Artifact tax

[Fink]

Here's an idea I had I'm going to post, so I don't forget about it.


The idea is this: noone really owns an artifact, the gods just let you use it for a while. To keep the gods on your side, you need to frequently drop offerings at the temple, or you will be hurting.

This would translate into a per-day tax, payable every now and then, for an artifact (whether you have it equipped, or stashed in your house).

This tax would be based on the level of the artifact, and the level of the player: the higher the art, and the higher level the player, the more you will need to keep the temple happy.

Because most players have backup loot, we can get pretty rough here on the costs. We can make the ownership of an artifact really present in the players mind by gouging the heck out of them.

We would call a taxable day for the art tax a day that you entered the dungeon (so that people who stop by for a chat dont get penalized).  Also, to avoid making new players life unpleasant, we could say that a taxable day is a day where you went to a dungeon level that equals your character level, or below.

The reason for this last bit is because rescuing is suddenly going to become very expensive, and we don't want a situation where a person at 800 feet who died cant get a res from, say, me if I wasn't planning on playing properly that day: I would have to charge them for it due to the art tax, and it would probably be too much for them.

I, as an example of this tax, own a high-end body armor artifact (and a couple other good ones I have equipped). I am level 50, and play deep. So, we could really gouge the living heck out of me for use of the art. My art tax for the armor could be, say, 1.5 to 2 million for the armor (along with tax for the other art I have). Suddenly, I'm paying very serious attention to what I'm doing, because I need to keep the cashflow coming for the right to use the art.

Lets say I have the good luck to find another peice of high-end art. I may just well decide that, because I can't use it and instead would just want to house it, I probably should just dump the thing or get overwhelmed with artifact tax.

A funny result of this, that I bet Crimson would just love, would be the rescue scenario on a day where I didn't plan to play:

"Hey, can you come rescue me at 4800 feet?"
"Sure. But its going to cost you two million"

-------------------------------------------

I know that a very understandable response to this might be "well, maybe art shouldnt be so rare." But, new ego and base equipment await us in Vanilla angband, which will make its way to Mang. Also, with some judicious tuning on our part, we can end up with a scenario where the game *doesnt* assume that you have loads of art when you hit the bottom. Instead, we can keep art what it currently is: very rare pieces of extremely powerful equipment, that at most you will be able to afford just one or two, if you're lucky.

[Warrior]

It's an interesting idea though definitely not MAngband 1.0 material, IMO. Too far from Vanilla.

But it is interesting though, definitely. Especially on more busy servers sometime in the future. I think the best way to do it would be to base it on the players total worth.

We'd have to go through the artifact list and just put a % value of each artifact and decide if any of them shouldn't have a tax. Stuff like Narthanc, etc...

Say you've found Sting at 2000, you're level 37 and your total worth, houses and items and gold included is... 2M AU.

Sting is pretty good, so maybe 2%, so maybe 4k a day... 40k for 10 days, 120k for a month, that seems about right?  Maybe...

However if your total worth is 200M, it would cost you 12M for a month... which simply isn't fair I think, either way.

Hm.
A tax is a good way to keep inactive players from hoarding the artifacts, so I think it's right to make them pay for every day of the year.  If they play or not. Forcing people to pay to play... will keep people from playing.

Maybe total worth / exp * [artifacts value/100 or something] Which for 'Sting' would result in a daily cost of

300k $ / 800k exp = 375$ pr day.

This guy's worth is too low for his experience level. It'll catch up, maybe he died recently. He'll soon have to pay more.

20k $ / 6k exp = 3333$ pr day.

This guy shouldn't hold such a kickass artifact.

800k $ / 300k exp = 2666$

Which adds up to 80k a month.

200M $ / 100M exp = 2000$

Which means that the insanely rich and experienced player will pay...not a lot for Sting,  but if he holds something like Feanor and Dor-Lomin + Morgoth's crown and some others he'll soon have to pay 1-2M a month in taxes.  However, a less experienced player with 100M worth and 10M exp will have to pay maybe up to 10M a month for the same.

This means that someone rich will pay more, someone with a lot of experience will pay less.... Which kinda makes sense in our world.

But I guess all this might be too complicated.
I think it's right to make rich players pay more, but their experience and playing time should be taken into consideration. And doing the worth/experience routine makes it easier on those who just got unlucky. But it also does makes it easier for those who are just crappy and dies a lot from their own mistakes... and allows those to hold on to the arts cheaply...

I dunno!

[Berendol]

Morgothian artifacts shouldn't factor into the taxes, because you are guaranteed to get one every time you kill him. Who regularly uses Grond, anyway?

When would your artifact/house be reset for welshing on your taxes? When you log in? A few minutes/hours/days afterwards? While you're offline? What happens if you logged off in your house, and it resets, or were wearing Bladeturner while mangling a dragon pit at 5700'? Could you "pre-pay" for a month's worth of said taxes?

Seems to me the only way this would prevent hoarding is if artifacts/houses would 'expire' on a rigid schedule when a tax balance is left past due, regardless of your status.

Artifacts would have to 'expire' and simply turn into enchanted items of their base type. Turning them into ego items would make it easy to convert the junk arts into something far better.

A good player is typically able to scum up all the money he needs in minutes or hours, while a new player would constantly be fighting to make payments. We'd really only be adding a time-sink for new players with this, I think.

I'm not sure taxation is the best way to go about the problem. We all have enough taxes IRL! It certainly is an interesting idea, though, and merits discussion.

[Fink]

Yeah, the nitty-gritty of how we apply the penalties is something I purposefully didn't dive into above, so the idea itself would stay clear, and the post on one page

For art taxes, I fully agree that they would be something that would scale based on the artifact itself, and the player. The goal would be that a player would have to maintain their artifact at a rate that is appropriate to them. I think using both the artifact itself (the low daggers vs. bladeturner) combined with the player level (clevel 8 vs clevel 50), would get us where we need to be so no player would find it completely impossible to maintain the money committment the artifact represents.

I mentioned that we can be tougher with the art because, as I mentioned, the player does have other options equipment-wise.  I don't know if  (in blue-skying mode here) we would want to delete the art from the player's inventory on the spot - that might get a little hairy, and be a bit punative. I was envisioning a system where perhaps the art itself would become temporarily ineffective. I like your idea of having it act as the base-version of the art, with the bonuses etc on it being suspended for the "in arrears on taxes" period. I of course understand this is no small thing to set up, on the code front.

---------------

Re: Warriors comments above-

I admit I'm a fan of having values that are hard-and-fast, and that scale on known numbers. This way, when the player is evaluating if they want to keep the art or not, they can have an easier sense of the committment (vs having to project ahead just how wealthy the player feels they may become, if we use a percentage of total wealth). This way, players can easily talk to eachother about what an art represents cost wise, like "I dunno man - after about clevel 25 or so, it just isn't worth keeping artifact X - the upkeep costs at the temple just start getting rough" etc.

[Billsey]

If we're going to tax artifacts, perhaps we should look at property taxes as well (or instead). Based on the value of the home and it's contents, it could easily make major changes in what people horde and how long they hold on...

[Warrior]

Yeah, I think artifact tax is gonna be a bit too complex. House  tax seems to me much easier to implement and easier to understand for the players.
But I still think it'd be a good way to stop hoarders. Maybe just put a crazy tax on housed artifacts... But then again probably better to just make artifacts disappear when dropped. Problem solved.

[grisu]

1.) arts tax is a good idea, but should be exp tax instead gold tax to hurt the owners
2.) tax should be paid if you NOT dive below your dungeon level.
It should hurt inactives and not players who help smaller dead players.

The implementation isnt easy, but fits very well as counter to the art problem.

[Berendol]

Hold on, which problem (or both) are we addressing with this tax?

1) The need to have artifacts redistributed

and / or

2) The need for high level players to spend large sums of money

Regarding the "with arrears" idea, I think the artifact should just simply fade and become the base item. Then the artifact will be reset, and someone else can have it. "Your Quarterstaff of Olorin glows ominously. --more-- You feel the gods are displeased with your failure to support the Temple. --more-- You are wielding a Quarterstaff."

[Warrior]

I think we should solve the artifact problem by adjusting things currently in the game instead of adding something totally new and possibly quite difficult, like taxes.

MAngband is multiplayer and MAngband has one set of artifacts. That problem is about as old as the game.

This problem was (almost) solved by the creation of a few new ego items. Stuff like avari shields, istari gloves, numenor bows and so on. I was the one who suggested/created most of those and maybe the most important thing back then was to make sure that this new stuff would be rare enough, that it wouldn't flood the dungeon. And it doesn't.

One specific item that was supposed to help players survive without easy access to the artifacts was The Orcish Shield of the Avari. If you found one of those, you wouldn't necessarily be as desperate to find the Small Metal Shield of Thorin as you'd normally be. I think it's safe to say now that after so many years of testing that these items aren't exactly flooding the dungeon. I suggest we adjust the rarity of those two slightly to make them work more the way they were meant to.

That was just an example, I would like to see a few more new types of items, especially a new type of helmet/crown, the helmet equivalent to an orcish avari or kolla lordliness. This to deal with the other normal "must have" artifact, Dor-Lomin.

The third/fourth new type of item is one that gives either speed OR damage, because thats typically what you want Cubragol, Cambeleg or Ringil for. To fully compensate for the lack of artifacts, which I think is, in a way... a very charming aspect of MAngband, we should adjust what we currently have and possibly add at least a couple of more items.

I'll continue these thoughts somewhere else...

[Ashi]

I agree with you that the lack of artifacts is a "charming" aspect of MAngband. Thanks to items like Istari gloves and Avari shields, I've never been "afraid to fight morg until I get at least one artifact" so if someone's already got Thorin and Dor-Lomin and Ringil, it doesn't really bother me. I find it interesting that you said this, though, because you're usually the most outspoken against players holding on to big artifacts and have at least once refused to play because "all arts are found".

I think the idea to make arts just disappear when dropped is the right way to deal with them. It's been successfully implemented on other servers, doesn't deviate greatly from Angband, and doesn't require extensive effort and coding.

[Warrior]

I don't think I meant that it's a problem if active players who needs an artifact uses an artifact, or many artifacts for that sake. I think I've mostly been annoyed with inactive players like angus/bigjuan who had lots of artifacts (and houses) and didn't play for a long long time.

Of course it might've been frustrating sometimes to see someone kill Morgoth for the 20'th time, die for the 50'th time and refuse to retire even when there's nothing much left to do but find another way to cheezily kill Morgoth.

Even if thats all up to the player of course I can still voice my opinion on it, when there's many others standing in line, who could really benefit from the artifacts.

Like when Angus dropped Dor-Lomin after winning and finding Morgoth's crown and I spent days looking for it and then found it. That's a perfect example of how things should work.

And again, yes, best way to deal with it is to have dropped artifacts disappear, they hate being neglected and will just refuse to sit still, unused.

But an artifact tax, I think... is taking it all too far. I rather think Berendols suggestions about changing the buy/sell price to shops, maybe just add a store_greed flag or something to the item... would be a better way to handle the economy of mang. Though that wasn't the #1 point here in this thread I know. But making gods "official" in mangband, beyond the RNG - I think that's taking things too far

[Fink]

Very interesting points and ideas here - great stuff to read.

I'm primarily focused on the house tax idea. However, it struck me that a similar deal could be evisioned for art - tho Warrior is definitely spot-on when he mentions it is very "un-vanilla."

My thinking, for arts, was to try to come up with a system that makes the power of artifacts be more poignent, and not taken for granted by the people who currently possess them. This led me to the idea of "maintaining' your art, to keep the gods happy and your art working. I was hoping to hash out an idea that keeps people in a situation where using an artifact is a serious thing, and where possessing more than one might be a little too difficult.

It definitely is a kooky idea, heh, but I think the principle is sound to some degree - to have a setup where artifacts are things that are blessed by the gods, and that are almost living things themselves that need to be lovingly maintained and looked after (kind of like owning a Ferarri - the purchase cost is negligable: you need to have a mechanic move into your house once you get one ).

[grisu]

i think the art tax is much more important than the house tax.
i am sorry to target the wrong guy as an example, but dor-lomin occupied by the same person by over one real year isnt the way which helps this game. i even feel bad to have eonwe as back-up. so lets punish me and even more other big players owning arts.

[Billsey]

I don't see a problem with a player hanging onto an artifact for years on end ... as long as the player is active in the game, and using the artifact. A property tax assessed against the value of your house(s) and the items stored there just might be a good way to keep the better items from being stored indefinitely.

I visualize the tax (small percentage of value, maybe 0.1% or 0.01%) accumulating daily as part of the switch from night to day, and accumulating for all players, not just those playing at the moment. Tax would accumulate on a daily basis, but would only be due on a 'monthly' basis (month in RW time, not dungeon time). Players could pay off their tax liability at any time from anywhere in the dungeon. When a tax payment is over due by one RW month, the penalty is imposed by selling off items within the house(s) to the black market. Items to be sold always start with the highest value and work their way down until the due amount is paid. When something is sold which brings in more au than needed, the extra cash is placed in the house where the item used to be. When the house itself needs to be sold (ie., it's empty) the excess cash is lost.

End result is dormant players are most affected, and high end items such as speed rings and artifacts are sold first. A player really wouldn't want to horde the best stuff unless they were going to stay active (and paid up).

[Berendol]

Hey. I have an idea similar to the artifact tax that could also work.

What if artifacts were a bit more susceptible to disenchantment attacks, regardless of the wielder's armor? And then, what if normal enchant scrolls didn't work and you had to buy special scrolls to re-enchant them? These would be scrolls that could bring them back up to the maximum specified by the artifact definition, and they would give you one guaranteed point at a time. That would be sorta like tax, sorta like degenerating items, and sorta like normal game process... without magically disappearing things in your wallet or inventory!