Gabriel's Economic Plan Part A
 

Hello Erians,

Here's my awesome economic plan, you may tell me what you think.

• Businesses need to be taxed BECAUSE of the unfair amount of money that can be made compared to regular Erians gaining money. Demisis's idea of "robbing" the bank is also flawed with the possibility of having over 10-15K in the cash register.
• Having set amount prices on the items, so when you /itemtrade you can only lose some money, like 10K less or 10K more. This will help balance out the economy with set prices.
• Allow people to start their own small businesses if they please. Possibly adding more types of companies? Drug, Manufacturing, Gun Creation.
• (Drugs as in like legal drugs to help bleeding problems, perhaps like caffeine pills for higher level of speed.)
• Why not start a realator-type business for people to start selling houses?
• Create more player jobs, such as Fishing, Cooking, Cleaning (could be another company, cleaning houses) and construction.
• Possible Robotic-Business like in the past?
• Oil companies might add to the realism of Era, and it will make businesses pay more to create items to sell.
• Every player must pay taxes, depending on how much they have and how much they own, staff will figure out how to script this.
  

I fail to see how this will solve our economic problems...

Economy is broken? How is that possible when you can mine and do other things for straight up cash.

Solve your economic problems? Stop being lazy.

:fro:

Taxing players is a bad idea. Taxing a business sounds fine. Or perhaps giving businesses bills or such for upkeep... leasing and so on.

What is simply needed is for every way to pull in large amount of incomes, there needs to be some sort of payment. Not necessarily taxing or bills, but a negative along with it in order to balance things out.

Era's economy is broken.


Taxing businesses is planned.

Hey your new avatar is pretty neat

Taxing players isn't that bad, especially if there's no other way of destroying money on the server.

I wrote a blog entry on why some economies on Graal fail. I'm not sure how bad Era's economy is, but the list above focuses more on gaining money than on losing it.

What's the current Era economic problem?

Too much cash, or at least that was the problem last I heard.

They should just create money sinks instead of taxing players. I've never heard of just taxing players just because... I can understand if they get their money through a business or some such, but taxing players just to get rid of money is a terrible idea.

Just give players a reason to spend their money and it won't pile up. Put up places players can buy houses, then give them mortgage and bills. Have stuff to buy other than guns for players to show off. Pets... just something.

Thank you!

Those are good ideas, Dusty. :p Taxing players "just because" could add a sense of realism to the server, if nothing else. It's up to whoever Era's NAT is. Another idea is to just raise all the prices of items.

For instance, if the average player wealth is 1000g, and you want it to be 500g, you just multiply all the item prices by 2 (avg player wealth / desired player wealth). Zurkiba taught me this.

NAT's arent there to decide things. Even I as a NAT say that.

You don't just get taxed in real life though. Your checks get taxed. Like I said, if you're receiving your money from a business... perhaps. But lets face it, to tax your income would not really have a point as you may as well just lower the amount of money you receive from jobs.

Tax in real life has a purpose -- to give money to the government. In Era, where there is no government, and the taxed money just disappears... well, why not just lower income? The outcome would be the same.

Era needs communism.

I don't think you can have too much money, but it is possible that the money isn't spread evenly enough.

You do know what inflation is though?

Can't fight it online, other than having people lose money.
Taxes on the wealthier would be a good thing.

Runescape's economy is terrible too.

As an expert in this field with a Master's Degree in Macro and Microeconomics, I hold that this plan is indubitably useless.

Tried and failed. Capitalist pigs defeated the commies at the battle of In Front of the Hospital.

Good point. I know that in Valikorlia taxes would actually go somewhere, as there are multiple player-run governments. But, on any other server? Yeah, you might as well just lower incomes or raise prices.

Simple: make more things to buy at the higher levels. Make them expensive, and put them at a set price, so people will have to lose money if they want to resell anything. Also, put them in high quantity, so no one can buy the entire stock.

No, it wouldn't. Sure, it'd "remove" money at the same pace as taxes from wealthy players, but it'd stop newbies from earning anything.

No, I was talking about taxing payments(AKA real life).
No matter how rich you are, you're still getting the same income as everyone else for jobs.

Just cap the maximum amount of money that can be put into a bank account. Players will just have to carry any additional money on them.

Creating a lot of expensive items doesn't fix the main problem, which is:
unlimited "supply" (since most expensive items never break and can be traded around forever) and limited demand.

The obvious solution: make items break.
But it needs to done carefully, in a way that isn't too intrusive or annoying.
eg. making guns stop working completely when they're "broken" is too intrusive.

With a hard limit per account players with multiple accounts would have a massive advantage over other players.
One idea that I have thrown around is limiting bank accounts initially and then charging players to upgrade their bank account to let them store more money.

i.e. You can only store $5,000, until you pay $500 to increase your bank limit to $10,000.
Then another $1,000 to increase it to $15,000.
$1,500 to increase it to $20,000.
$2,000 to $25,000.
Etc.

Microeconomically it'd make sense to stop expanding at $55,000; when you'd be paying $5,500 to increase your bank limit by $5,000. But macroeconomically you'd basically be driven to expand it as long as you can make more money to store (forever).

I like all of your ideas, but here's the thing, because of the mining prices going down, people don't want to mine as much. So mining is left for business. My other idea would to add an oil business. Because oil is used to make most products and it would add to realism. 2 Competing Oil Companies :D

Oil isn't used to make any products. Grabs are used to make products, and grabs are free.

Okay, I see a few problems:
-Money doesn't have much value
-It takes too long to make money from the jobs, so people sell guns for too high of prices, making the problem worse. Make the jobs better. This will also equal out the value of money between noobs and the richer crowd.

So, here's what you do:
-Make the jobs provide more money (and things like mining levels take less time)
-Tax money in the bank (%3 per day?)
-Increase drop rate on money, so people need to use the bank
-Make banking free otherwise, so everyone uses it

What kind of bank taxes you? Normally you get interest, not taxed.

This isn't the time for realism.
Once you fix the economic situation, make it harder to resell guns for huge profits, etc, you can put the banking back to the way it was. But this way, you'll be able to control inflation, without a reset.

Your first two points almost contradict eachother.
Making money easier to get wouldn't help to increase the value of money, it would decrease the value of money.
And since money would become less valuable people would sell things at higher prices.

I don't know how I feel about taxing money in the bank.
At the moment there is a "withdrawl fee" of $5 when you withdraw over $100, but I think that the withdrawal fee is too annoying.
A flat percentage tax would be too strong I think. (If you had $20,000 in your bank and went on holiday for 2 weeks, when you got back you'd only have $13,000 at -3 percent per day. $200,000 would become $130,000. Which people would just circumvent by withdrawing all their money every night before they log off).
If there was a daily bank tax it'd be 1 percent or less.

Also, at the moment the amount of money dropped by players when they die is based on how many deaths a player has.
A player with 10,000 drops a lower percentage of their money than a player with 100 deaths.
But that doesn't even matter because as it is nobody ever goes anywhere with any money on them.

True. But right now, those with a lot of money are the ones causing the problems. You could tax just them, however, figuring out the line where to tax them heavily, or remove money in general, would be difficult. Therefore, I suggested leveling the playing field. You see, there are more forms of currency than money on your server. If you were to delete all money right now, those with better guns could sell them for as much as they want, and would probably be patient enough to wait a while for people to make the money.
A better idea would be to decide on a max amount, and anyone over that amount would instantly lose all the money over it. Then, place taxes in place for everyone, heavier ones on the more wealthy than the poor.
Money isn't too hard to come by, I retract that statement. The problem is that the inflation on it is so high, that the money you can make from the jobs is almost worthless.
Make it a percentage, not a set amount. That way, people withdrawing exorbitant amounts will be effected more than those trying to buy a knife
Yes, but as you lose money, the amount withdrawn would be less as well. You could also create levels, that way it's not a flat tax.
True, but if money was "taxed" in the bank, more people might walk around with cash.

Another idea is to limit the amount of money people can make from a player to player transaction. Tax it, as well as place a cap on how much one item could be sold for.

The problem is the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Obviously, the answer is Robin Hood.

If we're not going to tax the bank system, then why not have people gain money in banks? Then we all have more money. Also, why not make all guns PUBLIC, then we won't have a giant buying and selling problem. PPA guns public, Gang guns public, etc.

If Era's problem is too much money, you don't want to add anything that gives players money for doing nothing.

Here's an idea: addictive substances
:D
Make the cigarettes cost $10 a pack (It's up that high in some areas :frown: ) and have them improve the accuracy of the person, at the cost of 5 hp (temporary). Then, make it so that if they smoke more than 3 a day, they will lose hp if they don't keep it up.
Better than making them an event prize.

You could do that for other substances too. Steroids, for example. Side effect: possible roid rage shooting frenzy.

Be creative, you need people buying stuff constantly. Increase the price on ammo too. Everyone needs that. Keep handgun ammo, shotgun, uzi, etc cheap, so noobs aren't hurt by it too much, but increase everything else. And btw, you can tax income. Just do it through the banks or something.
Might want to do something soon though, some people have been complaining.

I think a lot of the "rich people" guns use the same ammo nooby guns do..

Ugh.
Fix that too.
Seriously, it won't take too much effort to start changing things, especially with the staff Era has.

Excaliber you don't even play Era. The problem is that a lot of honest players such as myself stay poor while the scamming glitch abusers get rich fast. If you start taxing people, the rich may become slightly less rich but the poor will become poorer.

The rich don't need buffs, they most likely already have some strong weapon to begin with. I like the idea of Graalroids, could have a positive effect in gym training too but side effect would be what you just said.