Economic Stability

In another forum, and another topic, I <a href="https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=petition-against-the-auction-house-approach/#post-3811">lay out in ridiculous detail</a> why I expect the in-game monetary inflation to spiral upward at pace more or less determined by how much gold is dropped by sword-and-arrow catchers or doled out as a reward for being a good person or for stabbing the guy carrying the priceless artifact or whatever. I also list a prime example of a game that self-regulates its economy "invisibly" to the common player and still feels fair and balanced for the little guy. I'm posting about this because it's important to me as a crafter and a trader for the game to function in a way that presents a challenge and an opportunity, even if only a fictitious opportunity.

Now, how can that example apply to this game to avoid having to exponentially increase land taxes or resort to other drastic measures to funnel money back out of the game so that prices will remain stable? Well, it's not necessarily easy, it can conceivably be done mathematically with how the game rewards you on average compared with the repair rate for appropriate gear for the level, but when you involve players in-game, some people will exhaust their supply of equipment without making appreciable progress while others will tend to accumulate money and/or items since there's not usually a big hole to swallow up all that extra cash by drawing the coins inexorably toward the vortex at the bottom. At least, there isn't unless you charge asinine amounts of money for basic game services players will use all the time, the price point of which are generally static.

What exactly would the regulated economy look like? Ideally, while also considering some buffer amount, it'd be best if the material of all types entering the game kept pace numerically with the material exiting the game. This might mean a lot of things with respect to how the spoils of war and the rewards of virtue appear in the game. Maybe more scarce, or plentiful, but requiring a high number of resource items to produce usable items. Times may be tough at one point, while at some point after tax day, maybe an event occurs (Uh, apemen overrun a gold mine and run off with the nuggets...kill them and you can keep the gold!) or maybe the game just gets more generous overall. Anyway, this would all be regulated on the back-end while playing online, so fewer loot occurrences might be better, and might make finding caches more exciting to begin with, not to mention make the gypsy's offer of her wedding ring hold some value of temptation instead of being a dismissible or valueless gesture that can safely be ignored.

Everyone wants to be rich, of course, but what do you do once you are rich in game, anyway? I'd be interested in all of your opinions on whether an economy with regulated scarcity would bother you or make you feel like your items had higher value, so tell me what you think.

 

You seem to have good insight, but I must admit I'm lost and therefore unable to provide anything insightful in return. The best I can do is provide this observation: you wrote all that with just 14 sentences.

 

That's because I was getting sleepy.

 

I too am interested in how the Economy will be kept stable.
As someone who will be limited to a few hours play a week, I don't want to find a situation where be unable to afford the simple reagents and weapons needed to enjoy online play, just because someone else is hoarding them all and inflation is rampant.
I have backed because we can go fully offline if the economy crumbles. I would however like to try out the "selective multiplayer" I hope this works as well as its theory as I hate the spam of general MMO's.

 

Full loot=problem solved
Monsters should loot relevant items from players.
Players should die and lose things often.

Limiting the amount of drops will punish good and bad players. Since it IS a game, let's not punish the people who play it well.

 

'Full Loot' doesn't remove anything from the economy at all. It just shifts it around until the most powerful entity claims it.

I'd like to see a system where people have the opportunity to part with thier gold on a more permanent basis:

1) Character bound equipment: Once you use it, it's like a car; it loses half or more of it's value and can only be sold to NPC vendors.
2) Housing damage from siege: You have to pay to repair your house after the event. Some items may have to be replaced as well.
3) Theft by NPC: NPC picks your pocket, or maybe if you keep too much stuff in your house it becomes too much of a juicy target.
4) Wear and Tear: Stuff just wears out and can't be replaced. Reagents go stale, sword breaks, stuff like that. Need to spend gold on constant upkeep.
5) Brigands on the overland map: If you camp or wander around, be prepared to be attacked. This is along the lines of what Acrylic300 was saying, except I propose that the bandits slip into the night and are gone.
6) Pay to Advance: Some lessons, spells, feats, powers, whatever cost money, especially the higher level ones, and you need to spend some gold to acquire them.
7) Room rental: Sort of like home ownership, except that it's just a room at the local in or flop house. You still need to pay gold for it, so it's a valid sink.
8) Limits on what can be charged for items: I hate to think of this one, but if nothing else, a hired vendor could be linked to the invisible 'world wide market' and could prevent a player from marking an item up too high. Not an ideal solution, but it would keep things reasonable.
9) Storage limitations: You can only have so much gold and stuff before you have to get rid of some of it or start passing up the loot. We are not talking about the virtual money that is held in real banks remember, but 'physical' gold that must be stored in locations and protected as well.
10) Random events that everyone is dinged on: The bank is robbed, everyone loses a percentage of their gold. A fire sweeps through town and all houses are damaged. Vendors go on strike and demand more money this month. The king levies a tax this month to pay for the bridges that got washed out in a flood. The dragon hears about how wealthy a certain individual is and decided to expand his hoard. The list is endless here as long as everyone is subject to it.

None of these things are really so harsh that you can't bounce back or in some cases ignore them, but they will make sure that a character and his money are parted.

 

There were many times in UO when I got myself in such deep trouble that I could not recover my belongings on my corpse. When I think of full loot I'm also meaning that we should not respawn after death with anything. That's one thing that really irked me about WoW. I do however, like the idea of extra equipment damage after death, or any number of other monetary punishments for death.

Full loot also helps because the looters want rid of it quickly and sell it to npc vendors for 10% of what its worth. Easy come easy go mixed with a little guilt maybe.

If loot drops change over the course of the game it's going to have an adverse effect on new players. Death penalties will effect everyone. Random evens will not teach anything to anyone but will at least be fair.

 

Random events might be cool if you could buy insurance. I'm all for something if it teaches a lesson.

 

Crafting as a viable profession and play style is a stated goal of the game. To generate cyclical demand, items will decay (and I believe it was stated they decay more on death) irrespective of the usual pay gold and/or hire a crafter for repairs mechanic. (Hilariously, the next few <em>paragraphs</em> are the corollary to this statement.)

That said, it would be incredibly poor form if usable items were common loot from normal monsters, as with Diablo. Even if equipment predictably dropped from boss-type enemies, as with World of Warcraft &amp; al., if items can be reliably used for weeks at a time and you get new drops once a week, that would tank crafting viability such that the economy could barely support 5% of the player base as crafters, and crafting may be relegated to vanity items. I predict that the percentage of time you will see an actual, usable, equippable item drop from an enemy in online mode will be 1-5% of what you would normally expect in other games, <em>if that even happens</em>. So, what's likely to be there instead of items? I'm going to go ahead and guess it's probably going to be gold.

Even if it's not gold coins, it'll be gold nuggets or gems or other valuables fungible for currency as with Ultima. Or, it will be other "vendor trash" style items for which you will also receive currency. Even if it's items that you can only sell to other players and you can only use to make equipment, "how much drops" has broad effects on whether or not crafters will be able to buy it from you at all. That is 100% of the problem that myriad game economies face, because the endless pursuit of progression will invariably lead to "drop inflation", or else face complaints that monster D isn't giving more reward than monster A, even though D is harder than A by three tiers.

Before we even start having a discussion about gold/item sinks like fees and item loss on death, you need to intellectually absorb the fact that how the game rewards the player for playing it has far-reaching effects on the game's economy. Even if you don't think the game's economy is important, playing online will make you involved. Even if all you do is just play the game and also refuse to loot and sell "trash items" that are used for crafting. The degree to which <em>that</em> has an impact on existing game economies would probably be astounding if it was actually measured. It could possibly tank a game economy based on monster drops if items decayed in the same game.

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Let's also consider what an individual crafter needs to do in order to facilitate the items adventurers would need in lieu of finding them in dungeons. I've heard say the statistic of 20-25% of players in most MMO's go for crafting/trading, which is a pretty high value that I'm somewhat surprised about. That comes out to roughly 3 or 4 adventurers per crafter.

Let's say adventurers have 9 non-consumable equipment slots they need to fill and items decay every three weeks for an average player. That works out to each crafter gathering the materials for and making 9-12 equipment items per week, which sounds like a fairly small number (though, it does exceed the number of crafted items I was able to sell in WoW per week by an order of magnitude, even as a max level crafter with raid-drop recipes). Keep in mind though I'm sure there are also consumables, decorations, vanity items, intermediate parts, and many other things that people will need to craft. If the reliability of items were scaled back any further than say, a week, people would complain about gear being too brittle. On the same token, lasting any longer and I might sell only so many pieces per month, which would make the crafting game a long, boring waiting game.

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Now, all of <em>that</em> said, this next part should be easily and well understood already... First, let's say that the average player can progress through the story-mode of the game and do some side adventuring without dying, or at least that you don't lose everything. Let's also say that in this game, using a probability-driven loot drop engine like most other games, they can predictably earn enough "stuff" to get a full set of equipment and still cover the cost of "other stuff" and have "a little extra" every week or two weeks. I would consider that reasonable. If you set it up so that all their equipment decays through normal play without dying in about three weeks, then every nine weeks an average player will use three sets of equipment and have money to buy roughly another 2-6 full sets of equipment and "a little extra * 9". This might make them rich, or it might not, it's hard to say. When I was playing WoW end-game, doing daily rep grinding and selling crafted consumables and raid BoE's for months on end, even I did not have gold on-hand equal to my equipment value.

Let's say to check inflation that we implement a full loot/item loss mechanic. How often should people die? Dying more than twice in 9 weeks could conceivably wipe out all of the average player's savings. In a persistent game, that would be pretty devastating, many people would quit in anger and disgust. It is plainly obvious that this will disproportionately punish bad players beyond the normal lack of reward that they're probably used to, and it may in fact make the game unplayable and unfinishable.

Even not considering that, if average players die say twice a week, crafters will need to pump out roughly 50 equipment pieces a week just to make the game playable, or else the game will need to butt into the economy and furnish (good) equipment, and that's a slippery slope. That might be easy...or that might be hard; some people might be that industrious, but I'm willing to bet we would see lots of empty vendors and frustration. It might be cheap...or it might be really expensive, if the prevailing level of equipment requires things that take a lot of time to collect using a probability drop gathering system. And, that is, of course, supposing that players are willing to cope with losing everything they have that's not in the bank over and over. The vast majority of people aren't, contrary to what griefers might believe. It'll take many item decay iterations and much money stashed in the bank before most PvE players will begin to accept PvP encounters with actual loss involved.

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Lastly, suggesting full loot and monsters looting players as an economic balancing solution comes off as dubious, to put things nicely. Maybe you're not a griefer, but that doesn't matter a whole lot to me honestly, you clearly haven't thought it through. Beyond that, I've grown past sticking it out with games that take away everything when you die, even if it's not permadeath. I don't have three months off out of the year, I can't just muddle my way through the hours between 8 and 3:30, and I don't get to take out loans on the public dime to cover my lifestyle expenses so I can retake the class if I play games instead of doing a research project.

Whatever means other players have to cover the cost of the 10-20+ hours of play time they lost from dying, I don't have that. My time is too valuable, and the dev team appears to understand that perspective. You are free, however, to play other games with that mechanic, of course, you just won't find me (or many other people) there.