It has been brought up in several threads here in the market forum that gold sellers is one of the big problems that we do not want to see in the game. I completely agree because I do not want to see real money effect the in game economy or for there to be any "pay to win".

So I was thinking about how you could more limit the incentive of gold sellers in the first place. The devs already have mentioned some of there ideas. But I was thinking, what about

Banks

This may be a stupid idea, don't know, just throwing it out there.

I know that CoX called it influence/infamy and it was supposed to be a measure of how much you had done as a hero/villain, but it was still the in game currency that drove the economy.

For as long as history has been recorded there have been people that have loaned others money at a cost. Today we call them banks (and sometimes other things).

What if a character could go to a bank just like in the real world and borrow money? Take out a loan? and then pay it back, with interest, over a specific amount of time?

In the real world when you want a loan these things are based on some basic things. This biggest factor is your earning potential. The developers will know what your earning potential is, how much can the average character earn over a given amount of time. The characters actual earnings could be compared to the average because the game keeps track of how many hours a character has been played and what there earnings have been. I know CoX tracked this info, there where badges for the amount of inf you had earned in this was based solely on defeating enemies and completing missions.

So, you go to a bank and you can borrow money. Some amount that it based on the number of in play hours that it needs to be repaid and the characters earning potential. Then a certain percentage of your earnings from defeating enemies and doing missions is automatically deducted, including interest.

You can also make extra payments by visiting the bank and making principle only payments with any cash you have on hand, which could effect your credit rating for future loans allowing that particular character to borrow more in the future because they are able to pay back the money in a shorter time. If you take longer to pay it than you should that could effect you credit rating in a negative way.

Okay, so there are a few concerns that I can already see. What if you take a character to the bank and get a loan, transfer the money to some other character and then delete the character that borrowed the money. This would definitely be a bad thing for the economy.

My answer for that would be to make it impossible to delete a character that has an outstanding loan. There hasn't been anything solid said about how many character slots will come with a standard sub, or how additional ones can be obtained. I'm just assuming that there will be some initial limit to the number of character slots that go with each game account. If a player does this too much they burn up character slots and eventually they are unable to create new characters. This should be plenty of incentive to not do it, abusers of the system eventually ban themselves from being able to create new characters.

Maybe the system can look at the character and calculate the value of any "gear" the character has and allow a deletion of the character if selling off everything could pay off the loan, but I like the idea of preventing deletion completely.

Also, there should be some minimum level that these loans can be acquired, possibly even a maximum number of loans on an entire account.

Also limit loans to only "VIP" players or whatever they will be called, those paying for a sub. F2P would not be included, and if you borrow when you are VIP and then go to F2P the character is still responsible to repay the loan, but you could not do any additional borrowing.

Well, don't know if it could be possible. I'm sure there are a lot of bugs that would need to be work out. Not to mention an extra complication added to getting the game launched. Not even sure it's a good idea at all, but this could have an effect on the appeal of being a gold seller since it would remove some of the need to have them. It would also allowing impatient people to buy things sooner. Not to mention adding another money sink to the game, the interest that needs to be paid.