Quote:

Everbody benefits.

Especially the 'good family men' who take 60% of every transaction since masons, farmers, government officials, quarrymen are all far less skilled with swords than a professional thug.

You'd run into other problems in your economic model too, like all your resources pooling on a few players, the reason real world economies work is because we all need something (food, shelter, entertainment). But what are you gonna do ingame? Make players buy food? This won't work, because you'd either (a) need all food to be made by players, in which case the hungry player can just make his own food, or (b) have a NPC trader who takes currency in exchange for food, but then, how does that money get back into the economy? The NPC doesnt need anything sure he could buy things, but people probably aren't going to sell him food, so you'd end up with a food vendor with 7000 rusty daggers. Also how do you prevent exceptionally rich people from just hogging all your world currency by being offline? The reason most games don't bother with real world economies is because they arent really feasible, you either annoy the player with all kinds of complications, like 7000 NPCs with no money, so the player has to trek all over the game world just to find an npc to give him money so he doesnt starve to death. To monsters not dropping any gold because its all pooled in some player traders pockets.

I only see two outcomes to this:

A) The most likely - the game developer doesn't have a firm grasp of economics (I don't either, most of us don't, it's very complicated) and makes a variety of simple mistakes, like making resources infinite or too easy to obtain, messing up resources and needing to patch incessantly which will throw off the entire balance every time, not understanding that a "more important" economy exists outside his game on ebay, etc. The whole system basically fails due to rampant inflation or some other problem, and is scrapped and replaced with a simpler model after the first few months of beta or release.

B) The idea sort of works; there are limited resources and a few people control them, capitalism is born, and the servers quickly, much quicker than "real life", move towards capitalism's inherent problems of "5% of the people control 95% of the wealth", "being born into privilige", and "omg i hate my job so much". You would end up with the powergamer guilds having an iron grip on all the gold mines, farmland, stone quarries, whatever, and the only way to get any money to not starve to death is to work for them. Translation: if you want to continue playing the game, you have to do whatever the group of snotty, homophobic, whiny 12-year old boys tell you to do. This is, of course, those 12-year old boys' dreams. But it's also ranks among everyone else's worst nightmares, or at least very low among "fun things to do for a hobby".

I have difficulty grasping how capitalism would be a safe or profitable thing to do in a video game, because it requires a solid and complex legal foundation to handle loans, rent, bankruptcy, dividends and shares in a way that is profitable to the average capitalist.

Of course, in the absence of such foundations but with the presence of pvp, you would end up with "feodal capitalism", also known as serfdom, where the capitalist would be a noble in a position of military power, who would own the village lands, ovens, mills and other buildings and force serfs to pay a rent by using his armies.

Another thing to notice is that information asymmetry in games behaves differently than in real world, simply because you know the level of other players (and thus, their skills). Because of this, instead of creating guilds (groups of players skilled in the same area, who know each other and provide a safe façade of skill and quality for clients to see), players tend to create clans (groups of players skilled in complementary areas), simply because a player in your own clan is someone you can trust (since you have access to a lot of information about him).

Concerning the "95% of the wealth goes to 5% of the people", this is a very important issue with closed economies, since all these resources are basically unavailable for everyone else. However, one cannot put ten tons of iron or grain in one's pocket. Large amounts of resources must be piled up somewhere in large buildings, where they can be stolen from (for instance by guards, for a quick profit on the black market — who'll notice a few pounds are missing, especially when it's hard to measure the exact contents ?). Single players could not hoard large amounts of resources indefinitely because of that. Could clans manage to do it?

Well, not really. Let's first make an additional assumption about our game world. Like the real world, resources are not concentrated in permanent "mines": grain can be grown anywhere where fields are avaialable (and disappears after a while), ore mines get depleted and others are discovered in other areas. This would force clans to own all the land if they don't want to miss an emerging ore or gold mine, or a wild wheat field. If a clan can own all the land, you have a problem in your game, because the world is too small.

Another reason why clans could not acquire all resources is the cost. As resources outside the clan get scarcer, the price of "that last bag of iron ore" is likely to jump into the stratosphere. The clans would probably have great difficulty to hoard even more of the resource by buying it, and would even more probably get some stolen (other clans would get a huge profit by stealing from that clan, could ally with each other, and so on).

Quote:

Original post by BleedingBlue You'd run into other problems in your economic model too, like all your resources pooling on a few players, the reason real world economies work is because we all need something (food, shelter, entertainment). But what are you gonna do ingame? Make players buy food? This won't work, because you'd either (a) need all food to be made by players, in which case the hungry player can just make his own food, or (b) have a NPC trader who takes currency in exchange for food, but then, how does that money get back into the economy? The NPC doesnt need anything sure he could buy things, but people probably aren't going to sell him food, so you'd end up with a food vendor with 7000 rusty daggers. Also how do you prevent exceptionally rich people from just hogging all your world currency by being offline? The reason most games don't bother with real world economies is because they arent really feasible, you either annoy the player with all kinds of complications, like 7000 NPCs with no money, so the player has to trek all over the game world just to find an npc to give him money so he doesnt starve to death. To monsters not dropping any gold because its all pooled in some player traders pockets.

if a player doesnt play the game for months on end he may find he can't pay his rent for the house he has in the game.

If you want food you have to set up a farm and grow it. Youll have to buy land and what not. Or you can hunt for food which is dangerous.

There will be no npc's. Its rather easy to get rid of npc's if developers would give it a shot. A player run shop with lots of automation features. Bloody hell, that didnt require a degree in game design.

Quote:

Bloody hell, that didnt require a degree in game design.

No, but it's a mite harder than just saying 'I'll code up some automation and everything will be skippy!'. Does the automation work well? Are shops difficult to obtain, effectively forcing players to act with an established clan if they ever want to run a shop? Does said automation allow a player to build a shop and log off, just building profit? If not, would players need to wait for shop owners to log in just to buy some bread?

I've just thought, doesn't Neopets already have something like this?