players have succeeded in ravaging everything. I could give examples and drop names but it's kind of pointless, especially seeing as few people would likely know what I'm talking about anyway. If there really is a problem in UO with land being controlled on some shards by a handful of real people using multiple accounts, then I feel it's the sort of situation where the GMs should feel obligated to step in and deal with the problem.... at the same time however, understand that rumors are just that, in many cases stories about player illuminati type conspiracies are just that.
All games deal with currency creation, its well known and expected. Most all games have gold sinks & UO is no different. Uo’s inflation is mostly related to dupes and scripting, again this is well known and expected. The real problem arises due to inaction or inability to stop the above forementioned.
I think its funny everyone wants to cry about housing on Atlantic, but everyone has these shard shields so they can go to other shards EM events then bring them back to Atlantic to sell for Higher prices. EM event items should be shard bound. Same with pinks and power scrolls!! we need to stop all this off shard farming & importing it all to Atlantic. Then maybe House prices will drop. See all these houses with 30- 50 Auction Safes with EM Event items ranging from 400 mil to 2-3 plat. OH lets not cry about that lets cry about housing.
Used to be you couldn't place so much as a small marble on any shard and homeowners would only let their most trusted friends access their place. You just had your 125 item bank box. You had to save your pennies for a long time and buy something equivalent to an 8x8 or 10x10 house today.
Now some people can't place a massive 15x15 or larger on one particular shard out of the many. Bummer. Lol
Yea - It's funny because 20+ years ago if you had a "small wooden house" (ie 8x8) you were happy because it was hard to find housing spots. Now everyone wants a castle or 18x18 so they disregard the 8x8 or 10x10 spaces that are out there and somewhat plentiful (on ATL).
I remember my first house, too. What a joy. It was in Fel, just across the water from Cove, southeast of the swamp. I wanted it to ship mine the mountain ringing the town. Small little place, but I loved it. Reds would run through regularly. I got whacked plenty living there. Sometimes they would cast fireballs and shoot arrows when I would sail by. Fun times.
