Banking & Player Credits - Thread

Cyberkilla

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Thu Jun 3 19:32:40 EDT 2010

There has been some discussion recently about the way player's earn Credits. The problem is two-fold:

#1. Banking is infinite and those who are already wealthy find it easiest to deposit more money.

#2. Money that is not banked is almost a write-off. An attack or two can take a large amount of a player's unbanked funds, making it difficult to keep any money outside of the bank at all.

With most of the money players earn coming from NPCs on the maps, the only substantial revenue from a PvP attack is against inactive accounts that are bleeding money (an inactive account losses a little cash from their banks daily).

The thing is, inactive accounts may stop bleeding money, because I'm trying to encourage players to return, despite being away for months. It is a significant setback to find that:

#1. They've been attacked a million times because they were still listed on leaderboards, Swift Kill lists, etc, so their level has dropped a lot.

#2. They've lost almost all of their Credits because it's bled out of their bank and been stolen by other players.

I have made changes in recent months to push inactives under the radar a bit, because there are plenty of NPCs to attack. They aren't blocked off from attack, but they aren't advertised, if you get what I mean.

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Anyway, back to the point...

Perhaps a player's available funds should not be split into "Pocket" and "Banked" any longer. Perhaps there should simply be "Credits", with all money coming in and out of the one place. PvP attacks could still take money from a player, but instead of being a % value, it would be based on the player's wealth. Examples:

If target has 1,000,000 Cr then steal 10,000-50,000 Cr

If target has 10,000,000 Cr then steal 25,000-100,000 Cr

If target has 100,000,000 Cr then steal 50,000-200,000 Cr

I just made those values up, but you get that point. That way, you COULD have a large wealth, and not lose 25% of it in one awesome attack.

There could obviously be skills and other things to make the winnings higher/lower. The 10,000-50,000 range would be random, so you might get 15,000 or even 40,000. Anything inbetween those limits. See what I mean?

This is purely off the top of my head, and it's 00:23, so don't hit me too hard. I'm just putting it out there. A lot of people complain about things like:

- The risk of taking money out of bank to buy an item.

- The annoyance of money from trading items/points having to pa** through their pocket first.

- People trying to use various features of the game as pseudo-banking because they've ran out of bank deposits.

- Potential mule accounts storing a main account's wealth in their banks.

Having one single "credits" attribute would solve all of that, it would make ALL money both vulnerable and safe, because the amount you'd lose wouldn't be so huge.

The amount you would lose in a day would obviously depend on the number of attacks you receive, so we'd definitely have to be clever and ensure that in the future, when there are more players in the game, you couldn't be taken to the cleaners by 1,000 enemies

Another thing.. Whilst I said "no bank", there could still be a little mini bank, but it would be a hard limit, like 50,000,000 Cr (or more if upgraded). You'd be able to put up to that amount in the bank, but no more, and daily deposit limits might apply.

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EDIT:

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What's the alternative to this? Well, if it were a 3D game where you could actively avoid danger by running away from it and hiding, we could leave it as it is..

I'd imagine that many 3D mmorpgs have a bank of infinite capacity, but they have to physically travel to it and deposit their treasure.

Well, in FutureRP, you can't run to the bank, and you can't run away from danger. This means, any money that isn't banked is fair game. Anybody who isn't at the top of the food chain will lose money from attacks, so naturally, the people at the top of the leaderboard end up with all of it!

Other options are:

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#1. Player money is ALWAYS safe. You don't need bank, because it won't be stolen.

#2. Only the money you've earned in the past 24 hours can be stolen - everything that have left at the end of the day is "safe/banked". From your perspective, you only have a "Credits" field showing your current funds, but it also tells you that you've made "10,000,000 Cr today" and only that is vulnerable.

The issue, if you consider it an issue, is that you can only steal money that is actively being earned. You can't take any of the wealth that they've managed to ama** previously. In the long run, if you're fighting daily to take their money, you can still punish them by preventing them from getting richer.

The problem is, the only way money will LEAVE a player's account (other than the volatile money earned in the past 24 hours) is if they spend it. Potentially, you would never "lose" money, because you'll always end each day with at least 0 credits earned. However, ask yourself, is this any different from now? JD and the like are untouchable - they have their cash banked safely anyway. At least with this system, other players would get similar security.

There could be skills to steal some of the "protected" money, to stop it being completely untouchable, but for the most part, PvP would happen on a daily basis and anything left over was relatively safe from theft.

Invisible War ][

Edited 2 time(s). Last edited by Cyberkilla @ Thu Jun 3 19:49:12 EDT 2010

Cyberkilla

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Thu Jun 3 20:18:31 EDT 2010

I think one possible compromise is to:

- make the bank a bit less "safe", by introducing a few skills that give a tiny chance of stealing a small amount of banked money.

- make the bank have a hard limit like 250,000,000 Cr (if upgraded with pts) that can be perfectly safe.

AND

- make unbanked money slightly safer by calculating losses from attacks not as a percentage, but as an amount determined by the total unbanked money available, as explained in the previous post.

Quote from Previous Post

if unbanked is 1,000,000 then steal random amount between 10,000-50,000 Cr
if unbanked is 10,000,000 then steal random amount between 25,000-80,000 Cr

Invisible War ][

Edited 3 time(s). Last edited by Cyberkilla @ Thu Jun 3 20:21:15 EDT 2010