[MUD-Dev] Asheron's Call: An example of how easy it is to lose your balance.

[Dan Merillat]

Some people here may have noticed this already, but for those who
don't play AC, or havn't this week, here's a really stunning example
of unforseen effects of a change.

Money wasn't terribly difficult to come by, but it did take effort.

There were two main reasons for this:

  1) Money is heavy.

    Each coin was one burden unit... one point of strengh let you
    carry 150 burden units.  With strength ranging from 10 to 300 (350
    in extreme cases) it's fairly obvious that that limits your
    ability to carry massive amounts of pyreal.

  2) money is expensive.

    To get around this, you can buy trade notes.  Buy at 110% of
    value, sell to the same merchant at face value.  Sell to a
    different merchant at 80% of face value.  That's about a 30% loss
    to move money from A to B.

Now, there were ways to "cheat" the system... find an expensive,
lightweight object and have a very strong character buy lots of them
in a town where it's cheap, and sell them to a town where they buy
high.  This type of "tradewars" money making was limited due to your
inability to carry much from A to B...  and if you used trade notes,
that 30% hit left you with a negative profit.

Wednesday, the monthly server patch goes in.  Magically, pyreal has no
weight.

... and the race is on for the first billionare.  (the problem should
be obvious from my setup)

I doubt Turbine will rollback again, so they're going to have to be
fairly creative to drain the economy.

--Dan

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