One way, if you want to keep the curent form of monster drops and money sinks, is to allow both, but have them connected in that the more money that is put into money sinks (like reparing or vendoring) the more money the monsters drop. This gives you a "Choke Point" where you can control the flow of money in the game. If you need more money then you allow a greater ratio of money into the game. If you want to restrict the money (stop or reduce inflation) you can lower the ratio. This ration can also be tied into other influences like the number of players entering or leaveing your game (if more enter you will need more money to go around, if more leave then you will need to reduce the amount of money).

If you don't change the amount by too much, then the player will not notice the changees.

Quote:

Original post by bmanruler I think the best way to stop inflation is to not allow money in/out of the economy. [...] A few problems with this though: it means rich players will actually make other people poorer just because that money is not available.

Closed economies work only if they have internal mechanisms of keeping the money moving. In a MMOG however, you will always have players quitting, accounts lying dormant, etc. which essentially means that money is seeping out of the economy. So in my opinion the more useful option is not to keep the money in, but to have a steady flow from in to out. The more people the money touches on its way out of the economy, the better (more interaction, more fun).
Allowing players to hoard a limited resource is always a bad thing as it creates a monopoly. Add some chinese money farmers and ebay to that and you have a potential game breaker at your hands.

That's a good point. Dormant accounts are a problem for any ideas involving unique items or finite in-game wealth.

Although I mock and belittle the "Juts liek teh MATRIX!" threads, I think that an MMO can survive and even excel with a solid, feasible economy based on player-built goods and player-obtained resources.

As a kid, I read the Dragonlance books, and I thought it was cool that, during war, steel was used as currency, because its value was above gold. Matallurgical absurdity of casting and reforging steel aside, I think that could work out in an MMO. Tin, copper, iron and, say, tungsten could be harvested from the environment and used to craft items, or minted into coins and used as currency. You could buy a gross of iron coins and smelt them into an iron ingot, which could be used to build items. Standard MMO magic weightless money laws apply, of course.

Of course the NPC groups would magically have sacks and sacks of cash, but having the money be a resouce and not a score would be a good way to get around part of the money problem. High-level gear would require higher proportions of fancier metals, so a newb with one orihalcon coin could trade it to a veteran for enough copper and tin to build a bronze helmet.

Then, have enemies that, I dunno, eat the minerals or something, to explain why tin mines are full of little weeny monsters and adamantium mines are filled with elder dragons. Players who want the fancy ore will have to bring lots of frinds and some decent mining skills if they want to get them, but monsters won't just up and drop loot and cash. That's always been a dumb idea.

Quote:

Original post by NotAYakk You want inflation.

I think this is a good point. The reason MMORPGs don't have closed economies isn't because the developers never thought of it, but because false economies are more fun. People who play MMORPGs want to be a hero, and find fabulous treasures, and become incredibly rich. Character development, or "grind", is an integral part of MMORPGs. Some people are acting like we should be striving for a completely realistic american economy simulator, and I can assure you that that is not what most players want. An MMORPG with a closed economy would amplify the inherent problems of capitalism, leaving 5% of the people holding 95% of the wealth. That might be more "realistic", but it's not fun; most people want to play as an epic hero raiding dungeons and finding lost treasures, not as sweatshop worker #71345 begging for scraps from UberLeetGuild, the conglomerate of junior high kids who can afford to spend 24 hours a day consolidating their grip on the world's limited resources.

Yes, implementing unfun things for the sake of "realism" is silly.

Runaway inflation is also a game-destroying problem, and that's why people are discussing it. This thread didn't arise out of a "how can we make games more realistic?" train of thought.