MMO Economics

#21 Ben, Excellent point on the scarcity of ability. This is just another one of those things that is good for the economy but players dislike. The feel like they paid for the game so should be able to do anything in the game. Their expectation needs to change. In truth they are paying to participate in a game, where they can only perform a subset of the entire game.

Hedge, I don't know you playstyle but the real problem with EQ and other mudflation is that how it affects new players. When EQ first came out, and good equipment was hard to come buy things are different. There was an orc you could beat around level 15 or so that sometimes had some chainmail armor. This armor was considered very good at one time and players would wear it well into the 20's levels. However as this armor accumulated in the system, level 9 and below players could afford to simply buy this armor. This creates a game of ever better equipment. So early players work very hard and get invested in the game, while new comers have it easy and do not become so invested. the problem here is that players that don't feel invested are more likely to leave. This creates a player retention problem. The player base Churns and in the end the game gets an ever shrinking player base. I heard EQ recently combined many servers because the populations had gotten so low.

Jon, Labor is scarce in MMO's Characters almost always speacialize in combat. Clerics to heal, Warriors to take the brunt of the dammage, Shammen casting buffs all around, Wizzards and rangers Dealing ranged damage. Ben's point is that Crafting (which is far more important to the economy than combat) is almost never speciallized. Everyone can be a master blacksmith. I think this is the point Ben was trying to make.

I also like the idea of dropping less valuable and rare items when inflation is occuring. In addition to this merchants should pay out less money for the goods players choose to dump. It should even be able to get to the point where some items are so worthless players can only drop them on the ground and let them decay. Eventually enough value will leave the system that good rewards start dropping again, and merchants raise the prices they pay for stuff. Harvested/mined resources should have similar restrictions as loot from mobs.

Ben, you mentioned a skills system like elder scrolls. I've not played it so I don't know what its like, but I've imagined a system where lets say their are 100 skills. A player can have only a handfull like maybe 5 at a time. Lets presume a player is a master in all 5 skills. If they want a new skill then they must retire one of the five. Say they retire from smithing. Later if they want to start smithing again, their skill is back at zero and they must work their way back up. Such a system creates scarcity of labor.

As far as spawns buying items off players for loot, with money paid into sinks, what happens when the buy rate exceeds the rate that players sink money? spawns can't afford to equip themselves. And what about the player who sets the price way above the fair mark, but the spawn purchases the $100 sword for $1000... This just gets too ugly to me....

I'm running out of time, I'll have to post again later.

#22 @William - Yes, I forgot the vendor aspect from my original post, but I did mean to say that vendors would pay less for items during inflation and costs of items would go up. This would be regulated at a certain 'level' so that noobs can still afford stuff. High levels are the ones with the money and are the ones causing the problems, so we should focus on THEIR uses and not the people just coming into the game. Of course, you aren't going to say that sword a is $50 to a level 60 and $25 to a level 20, but you should make sword b $100 for level 60 and not even buyable by a level 20. Items should all be ranked. You should not be allowed to purchase or equip anything that was meant for high levels.

In my system, which is basically a 'skill' based system you are only allowed a certain number of 'skill boxes' and have to forfiet some to get others when you run out of skill boxes you can obtain. People CAN specialise in crafting professions. Don't allow anyone to be a crafter, allow anyone to be BASIC crafters and if they want to actually build GOOD stuff they are going to end up not being very combat oriented. This means that the combat people need the crafters and the crafters need the combat people.

I agree that people don't like the idea of being FORCED into using other people to get what they want, but like you said, we need to change their thinking. Most people who purchase a car have no clue how to maintain it. When they buy it they KNOW they are going to have to rely on someone at some point to give it tune-ups, change the oil, wash it, detail it, and eventually fix it. This is accepted because everyone is used to having to do it.

Some people might quit right away or not even sign up to play if we have a system that makes you rely heavily on the rest, but the GAME and ECONOMY will be stable and balanced enough that when the people who stick it out finally realise that the game overall is a better experience, they will start bringing friends in and soon you have a community that not only enjoys the new system, but will STAY playing longer.

If enough MMOs go with this model, which if one is succesful they probably would, then before you know it everyone will ACCEPT this model and not even give it a second thought.

#23 @William-

"As far as spawns buying items off players for loot, with money paid into sinks, what happens when the buy rate exceeds the rate that players sink money?"

You would have to balance the spawn rates of the various power levels of mobs to the rate of money sinks. In SWG they did this with the mission payouts and the money sinks.


"And what about the player who sets the price way above the fair mark, but the spawn purchases the $100 sword for $1000... This just gets too ugly to me...."

You could use a price function based on the supply and demand of human players to come up with a market clearing price. You can have mobs only buy at that price. Since demand from mobs would equal that of the players, those that would charge exhorbitant amounts would never sell thier goods and be forced to lower the price. Ideally you would write a demand function for all npcs and have them participate in the economy like any other player would. You can look to TES: Oblivion for guidance on that.

#24 One of the problems that I see is how do you calculate the adjustment made in relation to player levels? If you reduce the reward paid out to higher level players and subsidise the payout to lower level, and its assumed that tougher monster (fought by higher levels) have higher rewards... doesn't that really just flatten the reward curve? Does that make sense or do we need graphs (I hope not. you all seem smart enough). This makes for an intersting question.....

Should higher level players have more economic opportunities than other players?

Surely there would be some benefit. Say you have your basic level 1 monster. A Rat. A level one player can probably kill a rat every ten minutes. But a level 30 player could probably run through and kill a rat every minute. So that player could obtain the reward ten times faster. This could be a problem in that lower level players would be hurt because the high level players farming rat fur or whatever.... So either this would be accepted, or a function would have to be added to deny a reward to players fighting out of their appropriate level range. No rat fur for you! Of course if such a function existed level 30 players would have to fight level 30 monsters to get a reward. The question then becomes, "how different should the reward for killing a level 30 monster be from killing a level 1 monster? Should the be very different at all?"

Having crafting components that are available only from low monsters, but are needed by higher level crafters creates an economic opportunity for low level characters. Still some players will create alts just for farming these resources. So to eliminate alts, you need to set up single character servers, but are single character servers really good or bad? Ben, you seem familiar with SWG, and If I recal they have/had single character servers... Do you have any insight on that?

#25 SWG had single player servers from the get-go. I think they allowed multiple characters on a a server after the combat revision. I have to hand it to those guys. They basically changed the game after years of playing because they thought it was the right thing to do. A pretty gutsy move if you ask me.