A new name
 

It occurred to me that perhaps the P99 staff could charge a fee (say 10000p, for example) for renaming characters. The money paid for the service would be deleted to combat inflation. This would also work well for those buying new accounts, because they could personalize those characters in that regard (not that I necessarily condone trading accounts but that's something else altogether). There may be some pejorative consequences to this idea that I've failed to consider, though I thought I'd make a post about it anyway.

What do you think then?

Well, no. Then there's nothing to stop someone from acting like a total dick, because consequences for your actions would be basically nonexistent as long as you didn't incur a ban.

a name earns a reputation that is priceless and this is a stupid idea because of that

Funny that in a game where you can have many names, a concern exists over changing a name. I would support the 10K to name change...even other changes such as sex, race would be good money sinks.

Money sinks are good for the economy and the game could definitely use more of them.
Name change would definitely be a hot topic for debate though.

not race. there are exp penalties associated with race. imagine i create a halfling warrior to get the exp bonus and then at level 60 switch to an ogre.

and don't even get started on updating faction for the new race...

Agree. There are a lot of cosmetic changes you can do for money sinks that would work -- armor appearance, weapon appearance, auras, sex, titles -- but race would not, because it is not solely cosmetic in this game.

You also have to look at what would any of the dev team get out of doing this? More work for nothing. It's not like they are selling PP and making anything off of it. And the second you start donating for special features you run into the legal issue of them taking money for SOE's product.

Very slippery slope that we are approaching here.

It would not be worth it to the Dev's or Coders to do this because there would be absolutely no benefit to them, it might draw some new players, but it may cause a whole slew of players to leave because this is not classic like and you turn this into EVERY other mmo out there. There's a reason were not playing those other MMO's. Reputation is EVERYTHING in this game, you know someone by their name, if you give that up.. it just would not be the same at all.

I agree with both of these points!

TBH the largest money sink in the game for me at the moment is definitely potions. 10 charge port potions are around 3k a pop, and resist potions around 750. Having to carry all of these easily starts to add up, especially if you factor in the price of single charge gate potions that cost 1k. I had heard rumors of Lynuga being too common of a spawn, or the rate at which mallets are awarded being too high, which is also a fairly large money sink for most people/guilds. Unfortunately the current in game money sinks (potions/recharges) only seem to be utilized by a narrower crowd of people.

Something with a more broad scope that could be used by all players would be neat/handy however due to the very small community we have and the fact that reputation does matter on your current character (this is classic!) I don't think name changes are the best way to go about having a money sink. The MOST classic money sink I could thing of would be something similar to the Shadowhaven casino that was introduced on live (I can't remember if this was during Luclin or later) since it was actually introduced by Sony, albeit a little after the current period.

Edit: I just wanted to add that currently I'm not sure this is a big issue, because the amount of platinum in the system doesn't seem to be THAT crazy. Top items are selling for about what they were on live at the moment, and our economy hasn't really become stagnant yet (as I'm very sure it will a few years after Velious is released under the assumption this server becomes locked in that state) so prices fluctuate within pretty standard bounds that can be farmed by most all players. The top prices I remember things selling for on T-marr during Velious were SoDs and BoCs selling for around 500k a piece. That seems pretty on par with how top end raid items (CoFs/BCGs) sell around here, and then there are the lower tier items like Manastones/fungis/RBBs that are a bit cheaper. Longest edit ever.

Let's keep it short and simple on the debate:

"Not Classic"