Thanks to several independent observers for forwarding information about a money hemorrhage in EverQuest. Apparently a little bug appeared on an NPC that allowed the conversion of any amount of cash into 10 times its value, almost instantly. The first sign of a problem: plummeting prices of platinum pieces in terms of dollars, a development quite understandably lamented by a moneyseller. When your inventory is digital currency, money dupes are a major problem. SOE also treated it as a problem, and diverted major resources to plugging the hole. It now appears to be fixed (although I'll have to log in tonight to see.)
Some thoughts -
1. The moneyseller is almost comedic in asserting that all he cares about is the integrity of the game. Look, the ethic of role-playing and lore within EQ is regularly and repeatedly abused, but I don't see him ranting much about that. But when the dollar value of the money falls - WHOA, now THAT's a serious problem!!!!
2. What does a money dupe really do? Well, it raises the prices of all goods in the economy. By itself, that does not matter at all - who cares whether the price of a thing is 100 or 1000 or 0.0001? The problems are that
a. some people get the money first, shifting the distribution of income their way. That's unfair - unless you believe that the meta-game of hacking and cheating and duping and exploiting is all part of the game itself (I don't.)
b. it dumbs down the game. If money matters in the sense that it can buy valuable things - and mind you, in many of these economies, including EQ's, money almost doesn't matter in this sense; it's often pretty hard to find any real use for your money at all - but anyway, if money can buy great armor and spells and such, then flooding the game with money means that you're flooding it with more powerful items. Let's say I go do the dupe and get myself a million gold pieces. I use them to buy the most powerful gear, driving up the price of that stuff. With this most powerful gear, I kill monsters more quickly, meaning that I level up more quickly and accumulate powerful items more quickly. What do I do with these new items, since I already have great stuff? I sell them down the power ladder to lower-level characters. The net result is a rapid run-up in high-end prices and a rapid collapse in middle- and low-end items.
3. Note that neither of these outcomes is necessarily a problem for the game company. What do they care about the distribution of income? Is a small shift in an already disgustingly unequal distribution of play resources and income going to drive away the marginal user? No. If such inequities really mattered, there would be some sort of progressive tax, so that anyone who got their hands on a massive amount of money overnight, however they did it, would just lose it all to the tax man. Beyond that, maybe the reputation for being a hacked game might have an effect, but again, it's not big at the margin. As for dumbing down the game - for an older game, it might be wise to make it gradually easier. Why play something hard like Horizons when I can chat up a guy on my first day of EverQuest and get a gift of 1000 platinum pieces to start out? And if the moneysellers are thought to be a problem - which is open to debate - hyperinflation definitely makes their lives tougher. That's how Germany got out of its WWI reparations burden - they turned on the money machine!
All this takes me back to thinking about the role of money in the economy. We believe that money has specific purposes - unit of account, store of value, medium of exchange - and looking at these purposes, it seems that inflation must be a bad thing. Inflation mucks up all these uses of money. Yet when we build a virtual world from scratch, not only is there always inflation, its always pretty severe. And also, its always accompanied by a fairly rapid growth in real wealth too (ie players at a given power level gradually get not only more money but also more gear). Meanwhile, in the real world - where, don't forget, money is just as constructed as it is in the virtual world - we have this chronic inflation of 3-4 percent that never goes away. Looking at the functions of money, we have to ask - why, on Earth and in Norrath, do the authorities allow this to happen? Why does money inflate, if that just messes with its role in the economy?
There's something deeper going on here, that you can only see by looking at virtual worlds, places designed for the specific purpose of having fun. Everyone have their eyes open??? Good. Here's what's going on:
Inflation is fun.
And that's why we have it. That's certainly true in Norrath; whatever's in Norrath is there for fun, right? But could it be that that's why we have it on Earth too? The mind boggles.
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