Idea on world economy and control on money deperciation

I have an idea on the economy. The development team can set up event like city A is going to attack city B, or City A is preparing a defense against evil horde, or even send out a small troop to kill bandits around the area. Then the city NPC will start to buy player crafted item like sword, armor, food, ect. The more item sold to NPC for the event, the better the city will be prepared. Each city or town will collect tax on housing, trade, and resource under its control like mine and farm, and use this money to fund these event. This way these events will not create a large amount of gold and make money depreciate. Also players can contribute to their city and make a difference as a whole.

Also, to control the total money pool and prevent depreciation, there should be some limitation on what players can sell to the NPCs. A lot of my online gaming experience were ruined by the gold farmers who grind endlessly and junks to npc for cash. Each city should have a different goal like preparing a war, building defense, or developing its market. Then according to these goal, NPCs at different city and town will want to buy different goods, for example, weapons for war, wood and ore for defence, trade goods like wool, silk, and jewels for market. NPC will only buy those goods in need at the city. commodity goods like food, wood, and leather will always in need, but the more players sell the the NPC, the lower the price will be. The price can be adjusted on a daily bases. But for weapon and armor, when a certain number is met, the event will close out and NPC will stop buying from players.

For single player off line, the city should be able to produce the good it need according to the story line so a player will be able to play through without learning blacksmith.

The implementation of the city events and limitation on what can be sold to NPC will help promote intercity trade and also put a control on total money pool to prevent depreciation. Because most of the money are created only at the city level (some treasure chests in the wild will not make a big difference), depreciation will never go out of hand.

 

I think you have some good ideas about the items being purchased by NPC's, and maybe being lost (possibly randomly discoverable on a corpse in a dungeon, but not always).

The different city having different needs and thus different prices is a good idea (implemented from way back in games like Elite), this also allows a person to be a travelling merchant, and allow some risk of bandits (NPC or PC) so that again things get taken out of the system by being stolen (pickpocketing?), a portion given away to prevent death (your loot or your life), or dropped and whisked away by bandits. As the PVP can be scaled with selective multiplayermight be a problem - so maybe it could be activated by putting things in a "merchant bag" which has a higher carrying capacity than your normal inventory, but allows PVP or NPC Bandits to be attracted. It may even just cause a slow down of movement or something slightly inconspicuous. This can then allow hiring of mercs for protection (NPC available again, to take money out of the system), and the cycle grows. but this goes off topic.

 

we were talking yesterday in chat as well about the effects of limiting the amount of resources on NPCs, especially if these can be harvested by players.

This would kick in the gears of a harvesting system that would get money flowing back and forth between Crafters and PvE/PvPers by increasing the dependencies of the player types on each other.

The key was to limit the resources sold on the NPCs, not remove them entirely. That would force cooperation and could result in a recluse system where players tend to hoard the resources due to scarcity.

As far as pooling gold back off the servers via "gold sinks", this can be done in quite a few constructive ways. The easiest of which is a Dye House, where players can pay to have their cloth dyed special hues that can not be obtained through rewards or loot drops. Making these particular colors available to all ensures that the money leaves the server. Adding additional hues to loot or rewards is still fine, but it results in money passing from player to player again. I had a system where someone who owned a dye tub, rare or not, could lock it down on their property and it could be used by other players on a pay-2-use basis. The cost was specified by the owner, but also had a cap. This helped the player generate some revenue without over-doing it, and allowed players to create their own custom dye houses.

Again, there are many, many constructive ideas for gold sinks that work quite well, such as the Merc system Maeglin mentioned, or housing tax, or limiting what can be sold to NPCs at all as Silverbee mentioned. In that case, it is advisable to make those non-sellable items useful for something, such as refining or breaking them down for raw resources for crafting or construction.

Stemming the amount of gold introduced to a server is usually problematic for a few different reasons, but a limitation of currency can also force a barter system to flourish.

 

I have a feeling that 'house deeds' will be the most valuable form of currency around. I'd like to see them freely tradeable/sellable, and in certain cases able to be lost by declaring war.