(i posted this in a simaler thread a while ago)

have npc’s shops running on a basic supply and demand rule
For instance
1 player mines minerals
2 player sells minerals to npc
3 npc makes swords and sells them
->the npc will lower prices if he cant sell anything or rasie them if he is selling a lot but the price he pays for minerals is relative to selling price of swords (so the players wont mine copper if they cant sell it)
4 the sowrds get lost, break or get dull and requre more minerals to fix or replace

you could do the same for any resurce, just have a defined resource chain with a finite start point and end point, and npcs working on a floating value according to some simple rules

regulating drops will not really help in the long run, nor will taxing. the system you proposed also has the disadvantage of affecting casual players a lot more than the powergrinders - which, generally speaking, is the opposite of what you want.
if you want a somewhat stable economy you have to approach the whole thing like this:

(money in / playing time)*growth factor = (money out / playing time)

with the growth factor indicating how easy you want it to be for players to acquire wealth. i.e. the grind multiplicator.

in essence this means that every in-game action that has the potential of generating money, some sort of cost needs to be deducted.

a few options of getting money out of the economy:

item degradation / wear (balanced against monster difficulty and net worth)
item loss on death (especially effective with PvP)
entrance fees for certain areas (I will teleport you to the magical dungeon of uber-drops for a mere 10000 gold...)
rent (player controlled houses, stalls, shops, guild halls...)
players quitting and not giving all their stuff away (you have to take this into account)
various other running costs, especially for highly useful or high prestige items & consumables (feed for your mount/fuel for your ship, ammunition, spell components, non-reusable scrolls, healing potions, etc. etc.)

with options like these you can roughly calculate the profit levels of your dungeons - tweaking them so that higher level players are encouraged to go to higher level areas.

something like:

gross worth of dungeon level 5 = (net worth of dungeon level 5 - avg. item degradation of gear level needed - entrance fee - consumables) / amount of players needed for a useful party)

then split that gross value in gold & non-gold drops and distribute throughout your dungeon. it will probably be easier in terms of balancing if you use hourly rates instead of absolutes.
(and yes, that stuff requires a lot of balancing data)

in general, farming is not your enemy - running out of ways to spend money is.

Quote:

Original post by Kaze (i posted this in a simaler thread a while ago) have npc’s shops running on a basic supply and demand rule For instance 1 player mines minerals 2 player sells minerals to npc 3 npc makes swords and sells them ->the npc will lower prices if he cant sell anything or rasie them if he is selling a lot but the price he pays for minerals is relative to selling price of swords (so the players wont mine copper if they cant sell it) 4 the sowrds get lost, break or get dull and requre more minerals to fix or replace you could do the same for any resurce, just have a defined resource chain with a finite start point and end point, and npcs working on a floating value according to some simple rules

A similar system is already implemented in Guild Wars, but it just doesn't work that way. The high end item is still 3000 times more expensive than the lower end one. And it never stop growing.

anyone know of a game with too many "money sinks"? just curious.

project entropia? EvE-Online is also pretty money-sink-ish for PvP players.

Quote:

Original post by abstractimmersion anyone know of a game with too many "money sinks"? just curious.

Ironically enough, World of Warcraft.

I hate money sinks for the sake of "stopping inflation." In World of Warcraft, you have to farm gold to continue to do things like raid and keep your equipment together. Of course, you can't have a runaway economy, but the main problem leading to inflation is the fact that money is CREATED all the time - every time you kill a mob, do a quest, vendor an item. It's not a closed loop. Postfixing this by adding in gold sinks is not only frustrating to the player - it's counterintuitive. Unfourtunately, it's the best you can do with the simple world simulations most games run on - the concept of having an actual economy without random creation ex nihilo is apparently not worth the time to explore for most developers.

Still, I think that if you had a system in which money operated on a closed system inside the game world and built gameplay to accomodate this, you'd be better off. The current systems used are often a mix of economy and old-school gameplay - you've got to worry about inflation and the like but you still want random skeletons to drop gold pieces.

One of the ideas I had for my MMORPG research project (I'd call it a game but I don't expect ever to market it unless I miraculously got funding...) is only introduce money though vendors, hunting produces goods.

The game is based in the future and most hunting initially would be in a crashed spaceship that is using nano-tech to constantly produce more security type robots. Hunting would not give the player gold but instead robot parts. These robot parts could then be used to make weapons, shields or be broken down into raw materials. from this point they could either trade goods among players or sell them to NPC vendors who will not buy specific parts if their inventory is already full.

Now I figure this still has its own difficulties for item inflation but I think it is an interesting direction to try.

You want inflation.

...

Really!

Hunting monsters produces resources. Be it character levels, new gear, gold, or what have you.

The more people play, the more total resources will be accumulated in game. If players cannot accumulate resources by playing, they will tend not to play.

The total resources per person in the game is (wealth per capita):
TotalResources/TotalPlayers

But, TotalResources is TotalPlayers*TimePlayed*AverageReturnOnTimePlayed.

So you get:
Wealth per Capita = TimePlayed * AverageReturnOnTimePlayed


What people call "inflation" is often "the deflation of the value of money in the game". Money is worth less and less as it flows into the game.

Other things continue to inflate -- player power, items accumulated, etc.

The value of items, for the most part, also deflates. Non-tradeable items tend to deflate slower than money, while tradeable items tend to deflate faster than money (because they don't leave the economy, and items become obsolete as "better items" and "identical items" become more common).


I suspect the real problem with online games is that the "AverageReturnOnTimePlayed" collapses. Either because people start comparing themselves to the "distance to the end of the game", and see it spiralling away from them, or because the area approaching the end game is designed to take forever in order to slow down the high-game-use players. Often this change in "ReturnOnTimePlayed" is sharp.

A sharp change in "ReturnOnTimePlayed" frustrates people.

Another inflation effect is when one's ability to gather some resource is outpaced by the deflation on that resource -- so you can never "get enough gold" to buy that sword. Your goal fly's away from you faster than you crawl up on your goal.

This is just another example of the "ReturnOnTimePlayed" growing and frustrating people.

ReturnOnTimePlayed should shrink with your player's relative location in the game's content heiarchy, compared to the other players.

Instead, in most games it is static with the given content. Tweaks on the ReturnOnTimePlayed are released with new expansions and extensions in a non-continuous manner.

I suppose the advantage to this system is that it helps people identify their accomplishments as "real" accomplishments, not accomplishments that get easier and easier if they just waited. The feeling that your accomplishments in game are "real" motivates you to continue playing. If the difficulty of every accomplishment in game, or the reward from it, went up like clockwork... Well, I suppose people would be able to brag about being "first to accomplish X". On the other hand, people would feel like their progress was dictated not by their own abilities, but by the content "sinking" to their abilities.

Hmm.

I need to think on this more.

Thanks for all the replies guys,

Just like the real world, there is no best way to really stop inflation. There will always be people that work harder for a better life and causing the item price to inflat.

Now after coming to this conclusion...*laughs*...I realized making it fair to both casual players and hardcore players will be what we called Communism

I think the best way to stop inflation is to not allow money in/out of the economy. Come up with a logical reason for this: npc's work for a large guild/corporation and it starts the game with a set amount of money. This can then be spent on things like player missions, to give players money, or taxes, to get money from players. At the end of the day (or whatever timeframe you care about) the net change is zero.

A few problems with this though: it means rich players will actually make other people poorer just because that money is not available. So a virtual Bill Gates could stopper the economy. This would kind of put a damper on most peoples dreams of becoming rich and powerful, so that would have to be looked at as it would be a game killer for many in an MMO. So allowing some inflation would not be a bad idea, but then you have another problem. Once inflation kicks in, a noobs time is not worth as much as a vets was at the same level of the game. This is what causes the seperation of classes seen in many MMO's in my opinion.