Hello Amazon, Fellow designer here to provide some feedback on the steps going forward. Ill bullet proof this so that you can save time from walls of text. Italic text is the logic behind the change.
Some Changes to help stabalize Gold Economy Abuse
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Cap companies bank for currency (gold) to a max of 100,000.
some companies are expending large amounts of gold vs others in the current setting which is causing a significant statistical advantage against others in war/pvp battles. -
Reduce player gold cap to 250,000 and re-evuluate expanding it later
Limits gold-selling potential for the time to give the development team some time to combat these types of gameplay.
The Tax System
Rework tax types to reduce to a number of three (listed below).
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Property Tax is set based on the amount of people that live in a Settlement.
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Crafting (refine, and production) tax will now be disabled until a sink for it is needed, but the tax will be set based on the level of the Settlement. So a level 5 settlement (city) will tax @ 25%.
Note: city level will be set automatically by the amount of houses that are in a zone, and players wil be limited to one house. Devs can easily adjust the values with a small hotfix to play with the tax rates themselves. the high tax values will largely be a major mechanic to keep people from clustering hard. -
Trading Tax is now set based on the amount of trade a zone conducts, specifically how many orders are completed in the last week.
setting up the cities like this will help make more productive, more advanced cities more open to attack since they wont nessisarily downgrade when capture, since their level is dependent on people that live in the city, not who got it. Downgrades can still take effect if not upkept by resource demand (ie paying the cities upkeep fees)
Companies should only generate tax off player-housing and it should be no more then 10% of the total tax income, and these value should be generated weekly.
Benefits for Taxes (for crafting)
tax level will dictate upgrade times for the various parts of a settlement. For example, low taxes will cause things to take long periods of time to upgrade, where as high taxes will allow upgrades to complete in an hour. this will help make a build-up-time for cities to reach their potential while at the same time providing the benefits of smaller cities having lower taxes. So players will trade living in a cheap place with limited taxes and production options, and living in expensive places with more potential crafting (etc) options.
this behavior will help encourage companies to develop a zone and mantain it. the intent here is to help push companies in the direction of using their company gold generation to maintain their zone and use it as a sense of accomplishment, not a gold making machine for company leaders to exploit for personal desires, or to provide unfair advantages of players over others in war.
Settlements will now base their levels/sizes (from hovel to city) on how many people live in them.
Player housing
Set player housing cost to 1000 base + Crowded rate. Set up a rate of how much population is in a city, as it grows it becomes over-crowded which rates the tax rate accordingly, and with it the size of the city.
There should be some re-evauation of zones to allow for the initial costs of housing to allow new players to obtain access to a house. Players regardless should be limited to a single house, to help generate both companies being stationed in a zone together, as well as loyalty to a zone.
Companies need power to draw players
- One idea to help with this is allow companies to offer their own gold to get people to do settlement-board missions. This will draw people in at the cost of their own coffers, and it has massive benefit in regards to increasing economic viscosity.
Items turn in from these board missions should be sent to the oblivion. Some company members think that the companies should be able to stockpile these resources, but this will cause negative inpacts on the economy (or at the minimum has potential for it).
Cities need some more graphical changes to
having cities change in a way that alters the material of the buildings. For example, if they changed from wood to stone. This may be fairly easy to accomplish depending on how lumber-yard is set up it should just be model swapping.
Housing should be increased in area/space
houses are just to small, do not make the mistake that guildwars 2 did with this. there is a huge amount of income that can be generated from this. guild wars two has been named by its players “housing simulator online” because of the potential.
Forts need a more important role in the game
Forts have huge potential. They should be changed in a way that draws people to the fort for prolong periods of time. The biggest potential for this would simply be to move the fort to being parts of the city. This would make it a major hangout spot for people.
Forts should offer some sort of benefit that is economic, for example free repairs for the owning company alone. This will have the benefit of encouraging pve companies to fight for land.
Bounty System
It’d be great to have a system in the game where if you get 5 kills, you pop up on the map with some sort of title, and if you get 10, it gets upgraded. If player kills you as 5 kill title, they get 1000 faction rep/standing. If they kill you with 10, they gain 2500 of each.
Players that have either 5, or 10 kills should gain 100-200 faction rep/standing per a kill the make on each unique player with a degrading value after 4 or more kills of the same person in a 24 hour period granting no bonus.