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MMORPG economies
Creslin321
Member Posts: 5,359
So most economies in MMORPGs are quite silly. They generally consist of a potentially infinite money source (NPCs/quests) that generates money for players, and "money-sinks," such as items bought from NPCs that remove money from the player-base. The problem with this is that the money-sinks inevitably never consume as much money as the money sources generate, and the whole server winds up suffering insane levels of inflation as time goes on.
Further, while the forces of supply and demand affect the player economy in a natural way, the economy that exists between the players and the NPCs is completely unaffected by these forces. For example, if you sell 20 iron swords on the auction house at the same time, you will flood the market and either not sell all of your swords, or be forced to lower the price. However, you could sell the same iron swords to NPCs for the same price all the time. This disparity really winds up working to kill the economy as the inflation incurred from constant NPC sales skew the prices in the player economy.
So how could MMORPG work to create better economies? I had a few ideas...
1. Completely remove the ability for players to sell goods directly to an NPC. All sales will occur through a marketplace/auction-house type structure, but NPCs (i.e. the game) would sometimes buy items from the auction house.
2. Give the collective NPC market a degree of intelligence that influences what they buy, how much they pay for it, and how often they buy items. This system would contain variables like how many iron swords the NPC market wants to consume every hour and how many are on the market. If supply exceeds demand, they will be willing to pay less and eventually not pay at all. This should cause more variety in goods sold.
3. Put a "money-cap" in place for each server. Every server would have a finite amount of money, similar to how our economies worked when we were on the gold standard. This will stop the value of money from constantly dropping due to inflation.
4. Get rid of "trash" items. MMORPGs have TONS of trash items that serve absolutely no purpose but to be sold. This is silly. Every item in the game should provide some value to players.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Comments
Take a look at EVE's economy.
If you think of the economy of the real world, inflation is not only expected but necessary as value is constantly added. Take raw materials from the ground, refine, refine, refine, refine, product. Each step there is some sort of value added.
An in game economy shouldn't be expected to work any differently. Trash items exist to clutter your bag space and force you to go to social hubs periodically. They have no other purpose than to put a speed bump in your grinding.
And giving money to the player in the form of loot drops, trash sales, or vendoring is essentially the same as taking crafting materials from the world and selling them to other players at a profit. These vendors and the ability to sell things to them is what allows noncrafters to actually play these games. They are a necessary element in MMORPGs and they will never go away.
If NPCs bought things off the AH, how is that any different than selling to a vendor. Set vendor prices are they way developers can regulate the economy (Look at EVE). It makes it so that players or guilds can't create monopolies over resources.
NPC vendors allow economies to exist, without them, a player controlled economy would exist, but would be unable to function as no one would have any money.
Also, the Gold Standard is terrible, there was a reason just about every civilized country in the world has abandoned it.
MMOs played: Horizons, Auto Assault, Ryzom, EVE, WAR, WoW, EQ2, LotRO, GW, DAoC, Aion, Requiem, Atlantica, DDO, Allods, Earth Eternal, Fallen Earth, Rift
Willing to try anything new
One alternative is to eliminate the economy. Show up, get some standard gear and go play. Success would rely on player skills instead of gear or money. This is the FPS formula, and they don't have gold farmers, problems with inflation, or a need to grind money.
To provide a sense of achievement in a persistent world, the players would contribute to changes to the game as a whole. Help clear the monsters from the castle. Once cleared, repair the castle. One repaired, use it for defense, as a resource depot and crafting center. Then move on to the next large task. Explore, fight, harvest, and build. The game progresses along, discovering new materials, new gear types, new towns with new NPCs and even new opponents.
It's a very different game from soloing personal achievements in a static environment while relying on gear and character skills.
I think you are on to something here. But you can't have crafting without some kind of economy. So it would be nothing but conquest and upgrades gained through territory control.
MMOs played: Horizons, Auto Assault, Ryzom, EVE, WAR, WoW, EQ2, LotRO, GW, DAoC, Aion, Requiem, Atlantica, DDO, Allods, Earth Eternal, Fallen Earth, Rift
Willing to try anything new
After reading your first few sentences I was about to say that this sounds like an FPS, but you of course realized that
. No economy can indeed be successful in games, but I feel like it's less of an RPG without one. Not that, that makes it bad, but I prefer RPG games.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
A Couple of things,
A gold standard is not the same as capping money.
IRL a gold standard is when you peg your exchange rate from gold to currency, it involves the central bank defending this exchange rate by buying and selling gold and currency. It creates massive inflation and deflation spikes and is generally a horrible idea.
Capping gold, I get the idea, control the total volume control inflation. But it isn't quite that simple. A gold cap does not work with a growing population, distribution becomes an issue, where do new players get gold for instance, this is related to hoarding as players can hoard money. Capping money regulates the volume but not the flow.
Inflation in MMOs is not the same as inflation IRL. In real life you don't print money every time you go to work but in MMOs every quest you do you spawn gold. In MMOs the issue is players accumulate gold as they level, gold can be farmed as well. Players use their large ammounts of gold to drive the price of items up, this is bad for new players especially, since the quest rewards are not indexed to inflation.
It doesn't matter how much gold is in the game so much rather the rates at which the gold is growing and players are spending it.
Also keep in mind it is a game, the economy should be designed as such, gaining gold is fun for a lot of players so I think you should have an economic system that allows for that. The point of any mechanic is to promote fun.
So I think you need an economy that keeps the gold growth rate at a resonable level, which I think you can do with intelligent faucet/drain, and a system to get new players caught up with older ones that have accumulated large ammounts of gold.
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How do you force people with gold to spend it?
The most commonly used real-world money supply statistic measures not only the number of dollars in the economy but how frequently that money changes hands. So if you fix the amount of gold in the game, you must also fix the rate at which people spend it - hoarding must be punished.
1,2, and 4 wouldn't change anything.
So what happens when the server hits the "money cap"? No more quests, monsters stop dropping stuff?
Pre-NGE SWG had no NPC vendors, and it had the best economy in any game.
Crafting without an economy works like this:
Miners mine ore because they enjoy mining. They go where the ore is and dig it up. The ore that they dig up gets dumped into a big pile in the nearest town. Crafters craft because they enjoy crafting. They go to the ore pile and get what they need. The item that they craft gets dumped into a big pile in a storehouse.
From there, everyone who needs gear goes to the storehouse and picks it up. If there's a Good Sword, you take that over an Average Sword. Good Plows are preferred over Poor Plows, and so on.
If that's considered an economy, so be it. I'm excluding money and asymmetric barter. That is, you can swap weapons with someone, but you can't swap a weapon for a helm. It's like being in a club and everyone gets the same standard gear choices. The club provides everything. After all, you've paid your club dues.
The only loss of roleplaying that I see is that nobody gets to roleplay a financial role as they can in, for example, EVE Online. A wealth of roles would still be available. In truth, I would consider the game I have in mind to be superior in roleplaying because of the fact that everyone would be playing their role without the ubiquitous pollution of concerns over money. In an RPG with an economy, everyone has to worry about money. In an RPG without money, players focus on the activities that they want to experience. Unless they want to focus on money, they've got immediate access to what they want to do.
One thing that I would like to see addressed in more games would be the actual weight of a golden treasure trove. Players walking around with a million gold or even five suits of armor suggests a complete denial of physical properties. Perhaps a mule is used, perhaps a portable hole/dimensional pocket, and banks could even send a group to pick up hauls on contract. A guild hall may have its own guarded treasure vault and a home may have a basement where a locked chest holds key items.
Of course all of these locations should be able to be robbed and or plundered
Now that is distribution of wealth.
While some games address space/real-weight issues most simply contend that it is an unnecessary 'fun stopper'.
LMFAO. Why??
Economies in MMOs fail because they are divorced from any concept of scarcity (except time). As the OP mentioned, there is an infinite supply of "money" (of course treated as some given in the game) and an infinite demand by NPC vendors. Loot is generated out of thin air. Where did the sword you looted from that turtle come from? No where. NPC money faucets enable gold farmers. There is no way to be a gold farmer without a perpetual money faucet, and there is no way to support gold farming if the game world functions on real scarcity (no creation ex nihilo of anything). Given these 'economies' have no basis in reality, they shouldn't be expected to function with any semblance of reality.
Read my post. Let me know what word you are having trouble understanding.
I did. You asked "how do you force people to spend gold?" and then "hoarding must be punished". So my original question remains: Why?
A compromise would be an already functioning NPC economy that runs without any player influence. Players would then compete with others and with NPC's as well. This would give developers all the control they desire and players a "virtual economy" they desire. Most games it would be silly to start an economy from scratch like swg because it conflicts with the lore.
There are 'bumps' in this design, it's a little more demanding on resources, but works better than the rediculous gold farmer paradises we have now. And some other things not worth going into. It's also contrary to the agenda, so expect less of the same in the future. Probably no economy at all except RMT.
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Ah, I see. Look at players (and play styles) as sources (harvesters) and sinks (hoarders). If there is not limit on hoarding or disincentive to hoard, then an ever-increasing fraction of the gold drains into hoarders. This is the root problem in MMO economics - the distribution of wealth, not the absolute wealth. With open-ended money supply, you get inflation amongst the veterans/merchants. In a finite money supply (as the original poster suggested), you get deflation amongst the newbies/consumers.
In real-world economics, central banks target keeping inflation around 2% as a way to create an incentive for the wealthy to spend (so that if you just sit on your money and don't spend/invest it, it wastes away).
I hope this helps.
This is, I think, one of the keys to having a more believable economy. The NPCs need to actually have some sort of reason for exchanging. NPCs that are more than infinite gold spigots and that do not possess an insatiable demand for broken turtle shells would be a big step.
But what incentive is there to hoard? And what actual effect does it have? There is less money "in circulation"? But again, so what? The only thing that happens is the purchasing power of a monetary unit increases. This is only a problem if you have fixed prices, which is rather pointless, as it defeats the point of a price system in the first place.
As for purposefully "wasting away" someone's savings, besides being a sneaky way of robbing the saver, what does that gain you? There is no benefit to be had from any increase in the money supply, or decrease. Any amount of money will perform the job of a money. If the money becomes so rare, such that the purchasing power is astronomical, a more convenient money will be chosen by the participants.
Since online RPGs are largely community-based (in theory), perhaps a communistic approach would be best.
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I thought the OP's purpose was ways to make MMO economies more realistic, not more fantastical. But sure you could have a communistic game "economy" since the game world is not bound by conditions of reality. In particular, any scarcity in a game is only a simulation, a true "artificial scarcity". The game can instantly create whatever items a player wants in unlimited quantities.
Inflation is not liked by many developers becasue it causes problems for new people to the game, they find they cant access most of the content and need to join a big guild just to do so. Games like WoW solve this problem by adding content in expansions that let newer gamers catch up to the older ones in the economy. In burning crusade for example players that were far ahead of the competion soon were over taken by smaller players who cashed in on crafting and gathering, allowing a levelling of the wealth.
Eve is unique in that because it does not have a levelling system and the design of the ships/equipment, then being a small player is not as much of a disadvantage as it is in games like WoW (to use the above example). This means that in Eve inflation works becasue it works within the dynamics of the game.
This is important becasue it shows that the way teh game works on the whole is what determines the economy the developers want. if a developer wants to tempt new players then it has to be even handed and supportive of them in the economy. They can not just be an ant, they have ot be able to take on a battleship with a row boat and have a hope of winning.
Economy is a fun game.
But let's not sit here and pretend that WOW failed to be successful despite a pretty inflation heavy economy with lite crafting.
So while economy is a fun game, it's hardly a necessary thing to flawlessly balance and have entirely player-run, because that's clearly not what players are after.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Oh, that problem is trivial. The reason for inflation in MMORPGs is the abundance of money.
People can accumulate insane amounts of money (even worse if they are goldbuyers) and then can pay insane prices for the most desired items.
So if you want an economy with pretty stable prices, all you really have to do is to constantly remove said money.
And not in some fixed "money sinks". In a way that scales, i.e. actually depends upon the amount of money present.
An example could be a tax of say 10% per month on all money values.
You could allow players to store a reasonable fixed amount of money in the bank so they can have some basic reserve for everyday needs (consumables etc). But the rest would get taxed.
So people would try to accumulate items instead of money. But this would actually rather tend to LOWER prices instead. The input of items is quite stable over time. If they are kept getting bought, people will want to sell them sooner or later again.
I couldnt disagree more.
The OP was complaining that prices explode because of the way MMORPGs are constructed.
And that is perfectly realistic. If you want your economy realistic, well there it is. An economy where you have insane amounts of money input, many thanks to goldbuyers.
No. Gold buyers do NOT input money into the game economy, unless of course they are buying iy directly from the game operators. In most cases, they buy from gold sellers, who already have the gold in game. Gold buying has no effect whatsoever on the money supply. It's just movement of gold from one character to another. The underlying game mechanics that allow gold farmers is the culprit. This being unlimited money supply from NPC vendors, unlimited demand for random crap from NPC vendors, and unlimited creation of said random crap, ex nihilo, in the form of loot. That is the money faucet.