[MUD-Dev] Curtailing the 'Super-Rich Effect'

[Trump]

My thought for solving this is a geometric cost of convenience.  Let's
take a look travel in the modern world:

As a default you have walking.  It's free.  (Nearly) anyone can do it.
But it's very slow and you your range is somewhat limited.

One step up you have bicycles / busses.  One costs an upfront fee of
about $200 and is more or less free after that.  The other costs about
$2 per use.  The are both faster and have better range than walking.
But not by much.

Next the car.  You can buy a car for a few thousand + plus a few
thousand more per year.  Or you can rent one for a few days at a cost
of a few hundred.  Or you can hire a taxi for about $20 for just 1
trip.

On and on you have cheuffers (sp), chartered planes, commercial
planes, private planes, trains, boats and so on.  The options are
actually quite staggering.

In many cases these means of transport are in addition to a previous
one.  You may own your own plane, but you cant use it to go to a local
restraunt.

With each step you have a huge increase in costs, but the associated
benefit in range or convenience, while significant, usually doesnt
make up for the additional cost.  At the upper end the costs are so
high that only the insanely rich can use them often.  Most people can
afford to use a car on a regular basis, but it still tends to suck up
a large portion of thier income, between insurance, repairs and gas
it's many thousands.

This sort of thing can be done in games as well.  Players can walk for
free.  They can take an NPC run caravan that still takes some time,
but isnt overly expensive.  They can use permenant portals that are
exensive, but only take them to certain areas.  And spells that will
instantly transport them from to whatever point they want (like UO's
recall) should be so expensive that they are almost never used even by
the richest of the rich.

The same idea can then be applied to healing and mana regeration, and
other things.

In most existing games this concept is there, but needs to be
expanded. A bandage costs 1 gold and can heal you a little more than
just resting.  A healing potion costs 10 gold and heals even more
damage faster. But there it stops.  The super-healing potions, if they
exist, cant be bought.  Most games fail to have the super-expensive
items that are unreasonable to use all the time.

For a while UO almost had it.  To be successful in PvP you needed to
have lots of Greater Healing potions.  They cost 50gp each and you
could easily burn 20 in a fight.  This in a time when you were lucky
to get 100gp off each monster you killed.  Yet there should have been
potions costing 500gp that healed twice as much.  And ones that cost
5000gp that healed even more.

The ability to pop from any town to any other in EQ for a cost of 500
gold would quickly make money valueable to high levels again.  Potions
that would take you instantly to any dungeon for 1000 gold would
probably sell quite well too.

-Azeraab

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