Sorry Siege no New Castles for you.

Quite a sticker shock.....   I did notice they upped the storage... but the price just kicked a good deal of us out of the running!

Well I only have a keep so I wouldn't be getting a castle anyway, but the cost of the Keep is way more than I will ever pay for a house, it's not worth it to change and certainly not for a design I don't like.
I suppose that's one way of making sure nobody changes to the new designs and they avoid the logistical nightmare of all that stuff going into and out of a house storage crate intact.
Where did the prices come from? Surely that isn't just the cost of the house tiles needed to build it?

Good Point.....   but they did say this was just the first round for new designs... a few more keeps just might be in the offerings... cross your fingers for a good one.

Lady_Storm said:

Quite a sticker shock.....   I did notice they upped the storage... but the price just kicked a good deal of us out of the running!

That is the storage of a normal castle with 60% increased space.

Those costs are totally stupid because it did not cost you that much to design it on TC.

Violet said:

Lady_Storm said:

Quite a sticker shock.....   I did notice they upped the storage... but the price just kicked a good deal of us out of the running!

That is the storage of a normal castle with 60% increased space.

No one caught that on TC, or was it never there ? I'm not even remotely surprised.

I was going to check but didn't mark a rune and forgot where castle i placed was 

I just checked the cost of the keep I entered, changing the lower doors kept the cost static at 1,167,000gp

Garth_Grey said:

No one caught that on TC, or was it never there ? I'm not even remotely surprised.

Guildies and I caught it on TC, the new patch with the new tool was only up there for a few hours last night.  

The price is far too extreme. There has to be a couple of zeros knocked off or no one will build them.

Honestly, with the amount of gold and platinum available, even on smaller shards, I bet your going to see lots of these new designs. I suspect that the majority of the player base greatly underestimates just how much gold the wealthier members of the player base have.

With these prices, people will have the added benefit of being able to show off that wealth.   

While I understand the desire to fight inflation, I have a big problem with the way this is done.
1) While duping is still active in the game, any kind of gold sinks are about as effective as trying to bail an ocean with a bucket.
2) A one time expense is not an effective gold sink even if duping was not a factor.
3) It's the little guys, not super rich who suffer from inflation the most. Who do you think this pricing is going to hurt?

TL:DR - right motivation, wrong approach that will not work and hurt the population it is meant to benefit.

I don't know @Sliss, when I first saw the prices I was like "WTF??!!!??" Then I thought about it for a bit. These are 300 million gold vanity items. They have no advantage in game over a standard castle you can place for 800k gold (or buy for whatever amount). The storage is the same. Plus, we can customize the 800k gold castle 'till our little hearts are content. (And yes, castles cost more than that, which is my last paragraph.) 

I agree with you on your point 1. Point 2 might work at this level of cash. I'm wondering if Broadsword didn't take a look at their metrics and see how much gold is there, who has it, who spends it, and what price point would most likely lead to a conversion and remove that gold from the game. Think about the rares trade forums. Those rares are selling for hundreds of millions to billions of gold. These are just new rares, but the gold gets pulled from the economy, not recycled. The price for the castle conversion seems to be right in the hotspot of rares market prices. I'm going to say that is not accidental.

Your point 3, well, if you already own a castle in UO, you're not one of the little guys. We're really talking about rich vs. super rich. I mean how much does a castle cost now? I think on Pac it's around 200 mil? What's Trammel Atlantic, a Plat, more? The "little guy" isn't playing at the level of owning a castle to begin with.

Not everyone who owns castles is rich...I was gifted my castle..and when I actually placed 2 castles of my own it's really not that much...apples and oranges on that count my friend.....800k compared to 300 MILLION....apples and oranges.

I know plenty of people who inherited castles, not everyone paid 150-200 mill for one.

I have castles on a couple of the quieter shards.  Unless I go buy it from a third-party broker, I'll never have the gold to convert even one of those castles to a new design.  If I took all the gold I have in game on all shards, I wouldn't have enough to even convert a keep.  These new designs will definitely be for just the richer players.  Maybe they will create a nice new revenue stream for the third-party brokers too.  For someone like me, they will just be one more item in the game that is out of reach and far too expensive to be an incentive to play more to make more gold.

Arroth_Thaiel said:

Your point 3, well, if you already own a castle in UO, you're not one of the little guys. We're really talking about rich vs. super rich. I mean how much does a castle cost now? I think on Pac it's around 200 mil? What's Trammel Atlantic, a Plat, more? The "little guy" isn't playing at the level of owning a castle to begin with.

I think the situation is different for many. I own a castle on Pac. It was gifted to me by a guildie. I don't think I ever had more than 150M at any given time. In recent years most of the gold I did have was spent on powerscrolls for my pets.
I love customizing houses, and in fact was torn having to move to a castle, just because you can't make much out of it with all the existing walls compared to 18x18. I was looking forward to new castle designs. While they are not my ultimate dream - fully customizable castle plot, they would have given me a few months worth of something fun to do.
I don't PvP, so I can't make money spawning. With taming nerfs, the roof and Doom are mostly out. So even a few hundred million are unrealistic for me.

even if you did spawn on my shard most PS go for 5 mil on ave so to make 300 million just off PS you would have to get and sell 60 PS that is assuming you lose no money to insurance loss don't have to buy bandages potions and that you can then sell said 60 PS wait lets take into account vendor fees especially on a slow shard like origin i think if i get the max amount of 120 PS each times (6) that's still 100 champs 

Sliss said:

I think the situation is different for many. I own a castle on Pac. It was gifted to me by a guildie. I don't think I ever had more than 150M at any given time. In recent years most of the gold I did have was spent on powerscrolls for my pets.....

Yeah, I have a castle on Pac as well, but no-where, I mean, no-where, near 150 mil. I enjoyed the creation portion of the contest. The prices shocked me. Yet, I can see why they did it.

What can I say, there is a lot of gold out there, and this seems geared to entice those who have it into spending it.

Maybe they will lower the costs for the next round? Or make different tiers of conversions? Have to see how it plays out over the course of 3 or 4 publishes.

@McDougle It doesn't seem to me this is directed at those of us who are just playing the game. It really feels like Broadsword looked at their metrics and set up something desirable to take a bite out of bigger fishes accumulated gold. Granted, with some of the bank balance screen shots I've seen, they're gonna need a bigger bite! 

Arroth_Thaiel said:The prices shocked me. Yet, I can see why they did it.

What can I say, there is a lot of gold out there, and this seems geared to entice those who have it into spending it.

Maybe you see something I don't. I do not see how removing 9.6 plat max per shard once, while gold duping still exists, would accomplish anything except alienating more players.

LMAO  UO removed 1000 times that amount and burnt the offenders houses to the ground and it was just a drop in an overflowing bucket.  This is the best idea that this DEV team can come up with tells us a lot about the future of UO.

There is no way I will ever pay that much to place one of the winning designs.  I'm lucky to have 20 mil to split between four accounts to cover insurance cost these days and far less across most of the other shards.

I've got around 60 million and I would expect to be paid at least double that to take any of the winning designs! 

@MissE , TBH, I liked your design a lot, i will for sure used that one over any other and been very honest and fair to the "winners". Because your designed was 1 of the winners and if you current have a castle already, your conversion should be Free!!

Sliss said:

Maybe you see something I don't. I do not see how removing 9.6 plat max per shard once, while gold duping still exists, would accomplish anything except alienating more players.

I think that's it, it's not once. Isn't it that every time a castle gets converted from one design to another, the conversion fee has to be paid?

If/when new designs are released, and you want to change to the newer designs, that will be another fee?

Every time a castle falls, and gets replaced, if the new owner wants to upgrade, there is more gold gone?

Not sure how this system is actually going to work, but if it's an actual gold sink, it should be continuous, not a one time thing.

AtlanticRealtor said:

@ MissE , TBH, I liked your design a lot, i will for sure used that one over any other and been very honest and fair to the "winners". Because your designed was 1 of the winners and if you current have a castle already, your conversion should be Free!!

Arroth_Thaiel said:

Sliss said:

Maybe you see something I don't. I do not see how removing 9.6 plat max per shard once, while gold duping still exists, would accomplish anything except alienating more players.

I think that's it, it's not once. Isn't it that every time a castle gets converted from one design to another, the conversion fee has to be paid?

If/when new designs are released, and you want to change to the newer designs, that will be another fee?

Every time a castle falls, and gets replaced, if the new owner wants to upgrade, there is more gold gone?

Not sure how this system is actually going to work, but if it's an actual gold sink, it should be continuous, not a one time thing.

Yes, in theory every time there is a conversion, there is a fee to be paid. Now, lets think what will actually happen. Vast majority of castle owners will not do even single conversion. Partially because the cost is outrageous, but even more so because they can't be arsed to redecorate a castle that is bursting at seams with junk they stuffed into it over 20 year period. Out of the ones that do convert, vast majority will do it only once, again because the price is outrageous, especially for a design that someone else created. Remaining is a tiny minority of players who did accumulate vast wealth through honest and not so honest means who might convert more than once. But even ones for whom the expense is trivial will be vary to convert more than once simply because of the labor involved in redecorating.
So the devs will be very luck to get the equivalent of every castle being converted once in total. Likely it will be much less than that due to the factors above. 
So the end result - a lot of development time spent to release a feature that will not make a dent in the inflation, but will anger pretty much everyone with a castle or a keep. It will also undoubtedly produce a nice bump in profits for dupers and scripters. Not my definition of success.