The Value of Gold

Part of the problem is that it won't ever be made to work exactly the same way a real economy works, and it will be the same problem we saw with the ecology system in UO all over again with players instantly killing everything in the forests.

 

Actually the real problem is that each time a creature is killed gold is minted into the game. There must be an equal amount subtracted, somehow, or the amount available will rise exponentially and it's value will sink accordingly. The more people have, the less it's worth.

Driving factor: There are activities which players will deem necessary to complete and many of those players will be willing to pay money to bypass a perceived "grind" thus setting a value action potential. The player will be willing to pay a sum, and the seller will be willing to offer the gold for a sum, and the two will have to intersect at a reasonable rate or there can be no sales. The rate will always be more than the buyer is wanting to pay but less that the seller wants to receive. The rate will only drop over time as players become more efficient at collecting and hording gold.

Danger: If gold becomes so easy to obtain that it barely seems worth selling then you can expect people to avoid performing mundane activities at all, and the game will suffer.

During the early years of Ultima Online I roleplayed a blacksmith merchant. I spent my spare time in the mornings mining ores to craft into fine suits of armor which I sold at Brit Forge in Britannia. A steady stream of players wanting repairs kept me extremely busy along with the occasional order for a complete set of armor in a particular metal. My name affixed to said armor all parties were happy.

The game introduced other methods of making repairs, and set a nominal price for such repairs at 50 gold. Later items became insurable. The economic factors in setting prices were destroyed and I could suddenly sell my ores for 500 time more than I could get for using them in a repair or item sale. New crafting quests made everyone want to have a blacksmith so materials ran dry, for a while.

Over time materials became cheap and plentiful again but the true West Brit Forge Blacksmith was a thing of the past, obsolete and not worth the time anymore. The value of repairs was gone and the prices earned from crafted items were so depressed that you lost money by doing so. Then came the fateful "******** land" known as trammel which completely removed all risk and the game changed forever. It surged at first as players moved to the new lands and worked on their hordes of loot and increased their wealth but the playerbase soon realized that there was not much to spend it on and no thrill left to be had, at least not on the scale of the old dangerous lands. A mass exodus from the game began, it never recovered.

I remember a span of three weeks in which bots ran wild, dupes ran wild and OSI did nothing. In three weeks gold went from $17 per million gold to $0.80 per million gold. A mass banning occurred which removed trillions of gold from the game, and deleted some surprising accounts including those of some of the most prominent websites at the time, but it was too late. Do not ever get lax in busting cheats, bots and dupes or there will not be an economy! This is hard to do, they are very clever, and it seems counter-intuitive to ban accounts when earning cash for a monthly subscription is the goal but it's an absolute must.

Things to be learned
- Do not remove all risk from a game, no matter how much the players say they want that
- Do not attempt to set prices on NPC merchants if you truly want fair trade to flourish
- Do not get lax in busting cheats since the entire economy can be turned upside down in a week(ask Ingotdude from UO circa 1999/2000).
- Do not allow a few to control a majority of total sales(gold/cash or trade), everyone's vendor should return in a search
- Do not allow bots to go unchecked, there is no control possible if someone can set up thousands of bots to auto-play(and they will try).

ULTRA IMPORTANT: RARES: Also required are items which are unique. SotA seems to know this by offering a lot of one time only items but these will not carry the game since they will be unobtainable to later players. Attainable items that are unique will require a lot of gold to purchase and there needs to be some mechanic to create enough of these to appease a wide range of player. Ultima Online solved this issue by introducing player event items with different hues and names. Clothing being the most popular but decorative being equally fun. There also needs to be a mechanic in which to preserve these!! As can be seen in Ultima Online when players leave the game their worn or banked items are deleted and as such a lot of rares left the game without being obtainable again. There is no thrill in obtaining "true rares" if you know the majority no longer exist.

I do not envy whoever will need to strike a balance with these rares. Too many or too few destroys the feel of the hunt. It's also not obvious that during early periods you must create rares WITHOUT warning people these are rares or the market will not naturally evolve and players will be turned off. Some players are being turned off by the overuse of "rare" and one time items for special people only in the current store, it's already treading on overdone. The fact that its helping the game get developed is opening purse strings but that won't be the case later on.

Here is a VERY interesting read on the laws of virtual world (in general and in their economies) written by a couple of law students : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=402860

 

No it's not (technically). Lot of creatures don't drop gold and without much of an economy implemented we can't make any definitive statements as such just yet. They could (hopefully) go with some form of limited finite system where gold is pulled from the world pool in the same way that loot is supposed to be but right now none of that is implemented.

 

Eggs at 500 may be unrealistic, but sufficiently rare virtual eggs will get that price. Or take the horse dung at 1M gp in UO - presumably it was ultra-rare horse dung after all. Not too surprising if you see some unique, strange modern arts pricing in the real world... Compared to this, SotA is a much more transparent market - real-world arts will only sell high with enough hype and attributed value, whereas in SotA everybody knows what's rare and what is not, and rare = cool, even if it's decorative manure...

But back to, say, the eggs as desirable commonplace things. So in SotA, they just need to be commonplace enough as items to never achieve high-price status - relative to other items, that is. Put in rare coloured ones that only the devs can give that colour (unrealistically in an alchemical/magical world), and you'll have exorbitant prices. Here's where the rare constellation & skill items come in, which will make a crafter rich!

As for the gold, well - if it's a commonplace thing flowing through the economy like water, it'll be quite worthless. The association "gold = rare valuable" is too much of an earth thing, probably. Personally, I still think of adequate loot for low-tier monsters in UO terms (low-tier = Ettin, Troll), meaning ~100 gold per drop. SotA's gold is much more valuable by comparison, as it's much less dropped. Dyes are an amazing luxury in SotA (UO: 3 gp for all colours the engine would support except true black!), and there's a lot of these little differences (quarter pounder vs. Royale with cheese, anyone? ). And yet, at the same time I would like to see my little luxuries as a non-hardcore player as well, and ideally without paying real bucks for every single one of them... many more tweaks to do here I guess! Don't envy the devs for this design challenge...

Cheers
MdG

 

As for gold, this is a topic I touched on in a much older post, which I do think could have some merit. In this case, I'd suggest dropping the name of the metal from the currency's name (gold coin, silver coin, copper coin, etc.), & go with a generic currency name that doesn't indicate the coin's composition, such as: guilder; florin; penny; shilling; thaler; royal; crown; mark; stater; groat; etc.

The encumbrance of currency wouldn't have to be a 1-to-1 matter because of the feasibility of the coins being minted in higher-value varieties, such as a 5-gp coin, a 20-gp coin, & so on. I also think that this could allow for a variety of crafting recipes for coinage that would be more than "just a lot of gold smelted down into coins" & so on; lower cash yields could come from doing the process with copper, and higher cash yields could come from other recipes.

Also, getting the recipe to create coins could be a quest in its own right, so as to get the right alloy blend for the currency & not getting busted for counterfeiting. Pure gold isn't ideal for daily coinage—it's too soft, hence why copper, silver, and other metals were thrown into the mix, which in turn affected the color of the metal (as seeing samples of white gold and rose gold compared to normal gold; Wikipedia's articles on metal fineness & colored gold are helpful reading).

 

This proves a frequent statement of mine. MMO gamers would buy a pile of worthless **** if it was labeled rare. Nice to know there is actual evidence to support my statement.

Wait for the economy to balance closer to release. In ancient cultures many items considered worthless today held great value. Salt for example.

 

Just because somebody puts a price on something doesn't make it worth that much to the economy, until someone else actually buys it.

More likely, that was just a way of saying HEY LOOK AT ME I HAVE A RARE PILE OF DUNG. Putting it up for sale for an absurd amount just makes it more visible. You really want to keep it, but if someone cares to buy it at the absurd price, at least you get a lot of cash for it.

 

No someone actually bought it.. but the point isn't "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" but it's an example of how little value gold had at that point in UO. So many people had that much gold to throw around that it just wasn't worth much to anyone.