[crossfire] Banking system

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
> On 12/24/05, Anton Oussik <antonoussik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thinking about lalo's patch, an interesting idea would be to make a
>> patch that makes the banking system more useful by introducing the
>> following changes to the banks:
>>
>>   - Gain interest on money deposited
> 
> [snip]

  Interest is probably a bad idea - you might very well get players gaining more 
money from interest than they can from adventuring.

> 
>> In my opinion this will encourage people to use the banking system to
>> store money.
> 
> It would, but I think there would need to be an associated opportunity
> cost, otherwise there would be no incentive to keep liquid capital.
> 
> maybe something like 'real' banks do, where there are two accounts,
> one a currant account against which cheques are drawn, and a savings
> account, which takes a week (or more) to take money from, has a high
> transaction charge, and also offers a reasonable interest rate.
> 
> This would unfortunatly require a more complex interface.

  At some level, it becomes a question of why not just make money a 'stat'. 
Instead of gold pieces, silver, platinum, etc, floating in your inventory, 
something just says you have 123456 gold pieces.

  That would actually simplify the code - look at a lot of the shop code to try 
to figure out if the player has enough money, as well as to give the player 
money.  If it was just a stat, all that becomes a simple add/delete operation.

  It would add some complexity to the pickup code - when picking up money, it 
would have to just add to that stat, but that wouldn't be that hard.

  The hardest part in this is dealing with things where you need to drop money 
to activating them.  Some form of legacy interface would be needed, but even 
that wouldn't be that hard (could just use some unique tag number to make a 
synthetic object in the players inventory or something).

  All this starts to get away from the discussion at hand, but is food for thought