Hoiyay said: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.
No, I agree with you on this.
bobwinner said: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.
remove any type of auction house system and have them deal with crafters directly and see how much money they make then.. the gold mongers become poor real fast and most of the time gold mongers sell there gold to gold sellers.
Doford said: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.
how about dealing with crafters directly instead of having an auction house/market board? it would eliminate a lot of problems with gold sellers and gold mongers overall.
Wouldn't dealing with crafters directly just move gold-sellers to be resource-sellers?
Making trading less fungible would surely just incovenience players much more than stop professional traders?
Instead of bots killing trash mobs (and vending for gold) you'd have bots gathering resource nodes and bot groups hunting down monsters with the good gear drops?
At least the trash bots aren't interfering with core gameplay as much.
It might help but often these measure inconvenience normal folks more than the organised baddies, after all bots (or even kids paid to farm) don't care what they do to earn RL cash, but normal players care how much fun their normal gaming is.
I'm not an economist, but from my experience:
One of the biggest threats to the economy is to have only one or two sources for an item that all players need for quest progression (if that item is a tradeable item or crafting part). If it is only available by killing mob X and/or Y then you have created an artificial bottle-neck and that item's value becomes super-inflated. If all players need an item or multiple quests need the same item, then that item should be available from multiple sources.
Camp control is another threat. If a powerful guild controls access to one or more key mob camps, then this can easily hyper-inflate the drops of those mobs.
Too much coin from any mob can be a threat and become over-farmed or even continually farmed by organised groups.
I think too much gear that are the same in stat terms can cause anomalies with the game economy. If there is a lot of gear for sale with the same stats, then those items quickly lose their "real" value. If there is a lot of gear for sale where there are differences in the stats, then that can help the economy and give players a wider choice.
Most MMOs have a fully artificial economy they try to mimic. This is what I feel causes the massive inflation that happens. The greatest game economy I have seen was Eve online. Virtually every sale and purchase was entirely made by players, the minimum price of recycling the item for base materials set a floor, but the price of the materials was also determined by location they were in and the local resources in the area.
I can't imagine VR will have a sweeping full economy and will take the mimicing route, but I think they should take a page from Eve though and make it so there are not generic mundane goods to sell. Make every drop be something desired by crafters. If the vampire dust has a value it should be from selling it to crafters for making a potion. A random baker NPC shouldn't be buying it. Broken or rusty swords should be smelted down into ingots. Make the players largely interact with the players. In game vendors should be more for buying items from than converting trash to gold.
Adventuring should be expensive with a few big paydays. Much like in life doing a good deed will cost you money as well. Will they help the orphanage or keep the reward? Players should be considering income while adventuring and not just knowing the money will be there. The chef and the leather worker may earn obvious money off various beasts, but other players are likely losing money unless they can sell or trade the goods to a chef or leather worker. The tailor may be focused more on spiders for their silk. The economy should be based on trading with people more than farming gold from every NPC.
If there is some sort of an in game event like wolf population is on the rise in x zone and we are putting a bounty per wolf slain then sure make the wolf teeth valuable, but don't just make wolf teeth valuable 24/7.
Many adventurers would be drawn to going after humanoid targets similar to how they were in EQ. Beasts should not drop gold or gold placeholders like high value teeth. Poor adventurers going after coin and belongings of bandits or goblins to make ends meet would use that money to buy crafted items. It should certainly give them more literal coin to be used any where, but its value would be tied to the value of the resources gathered elsewhere and their quantity on the market.
A small community of players/crafters should have no need for actual gold for the most part. As long as they have the baseline for spells or recipies it is enough if they are working together and trading among eachother they should be the best geared and likely poorest adventurers.
Maybe I'm the only one that wonders this, alot of these suggestions seem really strange to me, what are we considering a ruined economy?
Can someone attempt to clarify or give an example of a game that suffers from this?
Its natural that overtime you're going to accumulate more wealth, that's how it works, are we trying to stop that? Or are we trying to make it more difficult? I'm legitimately confused as to what the end goal would be.
Porygon said:Maybe I'm the only one that wonders this, alot of these suggestions seem really strange to me, what are we considering a ruined economy?
Can someone attempt to clarify or give an example of a game that suffers from this?
Its natural that overtime you're going to accumulate more wealth, that's how it works, are we trying to stop that? Or are we trying to make it more difficult? I'm legitimately confused as to what the end goal would be.
I think many of us have tried to say what we felt ruined the economy but I like your question and to be honest I can’t think of any games as good examples. I feel this is mostly because it has been way to long since I was really into a MMO and the last one was Vanguard. Not sure a slowly dying MMO is the best place to get an example.
I will try and explain what I feel would be a ruined economy for me. It has nothing to do with wealth that is just inflation really and while that can suck it will not ruin the game like item inflation. With most if not all items going to be tradable a rare item in time will not be rare and this is what we should be afraid of. I know in EQ some items were like this. They may have started out rare but in time anyone could buy it for almost nothing because so many had entered the economy, they no longer had value.
That being said I love that most if not all items will be tradable and would put up with just about anything to have that key feature. That is why I suggested a bunch of other ways to mitigate the effect. I am not convinced I would like a game that has made the necessary changes to eliminate all paths to a ruined economy. I hope that make mitigation into there plans but not hard rules like no drop items or all items break.
Porygon said:Maybe I'm the only one that wonders this, alot of these suggestions seem really strange to me, what are we considering a ruined economy?
Can someone attempt to clarify or give an example of a game that suffers from this?
Its natural that overtime you're going to accumulate more wealth, that's how it works, are we trying to stop that? Or are we trying to make it more difficult? I'm legitimately confused as to what the end goal would be.
IMO:
Accumulating wealth over time is the problem. It creates inflation. If everyone is rich, the currency is devalued, and inflation runs rampant. A loaf of bread costs a wheelbarrow full of cash. Not ideal.
Happens IRL to real currencies, happens to virtual currencies.
I completely understand, Porygon, your perspective. It's shared by millions (billions?) of people. Everyone wants to be rich, or at least, have enough to be able to provide for their families and have some left over for leisure, artistic pursuits, or similar wants, rather than needs.
Nothing wrong with that desire, it's what drives many economies worldwide.
But, in the virtual economy of a virtual world, runaway inflation creates very poor emergent player behavior. I agree with Jobeson's opinion a few posts up regarding the concept that ideally, most players would have very little need for gold. Instead, you create, consume and trade. Back in 2019, when things were looking more positive, I wrote this up. It describes a method of design for a virtual economy that would, among other things, eliminate inflation (because it eliminates tradeable currency) or allow it to be controlled in a thematically consistent way.
That's important. Players don't want their gold "taken" or "stolen" from them. That's a negative interaction. Instead, the one possible theorycrafted economic model I describe strongly encourages all players, with massive overpowered carrots/sinks (rather than sticks/taxes) to want to donate, sacrifice, or exchange their goods for other goods and/or services from NPC's, NPC guilds, and other players. There are many other possible solutions and models.
If you can create positive emergent behavior from the players and at the same time, provide more attractive sinks than taps, that's a good start.
An 'overly attractive sink' type of system can be implemented with coin currency, but the list of "If's" that make it untenable is very short. Pantheon, currently as described and demonstrated to date, will have all the features that will guarantee rampant inflation and more taps than sinks. In all game loops. Hopefully they get a grip on it before launch, but there's been very little indication it's a priority, so far.
I understand your fears, it makes total sense. But what game has existed where everyone has become rich? I've never seen that happen. I mean hell, I dont think other than EQ TLPs that I have ever considered myself rich in any video game, lol. Let alone an entire playerbase.
The only time I've really witnessed a ruined economy was on one of the TLP servers when a vendor bought tradeskill combine sold for more than the cost of the materials. Millions of platinum was introduced overnight, and even attempts to purge that exploited platinum wasn't enough.
Though I wouldn't go as far as you, @vjek, your write up is excellent and well worth a read for anyone interested in the subject/issue.
I'm feeling that effectively restricting the fungibility of trade currency would be a step further than most players would want. The bartering too painful, basically. The forced intermediate exchange to and from social currency would add another level of frustration.
To me, I think it would be more desirable and just as doable to use coin, but not have it be so prolifically lootable from defeated foes. It would even be on theme (given the medieval/feudal high fantasy feel intended by Pantheon) for coin to be relatively rare. It would certainly make more 'sense' than snakes dropping coppers when killed!
You could even employ a 'bank note' system - it could even be 'magical' to some extent and have 'self-created' (or even crafted?) promissary notes to further avoid proliferation of coins.
Something controllable, but more flexible.
I'm interested to hear specifically what you think the "ifs" are that make a coin currency system untenable even with adequate sinks and less coin availability?
Porygon said:I understand your fears, it makes total sense. But what game has existed where everyone has become rich? I've never seen that happen. I mean hell, I dont think other than EQ TLPs that I have ever considered myself rich in any video game, lol. Let alone an entire playerbase.
The only time I've really witnessed a ruined economy was on one of the TLP servers when a vendor bought tradeskill combine sold for more than the cost of the materials. Millions of platinum was introduced overnight, and even attempts to purge that exploited platinum wasn't enough.
It's not *everyone* being rich that's the problem, the problem is all players getting inevitably richer as they play longer such that new players are priced out of the player economy.
In EQ (original and P99) and others, 'old' players become so rich they trade amongst themselves at prices so high no new player can hope to take part.
To a certain extent it 'normalises' because lazy old players will pay new players large amounts for gathering mats and items they want for twinks, but that economy only goes so far (not far enough).
There are problems, though, even within one player 'generation'. I'm experiencing it in Path of Exile that I've gone back to to play with my dad.
I'm just hardly bothering with buying/selling stuff, because I know that in a few levels time (just minutes, maybe hours, in that game) I would be earning so much more it will make the amounts I was looking to buy/sell pointless - in the time it takes to vend the stuff I would make more by leveling up and buying/selling higher level stuff. It feels like you may as well just not bother until you get to max level. So you just use the loot you get? Not a problem? Not really, I suppose, except why bother with the buy/sell economy, then? Wasted coding.
It's similar, though less compressed, in games like EQ. If you have a high level character, it almost feels pointless 'earning' with the low level one. You can earn as much coin in minutes with the high level one as you would earn in days/weeks with the lower. More efficient to play for 10 minutes on the high level character and use the income to twink the lower level one.
TL;DR: Yes it makes sense, and feels good, for high level characters to be relatively 'rich', but if it is to much at the expense of newer players it will eventually 'spoil' the economy for new players.
There is something to be said for new players having to 'earn' everything, like the first players did, but *if* you want player trading *and* you want player trading to have lasting appeal *then* you have to stop mudflation and/or quite fundamentally change the way the economy works.
I know someone who has a masters degree in Economics. I'm going to ask them later, but if there were an easy answer then surely it would have been done.
Either that or no game developer has had the guts to try it because they think what needs to be done would be too unattractive to the players...
disposalist said: ...I'm feeling that effectively restricting the fungibility of trade currency would be a step further than most players would want. The bartering too painful, basically. The forced intermediate exchange to and from social currency would add another level of frustration.
To me, I think it would be more desirable and just as doable to use coin, but not have it be so prolifically lootable from defeated foes. ...
I'm interested to hear specifically what you think the "ifs" are that make a coin currency system untenable even with adequate sinks and less coin availability?
IMO:
If you make coin untradeable, it is a step towards solving the problem. Yet, no developer to date is willing to take even that one single step towards a solution. I am all for it, it would be a step in the right direction. Yet, it's not a popular option, typically. I share your concern that it's something "a step further than most players would want". :D That doesn't mean it shouldn't be used, but there are demographic consequences.
The bartering can be handled in the exact same way as current market/bazaar and personal trade UI's work today. There's no difference, and no extra pain.
The forced intermediate exchange (or, the forced involvement of an NPC/server-side-item) is a required step. Logically, any solution that accomplishes the same funnel would also work, provided it wasn't simply another player. Social currency being only useable and/or tradeable to/from an NPC is the crux of the reason this type of system works. It's the means by which each player is compensated or rewarded for their time investment, and cannot be influenced by other players directly.
That's the whole driver behind creating positive emergent behavior. You're directly rewarding a player for their time, and making it impossible to transfer that reward directly to another player. The only way you can help another player is by playing a/the game loop with them. That requirement drives the ideal player behavior; players playing the game.
As far as the list of "Ifs" that make a coin currency system untenable, any one of these would satisfy that requirement:
- coin being generated/provided/rewarded in the world from the adventure loop, as a result of killing enemies, and being directly lootable by characters.
- coin being generated/provided/rewarded in the world from quests, tasks, or similar non-combat mechanics and being given directly to characters. Even worse if repeatable, regardless of the interval.
- coin being generated/provided/rewarded in the world as a result of participation in any game loop or mechanic.
- coin provided by NPCs to characters as a part of selling anything (including harvestables, lootables, consumables, crafting components, armor, weapons, ANYTHING)
- coin being tradeable, under any conditions, with another player
- items available in infinite quantity from NPCs, and being tradeable (this being a trivial de facto replacement for coin currency)
A larger issue is that if you reward the player directly with coin for any action they take, over time, then time literally equals money. Then the virtual currency simply has a value as a unit of time spent. 1 hour = 1 gold or 1 hour = 10 platinum, or whatever the rate. Once that happens? RMT wins, because now you can tie the time reward in the game to a tradeable "thing" (in-game coin / in-game whatever) which permits a translation into a real-world currency. I give you 10 euros, you give me 100 platinum. Now i've just purchased 10 hours of effort @ 10platinum/hour. Who wouldn't pay for more time in their lives? :)
RMT isn't the only reason to address this issue, but it's a large reason. Every persistent world in existence has a measure of attractiveness to RMT abuse, and coin trade is the first milestone to increasing that attractiveness.
It's hmm.. easy? No. It's.. easier to not consider the solutions regarding virtual economies, and simply permit inflation, which is why so many games do it.
Yet, at some point, a developer IS going to have the fortitude to implement some of these things (or mechanics that accomplish the same thing, effectively) and there will be much rejoicing.
Until then, everyone is rich! woo hoo! :P
Nephele said:In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to the health of the game's economy?
Players buying and selling items or currency using real-life currency.
Bots.
I am not a fan of coins dropping from mobs without pockets (kangaroos and drop bears not included) in general so I can get behind heavily limiting coins as typical loot.
Bartering is brutally inefficient on a person to person basis. There does need to be some form of trade currency between players and as crypto currency has shown us humans will just make crap up that has no actual value to use as a currency if it is needed. We tend to lean towards either something with fairly universal value or something very limited in quantity but lots of really random things have been used through human history.
One example that I think fits nicely with Vjek’s idea is the frontier trade post chits. The trade posts were more like company stores where your pay was in chits for services or you could deliver goods to the posts for credit. That credit could then be used to buy sundries for daily life. Eventually the hope is to cash out for something harder that was portable or take your voucher back to civilization to be paid in cash at the main company counting house.
If each settlement had its own faction and credits system you could drive all trade, tasks, quests, and rewards through that system. Instead of getting coin for a stack of wolf hides you would get a certain number of credits to use in the settlement. Your current faction standing could modify both your sell and receive prices.
In addition to the npc vendor there could also be local auction houses where the goods are also traded using those credits only and if the auction doesn’t succeed then the item is auto purchased for half the going NPC price. If a player does not have enough local credits they can be purchased with hard cash but not the other direction. In this way the credit based auction houses act as both cash sinks and item sinks.
The inventories available, buy prices and tasks offered could all be relative to certain settlement targets and player activity. Some credits could be transferable or you could purchase large quantities of goods from one settlement and move them to another as a means of transferring value but at a loss vs keeping it in place.
This would open several different game play loops to almost full time play and would go a long what to make the game world feel much more like a real world. It will create some challenges and hurdles that don’t exist in other games but those are also the games with massive cash inflation, and item flooding problems. Not all pain or annoyances are bad. Often times it is the potential negative results that make the positive results feel so meaningful.
manofyesterday said:Nephele said:In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to the health of the game's economy?
Players buying and selling items or currency using real-life currency.
Bots.
Not that I am pro RMT, but players buying other players coin with real life money doesn't do anything positive or negative for the game economy. It would be like saying that, me handing out gold to low levels ruins the economy. It's just a shift in who owns the money.
Porygon said:manofyesterday said:Nephele said:In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to the health of the game's economy?
Players buying and selling items or currency using real-life currency.
Bots.
Not that I am pro RMT, but players buying other players coin with real life money doesn't do anything positive or negative for the game economy. It would be like saying that, me handing out gold to low levels ruins the economy. It's just a shift in who owns the money.
If people are buying or selling in-game currency or items using real-life currency, then there's a powerful incentive for more farming, hacking/stealing people accounts, exploiting, and botting. Of course there's always an incentive for people to do these things, but when real-life currency is introduced, then the incentive becomes even greater for the simple reason that real-life currency > in-game currency. And the more farmers and botters there are the more inflation there is (because more in-game currency and instances of items are generated). This inflation will especially hurt those who just play the game in a normal sense and who don't spend real-life money for in-game currency and items. The item that took a legitimate player hours of farming will become less valuable because there's another player who farms the same area with a network of bots who has already found several instances of the same item.
This is just basic economics.
manofyesterday said:If people are buying or selling in-game currency or items using real-life currency, then there's a powerful incentive for more farming, hacking/stealing people accounts, exploiting, and botting. Of course there's always an incentive for people to do these things, but when real-life currency is introduced, then the incentive becomes even greater for the simple reason that real-life currency > in-game currency. And the more farmers and botters there are the more inflation there is (because more in-game currency and instances of items are generated). This inflation will especially hurt those who just play the game in a normal sense and who don't spend real-life money for in-game currency and items. The item that took a legitimate player hours of farming will become less valuable because there's another player who farms the same area with a network of bots who has already found several instances of the same item.
This is just basic economics.
My friend, theres no way to stop RMT, people will RMT whatever they feel is most valuable. Whether thats coin or items or what. Thats not going to create some crazy domino effect where some random guy is going to see this and decide, yes, thats my new job. People who RMT already know they are going to RMT.
Second to that, RMT doesnt drive people to farm, placing values in items drives people to farm. If you play on the EQ1 TLPs you know where the best farming spots are, and what the best items are. You will always see people competing for these items, RMT or not. If a random gold seller wasnt killing hill giants, the random player who needs platinum would be. RMT doesnt itroduce anything to the economy, it just shifts it.
Again, im not in support of RMT, im just saying that its not going to have an impact on the game economy, which is what this question was about.
I believe this is often discussed but not really understood. I believe that an in-game economy funcitons much like a real-world economy so you need a macro-economics perspective.
I think the big problem is "MUDflation" which is created by over production of loot and no drain to remove wealth.
You need money sinks - normal functional things.
After a very short time, so much loot drops that all the costs of living become trivial and the economy gets skewed. You need a constant drain to bleed off the excess material wealth being fed into the economy by nonstop drops.
One idea I have suggested is a wear-and-tear cost - fix/sharpen/repair your gear after battles - you could even make this a tradeskill so players could sharpen swords during raids etc.
It's a balance between the amount of items in the economy and the amount of money in the economy.
Especially how quickly both can be generated from nothing, too much cash being freely injected through quest rewards, coin drops or the dreaded daily quests and games will easily end up with massive inflation. Especially when the earning power between a level 1 and a level 50 is so different.
IMO:
Yes, Prim, it is.
Essentially all you need to do is add more carrot than stick. What that means in practice is, you make the 'recycling' or sacrifice rewards greater than any other type of reward.
A simple way of doing that is rather than have coin, have regionalized fame, reputation or similar points that play a similar role, but are un-tradeable between players.
Then, when a player recycles or sacrifices an item, they gain regionalized rep/points rather than coin, and can only spend these at NPCs in the region to acquire, yet again, un-tradeable rewards.
This also has the benefit of being thematically consistent by region, if that's a public design goal.
Additionally, provided NPCs don't buy anything (for coin) but only reward players with regionalized rep/points, providing loot or resources to players doesn't become such an economic disaster.
This allows for tremendous flexibility in loot creation mechanics, looting mechanics in general, and harvesting.
Porygon said:manofyesterday said:Nephele said:In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to the health of the game's economy?
Players buying and selling items or currency using real-life currency.
Bots.
Not that I am pro RMT, but players buying other players coin with real life money doesn't do anything positive or negative for the game economy. It would be like saying that, me handing out gold to low levels ruins the economy. It's just a shift in who owns the money.
I agree with this. To stop inflation, the influx of goods needs to be monitored. If there are too many farmers, reduce the coin and vendor loot dropped over time, even to 0 if excessive farming continues. Eventually farmers will move to non-vendor loots, items other people need. This does not create wealth and inflation, just redistributes it. As the sinks catch up and inflation pressures recede, drops cant resume slowly at first. Remove high vendor payouts on items, (fine steel weapons, crafted resources) that can easily be gathered and sold.
More money sinks the better.
Take away peoples ability to earn money and people won't play.
Have more money sinks, some of which can be avoided (i.e. Rent/Housing costs / Stable fees / The more rare the more expensive an item is to repair).
I'd even be ok with taxes in a game. I mean, I hate taxes with a vengence, but if it keeps the in game economy from reaching game breaking levels of inflation, it's something I'd be ok living with.
What kills an economy in an MMO?
Two answers - real money trading and interference from developers.
Real money trading encourages bot/afk farming because well, in many spots around the world, that's a decently lucrative gig, assuming the game itself is popular. But dev interference is the worst culprit. If you put an auction house/bazaar in the game, the players will quickly and very organically adapt the market according to supply and demand. It will work just fine with zero interference. Start meddling by nerfing this, controlling that, or disabling something else, and THAT is what threatens an in game economy.
After that comes mudflation, but all mudflation does is wreck monthly sub numbers once everyone figures out that in the standard 18-24 month xpac cycle that WoW basically standardized, you only really need to play for like 2-3 months, and then wait until next xpac because game design will let you get to 90-95% of max awesomeness with just easy, casual play, and yeah, you could do the 40-50 hours a week raid guild thing for that last 5-10% of the gear score, or just freaking wait until next xpac and within like an hour of release, your newb quest drops are superior to top shelf raid gear.
Again, what can EQ1 and Anarchy Online teach you? Make important stuff instanced and Bind On Pickup/NODROP, and the economy will end up revolving around tradeskill mats and convenience, not necessity. In that way, it will be wonderfully self-regulating.