Not a sexy topic. Pretty hated. Probably already been suggested. Raffles offer a huge, wide-spread ability to flush money vs auctions.

How about raffle tickets, purchasable year-round and during the fair, to be redeemed/used at the fairs. Maybe 2 or 3 different types of raffles, armor alteration, jewel alteration, clothing alteration. Each ticket costing some X platinum. Tickets are only redeemable by purchaser, to cut down on RMT, every 1k going for $X is possibly $X not going to events.

Raffle tickets can also be purchased with items, you dump a bunch of items into a container and it spits out X# of raffle tickets. # of tickets based on RNG + variable based on appraisal of item, age of item, rarity of item. Common items are not accepted ofc. A lot less of a sure-thing and overall less payout in tickets vs. money bought tickets.

>Not a sexy topic. Pretty hated. Probably already been suggested. Raffles offer a huge, wide-spread ability to flush money vs auctions.

If auctions were intended to be true money sinks, they would be 1-way auctions.

I.E. once you bid, that money is gone. You don't get it back. You now have a credit with the house for X value. You can increase the credit by bidding more. You can cash it in by winning. But at the end of the night, you're not getting anything back.

>IMO this would just discourage participation for those who just want to play along, even if they don't expect to win.

Meh. Having people able to 'play along' and bid 1 gold on a trigger when the auction opens gets old. If that gets discouraged, I'm fine with that.

allow traders to set start bids

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"Game balance is sobbing over in the corner as it considers the ramifications of AoE Blufmor Garaen. Your spell slots send their condolences." - GM Raesh

Another idea is a traveling casino. Could have something fun like an item slot machine, you feed items or plat into the machine and it spits out a random item. Could be completely useless like a tuft of hair, a raffle ticket for an alteration, or could be exceedingly rare, something like 1 in 10,000,000 chance (or something). It would need to be balanced to actually sink currency and not flood the market with more items.

On a slight tangent, one of the best controlled economies I've seen is PoE, currency is basically used directly to craft, and crafting of the best items is very difficult and has a large RNG component to it. However, it's only good in the temporary leagues (3-4 months) and the hardcore league (permanent death) due to eventually the market becomes flooded with "best" items.

I think the problem with things like the lottery and traditional casinos is that the current inflation level, lack of money sinks and things to spend it on means that the incentive is rather low for the big account people to participate.

The item slot machine could provide incentive assuming there's that exceedingly rare chance at an uber item, maybe crafting materials, a fun RNG element, and/or a raffle ticket(at maybe avg 5-10x the cost over buying out right). Could be made by gnomes or something. Would need to be balanced to not flood out even more items into the market ofc.

How do we do the lottery?