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Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Things You Want to See in the Tax System
M33P
Member
Things I'd Like:
1. Sales tax, property tax (or a rent-based system), and maybe even a crafting tax. So that the node's money pool fluctuates.
3. Mayors get a system determined salary from their nodes money pool.
4. If Mayors are allowed to spend money from the tax pool, all of their transactions with said money should be public to the node's citizens.
5. Social programs that a mayor can fund rather than buying individual things will provide a less exploitable system.
ex. Instead of a mayor buying siege weapons and handing them out. A mayor can divert funds into a war fund which gives their citizens a system derived package designed for a siege. This will keep mayors from buying things with node funds in order to resell and pocket the cash.
5. And overall, a system that incentivizes people to think carefully about which node they want to trade with.
What do you guys think?
1. Sales tax, property tax (or a rent-based system), and maybe even a crafting tax. So that the node's money pool fluctuates.
3. Mayors get a system determined salary from their nodes money pool.
4. If Mayors are allowed to spend money from the tax pool, all of their transactions with said money should be public to the node's citizens.
5. Social programs that a mayor can fund rather than buying individual things will provide a less exploitable system.
ex. Instead of a mayor buying siege weapons and handing them out. A mayor can divert funds into a war fund which gives their citizens a system derived package designed for a siege. This will keep mayors from buying things with node funds in order to resell and pocket the cash.
5. And overall, a system that incentivizes people to think carefully about which node they want to trade with.
What do you guys think?
2
Comments
Could you elaborate or provide a link, I Kinda get what you're saying but kinda don't lol
Castle taxes are carried via NPC generated caravans from the nodes that fall under the castle's purview to one of the castle nodes at the end of each week leading up to a castle siege.[4]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Castle_taxes
Oh, that's pretty cool, I hadn't seen that yet. I hope it doesn't end up robbing the nodes of too much agency though. I'd much rather the castle just have a percentage tax on the node reserves, while the nodes can have a much more in-depth tax system.
Maybe even allow some nodes to lay outside the castles' zones.
*Nodes should also have some way to revolt against their assigned castle. Something like funding rival castles or denying taxes.
1. agreed with all of them
3. mayors shouldnt get a salary at all. There is plenty of people who will do it for free.
4. Mayors wont be allowed to spend tax money on anything outside the node system. That has been confirmed multiple times by Steven. Money that goes into the node system will stay/be depleted there. Its a closed system.
5. see Point 4. Your Siege Weapon example does not make sense to begin with.
Crafting Tax/Fee should scale with the complexity/quality/Level of the item.
I think whats missing from your proposal is a flat out tax from all npc-generated income you make (Hunting Certificates, Tasks etc.)
@M33P
Nodes will have to pax Tax to the castles they belong to. (Probably x% of all the tax money the Node gets)
This Tax Money will be transported through Caravans to the Castle (every x days) which makes them attackable/lootable by enemies of the Castle Owners.
Ya just read the wiki after they sent that link. It's a lot more fleshed out than I had previously thought. The only issue I have with castles doing taxes is that they prop up guilds as a sort of monarch of the server. I really do not want guilds to determine the tax system since there's like no upward mobility in terms of political power within guilds. Sure, someone can make a new guild to compete but that is an extremely hard barrier of entry compared to the nodes. Not to mention guild leaders will pretty much never change.
I'd rather 113 nodes influencing the politics of the server than the top 15 guilds (guild leaders), which the majority of people in the server will never get into the upper ranks of. Idk, I've never really been a fan of guilds so it could just be a me thing.
I mean taxes are used to build better workstations for the crafters. So, you would just be paying into upgrading your workflow.
For me it's more of an issue with the power structure guilds are designed with than the actual mechanics that nodes and castles influence each other with. If guilds were meritocracies or democracies, I'd be all for it. I just don't want a singular person in control of that much power for an indefinite amount of time.
I suppose, but being a mayor also requires a lot of work to get to. Unless you're a streamer lol. Also, I think giving a cut to the mayor will incentivize them to grow their economy so that their own salary will grow.
It doesn't even need to be a lot of money tbh.
I would like to see more granular tax rates for different things in the node, rather than a flat rate for everything at once. For example, I would like to see the sales tax of a house be able to be different from the sales tax on crafting ingredients. It doesn't have to be different rates per item - that's too granular - but certainly different rates per category of sold goods.
I don't think mayors should get a salary. It's either going to be so low as to be symbolic and pointless, or it's high enough that it will attract the wrong people I think.
I certainly agree that taxes should never be able to be converted to or used as a personal fund for the mayor, in any roundabout way. I believe that is already the plan, so we should be good there if testing goes well. All funds go to node development, including node defenses.
To add to the inter-node trade system we know is coming, being able to set different tariffs depending on the type of goods and on the specific node that is being traded with could be interesting, but I don't think it should be a deeply complex system.
Do you know what exactly the castles will be taxing? And whether they have control over how much.
Only what's in the wiki: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Taxes#Castle_taxes
And yes the monarch controls the tax rate.
So probably just something based off GDP then. Them using the phrase "a tax" is pretty insuring. Thanks for clarifying everything.
I think you really want to read through the following page:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_castles
However, just to be very upfront about it:
From what you have written so far, what Intrepid has in mind is exactly what you dont want to see. They have been very clear about that.
The Guilds owning the castles will receive both major benefits and major influence on the region as a whole.
Thats within the very core design behind them. Just so you are aware.
Regarding your questions:
Ya, I guess I'm just finding it hard to understand how anyone would enjoy playing under a monarchy. We got rid of them for a reason. I'll probably just try to ignore it while playing and hope they don't get too much power over the game.
Why they would have such a system? Because it embodies everything they have at their core of their game design
All of that is there and is ok except for player interaction. What percentage of players will ever be in the top 15 guilds and then be the guild leader of that guild?
Guilds are already things that have exponential power in mmos due to how they are structured. The older guilds will have the most resources and the best guilds will attract the best players. The chance of leadership changing in these guilds are reliant on the guild leader quitting the game or dying irl.
Giving them more power on top of that just doesn't appeal to me.
I want taxes to be easily understandable and visible by people in their ZoI. I don't want monarchs or mayors to be able to sneak in higher taxes without people being warned/informed. And I hope that there's a cap on tax values, because even if all mayors and monarchs in a server want to troll it, they can't try to "ruin" the economy.
Don't get me wrong, it would absolutely suck being a citizen of a Node where my mayor is stealing from the city coffers to pay for his fancy new toys. Yet at the same time, that in and of itself would make an interesting dynamic for politics and PvP.
Luckily Node Tax money only goes toward funding node development 😅
Eh. The more I consider all the details of possible embezzlement I don't think it'd be dynamic by definition.
The thing that makes such things 'interesting' and 'dynamic' if replicated perfectly from similar systems irl is that you have to be worried about being merc'd on top of worrying about being removed from power. So a lot of the power brooking and alliance building has this underlying risk of death.
But in a game, you can't 'die' in the same way. Or at least if Perma Death for Mayors is a thing in AoC I haven't heard of it. So it removes one of the primary components for the politics and relationship building that really sets a lot of the dynamism in the first place.
The moment you give a person who can't be removed from power for a set amount of time and can't be killed, the ability to siphon off funds, there is basically no risk to some embezzlement other than re-election (but not all nodes are democratic in the first place.) But even this 'risk' isn't really that much of a risk. The only thing re-election does is modify how MUCH you can extort, same as the other node types. This technically gives you incentive to milk as hard as possible if you care more about short term gain or want to weaken the node for some other guild to take over making it foolish not to with basically no risk.
You can argue 'your risking future embezzlement opportunities if you do it too hard' but I'd argue this results in the embezzlement becoming a defacto pay check with the only 'incentive' system being driven by possible destruction of the node and public support (and again that's only true if it's the node type that votes democratically.) Any node that does not have this check of public support really only has the 'will this make the node fall' modifier. That's a pretty easy thing to calculate if you actually know how to due proper analysis for that type of thing and I'm sure there will be people making calculators for how much money to siphon off even if only privately. If something will happen basically every time and you can calculate the exact numbers of what is probably going to happen with a decent amount of accuracy, is it still dynamic?
So tl;dr: Due to lack of perma death in AoC embezzlement lacks the key factor that creates most of the politics out of such a corrupt act in the first place. All other politics would happen without the ability to embezzle freely like some have been suggesting should be possible. It's both predictable and low risk. When a situation becomes 'the default' and 'predictable' it's no longer dynamic.
If you want to weaken a node via misspending on the other hand... that has much more room for dynamisim and has the potential for the community to push back. Embezzlement doesn't have this in a direct enough fashion to matter. For everything else... just give the mayor an actual salary with room for bonuses determined by node performance. Now THAT will be a system that can have dynamism since the node's performance is not 100% in their control.
Sure there is player interaction. It feels like you are under the wrongful impression, that only the monarch himself has player agency here. That is not true in the slightest, from a simple player, to a group of players over minor and major guilds to entire node populations have agency here in regards to how they want to deal with a bad monarch / support a good monarch:
@M33P