I don''t think lack of hard currency would suck at all. Do you say to your friends "look at me, I have $32543.12 in the bank"? No, you say "look at me, I have a Ferrari Testarossa and a large mansion". Status is measured by material possessions and the money is just the means of obtaining them in the real world. We only use money rather than direct trades because it is more convenient. But in a game world we can make it convenient to trade assets directly. Trying to ensure everything has arbitrary values, mapped to some currency type, is a very difficult task, and seems pointless when you can let the players do it themselves. As for removing NPC shopkeepers, well there are lots of human players who would happily play traders. Remember that ''shopkeepers'' weren''t exactly common in the settings these games are generally based on anyway. It''s just another modernisation which has been forced into games for some reason or other, probably simplicity. Why shouldn''t everyone in the game be a travelling trader? When you pass someone in the forest, why not ask if they have anything to trade? Set up a little transaction dialog, allowing each person to add or remove items from the trade. After each item is added, both players have to tick the ''agree'' button, then the transaction goes through. Problems of inflation no longer really apply since you are not applying any arbitrary value to anything.

Niphty... you said "And MUD''s.. aren''t exactly the kinda game i was speaking of". Bear in mind that Everquest, Asheron''s Call, Meridian 59, and Ultima Online were all made by people who came from text muds. UO had several people from Legend Mud, for example. Brad who worked on EQ played on Sojourn Mud, I believe, and this led to a lot of controversy since EQ is essentially a text mud superimposed on a 3d engine. In fact, this similarity alone shows that ''real'' games and muds are far closer than perhaps you think And there is far more prior study into economics and player trading on muds, which date back to 1979, than ''MMORPGs'', which do not date back nearly as far

Applying maintenance costs on items is a common way of reducing the amount of spare income. Rather than tax the money they have, tax the use of the items. One problem here is that you discourage spending Leading to more hoarding, in some cases, rather than less. Another problem is of finding the right balance. If maintenance costs are too low, you''ve not solved the problem, just delayed it. People will still earn loads of money, it just takes them a little longer as they are paying to maintain their items. If the costs are too high, you''ll discourage spending, as noted above, and perhaps frustrate players who can''t maintain the type of items they come across. it''s worth trying, but you have to take it carefully, and it seems to me more of a damage-limitation exercise than a solution.

Kressilac... higher level players do hoard. They do this on all the games you mentioned, but especially so on Ultima Online. (I can dig up references from Raph Koster aka. Designer Dragon to confirm this if necessary.) But it is also true that they give out massive amounts of money, to friends, guild members, those who swear allegiance, etc. The analogy here is to compare these high level players to Bill Gates: someone who has so much money, that they can give out small fortunes, and yet still be hoarding masses of it. A lot of money in real terms does come back into the system, but a higher proportion is actually tied up, in many cases indefinitely. A player with 5 million gold pieces rarely spends to take their gold below 1 million, for example.

I feel compelled to mention Reaganomics, but I can''t find a good joke for it. Oh, well. Just the idea is funny enough, right?

I''ve been thinking of my own idea of an economic system in MMORGPs.
I believe that the NPC merchants should change their prices depending on the number of goods they have.
For example if a merchant has a large number of Chainmail suits to sell then the price would be lower then if he only had one or two chainmail suits.
I also believe that these merchants should not reset their supplies and money after 15 min like in UO.
Rather the only way for these merchants to resupply their items would be by either players selling items to them or a caravan would visit the city once every day or so to restock all the merchants. If certain players stopped the caravan by creating blockades or killing the traders then they could cause prices to skyrocket.

This idea does need a bit of refining but in my opinion this is how merchants in MMORPGs should operate.

I think the problem is game economic systems try to simulate the real world. Not that they do it well but that''s what they go for. If I was to make one of these games I''d have money but nothing that costs money. The problem is how to get the money to players in the first place. Maybe the following would work.

When the server starts up the monsters have all the money, players have none. Players kill the monsters and take the money. When monsters die they take the money from the players, and now that monster can be killed for the money. The monsters might have some sort of sharing method (their own economy, maybe the money just sort of magically distributes over time) When the monsters respawn they don''t have anything. Money only has whatever value players place on it. However I don''t think its value will fluctuate wildly, or be zero.

When the server first starts up the players can only kill newbie monsters and thus they won''t have much money, makes sense so far. Later the pioneers will increase the money supply as they level and new newbies make characters. It doesn''t seem like the newbies have any chance of getting money but I think they would. For one thing twinking is very common, why not base the economy on it? Not all players will have to twink to make it work, if a few do it and then buy stuff from other newbies it will work perfectly. Another strong source of newbie money is doing tasks for higher levels. If you make the game so that newbies have something to offer (perhaps a feudal system, maybe necros need blood from their followers, etc..) the money will flow up and down quite nicely.

Eventually most money will be taken from the monsters. At that point adding new players to the server would decrease the amount of money per player. However if you make the low levels just as fun as the high levels I think you can keep it in balance. If your game really is growing in popularity just add more servers. Plus if there are sudden problems just have a gm dragon quest or something. Nothing like killing a dragon to add money to the supply. To take money out of the supply take money from the monsters (they will generally have a little because they kill players to get money)

I don''t like the idea of Monster killing being the only source of Income to players.
They should be able to find treasure maps like in UO, become a skilled worker for example a blacksmith, or be a thief and steal money.
Also, NPC vendors shouldn''t have unlimited supplies of money. A NPC''s only income would be through the sale of goods so it makes logical sense that they would only have money from the goods they have sold. Thus if no one bought anything from a certain vendor he wouldn''t have any money to buy items from players with.

I strong disagree with having trades in games. I do not play games to be a blacksmith. Maybe if they are done right (with a focus on gameplay, and none on realism) then they would work. For example a trade should never fail. Just aquire the parts and that''s it. Otherwise if becomes a tedious skill building thing that gets very boring. No trade should take any significant amount of time. A trade like mining is unacceptable. Maybe if it is something like gem harvesting that would be different, you wander around adventuring and you happen upon a gem which you can then mine. The idea of actually mining is not fun at all. Every part of a game, without exception, should be fun.

Kylotan: Your Bill Gates analogy holds true. I have to agree with you that high level players hoard. I think they hoard only until such a point that it doesn''t matter to them anymore. If they have enough money to fully recover their character upon death, theft, or bad thing... then they will begin to give money away. Higher level players give more items away than money and all of this translates into the effect I was speaking of. It increases the available money to a player at any given level.

My team of developers has come up with a few ways to potentially curb the inflation problem. One of them is repair costs. Items can be damaged. They should be damaged. I can''t believe that a suit of leather armor would survive a fireball spell. In line with this the difficulty of the items acquisition, the power of the item and it magical traits should play a role in damage that happens to it. If you give the player ways to prevent that damage(ie spend money on spells etc etc) you either force them to spend money on prevention or on reaction to item damage.

Another way is to enhance the trade system in the game. Give the player more outlets to trade through. Set up some sort of consignment system where players could adventure to fill their shops with needed items. Increase the shopkeepers AI by allowing them to price goods according to their preferred inventory. All shopkeepers sell everything, but each shopkeeper requires certain standard items to sell. When the items are high in quantity on a shopkeepers inventory, then the shopkeeper will sell them cheaper. When they get low, the shopkeeper can even go as far as to give out quests for experience to players that help replenish their specific inventory.

Some other ideas we had we trade systems that were much more unique to the creator. Try to create some sort of fashion. Allow the creator of the item to brand the item. It would later allow people to say I have a full suit of Kressilac tailored leather armor. If the skills of these tradesmen become known to the public, the prices will fluctuate with the quality of the good. Another idea could be insurance, healing services, curing services, and possibly mail services. On the mud that I programmed for many years players regularly took advantage of being able to send notes to other players online and being able to send notes out to the internet. This capability was just another money sink.

I am beginning to believe that if you want to stop inflation then you have to give the players significantly more ways to spend and use their money. This way money doesn''t pool in players accounts. Keep em needing money but not too poor and inflation will be ok. All in all this means finding creative ways to get money out of the system as fast as possible.

Kressilac

I agree with the post that said trade skills are not fun. The truth is games like UO make them tedious.
But however if trade skills were made quicker to use and more fun to use them I think they would be a great thing to have in any MMORPG.
For example miners could have mining equiptment upgrades. Also mining could be done automaticlly.
In UO one must constantly double click on your pick axe and then clikc on the spot that one would like to mine just to have ones character take a single swing. And even then, one only have a slight chance of find ore, and if one does find ore it is normally a very samll quantity.

To have ones character take another swing the process must be repeated, normally 100 times to get a decent amount of ore.


If the system were automatic where one would click once and ones character would keep taking swings at the cliff until they had found all the ore they needed, the system would work much better.

I disagree with your statement that trades shoudl never fail, they should, but trade skills should raise extreamly fast, so that one could reach the highest rating in that skill in a matter of one hour or less.


Trade skills should, however be a part of every MMORPG, I came across many people when I used to play UO who enjoyed trade skills, and I think it allows players an alternative from everyone being the big hero.

I agree with the post that said trade skills are not fun. The truth is games like UO make them tedious.
But however if trade skills were made quicker to use and more fun to use them I think they would be a great thing to have in any MMORPG.
For example miners could have mining equiptment upgrades. Also mining could be done automaticlly.
In UO one must constantly double click on your pick axe and then clikc on the spot that one would like to mine just to have ones character take a single swing. And even then, one only have a slight chance of find ore, and if one does find ore it is normally a very samll quantity.

To have ones character take another swing the process must be repeated, normally 100 times to get a decent amount of ore.


If the system were automatic where one would click once and ones character would keep taking swings at the cliff until they had found all the ore they needed, the system would work much better.

I disagree with your statement that trades shoudl never fail, they should, but trade skills should raise extreamly fast, so that one could reach the highest rating in that skill in a matter of one hour or less.


Trade skills should, however be a part of every MMORPG, I came across many people when I used to play UO who enjoyed trade skills, and I think it allows players an alternative from everyone being the big hero.

In our attempt to make trade skills more interesting the development team at VenuSoft came up with the bazaar/consignment system. One of the things that frustrates me on EQ is that I can get a pile of stuff that I want to sell and unless the weekly bazaar is going on, I can at most auction my items to 40 - 50 players all of the same level and capability. This creates a player driven market for trade produced goods very tough. To overcome this we thought it would be nice to allow players to place the goods they make from trade skills(or even through adventuring) on the open market that is always there for the players. This increases the value of trade skills in the game because now the items you make can be more readily sold or traded.

I agree that trade skills need some sort of macro to them so that you do do not have to do tedious clicking. I disagree however with trade skills going up to master in about an hour. In the real world masters of a trade are few and far between. This keeps better items from trade skills less common. If everyone could make plate armor by the time they were level 2 then there would be a gross shift in the balance of play and hence the economy doing all the bad things described in this thread. Trade skills should therefore take time and practice.(not time and clicking)

Providing a healthy trade system is a great way to overcome gaining experience through killing. Not everyone is a FPS person stuck in a RPG. RPGs have puzzles, quests, stories, killing, and trade to entertain the players with. Downplaying anyone system over another seems to me to take away from the total experience of an MMORPG.

Kressilac