Most of the design threads discuss things like story and combat. I just finished reading a very interesting article on the economy of Ultima Online at http://www.totempole.net/uoecon/uoecon.html by Zachary Simpson. It occurred to me that I really hadn't thought of how much work/design went into the mechanics of a game's economy. This was the only decent article I have found so far on the subject and was wondering if anyone else had some insights or links to articles that might be of use/interest? I regularly play Asheron's Call, and a recent bug exploit in that game caused all sorts of havoc with the game economy. After reading the Ultima Online article, it's apparent that probably all MMORPG's at one time or another have or will experience this problem, either due to a design problem or a bug or both (haven't played Everquest, so don't know what the economy is like in that game - any EQers out there care to comment?). I am working with the other folks at 21-6 (http://www.21-6.com/) on a MMORPG of our own, and as we plan on having a significant portion of the game rely on a strong economical model, this subject is particularly interesting. Any thoughts? Edited by - Mandrake2112 on January 21, 2001 12:34:27 AM

good luck!
Honestly, it''s impossible. You see.. economists say there is no "perfect" economy.. at least none in a limited-resource world. But if your world is unlimited.. then you have a bad game, right?
The reason star trek gets away with the no one really has to work thing.. is the replicators. Why work when there''s a thing which can simply put raw molecules together in the appropriate way such as to make anything. Why it takes forever to build a starship.. or why they would cost anything means nothing.. cause they don''t! it''s all a matter of someone who loves their job going in and designing it. Then someone else who loves their job desgining the electronics.. etc etc. If it were real life, it''d be on a budget.. and thus wouldn''t be as good.
So.. now you look at things and think "gee, could my game do that?" no.. not in an MMORPG or any MMO. If infinate money is possible.. then there''s no end to how high someone can raise their money. This means that there''s no way in which you could keep prices from inflating to astronomical units. This happened in a game i was in, an MMORPG. People were selling things initially for a gold. A year later, it was 500 gold for the same thing!
So.. what if you have no money.. what then? People who make things have no incentive to make them! there''s a problem inherant in anything you try to do. So your best bet is try to follow what the US govt follows. You make new money, but you keep inflation down. You''ve got to find ways to take money out of the system. In a game, you could have all the stores run by the govt. Thus when you buy something, money is lost from the system, but an item of value X is gained. The item isn''t worth as much anymore, so effectively.. money is lost. That''s how you control inflation.
Read up on any econ system you want and they''ll all claim to be perfect. But in truth.. there is no perfect one which has money or anything bartering. Only a completely free system is going to be perfect.. and only if people have a reason to work. Socialism is the key.. and because you can control the NPCs, you could make them work. But.. then you have to limit supply in the game. And then people start bartering.. so.. boom, the system dies already. It takes unlimited resources in the end

J

While doing some preliminary design work on our MMORPG I stumbled across this very article. It was a welcome read... mostly because it supported our design of the economics engine.

Our design had ''pools'' of objects and ''pools'' of money that would be used for the spawn of new mobs or would be repopulated with the loss or destruction of objects within the game. In fact the mobs themselves were going to be created (released might be a better word) from these same ''pools''. When money was used to buy something from an NPC - we basically took this money and placed it back into a money pool. When this same NPC bought something from a player - we took money from this same pool.
Each of the mobs had a min-max ammount of money that they would request from the money pool when they were spawned. If there wasn''t enouhg money. The mob was spawned w/o money. We used this as an alert that there may not be enouhg money in the world. This leads to other checks on the system... as you can see this could get complicated - fast.

It also had two affects: One, we created object once and only once (less stress on the server) and Two, we could control the rate of object/money/mob inflation. Sadly we never got to put our preliminary design to any test.

I would have to say that the ole'' ''KISS'' adage should be prevelent in the design of any POW Economy. If you try to model your system after the real world or try to follow some economic system - your doomed. There are way to many factors that need to be checked and rechecked to keep the system in balance.

Most important is balance. When objects are inflated and money is inflated you need to have a way to correct the inflation. When objects are rare, or money is hard to come by - again you need to correct this and fast.

Good luck to you,

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Making a perfect economy is just as impossible in a game as it is in the real world. Most game economies are unlimited, in that dead monsters just magically spew forth gold coins when they die. This can mean that certain people will accumulate hideous amounts of wealth. On the other hand, you could make a closed economy, but what happens if your game population doubles... is everyone half as rich? (Not very satisfying) Or, do the first set of players hang on to their money, leaving the second wave of players almost penniless? (Probably even less satisfying.) You could try injecting a fixed amount of wealth into the system as a player enters the game, but how do you decide when a player has left the game, in order to remove their wealth from the system?

Personally, I think it''s a losing battle to try and make the ''strongest'' economy system for a computer game. Even in the real world, we have more than enough money to feed everyone several times over, but we can''t do it for various reasons... Therefore I believe that the ''best'' economy is a non-existent one, or as close to it as possible. I''ve mentioned this in a previous thread 6 months ago, but I think moving to a bartering-based system rather than a gold based system is the answer. I have several reasons for this:

1) You lose the need to be able to set ''reasonable'' prices for an item, which would naturally vary from vendor to vendor, town to town, country to country, week by week. Instead of trying to analyse all these factors and place an arbitrary value on it, which will almost certainly be ''wrong'' for any given situation, let the players place their own value on it (ie. what are they willing to give up to procure the item?)

2) Encumberance becomes an issue. Anyone who''s played Diablo will probably know the feeling of having to decide which equipment to leave on the dungeon floor, and which equipment to take back to sell. Actually having to worry about carrying your ''wealth'' around makes one less prone to hoarding it. Of course, you can make gold have weight and take up inventory slots which addresses this point to a degree.

3) Rarity begins to play as important a part as utility. In a money-based system, if (for example) a Paladin finds a Super Mega Sword Of Unwarranted Goblin Genocide +5 that is restricted to only being wielded by Barbarians, they''re just gonna nonchalantly wander along to the store and cash it in. Whereas in a trading system, they will treasure this item, as one day soon they may meet the Barbarian who will trade almost anything to get it... (think Magic: The Gathering here, if it helps.)

4) As far as medieval fantasy goes, it is more believable. People didn''t walk around with 20,000 gold coins, but they might have the family heirloom breastplate which would be worth quite a bit in the right hands.

Disadvantages of the system include:
1) It really relies on a multi-player game where the players are human. You can''t easily do it with NPC vendors. But, you could probably come pretty close with a little GM guidance here or there... a GM can observe the game every so often, spot what the ''going rates'' were for certain items, and program in some relative values for those items so the NPCs can trade them. You can keep stocks low, so that in the event of messing up and offering something too cheaply, it won''t break the system too much. (Alternatively, have a routine that monitors player->player trades in the area near a vendor, and generate the values from that, simply copying the trades that the NPC ''sees''.)

2) People like to measure their character''s progress, and accumulated gold is one way in which they like to do so.

3) You have to make your NPCs drop one or more of a variety of items when you kill them, rather than just a sum of gold (but hey, wouldn''t that make a lot more sense anyway...?)

Any extra thoughts would be welcomed.

I did some research on some older threads on this subject and found a few good ones. I'm going to try to read this in detail and come back to this thread with some more ideas/questions:

Game Economy Thread #1   [Site: GameDev.net]

Game Economy Thread #2   [Site: GameDev.net]

Game Economy Thread - Starflight - #1   [Site: GameDev.net]

Game Economy Thread - Starflight - #2)   [Site: GameDev.net]




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Dave Myers
Co-Founder/Programmer/Designer
Twenty-One Six Productions


Edited by - Mandrake2112 on January 24, 2001 3:37:47 PM

First off, I never mentioned I wanted to create a ''perfect'' or the ''strongest'' economy as suggested in the previous replies. Don''t put words in my mouth and I''ll try not to do the same.

Okay, I went through the threads above and had a question about Kylotan''s idea about a money-less economy. It seems to me that there is a gap in the idea (though it''s quite possible I''m just missing something). For instance, let''s say that I want that shiny new platemail breastplate to replace my crappy leather breastplate. Now, I can''t just go buy it - I need to trade something (a skill or item or perhaps a task) for it. What happens if you have that shiny platemail breastplate to give me, but I don''t have something you want in exchange?

And again, if anyone knows of any other articles (or books) on the subject other than the one I posted please post it.

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Dave Myers
Co-Founder/Programmer/Designer
Twenty-One Six Productions

If the problem is more taking money out of the economy than anything else how about taxation? There could be an automatic sales tax on any deal - say 10% - that goes back to the main money pool. Other taxes could be levied on skill acquisition etc...

It might not be popular, but if the game worked well players would probably accept it.

I never place "economy" at the forefront of any game design. My theory is that if players wanted to care much about economy, they would be at work instead of playing my game.

This was my number 1 bitch with Ultima Online. How is making chairs for an hour fun? I want to kill demons!

Make the game fun, then make the economy support the game.


Edited by - Torn Space on December 11, 2001 2:57:47 PM

Well, there are two keys IMO. (I say the same thing about any multi-player subject really)

#1: Figure out your goals specifically. What does your economic model need to accomplish? What is acceptable and what isn''t? What sorts of activities should make more or less money, how important should it be, etc etc. I think a lot of people aren''t specific enough with game goals in general.

#2: Remember that in a multi-player game the drive to exploit logical problems is much higher. Many single player games have logic problems but it isn''t that big of a deal, people just ignore them. But in multi-player people are directly or indirectly in competition, which means they will be looking for things to exploit.

So, when you come up with ideas you really have to think carefull about all the possible scenarios it could introduce. For example if you make an enemy that drops a lot of gold when it dies you have to think about how that could be abused. How easy is it to find the creature, how quickly does it repond, can it be summoned somehow, etc etc. If people can save money and items how can that be abused? If different shops buy and sell at different prices?

Referring to the article, the part where they talk about signs of failure of the economy could be turned around as a goal. One sign the economy is broken is that advanced players throw out stuff that newbies would love because it isn''t worth their time to sell it. Well, turn that around and make it a goal, as in "it should be worth the time to find buyers for rare items." That isn''t an immediatly obvious goal unless you think about it a bit. What are the problems you want to avoid? Make a list.

Actually a lot of those signs that they mention are less economic concerns than problems with level raising. Newbie players have nothing to offer advanced players, because advanced players can fight tougher enemies, explore more, have been playing longer and hence have more stuff, etc. Somehow designers want "balance" but they also want level-raising to be a big part of a game, and you can''t have both. A meaningful difference in levels is going to create a meaningful difference in balance, that''s just the way it is. You make characters more powerful over time, then you expect new characters to be able to compete with them? It just doesn''t work out.

JM

About inflation I thought I drop something that I learned years ago. (So don''t sue me If It is not compleetly right). The key area is the left area. With much money growht a Growing M and thus a growing P, meaning inflation.

M*V=P*T

M=Amount of money
V=Velocity of money
P=Price
T=Amount of Transactions

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one''s wishes.
-Nikita S. Khrushchev