Anyone come across any interesting ways to get money into a MMORPG economy? (MMO is an overstatement because I only expect 50-100 players total and 5-10 online during offpeak hours) The traditional way is through drops and chests, which would probably work if done well. But I was hoping if there are any better or "fun-er" ways out there. [Edited by - Girsanov on September 5, 2008 5:26:50 AM]

Hi,

Could you precise the kind of game you are realizing ? (RPG or merchant game).

Did you look at Amit Patel's site (section economics):
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

Ghostly yours,
Red

Quote:

Original post by Red Ghost Could you precise the kind of game you are realizing ? (RPG or merchant game).

Sounds like an MMO if it has drops, chests, and an economy but I could be wrong =)

If it is an MMORPG, then I would say reduce cash sinks (charge less for item repairs, charge less for potions/consumables, and generally charge less for anything that is temporary in nature) for an open economy, and simply add currency to a closed economy. If you want to add cash fountains to an open economy, then I'd say...

Well, you can add more quests, increase the gold drop rate for monsters, have a lottery system that pays out more than it collects (note that normally a lottery collects much more than it pays, and is a sneaky cash sink because players tend to love them), increase the NPC buy prices (not sell prices!), have "talent" show events where players show off and get judged/paid by GM's, create "treasure trove" quests like "the dragon's hoard has been found! Slay the dragon, make millions!" There are quite a few possibilities, actually.

Treasure pots at the base of rainbows.

Heck if it is a MMORPG, add the ability to rob banks.
If a show off kills the dragon and makes millions, he will store it at the bank.
Robbing a badly defended bank is less risky than killing a dragon ...
Ghostly yours,
Red.

SORRY I just realized I forgot to mention the type of game!!! Edited the opening post to correct that error. XP

I was hoping someone else had come up with a system that is not the traditional model where players kill mobs to get Gold/Loot or mine/harvest to sell for Gold/Loot.

2nd Life for example, give each player some money everyday.

Project Entropia forced players to buy game money with real cash. (I am not going for this model, my friends will murder me: more importantly, they know where I live!)

Quote:

Original post by Red Ghost Heck if it is a MMORPG, add the ability to rob banks.

Robbing banks that store only player funding is not a cash fountain. The cash is merely changing hands. Only if there was more gold robbed from the bank than players loose from the interaction would the total amount of currency in an economy increase.

Player Jobs (not quests, but jobs) is something a few MMORPG games have tried. It's not very popular, but if done correctly (say, a fun but challenging minigame that stays fun but challenging that provides money) can add both value and currency to your game.

Events are always a good currency fountain, and as I said, things like "talent shows" or "dragon hunts" might add quite a lot to your game both community wise and immersion wise. People would be inspired by dragon hunts to - A) get rich, B) be good enough to get all that fame, C) join the elite few who have slain the dragon. More ideas might include counterfeiting money. Usually this is disastrous in a game, causing runaway inflation, but only because the rate of counterfeiting isn't controlled (often uncontrollable). Allowing players to risk jail time, or some "danger," in order to make counterfeit currency is not a feature I've ever heard of. Robbing banks, as Red suggested, would also be a "crime" that one could commit to gain currency(though again, if it's stealing from players then currency is not being injected into the economy).

Bounties on players that are paid out by "the world" as opposed to other players is yet another way, and perhaps a very interesting way. Bounties on monsters that kill lots of player characters is a more care-bear approach to the same effect... Just get creative.

Quote:

Original post by Girsanov Anyone come across any interesting ways to get money into a MMORPG economy? [...] The traditional way is through drops and chests, which would probably work if done well.

Have the vendors do it. Player trades items for cash, then trades cash for different items. Coin becomes a form of liquid item, just like it's supposed to be.

It also becomes apparent that the real wealth in the game is the items.

This is where things get tricky for personal reasons. Effort designing and modelling a loot item, nerfing the life blood out of it, and so on. Devs end up having a opinion of what the dollar value of an item "should be", and often want to hard code the price.

But the amount that players are currently trading an item for is the measure of it's worth, not the determinant. It can be used as a tool: The current average price and trade volume can be used to decide where nerfs/buffs should be applied, the frequency of drops, the locations/mobs that can drop it.

Tweaks that change the worth of an item to the players' game will show up as changes in the price players trade it for. And it's a more accurate measure (and incedentally more comfortable) than sifting through the signal-to-noise ratio of a vocal minority of qq'ers on the forums.

The faster players can reach an equilibrium on prices for stuff, the faster the devs will know where to make changes. This is a good reason to have a trading history for loot in-game. Loot settles on prices much quicker that way.

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on September 6, 2008 6:21:35 AM]

One way to determine item value is to have a relatively small number of component parts that it can be reduced to. Since in-game effort is the base "currency" of all achievements and acquisitions, as far as players are concerned (I'm noodling up a dissertation on this concept, so there's a wall of text coming one of these months), you can work out the value of component materials and thus items in this way.

For instance, if a master (100% efficiency) trapper can get ten beaver pelts per hour, then each pelt is worth .1 game-hour. If a miner can get one ton of ore per hour, then a ton of ore is worth one game-hour. Thus, ten beaver pelts are worth one ton of ore. If an ingot of iron takes one tone of ore to make and can be whipped up in a negligible amount of time (ten seconds of clicking at the foundry) then the ingot gains almost no actual value from the transformation.

If an insulated breastplate takes five beaver pelts and one ingot to make (and a negligible amount of effort), it's worth 1.5 game-hours. Now, the armor is obviously worth far more, practically, to a player than some skins and rocks, but an NPC vendor won't acknowledge that value, and he'll pay you the same amount for the materials or the finished product, or maybe even less for the item, since it loses so much potential in the crafting process. If you have a recycling system, where the item can be broken down into components, then he'll pay for the item what he'd pay for the reprocessed parts.

Then it's just a matter of determining the currency value of game time. If you want a master harvester to make $50/hour, then each beaver pelt is worth $5 and each ton of or or ingot of iron is worth $50. Distribute that up through the items and set a $75 price point for that fuzzy breastplate, and you're all set.

Thanks for all the input guys!


I was hoping to find MMOs out there that does not use the old system which is a combination or all of the below:

1) Mobs drop items randomly or gold

2) Players can "harvest" resources to sell for gold


Looks like there aren't any...