Before going into great and expensive lengths (in terms of programming) to prevent/stop monetary inflation, one should first ask if monetary inflation is really bad in a game.
There are only 2 important cases.
1) The purchasing power of money is decreasing. This will happen if the prices of goods and services that one can buy for money are increasing faster than monetary inflation (e.g the rate at which the monetary mass increases per time unit). In this case the people who are hurt (like in RL) are typically people with savings. If you have 3 M Platinum in bank with 0 interest, then after a time you will be able to buy much less of HP potions or silk threads than what you were used to. This is clearly not a problem for active players at middle/high level because they will be able to increase their monetary holdings at a rate which matches the increase of prices. This could however be a problem for new players coming in the game a long time after Day 1 because the drops at level 1 are still the same 1 silver, 2 coppers as on Day 1 but the price of the HP potion is 10 times the price of Day 1. Yet this will not be a problem either because the number of new players joining a game is decreasing very fast with time and also the amount of money players gift to newbies generally increases with time.
So one can conclude that in this case, which is the archetype of most MMOs, the monetary inflation is not really a problem as long as the prices of items sold both by PC and NPC increase at least as fast as the monetary inflation.
2) The purchasing power of money is increasing. This would be a pathological effect that should not be observed. It would happen if the weighted average prices of goods and services increase slower than the monetary inflation. This is not a problem for PCs because they spontaneously adjust their prices to the inflation. This may however be a problem for NPCs because MMO developpers sometimes forget (or don't care) to adjust the prices of NPC sold goods and services to monetary inflation. If they do that, then this pathological case could happen only in the case when the offer of goods and services increases much faster than the demand, resulting in decreasing prices what is the contrary of inflation but what is not observed in MMOs in average. Actually what is happening in all MMOs I know is that the prices of old, low level drops are indeed decreasing but the prices of new and/or rare drops are increasing so that the weighted average of prices never decreases.
Because of these reasons, monetary inflation is for me no real problem in a game and doesn't need any special investments in concepts and programming. The only things that the developpers must take care of is to periodically adjust the prices of NPC sold goods and services to the observed monetary inflation and, eventually as an option, decrease the drop rates of items whose prices would crash down much faster than monetary inflation.
Deadshade said:Because of these reasons, monetary inflation is for me no real problem in a game and doesn't need any special investments in concepts and programming. The only things that the developpers must take care of is to periodically adjust the prices of NPC sold goods and services to the observed monetary inflation and, eventually as an option, decrease the drop rates of items whose prices would crash down much faster than monetary inflation.
Much of that can be done dynamically by implementing supply and demand economic modeling. Every item would have a baseline Sell Price and a baseline Buy Price along with a Spread Variable. Each time a player attempts to buy or sell something to an NPC, that NPC looks at recent market trends for that item and dynamically adjust the price within the allowed Spread Variable. Over time as the population moves around and a given area experiences fewer transactions, the pricing lowers. So that newbie area which was one flooded with players later on sees far fewer new players so prices fall. When new players do arrive, they see prices lower than what players saw previously. Their effective purchasing power is initially higher giving them a leg-up in theose early starting days. As they progress and mvoe into more populated areas, their purchasing power begins to lower, matching that of other players in that area.
What VR's economist needs to be doing is monitoring market trends for pretty much every item and adjusting the SP, BP and SV of the items to keep inflation from running rampant. EVE Online's economist does exactly this, even giving out very detailed bi-annual reports about the game economy which players can read.
Vandraad said:Each time a player attempts to buy or sell something to an NPC, that NPC looks at recent market trends for that item and dynamically adjust the price within the allowed Spread Variable. Over time as the population moves around and a given area experiences fewer transactions, the pricing lowers.
Well it would work but is not really necessary. The solution I see takes almost no coding and insures that the purchasing power stays sensibly constant in time regardless of monetary inflation which can't be eliminated anyway as long as kills provide items and money.
1) The prices of ALL goods and services provided by NPCs are periodically (f.ex every 6 months) adjusted to monetary inflation. This insures that everything provided by NPCs has a constant price in inflation adjusted currency. This takes just 1 multiplication every 6 months.
2) The prices for ALL items bought by NPC stay constant. This means that their actualised value decreases what is not bad news. We must not forget that we talk here only about trash loot (bat wings, spider legs , bronze daggers etc) which players always vendor and which does not need to be differentiated. High value items (e.g useful drops) will be exclusively traded among players anyway so that their price will be at all times adjusted to offer and supply. No need to monitor that . The only minor issue is that new players arriving after 1 year will have their purchasing power slightly decreased as far as trash loot is concerned compared to Day 1 players. But on the other hand their purchasing power will increase for useful low level drops whose prices will have decreased. So finally both trends will balance more or less so that their purchasing power will be sensibly equivalent to Day 1 players and nothing special needs to be done .
Deadshade said:2) The prices for ALL items bought by NPC stay constant.
This is one prime entry of money into the global economy. And this is not just, as you say, limited to 'trash' loot as what one person believes is trash is not the same as what another person believes is trash. Early EQ1 a Greater Lightstone was a valuable item to sell to players but quickly devolved into vendor loot. Fine Steel Swords, common Bronze Armor pieces, etc all quickly became vendor loot. It is an ever evolving list of products.
To have vendors adjust prices dynamically allows for the micro adjustments necessary to smooth out any large jumps deemed necessary on the bi-annual adjustments.
To say that 'high value' items will only ever be player-player traded is very shortsighted. Each player asks themselves the following question: Is it worth more to me to sell it to a vendor now, for that quick injection of cash, or to spend X amount of time trying to sell for more it to other players when Y number of other players are trying to do the same thing. Unless the item is broadly determined to be of high value quite often these items will fall into the vendor loot bracket. If I know a vendor buys something for 10pp but the market average players are selling it is only 15pp is taking the time to sell it (knowing that auction houses will not be in Pantheon so all player-player selling will require active participation) worth the effort for possible a 5pp increase?
High value items will stay out of the vendor loot bracket much longer than more mundane items but some portion of the population will still sell them to vendors and that money entering the global economy needs to be accounted for an adjusted as needed.