Title basically explains it. Basically this is it: You change income taxes, per year, and you also get profit from state-made (NPC) stores in your game. Each store, basically maps a supply and demand curve, so if more people are buying the uber-sword-of-death then you up the prices. This would help curve some of the quirkier aspects to inflation (like "Hey i can go and beat up a lv1 monster for $10,000 but the shop-keep only wants $0.01 for the uber-sward-of-death!! sweet.) it would also stop too many people from getting it (items break after a while, so they need to be replaced. as more people want the items, they get more and more expencive.). Now, you take the in game money from your npc stores, and you give all the profit to the government. You also charge tax on wenever money (or items) are transfered from person to person (through a simple contract system). You would have a simple contract system, just as a nicity. Basically like a scripting language, it would be like: when the giant ogre of the east (id #12355) is dead, give jimmy $10,000. Contract expires some/day/later. Signatures of the two parties here. it would make this very easy, you simply remove your portion from the amount. You also use a similar contract modell for ownership, so the land from here to there is mine. ID of deed. Signature of your company, signature of person. Deed to 100 villagers, ID of deed. Signature of your company, signature of person. All the signatures are of the digital variety, and are unforgable (so someone can't plant deeds. You could also have a very very very low tax which taxes actual money. Now each and every person needs at least some money, once they run out, they need to go and get some more, or stop playing the game (RL money -> Game money exchange rate is very heigh, and theres a limited supply of game money.)). I would propose this buisiness model. You have bill accountability (you basically have records which say that bill x was it the possition of person y for the period T0-T1. So each person has money, which is made up of virtual bills. Each bill has a serial number which can be traced, so that you can't buy something with a bill that belongs to sone else. There is a finite amount of bills, which gets greater from time to time (per anum?) You basically have an exchange center, which goes and uses a similar ai to the stores, to go and buy and sell game money (because there is a limited amount of game money, and it needs to circulate thourouly). you get money off the transaction, taxes, and the stores, to pay for your game. So, you make the game, and give it away, and you set up a few servers in a few of the major contenents, and smaller clusters of servers, financed by individuals in other parts of those countries (to provide extra grunt to deal with a lot of users). But they all report back to your main servers, they keep the time for their zones, they make sure nothing goes wrong, and they keep all the economic records. You then controll all of the main servers, which controlls the economy. you also get the money from the game, which you use to finance it. You can then go and give back some of the money that you have remaining (sweet profits), for items in the gameworld, for monsters, and to finance quests and other importaint events. From, Nice coder

I'm a little out of sorts fighting off a cold bug, so forgive me if I'm off base. But. Why do I get the feeling in this model that if I project ahead several months after release certain power-leveling players will end up controlling the game economy by just hoarding cash? With the cash removed from circulation, cash itself becomes a commodity - especially for the newer player who, as time goes on, will find it increasingly harder to obtain decent prices?

At first I saw this compared to a commodities market, but after reading it again I feel like cash IS the commodity. If a player manages to control the flow of cash and manipulate it so that they're getting a percentage of other people's dealings...they'll make a mint, and with a limited cash production the poor newer players will stay poor.

But again, I'm not married to this mindset - it's just an initial reaction.

Yes if people start hording cash, the value of money will skyrocket.

But the thing is, is that they can't do that.

Eventually all the money will return to the government, through the taxes, or (this is the quicker way) through the stores.

Now things break down, items destroy themselves, and you use up potions, so you eventually need to buy it off somebody, or else you end up without anything.

Now the poorer new players could start off in a job of sorts, basically killing monsters or other players, and looting them for items. they then go to one of our stores and sell the items for cash.

Now, either way the storee gets a profit (for paying the player less then its actual monitary value), and as such, when it resells the item to another player, it can make a profit.

Now that we have that profit, we go and we can use it to make more items for monsters.

What we could/should do, is go and use our ability to use money like this, to help moderate the economy.

So, we could sit on a few million game dollers, so that they start going out of circulation, therby raising its value.

We could also make a few million game dollars, so that it lowers its value.

And also maybe change the tax brackets, and taxation per bracket, so that if someone were hording money, they'd get taked at 99c in the dollar.

From,
Nice coder