#1: The biggest threat to any in-game economy is the presence and allowance of multi-box farming. This leads to the economy having a drastic influx of supply which drives down demand and prices.
#2: The second biggest issue comes down to maintaining supply and demand for items. This issue has several areas that need to be discussed.
#3: The third biggest issue is not having enough gold sinks in the game as the game ages. Typically as the game ages, the player base continually gains more money and inflation happens as a result. Without enough gold sinks in the game, this can become an issue. Gold sinks can come in a variety of forms such as mounts, compacity upgrades, housing upgrades, auction house posting fees/cut fees, repair costs, quests that require the player to bribe someone, contribute to a cause, or help the poor.
#4 This last one is a personal pet peeve of mine and it may come off as a bit rude. This is an issue that arises in the community and it isn't something that falls on developers. I'm going to preface this statement by saying that I am all for a free market that is determined by the server. With that being said, idiots who don't understand item value, principles of undercutting, or how to play the AH can really tank the economy and item pricing. It only takes one person drastically undercutting by a stupid amount to cause a trend in item devaluation and cause crafted goods to be crafted at a loss.
Currently in most games,
Normal players (adventurers) face "time sink" and "gold sink" mechanisms, such as travel times and armor repairs, to slow them down from gathering riches too much and too fast.
Auction house players (goldmongers) on the other hand, face zero "slow down" mechanisms since they don't have to deal with travel times or item repairs, because they just stay at the auction house 24/7, they don't travel to dungeons, they don't fight mobs, they just stay at the auction house and work to crash the economy.
The problem is, auction house give them easy, quick, automated actions, that can crash the economy in no time. However, there is a possibility of a solution.
When economy is crashed/inflated by players, it is done by trading huge quantities of crafting materials.
Remove crafting materials from the auction house.
Make the player-driven auction house only for equipment items (weapons, armor) and vanity items (mounts, pets, transmogs).
Crafting materials should be a NPC-driven auction house, separated from the player-driven auction house.
Then, the NPC-driven materials auction house will automatically regulate itself with supply and demand from players.
One step further would be making a localization variable to give each major city its own material values, which will be regulated by players' supply and demand, encouraging players to travel for profit.
bobwinner said:travel for profit.
This is something that is really high up on my wish list. In order for this to be a thing, there would need to be a number of mechanics in place, all working to facilitate the emergence of price variation between regions.
One of the biggest hurdles in actually being able to create a game world where something like this is possible is preventing inter-regional prices from leveling out too quickly.
This is hard to do when you've got teleporting classes that can jump from region to region in a matter of seconds.
One potential solution to this would be to create some sort of lore as to why certain goods could not be transported via teleport. This would no doubt drastically slow down the speed at which inter-regional prices could be leveled.
A second option would be to restrict the distance and/or frequency that teleporting classes could teleport. This could be fine-tuned to have pretty much the same effect as the previous option.
A third option, and something Nephele has already said will exist, thought to what extent I don't know, has to do with regulating the amount of inventory space taken up by raw materials.
I think if the team is too far down the pipeline with systems that would make implementing something like option one too difficult, then option two and three could be paired to have pretty much the same effect as option one while in combination being less burdensome than what it would take to use option two or three alone.
1. RMT
2. Automated gameplay, or use of software to input keys or movement to multiple clients with 1 keystroke or without having to select that client.
3. Making gold too high of a factor in player power.
If theoretically someone had a character with no gear but was max level and had infinite money could that person be able to buy gear/spells/abilities to be 100% as powerful as someone who had experienced most of the content in the game and done all the quests and raids and dungeons? 80%? 50%? How powerful would a level 30 be in that same situation? By making the most powerful items in the game tradable it encourages 1 and 2 and leads to people wanting to grind efficiency instead of experiencing different parts of the game. "why travel over there and lose 30 mins to get that breastplate when im making 12g per hour here and can just buy it later with this money." I know some people like this and im not making fun of it, i just feel its not healthy for the game and leads to monopolization of content more aggressively in terms of locking down camps or spawns where rare and powerful tradable items are known to drop. It is going to happen even if the item is no trade but is made worse if it is locked down for a profit based reason. Maybe im in the minority in terms of these kinds of beliefs but i feel like some tradable stuff is ok but i want the game to encourage us to experience all the different areas and quests and content instead of being a specialist for profit as a path to power.
Making gold a gigantic factor in player power is a pay to win mechanic in its own way in my opinion.
Nephele said:In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to the health of the game's economy? What are the things that we should be watching out for, or trying to prevent, that might cause problems for the game's economy both short-term and long-term?
I haven't read the whole thread so please forgive me if any/all of this is repetitive. In no particular order:
* Trash loot. These drops translate directly to coin and there's really no reason to have them. If anything is going to drop at all then it should be something that is useful to players in some way (crafting, gear, etc). Why would a vendor want something that no player would want?
* Excessive and escalating coin drops. It might make sense for a boss to drop a large pile of riches to be divided among those who killed it but a level 40 orc really shouldn't carry more coin than a level 10 orc. At least not a common mob.
* More than 3 coin tiers, e.g. copper/silver/gold. Higher coin tiers only invite excuses to throw more coin at players. 50g at level 5 should still be worth something to a level 50.
* Crafters. Yeah, I said it... but bear with me. An adventurer's skills generally cannot be sold (barring mercenary transactions as pick-ups). But all of a crafter's skills have a monetary value. In the early game those few crafters who reach the peak of their craft before most others often charge insane amounts of money for their time. This creates the 1%. Even in late game when there are recipes that are rare and only a few crafters have them they can ask huge piles of coin for their output. If coin drops are limited this will result in the wealthy class (top tier crafters) and the poor (everyone else). There are a couple things that might be done to combat this:
* * Drop a lot of coin and watch the whole thing spiral out of control
* * Force the trade of crafted goods through a broker and cap the value of crafted goods (do not allow player-to-player trades)
* * Make all high end and rare recipies require drops acquired through adventuring so balance the flow of cash among crafters and adventurers
* * Allow a single character to max multiple crafts so that those skills are not as rare
Out of these the first 2 are pretty much garbage solutions that nobody would agree with. The 3rd makes the most sense to me though I am also in favor of the 4th. I will buy as many accounts as I need to to have access to every worthwhile tradeskill without having to pay or wait on someone else but I'd prefer to not have to run 8+ accounts.
The game economy has two main components, the item economy and the coin economy. The way the question was posed makes me think that this is mostly asking about the item economy since that is where “health” comes into play. The coin economy scales independently from the item economy - its inflation has only to do with the ratio of gold taps to gold sinks, and all of the taps/sinks are player-to-system . The item economy abides by the same rule of item taps to item sinks, but it is where all of the player-to-player economy takes place. Of course we want basic goods to remain at a reasonable stable price, while premium goods can simultaneously exist with very high prices. But Inflation is a much simpler problem to solve than the health of the economy itself.
A healthy economy means that there is a vibrant market where player-driven exchange is flourishing. A flourishing player-to-player market requires that there be scarcity, as well as a continuous demand for most items. Scarcity is a simple dial to adjust, while demand is where most of the work is. For players to keep buying stuff they need reasons to do so. Either they need it for a trade skill, or it is an upgrade, or it is a consumable.
An example of a game with neither scarcity nor demand is Minecraft. there is too much of everything available to everyone at all times - bringing the need for most players to buy/sell from each other to nearly zero. The only exception is when someone manages to get an artificial monopoly over one specific item that everybody else needs. It is a problem if only one person has a monopoly, but if lots of people each have a monopoly on different goods it actually promotes trade. The more you specialize the gathering / crafting professions the more mini-monopolies you can create, and the more interdependent the economy becomes. This is an argument for limiting the number of gathering professions each player can have. If everyone has access to everything then the only time people will buy stuff from each other is for the convenience of not gathering it yourself.
A PvE game suffers from the Utopia problem where items are not getting removed from the system unless they are sold to NPC vendors, consumed by players, or deleted to free up some bagspace. In EvE everything can be broken down to base components and re-made into something new, but the main item sink is that items are removed from the game forever after getting destroyed in combat. Loss through PvP being the primary driver. IRL it is a lot like trying to improve the economy by employing millions of new window repairmen because you are also paying kids to run around breaking windows. Is the economy improving? Technically, yes. But at the cost of massive inefficiency, where people are wasting their efforts repairing what didn’t need to be broken rather than doing something great.
When it comes to maintaining a demand for items - consumables are a good place to look. You can have collections, trophies, house/guild hall decorations, quest items, you could repair your own gear by destroying other gear, you can break stuff down into crafting components, you could destroy items to capture their enchantments, you could destroy items to learn how to craft them, or you could have Cumulative inputs - what if every high level sword began with a simple iron sword and had to be made into each of the intermediate steps? It would keep the demand for iron swords (and every intermediate component) relevant at all crafting levels.
At some point though, consumables merely flatten the curve to push back the day when everyone will have completed all of the things there are to achieve. New content/expansions move that line back, but in the long term no amount of items sinks will last indefinitely without new people joining the game. One of the most important drivers of an economy is new people entering it. Like a pyramid scheme - if everybody is at the top selling stuff there is nobody at the bottom to buy it. So for the short term the majority of work to have a healthy economy has to do with creating a demand for scarce items, and in the long term the most important component in maintaining a healthy economy is attracting new players to the game.
A few other suggestions for an enjoyable economy:
-No up-front auction house fees. They prevent players who are generally poor from entering the market when they get their first awesome item. There should be no risk in trying to sell an item. A culpable example is WoW. The auction house fees make it too risky to even attempt to sell some items because you could pay half the value of the item in fees if it doesn’t sell on the first attempt.
-Allow guilds to place buy/sell orders that directly use the guild bank balance.
-Buy orders.
-Prevent RMT - gold sellers are a scourge on every mmo. #1-give the reporting process for bots and gold spammers in chat top priority. #2- if there is ever a non-subscription model - gate chat access on free accounts to prevent new accounts from gold spamming.
-Slow it down - if everyone can find enough gear to fill all their slots by level 3 then you have a flood of items coming in overwhelming the economy. If I am level 10 and looking to fill half of my item locations, not for upgrades, but because they are still empty then that makes gear feel more meaningful.
The biggest threat is too many of the same item.
As others have mentioned, give us ways to destroy our item.
Give it to the altar, the city, the guild hall, the achievement bank, the smelter, and/or the disenchanter.
It can also help if npcs buy stuff from players reasonably. Either the npcs randomly buy stuff out of the AH, or vendors are actually profitable to sell to.
Pantheon is already looking to make us all have several gear sets, between all stats being useful for everyone and climates, and that will definately help create the much needed demand to reduce item overload.
You can limit farming by putting in rules against kill stealing and over-farming, especially for too-high-level players.
Finally, make sure that items are meaningful, rare, and require a large distance to farm so even high level players have trouble.
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Too much money can also cause issues.
Limit actual money from adventuring:
Rather than gold, most mobs could drop their trash items that are way too heavy to carry home, and maybe occasional potions and food.
Speaking of which, Food and drink, potions, repairs, death tax, etc. are all great ways to tax players.
If you must have Auction Houses to handle all our economic time expenditures for us, at least make them stupidly expensive.
You can ensure that these things get significantly more expensive as players reach higher levels.
Food for example could give small bonuses but cost a ton. Raiders at least will do it.
Spells, mounts, and abilities can also be expensive, but you should avoid relying on one-time expenditures to regulate the economy.
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Time can be a real nasty enemy for over-inflation. Most servers should let everyone keep their characters.
I for one wouldn't mind a server that wipes every year or so. This would also be a very easy way to fight inflation.
Basic economics teaches that the primary cause of inflation is increases in the money supply. You do not get inflation by manufacturing more products - you get inflation by manufacturing more money.
Disasterous hyperinflation can come from hacks, bugs and exploits. Taking something designed to give 1 gold piece and finding a way to get 1 million gold pieces and distributing the money far and wide before the developers find out and can confiscate it. Things like this have happened in more than one MMO.
More normal inflation comes from gaining money in ways the game allows. Harvesting 300 exotics and selling them does not add to the money pool. But if Pantheon works in the normal way each level quests will pay more and cash loot from killing enemies (including bosses) will be greater. So whereas a level 1 played 24/7 may get a few silver a day, a level 50 played 24/7 may get a few gold or mithril or platinum a day. Added to the pool of money.
Players know this - of course. Even is a game like Pantheon with a focus on slower play and stopping to sniff the roses - many will be speed-leveling. Some to get the best character they can but even altoholics will speed-level to get a level-cap character to support a growing family of toonlets.
Iksar - if I make a consumable and sell it to Mary for a gold piece how does that cause inflation? I now have one gold piece more and she has one gold piece less but what else has happened?
dorotea said:Iksar - if I make a consumable and sell it to Mary for a gold piece how does that cause inflation? I now have one gold piece more and she has one gold piece less but what else has happened?
The issue is that a large number of players (likely the majority) end up behooved to buy consumables, and the nature of them is it's something they have to keep buying and often. So now you have massive amounts of players becoming gold farmers so they can keep up with the costs "required" to engage in whatever challenging content. In the absense of consumables, the amount of gold entering the system is much lower as players are pressured far less to participate in such a thing.
Most non-consumable items/equipment players might want can be earned in the world without needing to specifically farm money, and those that can't are more rare purchases.
I think mobs should drop items that would be expected from the type of mob. Thus a wolf would drop a pelt and meat. A ratkin should drop a weapon and pelt. A warrior should drop a shield, and money. A mage should drop a spell, or a book, or a staff, and money. Etc. Yes, I'm for usable items to drop from mobs. If you want to make it a bit better, I'm all for needing to take that item, say a shield, to a pc blacksmith or npc and have it "fit" to the player. Thus an extra step. More fun, more interactive. I have no idea if that can be implemented. I'm for almost everything to be tradeabl. No trade on something like a finished epic item, weapon etc. It would also be good for every mob to drop some useable crafting bit. A person should only get drops or experience from a green or higher mob. Period. This eliminates high level PCs from farming low level items. Farming grey mobs...destroys...Terminus. Farming green, blue, etc mobs is fine by me. I'm totally in favor of randomized loot. Thus a pristine pelt will drop from various types of wolves. A named wolf should have a large pool of items it drops. It should have different spawn points too. Houses, guild halls are both great for displaying trophies. Great item/money/time sink. Crafting using reagents to fix/make items make a great item, a fun money, time sink. I'm all for a very large reagent bag. This is especially important early in game when you don't know what is good for what. I am totally against vendors paying different prices for item "x". I don't want Pantheon to turn into the home shopping network. If I have to log on for a two hour shoppping spree, to sell my stuff, I'm out. I can't imagine spending hours trying to find the best deal for my drops. What a massive waste of time! Terminus seems to me to have a barter system economy. Thus a baker buying a sword seems real to me.
I am a little late to this party, but when has that stopped me from spouting off before?
The biggest threat to a functioning game economy is significantly more supply than demand.
This is true for items, cash, services, DPS characters and DKP (this one is actually more important than it sounds).
Cash farmers, bots, duping exploits and Seafury Cyclopes (imbalanced cash rewards) have destroyed game cash economies by flooding the game economy which drives the value of cash way down. It drives it so far down that only those with huge amounts of cash can buy anything as the rate at which you can legitimately farm new cash is insignificant to the amount already in circulation.
Similar to cash flooding markets items flooding the market will also trash the trade economy. As more and more items enter the market relative to the number of characters in the economy the items of interest or that are an upgrade shift upwards in power. Any item bellow this power point become worth only what an NPC will give the player for the item, fueling back into an overfilled cash economy.
Items flooding the economy in Pantheon is a huge concern for me. If all items are tradeable and items never breakdown then over time only best in slot items will retain any value, and that value will drop as the number of available best in slot items approaches the number of active character for whom that item is best in slot.
The solution to both issues is basically the same. There needs to be a perpetual incentive to remove both cash and items from the economy. One time cash or item sinks will not work as over time they become insignificant and in short term they can be really irritating as they are usually sized to be significant in the medium term.
You also need to be careful with the perpetual resource sinks to ensure that they are not a huge divider between the haves and have nots. Cyclical vanity costs are one of the best ways to incentivize the rich to take resources out of the economy without forcing the poor to do so in order to compete on an even adventuring or crafting level. These can be things like in-game political rank that is in-name only without any true power over the adventuring or crafting sphere.
You cannot leave the adventurers out of the resource sink entirely so there should still be some form of benefit to the adventurer if they are willing to sacrifice resources. It is important to set diminishing returns for each amount sacrificed but with no true ceiling, eventually though you would end up doubling the amount sacrificed for only a 1% increase in temporary benefit. The diminishing returns would set a practical and theoretical limit to the maximum possible gain.
For example by spending 100 faction points you could gain a buff increasing your maximum mana by 100 for 3 hours. You could choose to spend more than 100 faction points to increase that buff but still only for 3 hours and the buff will be lost on death. The buff would become 100 * ( 1 + (FactionSpent – 100)/FactionSpent). At 200 faction spent you would gain a buff of 150 maximum mana, at 1000 the buff would be 190, at 10,000 it would be 199 and at 100,000 it would be 199.9. 200 faction might be worth it but very rarely would 1000 even be considered, much less 10,000.
As a player you could gain faction by doing adventuring tasks, gathering writs, crafting writs, donating gold or donating items. At different points it will be more time efficient to donate items and cash vs doing tasks or writs. The resource poor players would still have the option to do tasks or writs for the same buffs.
Another way to pull resources out of the economy is item charging, activation and or attunement. If magical items drop in a drained an unattuned state and any time it is traded between character it drops down to an uncharged state it creates an opportunity for resource sinks.
Options for attuning an item:
1) Use an unattuned item long enough in combat and the item will become attuned and fully activated. (effectively the item would have an exp bar that needs filled before it works)
2) You sacrifice items attuned to you already to said new item. (effectively transferring a portion of stored exp from one item to another, destroying the original item in the process).
3) Draining attuned items to charge another. (Sacrifice liquid resources to transfer a smaller portion of exp from one item to another without destroying either item).
4) Consuming attunement crystals to attune a new item. (Worst time spent to effect ratio method of attuning an item.)
Items with clickly effects or procs could also have a limited number of charges. Those charges could regenerate slowly over time or you could use Attunement Crystals to refill the charges quickly.
This attunement system creates a loop where all lower tier items can feed up into higher tier items. Fully attuned items will constantly be leaving the economy in order to fuel better drops, better crafted items and recharge active effects. Withdrawing the experience from an item without destroying it also becomes a cyclical liquid resource sink with its own value break points, assume an exponential increase in liquid resource cost relative to amount of experience extracted.
Low level players will have valuable resources to pass onto high level adventurers. Even the least power crafted items would have some value to an adventure specializing in taking uncharged items, attuning them, then sacrificing them either to their own high level item or creating crystals for trade. Effectively they will be trading their time spent. The mentor system could tie very well into the attunement crystal generation market as one would need to kill non trivial monsters in order to gain experience and killing high level monsters with only unattuned gear would be virtually impossible solo. The mentor system would suppress your level down to a lower tier allowing you to gain experience from mobs of lower level who have a higher margin of error, if lower exp awarded.
Sorry for the wall of text but it is a big issue.
I think the threat is embedded in the entire economic system in every current MMORPG. I would like to see an MMORPG that turns everything on its head and has something like a pegged standard, just like a gold standard in terms of real currency.
I think a pegged currency is the only way to create an ever-growing true virtual economy. I believe a true virtual economy is the only way to have a challenging living world whereby players provide for the needs of the NPC and player populations. With various local economies, multiple competing factions, and a 100% worker-crafter-logistics trade system.
Economies like eve, wow, or any other current MMORPG just don't grow or evolve. I don't think they can.
IMO:
A good suggestion, Doford. It's the 'everyone is rich' problem, and there doesn't seem to be a large appetitie to address it in any meaningful way.
The very simple mechanic of vanquished enemies dropping immediately equippable/wearable items and/or currency, plus the ability to sell any amount of anything to NPCs for infinite gold is.. logically broken.
Yet, it appears (without confirmation or denial by any VR developers to date) that is the exact same system they're going to implement in Pantheon.
I've seen this in Fallout76 to an extreme degree. Start out with a currency; caps. (bottle caps). Ok, but everyone is getting too many caps, because caps drop from creatures. Developer panic; what do we DO? Put a limit on the currency. A cap on caps (ha!). Ok, then.. players make their own currency, because caps are worthless.
Well that's no good, uh.. ok, we'll introduce another currency, scrip! Oh, but players who play a lot can generate thousands of scrip per day, if motivated.. well crap, now what? Put a limit on the currency, AND make it so it acts as a time gate. Not good enough, players are hitting the cap every day. Limit the the gains per day. Limit the total!
Ok ok, we've got it this time, a THIRD currency, bullion. (gold) We'll put it behind a long quest line, and faction. Oh, crap, people consumed that content in a day, and are now at the cap, and have collected all the recipes for bullion. Now what? Put a cap on bullion, total, per player. Put a daily cap on bullion gains. Put a daily cap on faction gains. Players hate it, but we're in panic mode.
And still none of it matters, because of other issues (the server trusts the client), rampant abuse, no policy enforcement, etc. All the typical post-launch problems for any large multiplayer game (fo76 only has 24 players max per server, so MMO doesn't really apply in some ways), and the economy doesn't really exist. Players have way too much currency, everyone IS rich, there's almost no sinks, and playing the game, a lot, makes things even MORE broken. Player 'stickiness' is a huge problem, and all the wrong inconveniences have zero tangible positive economic impact.
So far, the public design goals for Pantheon show a very similar scenario playing out, entirely due to a lack of serious iterative public economic design since 2014.
It isn't managed in the real world, so why do we expect it to be possible in a game? Hehe
A seemingly frivolous comment, but actually, I think the answer is in there.
It is a game, so the devs *should* have total control of the situation. The problem is taking that control without ruining the feel of the game.
Players like shinies and the jingle of dropping coin. Monsters are infinite.
Seems to me the only way in a game is to balance infinite monster kill rewards is with 'sinks' of those rewards at a similar rate.
If the more you play the more you are awarded then the more you play the more costs you must encounter.
Unfortunately, things like subsistence food/drink and item damage/repair aren't very fun, but perhaps can be implemented in a way that is at least fair and not annoying to remedy?
No one likes the feel of a 'tax' for playing or a 'punishment' for playing a lot, but it is essentially what is needed.
Other ideas for 'sinks' that could be implemented in a 'fun' or at least interesting way: -
Sacrificing: You 'destroy' an item at a magical altar to gain tempory buffs.
Donating: You give it to a city for their defense to gain reputation.
Salvaging: You break up an item to support your crafting.
Cosmetics: Yes, I dared say it... What if you can 'sacrifice' an item to get a crafter make another of your items look like it?
Enhancement: Crafting processes that destroy one item to improve another (and the other could then be locked to you, not tradeable)
Any or all of those could also have a cash cost.
'Sinking' an item needs to give 'reward' with non-tradable worth, or at least with less tradeable worth than the original items/coin.
Basically, players should be juggling their resources in order to maintain their adventuring lifestyle. If you want to go on a long adventure to camp a monster that has a particular drop, you need to be thinking about how much food/drink you will need, how much damage you will need to repair as a result of the camp, the travelling cost to get there, etc.
It should be much like the encounter-to-encounter choices you make over how much burst damage you do against how much downtime you want between fights. A conscious cost-benefit choice. If you go hardcore and take on a really tough (resource hungry) camp for a few days, then you will perhaps need to go back to a slower pace of 'job' adventuring to pay for that later, or you will at least need to burn a lot of 'cash' to obtain the buffs (or whatever) needed to maintain a high pace or long time of play.
Some related tricky ideas. Just for discussion: -
Diminishing returns: The more you get a particular loot drop, the less likely it drops. Yes, this is a tricky mechanic, given changing groups.
Scarcity: The more of an item that exists in the world, the less it drops. Weird and with consequences, but in a world where the dead respawn and drop the same 'unique' treasure, is it out of the question?
Trivial loot drop rules: If you are overpowered for a particular encounter, you don't get loot. Would help stop farming.
Item lifetime: I personally *hate* games where all items need to be eventually replaced, but pehaps it could be necessary for some or all?
IMO:
The fun ideas I like, (sacrifice, donation, salvage, cosmetics, enhancement).
The 'related tricky ideas' I don't like, and have not enjoyed their implementation in other games. I can elaborate at length, but for the moment, I'll leave it at that for those. :)
Theorycrafting a bit more with your fun ideas, I'll offer these suggestions:
Allow and/all of those fun ideas to be applied to each item slot. That's (currently, iirc) 22 different targets. (plus the player themselves)
What I mean by that is, whatever the output of those actions is (widget, untradeable currency, renown, fame, regional benefit, whatever), you can then apply it to each item slot you have.
If your equipment aligns with the slot buff, it's amplified. If not, it's simply an additional long term buff/effect.
They (the slot buffs) can be removed, upgraded, extended and/or overwritten at any time.
They could be restricted to things like customization of role/class abilities/spells. That is, via this mechanism, you can customize each aspect of the active & passive abilties in the Living Codex of your character. (racial, class, temporary, group-only, solo-only, by mastery rank, etc)
More dramatic effects could have shorter timers, and/or you could get longer powerful buffs by sacrificing more valuable items, equipment, amount of XP, fame, or faction.
Essentially, you'd be allowing the player to consume their previous rewards + time spent and redirect it towards customization/enhancement of their role.
All you have to do is make the buffs/customization attractive/powerful enough, and everyone would sacrifice EVERYTHING to get those effects.
Equipment alignment can be provided by NPC or PC "aftermarket" crafter outputs. Unfortunately, Nephele has said this doesn't align with their current goals, but it could be done, technically.
If you have appropriate NPC involvement, it doesn't matter how much sacrificial loot everyone has if the carrot they want is desirable enough.
This isn't the only way this could be done, it's just A way that might work.
I think the obvious ones are gold farmers/sellers and expansions.
I don't mind items that break after a long period of time, if you can get the same without too much trouble, especially, crafted items if it's easy to recraft the exact same item. A long period of time like, ... months. It can be a complementary money sink.
The big phat loots should probably remain unbreakable, such as your Mythical Two Handed Hammer that has 1% chance to drop on the hardest boss of the game. Although it's repair cost might be x10 a normal item.
It's a difficult subject, but I think the MMOs with the best economy always have some end-game gear/item/spell upgrades that are made by players with crafting. Usually a player centric economy system.
Not sure if there is any EVE Online player around but contacting those devs (CCP games) would probably be a gold mine of information on the subject.
Khraag said: ... Not sure if there is any EVE Online player around but contacting those devs (CCP games) would probably be a gold mine of information on the subject.
Just so it's been noted..
https://evemarketer.com/ .
https://market.fuzzwork.co.uk/ .
They have an API that permits a global view of EVE markets.
This is directly in opposition to Pantheons stated public design goal of regional-only markets.
edit: good lord these forums suck.
Probably going against popular opinion...but I think having as much gear be continually tradeable as pantheon is planning is going to be a major game breaker and hur the economy.
Most all of their ideas I either fully support, or can understand how it can be a benefit one way or another.
Tradeable gear like that, to me, seems like a complete and utter mistake.
What are the biggest threats to the game's economy?
One of the biggest threats to the game's economy is using the same models that have been used in past MMO's and expecting different results. If you have a auction house, stock trading system, grand exchange, or what have you, people will ALWAYS find a way to exploit the system.
I'm sure you're aware of the definition of insanity.
starblight said:Over all it seems we are trying to have our cake and eat it too. We want items to be tradable and not bind on pickup or equip. Items never break permanently. It seems like only a matter of time before the world is going to be filled with items. Oh, and I love the no-bind, tradable, and never break items. I would rather have a bad economy than to get rid of that.
Some ideas in no real order.
- If you have an exchange have a listing fee and a selling fee. This limits people trying to play the market. Not a full solution or anything but it helps.
- Limit how many times an item can change hands based on accounts. Say every item can have 4 accounts only. I feel like this might be a compromise. If you were buying it you would be able to see how many more owners are left.
- I feel like inflation is a problem but not as much as item inflation. What if you had NPC’s buy items off the market? If you did it right people might not even know it was purchased by an NPC or maybe you would want it to be known.
- Another way to remove items from the world is breaking them down for material or other items.
- Donation of items to gods, church, officials, any NPCs or organization for some form of gain.
- Destroy item to add it to your permanent storage of items you have collected. Collect them all and get badges, titles.
- If you have housing or guild halls allow displaying items like armor or weapons for show.
- Let you give items to NPC so they will use them. Was good fun back in the early EQ days. Oh, wait than they drop them I guess that would not help.
- What ever you do no gambling like trade in 10 items and get random better item.
- Like one of the ideas above destroy item and you can now wear it as cosmetic only item any time you want. Or only in cities. I could see people wanting to collect all the items just for this.
- Have a tax on money. We all like the tax man. The more you have the more you pay. Or just a flat small rate. You would still pay more the more you have.
- Give ways to spend on useless things but fun. Like buying everyone in a tavern a beer. Everyone in the tavern could get a little more active for a bit. Let you change a taverns music.
- Donate to a local town ether coin or gear. The guards around the town could then be better outfitted or other notable changes to the prosperity of the town. Never underestimate some people’s generosity. Every item or coin that leaves the economy counts.
- Have a donation for a GM event. This could be huge item and coin sink. As a team you can’t just have a GM event every day but make it require a whole server to work towards it and it might be worth the cost to help out the game’s economy hence the game.
Ok got to get back to work.
Gold sellers will still find a way around it and use the auction house/ market board to move money around whereas If players had to deal directly with other players (dealing with crafters) it will make it easier for GM to track things and keep the economy stable, also not free accounts at all. make it all pay for access play.
Trasak said:I am a little late to this party, but when has that stopped me from spouting off before?
The biggest threat to a functioning game economy is significantly more supply than demand.
This is true for items, cash, services, DPS characters and DKP (this one is actually more important than it sounds).
Cash farmers, bots, duping exploits and Seafury Cyclopes (imbalanced cash rewards) have destroyed game cash economies by flooding the game economy which drives the value of cash way down. It drives it so far down that only those with huge amounts of cash can buy anything as the rate at which you can legitimately farm new cash is insignificant to the amount already in circulation.
Similar to cash flooding markets items flooding the market will also trash the trade economy. As more and more items enter the market relative to the number of characters in the economy the items of interest or that are an upgrade shift upwards in power. Any item bellow this power point become worth only what an NPC will give the player for the item, fueling back into an overfilled cash economy.
Items flooding the economy in Pantheon is a huge concern for me. If all items are tradeable and items never breakdown then over time only best in slot items will retain any value, and that value will drop as the number of available best in slot items approaches the number of active character for whom that item is best in slot.
The solution to both issues is basically the same. There needs to be a perpetual incentive to remove both cash and items from the economy. One time cash or item sinks will not work as over time they become insignificant and in short term they can be really irritating as they are usually sized to be significant in the medium term.
You also need to be careful with the perpetual resource sinks to ensure that they are not a huge divider between the haves and have nots. Cyclical vanity costs are one of the best ways to incentivize the rich to take resources out of the economy without forcing the poor to do so in order to compete on an even adventuring or crafting level. These can be things like in-game political rank that is in-name only without any true power over the adventuring or crafting sphere.
You cannot leave the adventurers out of the resource sink entirely so there should still be some form of benefit to the adventurer if they are willing to sacrifice resources. It is important to set diminishing returns for each amount sacrificed but with no true ceiling, eventually though you would end up doubling the amount sacrificed for only a 1% increase in temporary benefit. The diminishing returns would set a practical and theoretical limit to the maximum possible gain.
For example by spending 100 faction points you could gain a buff increasing your maximum mana by 100 for 3 hours. You could choose to spend more than 100 faction points to increase that buff but still only for 3 hours and the buff will be lost on death. The buff would become 100 * ( 1 + (FactionSpent – 100)/FactionSpent). At 200 faction spent you would gain a buff of 150 maximum mana, at 1000 the buff would be 190, at 10,000 it would be 199 and at 100,000 it would be 199.9. 200 faction might be worth it but very rarely would 1000 even be considered, much less 10,000.
As a player you could gain faction by doing adventuring tasks, gathering writs, crafting writs, donating gold or donating items. At different points it will be more time efficient to donate items and cash vs doing tasks or writs. The resource poor players would still have the option to do tasks or writs for the same buffs.
Another way to pull resources out of the economy is item charging, activation and or attunement. If magical items drop in a drained an unattuned state and any time it is traded between character it drops down to an uncharged state it creates an opportunity for resource sinks.
Options for attuning an item:
1) Use an unattuned item long enough in combat and the item will become attuned and fully activated. (effectively the item would have an exp bar that needs filled before it works)
2) You sacrifice items attuned to you already to said new item. (effectively transferring a portion of stored exp from one item to another, destroying the original item in the process).
3) Draining attuned items to charge another. (Sacrifice liquid resources to transfer a smaller portion of exp from one item to another without destroying either item).
4) Consuming attunement crystals to attune a new item. (Worst time spent to effect ratio method of attuning an item.)
- Attunement Crystals can be looted, or a player can sacrifice a fully attuned item to create a crystal containing 10% of the exp stored. (Likely either partially charging a larger crystal or making a certain number of full smaller crystals)
- Attunement Crystals can be freely traded between players where as magic items traded will wipe out any attunement experience.
- Attunement Crystals can also become a central crafting ingredient that helps establish the power level of said item.
- Broken items, (either from drops or repeated character deaths) could retain their stored experience and a skilled crafter could choose to either repair the item for resources and wiping out the stored experience, salvage the item for valuable raw materials, or distill the experience out of the item to create a weak attunement crystal for further crafting.
Items with clickly effects or procs could also have a limited number of charges. Those charges could regenerate slowly over time or you could use Attunement Crystals to refill the charges quickly.
This attunement system creates a loop where all lower tier items can feed up into higher tier items. Fully attuned items will constantly be leaving the economy in order to fuel better drops, better crafted items and recharge active effects. Withdrawing the experience from an item without destroying it also becomes a cyclical liquid resource sink with its own value break points, assume an exponential increase in liquid resource cost relative to amount of experience extracted.
Low level players will have valuable resources to pass onto high level adventurers. Even the least power crafted items would have some value to an adventure specializing in taking uncharged items, attuning them, then sacrificing them either to their own high level item or creating crystals for trade. Effectively they will be trading their time spent. The mentor system could tie very well into the attunement crystal generation market as one would need to kill non trivial monsters in order to gain experience and killing high level monsters with only unattuned gear would be virtually impossible solo. The mentor system would suppress your level down to a lower tier allowing you to gain experience from mobs of lower level who have a higher margin of error, if lower exp awarded.
Sorry for the wall of text but it is a big issue.
do this but make it an exp & gold sink for everything when it comes to Attunements and acclimation runes.