Well, I''m in the design phase of my be-all end-all (role playing) game concept, and I''m considering many different aspects that will give players a fresh perspective and more fun. Throughout all this, keep in mind that the game I am talking about will be of the MMORPG stereotype, with thousands of players interacting and maybe some NPC''s to keep things flowing smoothly. One area that I think would be very interesting and would add an extra dimension to playing the game is in an economic system. I know how in Diablo 2, which I''m using as a base of both good and bad examples, you get a bit of money from monsters depending on how hard they are to kill. Personally, I find Diablo 2 boring because after so long and at a certain level, the monsters are all the same and there are no new skills to learn, and the items you find and the money you earn become pretty much worthless because you end up having all the items you need. I think adding an economic system with real value on the money, a finite quantity of currency, and an honest and/or regulated system of trade could add more depth to the quest for supremacy and fun. Realize that in the context of the game, the economy will most likely be created upon the creation of the world on the servers, with no set value on anything except for some arbitrary values. I have some serious problems with how I should initially start the "economy" off as players join the system. I''m considering implementing 3 market systems: 1) The personal trade - individuals can negotiate a price or barter for whatever items they want to trade away or trade for 2) The auction trade - an individual or group that owns some item can auction it off to the highest bidder for cash. Only one item per auction allowed, with a limit of about 5 or so auctions per individual/group. 3) The retail market - Individuals mining resources, creating items, providing services, etc, could "sell" these items on a retail system where they set a price and the buyers can browse through all the competing providers for the best deal. All these systems are based on a system of credits, where the credits are traded as money for real items. My query lies here: how should I allow the credits to be distributed to players when they start playing the game? If I allocate a certain amount to each player when they start, the effect of the "mule character" I''ve seen used on Diablo 2 will start almost immediately, where a person will create numerous new characters and donate all the resources from their secondary characters to their primary one, effectively giving them an infinite supply of credits and causing the economy to completely self-destruct. If I start out the players with nothing except some low-level equipment like a pickaxe, a coat, some shoes, etc, that nobody else would be interested in paying for, then I could prevent the economy from crashing, but then another problem arises in my head: how the heck is anybody meant to buy stuff if they don''t have any credits? The context of the game would not allow the enemy units to carry friendly currency, although they could carry items worth a small value to some people as raw materials or as actual items. Resources could be harvested: metals, fuel, wood, etc, but I''m not sure who would buy them or how they would buy them. I could add a centralized market regulating body that could subsidize the purchase of materials from individuals, creating the credits necessary to make the purchase. This body could then sell the different resources to individuals and groups who need them, destroying the credits it takes in in exchange for the resources. The same body could pay individuals a defense wage for killing enemies nearby, providing defense mechanisms like gun turrets, service in repairing the base, etc. NPC''s coudl also earn wages at jobs that humans would find dull, like cleaning, building guns out of materials, providing food; then the NPC''s could purchase items off the human individuals, like weapons, armor, rare resources, new mops, anything... That would provide a system-subsidized method of infusing the economy with currency and letting it trickle out to productive players. Please let me know what you see that''s good, what''s flawed, and what you would change personally about my outlay. If I could go into more detail about the game itself and not just the economic system, I would like to, but it''s just too complex and original to share right now...

the most efficient and perfect way to run an economy is run it as an ideal economy, overcome the barriers of space, transport, etc...

Run an automated, massive, dutch (I think that is the term, not sure) auction that never ends. I have no idea how time flows and stuff but do it this way: when you want to sell and item you place it up for sale.

You determine the minimum price that you will sell it for. That price is not shown to anyone, so no one knows how low you will go. The person can choose how long he wants to offer to remain viable. Unless you are into some intense math just give them a set of choices instead of letting them specify exactly how long the offer remains viable. I''d recommend something like five minutes, one hour, and one day as the choices. Then the item disappears from his inventory.

Now we look at it from the point of view of the person buying the object. They can ask the auction house if a particular type item is availible for purchase. Then they make their maximum bid for an item of that type. They do not specify a particular item to bid on (such as Bob''s shortsword) they bid on a kind of item (shortswords in general). They have to pay their money then. Then every five minutes, one hour, or one day, you resolve the auction. This is kind of confusing so let me make an example:

Seller#1 offers a sword, he wants a minimum of $4
Seller#2 wants a minimum of 6
Seller#3 wants a minimum of 8

Buyer#1 will pay up to 5
Buyer#2 will pay 6
Buyer#3 will pay 7
Buyer#4 will pay 8

Now what the auction does is it tries to make the most people happy that is possibly can. Start with the lowest seller. S1 is charging 4. All the buyers are willing to pay that price for it so they have to bid. They all bid 5. Well they are all still willing to pay 5. So now they all bid 6. At this point another seller enters the auction. S1 and S2 are both offering to sell for 6 at this point, and B2, B3, and B4 are all offering to buy for 6. We have more buyers than sellers so the price goes up again. However B2 isn''t willing to go up to 7 so he drops out of the bid. Now we have S1 and S2 offering to sell at 7 and B3 and B4 offering to buy at price 7. The deal is made.

Who didn''t complete a deal? S3 was trying to charge too much so the other sellers got all the customers. If he was the only seller he would have closed the deal, or if he had been willing to sell for less he would have made a sale. It looks like he got too greedy. B1 and B2 should have offered more but B3 and B4 outbid them. So now the auction is over. S3 gets his item back and B1 and B2 get their money back. The other buyers get their extra money back and the item. The successful sellers get their money

It is truely the perfect auction system. You have to make sure to completely automate it. The computer is the one who is doing all the bidding, the players only enter in the max and mins. Always make sure that everyone in the same auction pays/charges the same price for the same item. That is the fairest way to do it and leads to a more efficient system. Notice how both items were sold at the same price, even though the sellers and buyers had different mins and maxs.

Explain to the players that the bigger the auction that they put it into the better deal they will get. So if you do the daily auction you will get the best deal, but it might be a day before the auction resolves. The five minute auction can be for things that are very abundant and low in value. The more sellers and buyers in the auction the fairer it is.

This has more to do with player start conditions then anything else...

first an observation...In those MMRPGs, players seem to start off with such a small amount of skills that you may as well make them babies...course nobody would want to do such a thing [guess thats why I don''t like those games that much...I hate "leveling up"]

Anyway...you could start players off with no money, but have various buisness men "hire" them for a certain wage...for example...right outside the area where new players appear in the game allow farmers, miners, etc. to park wagons picking up new players and takeing them to the field/mind shaft to work for a few hours...the players can gain some money and improve strength, etc..and the framers/miners can have some cheap labor [allowing them to make higher profits at harvest time, etc..

And by not haveing much money there will be little reason for PKers to attack them..well possibly

I like that concept, MSW, and it''s one that I had thought of myself also. But I still don''t know how I would start out the economy to begin with. You won''t have these farms or mines to begin with, when all you have is individuals with very basic skills and equipment. At this starting point, nobody owns land, nobody has advanced equipment or any monetary supply, so each of the individuals would have to find their own way of making money without the aid of anybody else.

Some ideas how this could work: The market system could be subsidized by the regulating body (the base camp or whatever) and when a person tries to sell something, he has to take the price the body is offering or no deal. Then he can buy different items out of that market and use them to suit his purpose. He could pay for an NPC-type character or a human character to build something for him out of the base materials he has.

An example:
Player X starts the game out. He has a pickaxe. He goes out to some rock and starts hacking away at it, uncovering some iron ore and tin. He also goes to the forest and chops down some small trees. He drags all this stuff back to base camp and sells the wood to the resource market to nobody in particular, it goes into the resource pool. He pays with his wood money for someone to refine the ore into iron, then he pays for someone to mold the iron into a better pickaxe. He proceeds to go out into the field, hacking more ore and wood down until he can afford to do something better with his money. And the cycle continues, with him buying perhaps energy-boosted equipment and more...

Tell me if you think that would be feasible, because i have some major queries about it...

dude, I had a post on this "economics in games". See if you can find it.
I have some running source code in C that allows you to manipulate supply and demand of items to see the price fluctuation. I can send it to you if you want. I would be willing to let you use it, just give me credit. Okay?
I''ve been working on a buying system for a game I''m working on, sortof buy x, sell y whatever. I still need to put in a personal inventory (got a buying list though).

One thing that I''m having trouble with (conceptually, haven''t got any code on it yet) is credit cards and gifts between players. Credit cards basically create money from nowhere, and then seem to delete it when the bill is paid. Should this "money" be treated as normal money and allow it to affect stuff like inflation? Or should it be ignored in the economic system so that it doesn''t cause wild changes in the economy?
Also, how should gifts be tracked, especially money gifts? Just ignore them because why track what player has what money, just that their is x total money out of circulation?


remember one thing though, whenever stuff happens in nature, it can be approximated pretty well with some function of e (Euler''s constant, about 2.7 something)

Are you even trying to be intelligent?
'cuz if you are, it ain't workin'

I like the input I''ve got here, it''s all helpful, but I''m still confused about the whole method of making an economy work. This is a more theoretical government question than a game desisn question, but as game design becomes all-encompassing, government, economy, and politics will become involved.

Basically, I understand that the government is assembled to govern (whoa...) the people that set it up. It sets up a system of standards and a regulating body that will keep everybody in check. We have public and private protection, a system of weights and measures, and a monetary system for trading stuff. I understand how the first two work out, but I''m baffled as to the last one. Two major issues here:
1) Where does the money come from in the first place, and how much is made?
2) I''m assuming the government just has money. How does the government accurately distribute the money to the populace?

I''m guessing at some answers here. Lemme know what you think.
1) The government makes money depending on the value of the goods being traded through the government.
2) The government just amasses a stockpile of stuff it can''t use. It will buy things from people and companies so that they can get money and buy stuff either from the government or from other companies or individuals. When it buys something, it just makes the money to make the purchase, increasing the amount of money in circulation. When somebody buys something from the government, it essentially destroys the money being paid to it for the goods/services.

Let me say that I''m in an economics class at school, but I haven''t learned anything about all this stuff yet, so throw me a bone here and help me make a great game.

short history of money:

at first gold was money, people just mined the money.

people didn''t like to carry lots of very heavy metal around with them, so they gave their gold to some guy. That guy then wrote a note that said he would give the gold to whoever returned the note, but it was signed and stuff, so it was harder to steal. It was basically a check. So the person #1 gives the gold to Mr.Bank, person #1 gets a letter of credit. Person 1 gives the letter to person 2 who then goes to the bank and turns it in for gold.

However once people started doing that a lot they stopped turning the letters in, they just used them to buy from the next guy. Eventually all the gold piled up in the banks and people never bothered getting the gold, they just owned it on paper. Then the guys with the gold realized that no one was coming back for the stuff. So they made up more letters and used them to buy stuff for themselves.

So now for every pound of gold in the bank the banker has written like 10 letters of credit worth one pound of gold each. What if all of those people came and asked for the gold at the same time? Well it would probably end up with the banker being beaten to death, but that never happens, well not often. So everyone just goes about using paper money.

After a while governments decide to take control, so they start making all the money. Eventually the government decides that linking the money to gold isn''t that important and they make it so that you are no longer allowed to turn in your money for gold, but by that time no one cares.

So how does the government put more money into the system? I forgot, it was kind of abstract and involved loans to banks I think, or the other way around. For a game I would just have NPCs get free money any time you determined that there isn''t enough money. Or you could just have it appear on the ground, that''s as good a system as any.

when the government needs more money to pay for something they want they do many things:
1. print more, really easy
2. steal it...I mean raise taxes, real easy
3. issue bonds with high rates, causing people to invest and give their money to the government. BUT, the gov needs to pay the bond back after a certain amount of time, plus interest.
4. ask for some from some other country (ala Russia asking USA)

when the government thinks the people need more money to pay for things they need;
5. print more, send it to banks, then lower interest rates on loans. The lower interest rate the more likely people will take 6. loan to make a big ticket purchase (house, car)
7. lower taxes
8. issue jobs
9. just give it away to lazy bums...oh, I''m sorry, I mean wellfare resipients.

most of 5-9 includes printing more money.

when the government thinks that people are spending too much (they seem to think this is bad for some reason. i think the reasoning is that it makes the market unstable, sets it up for a fall) they can do some more stupid $h|7:
10. raise taxes
11. raise interest rates
12. levy new taxes
13. stop issuing bonds

but of course, they don''t stop giving money to the freeloaders, they just give them more, instead of getting them off of their ashes and getting a job. (disregard my welfare rant, it was only intended towards the type of people that abuse the system)

Are you even trying to be intelligent?
'cuz if you are, it ain't workin'