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But instead of outlawing RL money exchange for ingame services or items, or just looking the other way, how might one put it ingame?

Same way [online] casinos have for years, take cash, return chips [gold]. Allow players to cash gold for cash [or not, since that requires you to have all the gold in the game in cash assets and act like a bank].

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Original post by abstractimmersion First of all, I intended this as a design excercise ("riff on that for awhile"). I don't actually have any plans to make an MMORPG whatsoever. I'm not trying to think of a gimmick, or a get rich quick scheme. And since it's an intellectual excercise, I wasn't immediately concerned about legal repercussions, I mean it's obvious that there might be some problems, although not necessarily insurmountable problems.

I must say I'm pretty in line with this idea. It's quite interesting.

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Original post by abstractimmersion But instead of outlawing RL money exchange for ingame services or items, or just looking the other way, how might one put it ingame? Say a player could do farmwork or fish enough to play to make up for the monthly charge, or even make 10-20 bucks a week. Meanwhile, he's training another character to be an adventurer. Then he gets a few guys together and starts robbing wheat shipments. Of course, then, he's got to find a buyer. You'd have to make fishing and farming hard enough that your economy wouldn't be flooded, but you'd give people a reason to actually play as a fisher or farmer. I mean, they aren't goign to make a living from it, (unless they live in China) but you'd have more dedicated craftsmen and producers. I guess no one wants to play in this sandbox, though.

I'm not sure. My friends playing Ultima Online spent countless hours at mining and crafting swords. I found it pretty pointless to propose a game in which you could do a repetitive task like that but it actually worked.
I believe that having players produce goods could be a definite plus but a sort of automatic economy (just as in actual games) is needed.

The elder scrolls III: Morrowind had a very interesting system for that. By using a skill (alchemy) and equipment you could brew potions. At the beginning of the game, homemade potions are weak, usually not worth carrying, but extremely cheap. After half of the game (I was using a class which had a very slow alchemy improvement) my potions were not only cheaper, but also far more powerful than NPC's ones. There's a parallel between NPC an PC economics.

It would be extremely funny for a game to hve opportunities like that. Say Blomur needs to go in the dragon lair. He knows he'll need a potion of "resistance from hell on earth (fire)". Checking out the NPC's he can buy a ton of this, cluttering up its backpack and spending X golds. Instead, he decides to go find Linma, an elf (PG) mage rumored to roam in the woods. A third, player is in charge to kill Blomur so it makes a excessively powerful poison potion and labels it (note this is the cool) as "resistance from hell on earth (fire)". Then he finds Linma who (which?) is really tired of having PG searching for him/her and accepts cooperating with the killer for some escorting services to The Bad, Dark and Dangerous Forest.

Do you see Blomur, in the critical battle with the dragon, drinking a potion and dying? LOL, I think it would be funny - not to mention that when revived, Blomur would know at least that the potion didn't work...

Now, the problem is that no one is likely to play Linma in today's games (or not)? Is this where the 'real value' shall come in play?

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Original post by Krohm Now, the problem is that no one is likely to play Linma in today's games (or not)? Is this where the 'real value' shall come in play?

If you're trying to push it to a point where someone will just walk back and forth in the woods along the same path pretending to be an elf merchant 12 hours day, that the person is only doing because he'll get real life money, then you are pushing it to the point where it becomes a real-life job. The only way I would take that job is if it offered almost as much money and security as an actual job.

As to your player-killing scam, the victims ALREADY hate when things like that happen to them in current MMORPGs, and people get banned for doing things like that; few victims ever think it's fun. If in this new RPG, the victim actually paid $100 of real-life money for the potion you scammed him out of, that's grounds for getting arrested for real-life fraud. If, on the other hand, you were completely immune to the U.S. legal system (or whatever was the primary country that played the game), but you could still steal actual money from people, your game is going to be crawling with thieves, scammers, real-life money-making corporations, tax evaders, money launderers.... not really a fun place to go slay dragons anymore.

The point of that was that real "value" could be used to make boring tasks interesting. Maybe, or maybe not.
Because "value" would be offered, this would be much a different issue.
Anyway, no one will be forced in the choice. If they want do it well, else they can do other things.

Instead of using real money for in-game money, maybe you can use in-game money (or points) to buy things off some kind of online store. Similar to how some arcades have games where you win tickets, and eventually you can cash the tickets in for some kind of prize.

I can't imagine that the prizes would be that glamorous, but maybe you could get figurines or a T-shirt or some kind of memorabilia. I doubt scammers would have much interest in these kinds of prizes but I'm not sure about other legal issues. Also, the use of in-game money for real life items could be a way of removing some money from a game so that it doesn't build up so fast.

MMO money is inherantly real money, wether the game company says so or not:

People play MMOs, and take as valuable anything they make in the game. These money/items can be sold on ebay for real money. Generally market forces cause an equilibrium price, creating a market established exchange rate. This is exactly how real currency works too BTW.

EverQuest has a GNP on par with many 3rd World countries last I looked.

As a game company, all you'd have to do is provide an in game auctioning system. You wouldn't even need to scrape any off the top. You could provide something as simple as a sales tax or income tax. Say, 1% of all monster spawn. Then sell that gold/items back on the auction system to players.

The game company would also become like a federal reserve or central bank, since it could effectively mint coins (increase monster spawn, etc.), thus it could moderately control the exchange rate. However, trying to fix an exchange rate of one currency to another has serious issues, as any macroeconomicist could tell you.

Note that the game company can't just sell as much as it wants, because this could lead to hyper-inflation, just like what happened in Germany. Since everything is virtual, 100 bananas and 1000000 bananas don't take a whole lot different storage space, so that's a real temptation. The more the game company sells the less everything is worth.

That said, the game company has an advantage over real life countries: There's no foreign competition. Everything in the virtual world, items, food, everything, is there because it's been coded on a server. There's no resource flow of anything but money.

The game company would probably need to hire a macroeconomist to help them run fiscal policy in the virtual world, since the virtual world is in every regard a new emerging country.

If done well, I imagine that an MMO could be made 100% free, with money to run the servers taken from taxes that are resold to players for real money.

Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life

Nice long google tec talk, the creators of SL go into some detail about how the economy works and what people tend to do with it.

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What if in-game currency was tied to real money, allowing a player to "cash out?"

Games that currently do that:

There (they were first AFAIK)
Second Life
Project Entropia

Note that, often, the "cash out" option is run by players (such as Tbux.com, but it's equally effective in the end. Except the original developer has no control of the external market.

There has had amazing stability in the currency market over the last few years; it's pretty much been stable at 2000 therebux per dollar (buy) and 2200 therebux per dollar (sell). There itself gives you 1800 therebux per dollar, and won't take them back.

Note that there will always be an external (cash-out) market, even if the developer doesn't allow it. If they ban the trade on eBay, the trade will just move to where they can't touch it.

Now, given that you CAN cash out from most popular games, are people actually fishmongers? No. It's much more lucrative to be a level 60 camper going for the Ph4t L00tz.