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.
"Inflation is fun."
While I agree that inflationary money policies are used both in virtual worlds as well as in real world economies, as a way to balance the opportunities of newbies and veterans, I am not sure if 'inflation' is the only way to make games, or real life 'more fun'.
In fact, I don't think it would be difficult to make an argument that deflationary policies could be just as fun. Couldn't deflation have similarly fun result?
Maybe its easier with an example, for instance, an inflationary policy might be something like, 'ice dragons now drop more gold'. Ok, sounds fun. But, a deflationary policy might be written like; 'ice dragons now drop more weapons', or even better, 'ice dragons now drop more powerful weapons'. That sound pretty fun too.
Even in the real world, I am not sure inflation is really as fun as deflation. While an increase in salary, followed by an increase in the price of PS2s might sound fun in the short-term, the opposite is equally as fun, i.e. simply a price drop for PS2s.
I think there is a more fundamental lesson here, and that is, change is fun. In fact, change is not only fun, but can also be used as the core balancing factor for accelerating the balance between newbies and veterans.
Look at SWG, when they nerf a popular class and tweak an unpopular one, then newbies have a fighting chance to gain equal status in 6-12 mo. People might argue that this is no fun for the veterans that now have to re-examine tactics that has been working for them for some time, but this is the exact process that must happen with inflation or deflation, the appearance of new/better items and the disappearance of the same.
To really have fun with this topic, we could bring in the concept of planned change, or evolution, which unlike random change is often labeled 'more fun' by both new and old players alike.
-Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Boston | Dec 16, 2003 at 18:24
IANAE, but isn't current monetary policy pretty solidly in the camp of "small and regular inflation makes for the strongest economies"? If you have deflation, whether due to monetary policy or dragons pooping out swords, you disincent consumers from making a purchase today since their money will buy more tomorrow. This hurts the merchants and reduces the velocity of money. Obviously, if the strength of your internal economy isn't critical to the game, this is less important than for worlds where the economy is a large part of the game.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Dec 16, 2003 at 18:43
Bruce> "change is fun"
While I would agree with the statements "change is important to keeping the game balanced" or "change is critical to giving new users a chance", I don't agree that players think that change is fun.
People hate change. Game players hate change even more.
It doesn't matter how much better the product becomes as a result of the change, the initial reaction to just about any change is negative. The more the change is driven by the need to change gameplay, the more negative that initial reaction will be.
The players will, of course, adapt and many will become experts at the new version. Many will, as you point out, stay longer because the developers keep mucking with things. However, that doesn't mean that the people who are impacted by the changes will like it.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Dec 16, 2003 at 18:54
Brilliant post, Ted.
Random notes:
1. I think I understand why there is always a certain amount of price deflation in MMOs: Loot doesn't decay, therefore as time goes on the high-end items pile up in the world and eventually find their way into the hands of all who want them, gradually extinguishing demand and lowering prices. But why is there always inflation? I'm presuming it's because something similar is happening with currency: gold/plat/credits don't "decay" (or drain) fast enough, so the price of money also trends down. But why is this? Player labor is the source of all new money in the game, as it is the source of new items, but unlike items, money has no use value. So unlike with items, there's no endpoint where everyone has all they need of a particular currency, and therefore you would think that players would ease back on the effort to produce new money in sync with its drop in value, thus keeping the price stable. Yet apparently they don't. Does this mean the market is an imperfect governor of money supply? Or does it just mean the money faucets are sloppy, dropping coins along with desirable loot even when players aren't all that interested in the coins? Am I even making sense? And are these questions of interest to anyone but closet econ-nerds like me?
2. Interesting you should compare violations of the "ethic" of role-playing to violations of the economy. And interesting to note that up to a very high degree of tolerance, neither succeeds in driving a meaningful number of players away. I suspect this is because in most games neither role-play nor the economy is definitively *the* game. You can happily play the game largely ignoring either, and I think this reflects nicely on the open-endedness and pluralism of these games. The corollary is that because of this high degree of tolerance, any given player is going to have to put up with a certain amount of grief, defined however the terms of your favorite sub-game define it. Therefore a hypothesis: The games that tend to be the best teachers of democratic attitudes are also going to be the ones in which everyone -- role-players, plat-mongers, PvPers -- always has something to complain about. It's the games where everyone is happy you want to look out for. Those are breeding grounds for Maoists.
3. According to reports (http://www.juliandibbell.com/playmoney/2003_12_01_playmoney_archive.html#107115921004259262), Ultima Online was also recently hit by its own massive duping bug, ironically introduced as a side effect of a new patch meant to tighten the economy's gold faucets. Since the price of Britannia's gold piece has held steady on eBay, however, I'm beginning to think the people posting about this bug were wildly exaggerating its extent. But I'm open to other explanations. Can any of you economic masterminds conceive of a scenario in which a given world's money supply roughly doubles in the space of a week, yet two weeks later the value of the currency remains what it was before the bubble?
Posted by: Julian Dibbell | Dec 16, 2003 at 22:04
Julian> Can any of you economic masterminds conceive of a scenario in which a given world's money supply roughly doubles in the space of a week, yet two weeks later the value of the currency remains what it was before the bubble?
Well, speaking from SL experiences, when we've discovered money bugs we track the money and remove it from the system. Detecting large amounts of money creation in any one account is not hard (in fact, given the army of developers that UO has at its disposal, I'd say that it is downright easy) and after that it is just law enforcement, where did the money move to?
So, if the money bug tripped monitoring systems, they may have had private conversations with the abusers about returning the money.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Dec 16, 2003 at 22:49
Julian> Can any of you economic masterminds conceive of a scenario in which a given world's money supply roughly doubles in the space of a week, yet two weeks later the value of the currency remains what it was before the bubble?
Well, no. But my first thought in attacking this puzzle is that prices are determined by marginal valuations, not total valuations. You don't get the price of water by comparing humanity's overall need for it as against the available stock, you compare the need for one more gallon against the cost of providing one more gallon (because that's what the market trades - one gallon, not all gallons).
If there's a massive dupe, you'd think that the cost of providing a UO gold piece on eBay would have fallen significantly. But how much of a dupe does it have to be to effect the overall cost of giving up a gold piece for sale on eBay? How big a dupe does it need to be to have some effect on the channel that goes from gold-piece owners to middlemen such as Julian to the aggregators ("Mr. Big") to eBay?
If a formerly soviet nation triples potato production and also eats all of the new potatoes (more likely 'drinks', but we'll let Lastowka weigh in on that one), then there's no effect on world potato prices. This is especially likely if this part of potato production is small relative to world supply. So if the UO dupers did not make that much gold in relation to the total amount of gold, they would not have had much effect on the global difficulty of providing a gold piece to the eBay market.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Dec 16, 2003 at 23:47
Not to drag TSO into yet another thread, but it does seem on topic to point out that this week Maxis eliminated a money object that had been automated by simolean farmers, and the price of simoleans has not only stabilized but nearly tripled. Shows that even the most inept can fix their game economies. At least for a bit. Some discussion on this in an interview with GOM's Jamie Hale in the most recent post on you know where.
Posted by: Peter Ludlow | Dec 17, 2003 at 02:18
Oh I meant to add that there is also discussion that this is going to hurt the funness of the game for people that don't want to do drudge work. This point made by a simolean dealer on realsimsonline.
Posted by: Peter Ludlow | Dec 17, 2003 at 02:21
As an outsider (i.e. I don't actually play these games - just read about them), it seems to me that inflation, rather than being fun per se, acts more as a spur to keep you playing. If the money and items I have today are going to be worth less tomorrow, it's generally not in my best interests to hoard but to use what I have as soon as possible. A gradual decrease in value also means I have to keep running on the game treadmill to stay still and so might prolong the game and give players a reason to keep logging in even when they are no longer advancing significantly. It seems to me that in-game inflation is more about the psychology of gaming and gamers than how it effects the game directly.
Does that make sense? I haven't finished my first coffee yet.
Posted by: al | Dec 17, 2003 at 05:58
Apologies for a minor OT/divergence.
Cory Ondrejka> While I would agree with the statements "change is important to keeping the game balanced" or "change is critical to giving new users a chance", I don't agree that players think that change is fun.
I disagree in a blanket acceptance of that proviso. Some changes are perceived as good or are readily accepted by the players. Granted that does not include almost any changes that make a given group weaker at killing mobs or reduces their earning or growth potential, but certainly bumps to weaker classes are almost always met with enthusiasm and cheer, especially by those who play that class.
Cory Ondrejka> It doesn't matter how much better the product becomes as a result of the change, the initial reaction to just about any change is negative. The more the change is driven by the need to change gameplay, the more negative that initial reaction will be.
Another factor is perceived involvement in the process. If players, on the whole, perceive that the game operators are responding to at least some of the gamers' perceived problems with the game, the players are much more easily molified and accepting of the changes.
I think there are circumstances where changes in a MMOG are accepted and even lauded. If you look at some of the player responses to various patches in almost any MMOG, you will find instances where players decried the changes and instances where the changes were met with cheers and happiness.
I would agree, however, that balancing the two is often an impossible goal. You can't make everyone happy and no matter what you do, some people will be dissatisfied. I suppose the only advice I could give (within my limited experiences etc.) is to listen well to the beta testers. SWG would have been a MUCH better game and would have been more well received with another month or two of testing & balancing. It took SOE about 2-3 months to make the changes and balances that should have been in place *before* the game went live. I have to say, I was pretty ticked during those first months, finding so many broken pieces in what should have been a (primarily) working world.
Posted by: Alan Stern | Dec 17, 2003 at 08:31
"If the money and items I have today are going to be worth less tomorrow, it's generally not in my best interests to hoard but to use what I have as soon as possible."
Al, what a wonderful insight!
In a VW without NPC shopkeepers (ie: one with a player-driven economy and where the system doesn't sell you anything) instead of having unpopular decay, or tremendously unpopular taxes, you "remove" money from the game by decreasing it's Purchasing Power through inflation. In a hybrid game you ensure the commodities traded by NPCs remain at stable prices but are only raw materials and not the end products players really want (and drive the economy forward). As more gamers have a greater supply of coinage, they spend it less carefully and create an increase in the perceived value of the time of the seller, which kickstarts the inflationary cycle. The wonderful insight here is that this way it's the players the ones that are driving the drop in Purchasing Power (by driving inflation) and not you as a developer doing a price-hike, a decay system or a tax decree.
Posted by: DivineShadow | Dec 17, 2003 at 12:37
I wonder if you could implement an inherently negative-interest bearing currency? I.e. a gold piece is worth 2% less every day (or, better, every played hour). And how could you do this? And would it be an improvement? It would encourage spending rather than hording, but would that keep prices low?
Posted by: AFFA | Dec 17, 2003 at 21:49
DivineShadow> Al, what a wonderful insight!
I agree. I'm now wondering to myself about the use of inflation to spur investment on Earth. According to real (i.e. money-independent) theories of economic growth, investment only happens when there's a profit opportunity. On the other hand, investment spending itself generates new demands, which generate profit opportunities. What if a low-grade inflation creates the impression of profit opportunity, through deceptively high product sales, and thus kick-starts a self-confirming investment cycle? The sweet spot for inflation would be 3-4 percent - big enough to have this effect, yet small enough that people don't automatically consider thei rising sales volume as being generated by dollars of less value.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Dec 17, 2003 at 22:29
"I agree. [...]"
So while at first glance VW inflation seems to be bad (and hard to remove due to many factors), upon further inspection it seems it can actually be relied upon as the engine that keeps the wheels turning and in check. Akin to climbing up a "down" escalator. The whole engine breakdown does happen when either the NPC AIs sell all the finished goods or when you run out of zeros to represent the currency. :)
Of course as a developer you have to consider *where* this inflationary influx is piped into the VW, to make sure it is tapped by newer players before being *handed* off to older ones, otherwise instead of a seamless progression from newbie to veteran you get a disconnect between the experiences of the two and leave newbies that really like your title with the sole option of going to eBay in order to make the jump between player experiences. Hmmm... Without a disconnect, creating a fun experience as you progress and add value to the VW even as a newbie, why would you go to eBay? Eliminating eBay by virtue instead of by force - What a concept!
Posted by: DivineShadow | Dec 18, 2003 at 01:22
Alan>"If the money and items I have today are going to be worth less tomorrow, it's generally not in my best interests to hoard but to use what I have as soon as possible."
Unless I'm mistaken, when money buys less tomorrow its called inflation, but when items are worth less tomorrow it's called deflation.
Typically the net effect of inflation is that people shift their savings from currency to 'hard assets', like a home or property or stocks. However, typically the goal of any economy is that of deflation. This is the net effect of investment, either through increased production or increases in efficiency or productivity. Again, I think we would agree that an economy that produces less today than it did 5 years ago per capita is hardly efficient.
Which brings us to an interesting argument, simply, is inflation the quickest road to deflation? Or, is inflation the 'funner' road to deflation? In MMORPGs clearly the MUD-flation cycle creates a 'treadmill' where you either keep playing or you fall quickly behind. However, I would be a bit concerned if this policy was indiscriminately applied to real world economies, especially those that are quickly aging like Japan. At some point real life societies need to let deflation do its thing and enjoy the benefits of lower prices.
At the same time, if the treadmill in MMORPGs is truly driven by the deflation of goods, then I think there are a number of ways that this can be accomplished, one of which may be increasing the money supply, but without similar increases in gear drops, increases in money supply only make things more expensive, suggesting that players would shift their savings from currency to hard assets, like high end objects that maintain their relative value through times of inflation.
-Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Boston | Dec 18, 2003 at 01:57
Julian Dibbel> So unlike with items, there's no endpoint where everyone has all they need of a particular currency, and therefore you would think that players would ease back on the effort to produce new money in sync with its drop in value, thus keeping the price stable. Yet apparently they don't. Does this mean the market is an imperfect governor of money supply? Or does it just mean the money faucets are sloppy, dropping coins along with desirable loot even when players aren't all that interested in the coins?
Or does it suggest something about the players - that people will, given the opportunity, accumulate money purely for its own sake, even if it's disconnected from any possible use, even if the accumulation itself drives down its value? Does the fact that there's no endpoint to money accumulation actually encourage more (self-defeating) accumulation - not simply to keep up with inflation, but as an end in itself?
I suppose that falls under "the market is an imperfect governor of money supply," but I wonder if that devolves to fundamentally psychological reasons - at least in a game world where a vastly greater percentage of the citizens have transcended certain real-world economic imperatives that would limit their accumulation.
Posted by: Marc Singer | Dec 18, 2003 at 02:20
Julian Dibbel> So unlike with items, there's no endpoint where everyone has all they need of a particular currency, and therefore you would think that players would ease back on the effort to produce new money in sync with its drop in value, thus keeping the price stable. Yet apparently they don't. Does this mean the market is an imperfect governor of money supply? Or does it just mean the money faucets are sloppy, dropping coins along with desirable loot even when players aren't all that interested in the coins?
Or does it suggest something about the players - that people will, given the opportunity, accumulate money purely for its own sake, even if it's disconnected from any possible use, even if the accumulation itself drives down its value? Does the fact that there's no endpoint to money accumulation actually encourage more (self-defeating) accumulation - not simply to keep up with inflation, but as an end in itself?
I suppose that falls under "the market is an imperfect governor of money supply," but I wonder if that devolves to fundamentally psychological reasons - especially in game worlds where most of the citizens have transcended certain practical imperatives and uses for their money.
Posted by: Marc Singer | Dec 18, 2003 at 02:26
I'll post links later if I get time, but this 'banker' apparently has been discredited as the source of the massive extra amount of cash in EQ.
Instead, the current consensus seems to be that the money was made by people making bricks of medium quality ore by buying small pieces for 1 silver each, combining them and then selling the combined product for 6 platinum.
A plug-in macro client was spread by a person calling himself "the one" (I found a screenshot on a message board that he'd made of himself as a level 17 or 27 bard with Green GM name in plane of time... ! ) on a board called forever-hacking and apparently picked up by many people. It allowed scripting of tradeskill combines, and 'warping' from one location to another without having to actually move the character. By leaving this running is how the cash was apparently made.
Now I put this together by reading a few dozen game discussion board postings (mobhunter, the class boards mobhunter links to, gucomics discussion board, and some guild boards linked by those).
"the one"'s plug in macro client apparently also allowed such client side hacks as using /say and /ooc as any name (including the names of npc's or other pcs who were not in the zone), and telling the system you had died so you went back to your bind point without actually dying (gate for melee classes who don't get that ability).
Posted by: Dee Lacey | Dec 18, 2003 at 15:07
My impression is that we have inflation in the real world, not because it's fun (I sure didn't enjoy Carter inflation), but because national banks purposesfully try to ensure a low but positive rate of inflation. Low, because (relative) price stability makes it easier for people to making long-term contracts in the confidence that the money component will retain its value (or, at worst case, depreciate at a predictable rate). And positive, because prices (wages in particular) are downwardly more sticky than upwardly. In other words, if the demand for widget engineers declines, the salaries of widget engineers should fall, but it's hard to cut peoples' salaries; but with a little inflation, all you have to do is keep their salaries constant for a while, which is easier to do.
Inflation exists in MMGs largely because developers aren't willing to undertake the time and effort to build a system that's immune to dupe bugs and macroing--both problems that are very solvable, by the way. In other words, the cure is seen as more of pain in the ass than the problem.
Posted by: Greg Costikyan | Dec 18, 2003 at 15:25
bruce>"Alan>"If the money and items I have today are going to be worth less tomorrow, it's generally not in my best interests to hoard but to use what I have as soon as possible."
Unless I'm mistaken, when money buys less tomorrow its called inflation, but when items are worth less tomorrow it's called deflation."
I think there may be a little bit of linguistic misdirection going on there - maybe it depends on what is meant by "worth"?
The way I see it, items are worth something in monetary terms, worth something in bartering terms and worth something intrinsically (as things to be used). I guess the type of worth I was thinking about here is more as bartering goods and usable items, which I would expect to be influenced by their rarity and so is probably pretty much analogous to currency. With that sense in mind, as items get more common over time I'd expect them to be worth less to players. This'd be particularly the case if you're introducing other rare and powerful items for players to "upgrade" to. I don't really think it's a case of deflation and inflation together (would that make sense anyway?) but rather decreasing value of items of independant of whether or not their price changes. So there's no reason items couldn't cost more and be worth less.
Not sure if the above kicks a hole in the "wondeful insight" but hopefully you get what I'm driving at. Unfortunately I am no more an economist than an Everquester and am again disadvantaged (this time by last night's staff party!).
PS. Thanks for the nice words about the last comment I posted!
PPS. Is there an easier way to nest quotes?
Posted by: al | Dec 19, 2003 at 08:52
Hi Alan,
This is still great insight, and maybe the conclusion that is coming out of this thread is that some players work for money and other players work for stuff, while others work to get things done, or Currency, Rare Items, and Utilitarian Items. And, if we are going to assume that game designers need to keep the progression of the game moving forward for each of these 3 groups, they are then forced to come up with policies that may not appear as solid economic principles, for example hyper-inflation: through rapidly increasing the money supply, hyper-deflation: through rapid commoditification, and centrally planned technology advancement: by mapping out strategic advancements in technology and the yields of such.
From a game designers/gamers perspective, I think your insight is spot on. Hyper-inflation, hyper-deflation and planned technology advancement can be loads of fun, when the right mix is found.
At the same time, I'm not sure if game economies, and most of their monetary/production policies, are applicable to real life economies, if for no other reason than the fact that they have very different objectives.
-Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Boston | Dec 20, 2003 at 11:52
Bruce,
I couldn't have said it better. I agree the insight is still valid. And, like you, I noticed VWs economies have different mixes of flows based on their systems and what could be termed a "culture"; For example whereas EQ players focus on the dropping Platinum their items command and the greater functionality newer items have, UO players have less of an item treadmill and worry about the rising prices of items.
Overall I believe you're right on in doubting the applicability of VW economic policies to the real world. There are so many 'special' factors in them that there is rarely any direct translation to the real world. Even then, I still believe they can be a source of fresh ideas - like a brainstorming session - from which you can later pick a mechanism, take it mentally to the real world and try to figure out what would happen.
Posted by: DivineShadow | Dec 20, 2003 at 13:13
A small nitpick,
Julian Dibble wrote, "Loot doesn't decay...."
Not true for every game, of course. Even in games where items decay, if the items don't decay faster than they are accumulated, then you have the economic problems talked about here.
Meridian 59 actually has a fairly balanced economy, all things considered. I have controls that allow me to increase or decrease decrease the amount of money, items, and magic items created. I can adjust these as the economy requires. Unfortunately, the balanced economy seems to be the least fun aspect of the game for many players. People often complain about the need to go earn money in order to properly build characters and to engage in PvP fights. Further, people did not appreciate the steps that increased the cost of some spells which were the most powerful of the game.
Most people compare the current state of affairs to the "good/bad old days" where rampant economic-related bugs allowed people to have loads of money, to the point where we put a cap on the money a player owned when we patched the game (that is, any player with more than X shillings was capped at X shillings). The process of building a character was simply the matter of getting a generous chunk of money from a friend, buying all the reagents needed, then working up spells in a safe area without risk. Most people see this as being the more "fun" option, even though inflation ran rampant in the game.
I ponder how much of this is expectation created from previous versions of the game, and how much of it is the fact that a balanced economy always has winners and losers. In the inflationary economy, it's generally easier to make the losers feel less like they are the losers.
In the mildly off-topic realm:
Alan Stern wrote, "Another factor is perceived involvement in the process. If players, on the whole, perceive that the game operators are responding to at least some of the gamers' perceived problems with the game, the players are much more easily molified and accepting of the changes."
Er, you are quite wrong. The people who benefit from the change will generally like it, the people harmed will generally hate it, and people that don't know about it won't care about it. Players have a high degree of self-interest in the process. I could nerf an ability according to feedback from players, but the people who were (ab)using that ability aren't going to be happy just because I listened to player feedback. ;P
My thoughts,
Posted by: Brian 'Psychochild' Green | Dec 21, 2003 at 04:51
If you want to prevent inflation in the currency, you might also try making several currencies, or even allowing players to print their own money. This has a number of problems (a currency maker leaving the game being the most obvious), but over time the different currencies would have different inflation rates, different reputations, etc.
"Bad money drives out good money" only if there's one official currency and a few forgeries. Historically, good money drives out bad when there are several competing currencies. I have no idea if this would work in the virtual world with its lower stakes and lack of accountability.
I know TSO allows players to own "banks," but I don't think they use unique currency.
Posted by: AFFA | Dec 21, 2003 at 17:50
Could a switch to a fixed standard (e.g. the old gold standard) cause some interesting side effects on these economies? It would possibly stabilize some of the wild swings evident in the nature of these currencies, while creating a secondary market in the fixed commodity (which by the way would need to be finite and somewhat rare, or we would have an out of control market in the fixed exchange as well). I've always thought it would be interesting to replicate this concept, along with the idea of different currencies within the worlds, similar to the real world situation (e.g. sterling, euro, dollar, etc.). What do you all think?
Posted by: Poster | Dec 29, 2003 at 23:25
> What do you all think?
Does it make the game more fun?
Posted by: DivineShadow | Dec 30, 2003 at 03:48