It's a bit ludicrous to discuss the "wealth level" of ALFA as one net variable. We have some PCs that have lived through the loosening of wealth and loot controls that supposedly happened at some time in the past, obviously as they get most of their swag before the reigns were tightened up, they are going to have a lot more than PCs who have made their levels in a sanitized, near-zero gain environment.
There are difficulties with talking about net wealth, that's true. But it's also necessary to do so for us to be able to make any kind of assessment of where our campaign is headed. There is no realistic alternative way of assessing wealth, that I know of.
As for PCs from before the reigns were supposedly tightened up, well.. we have the opposite situation. The oldest PCs in ALFA lived through times when the loot was more tightly regulated. Things have loosened up, and haven't really tightened since. So this is not really a good explanation in our current situation.
Even from server to server, things will very widely, even discounting DM to DM variations in preferances for monetary/tangible rewards. I would say it is hard for PCs made in the last year or so to get by, paying for caravan rides or inn rooms, at least on some servers. I would also say the controls in place that make life hard for those PCs were likely designed with the wealthiest PCs in mind, and have had little affect on them.
Do I think there are PCs with dispropotionately large piles of gold and unbalancing equipment? Certainly- and this is one factor that makes such players difficult to DM for in my experience, as one is hesitant to head reward on reward, and they are often able to breeze through encounters that were meant to be significant/meaningful. Do I think making day-to-day life and necessities in game more expensive will help? I don't see how it would, just disproportionately hurts those players who wonder what all the fuss is about.
I agree. But you seem to be debating points raised in my "money sinks" thread now. Can we try to keep these two debates separate if possible?
I'd also like to say that the logs of the 2.x weapon test server are likely a skewed sampling of ALFA's population. By and large, the only PCs who had problems with the 3.0 conversion were ones with custom-model weapons. So, what you basically saw were all the wealthiest / most custom gear / most treasure-laden PCs, logging into the server to get their swag adjusted.
Custom-model weapons are not necessarily magical or uber. Many servers sell custom-looking standard weapons. It's true though that the 2.x test logs are skewered towards more active, and probably more loot-heavy players.
But let me emphasise that as it stands, it is the
only sample we have that even resembles ALFA's entire population. It has shortcomings, and no one is claiming that it paints a completely representative image of ALFA players... But they do give a bit of insight into what kind of figures we're dealing with. There's a substantial amount of people who log in with very little gold. There's a grey bunch in the middle. And there's a bunch of people who are insanely wealthy.
It's dangerous to try to generalise too much from such a flawed sample, but once again: since it is the only sample we have, it will be used.
I like the input so far. Keep it coming!
