Therefore, you need to make fun activities to burn up resources.

For example, in Runescape, an hour of playing around with Ice Barrage (a very high level spell), would use thousands of runes, which is several hours of runecrafting, even for a really high level runecrafter.

The main problem is the possibility of bots or gold farmers. Their value of playtime is negligible compared to a normal player, thus heavily skewing basic resource collection or whatever they do.


Another issue is that people are willing to spend lots of money and resources to train a skill, but the skill can't be unlearned. Therefore, you need a steady influx of new players to prop up demand.

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you need to make fun activities to burn up resources.

In the real world this is called entropy.

In EVE online, player's ships and equipemnt can be destroyed through the normal course of gameplay. When you loose something you loose it for good. In a way, this can be seen as a skin, but it is actually different than an economic sink as used in games.

In games, sinks are used to control the economy and to adjust inflation/deflation that occurs. However, in EVE, this attrition is not used to control the economy, but the economy (the value of the goods and services offered) is instead controled by the players. They set the prices and pay for the goods and services, and it is this controls the economy and it is this that makes it different from a sink/source model.

In a game like WoW, the developers control the drop rate (and to a lesser extent the amount vendors pay or charge). This emans that there is a (almost) static pricing of goods and services, it is just that the amount of drops increase or decrease. If someone or a group comes aong and rapidly explois an imbalance in the drops rate to sink rate (gold farmers) then they can quickly cause a disruption to this sink/source economy.

If, instead the decay and drop rates are fixed, but the value of the goods and services are allowed to fluctuate, then this control over the economy to the people in the economy and it self regulates. Gold farming will still exist to some degree, but as Polama said, the value comes back to time.

Gold farmers have to spend time gathering their gold (or toher resources). But, as they collect gold, the value of that gold decreases. This emans there will come a point where the value of the gold they can get, is not worth the time they would have to put into it and the system reaches an equilibrium.

Now, you might get a griefer that attempts to do this to make life hard for other players. But, because of the size of the economy in an MMO, it becomes impossible for a single player to cause that much disruption because of the time needed to collect enough resources to effect the economy.

By implimneting the two rules I have stated:
1)When a player creates wealth (currency or resources) it can't directly benifit them

2) A player can only destroy wealth (currency or resources) that they possess

It means that a player can't simply just manufacture wealth for themselves, they have to do it in a way that benifits the other players.

Take for example loans:
Takeing rule 1, I can create currency but not directly for my self. I could create currency as a loan to another player. Although they get the money, I can't yet benifit from it, and the creation of that money causes the money I have to devalue.

However, when (or if) they pay it back, they will have used it to perform some action that creates other resources (if they are smart). This means the economy has improved because there is now more activity going on in it (remember the value of a currency is the potnetial that it can be put to so the more activity, the greater the potential). then when I get the money back, I can destroy it and this increases the value of all the money.

So the drop in value from creteion is canceled by the rise in value from its destruction. But there has also been an increase in value due to the activity of the money (if it has been invested wisely), which means that there has been a total gain in value.

Now, you could not destroy all that money you get back, and leave just enough to account for the increased value due to the activity of the money. This would leave you with a bigger bank account and the economy has improved wihtout money being inflated or deflated.

However, what occurs if the borrower dosn't pay back the loan. Well, you then the economy has more money, but the value has not increase, whcih means that the value of the money takes a big nose dive and inflation sets in. The way to remedy this is for players to destroy their stores of money (which is not likely and why you need an authority to deal with that).

The problem with destroying money in a situation like this is that it means that less activity is going on because ther eis less money in circulation. But having too much money in circulation with not enough value in the economy means that you need vast amount of money to do even simple transactions, and those without a lot of money can't afford to operate in the economy (in real life this means poverty, in games it means that they will probably jsut quit).

So in this case (of massive inflation) the aim in a game is to eliminate the amount of money in circulation without reduceing the value of the economy and leaving enough to still facilitate economic activity (trading, and other investments).

pretty simple really

Even in a player controlled economy, the designer still has 100% indirect control. They can't change price, but can change supply (or demand) by simply manipulating "drop" rates or other variables.

activities of the players do can either create or destroy (objects or currency.)
if there are lots of ways to create (drops, mining, quest rewards, selling loot to npc) without enough ways to destroy (money sinks, consumables, "soulbinding") then the relative value of that object or currency will decrease until an equilibrium is reached.

Basically, the game designer has to manage the ways things are created and destroyed in order to control the relative value. (currency or objects)


Common problems and solutions:

-High inflation of currency? decrease supply (drops,etc), increase demand (money sinks)

-Items too expensive for noobs? increase supply, or increase noob's ability to to generate cash

-Rare item too expensive? Increase supply (make it less rare) or lower is value (decrease its stats)

-Good item too cheap? decrease supply (make it more rare)

-Gold farmers? different ways to tackle this one, but the way I like is for game designer/publisher to sell gold/items/game cards cheap enough to run them out of business. Other good ideas in this thread is to make the game complex enough where gold farmer can't multi-screen, or require English

-someone corners a market? I like the buy and sell orders for this. It makes the equilibrium price much more visible. If an item is hard to obtain this will happen, no avoiding it. Its up to the industrious players to keep a hidden supply of commonly "market cornered" items and undercut them out of business. Having these items for sale for real-world currency would help too.

-crafting decreases value relative to required items? (see WOW) This is because crafting has no cost (it actually has negative cost since skill level increases have value). If it took a character 5 days to build something and he was idle the whole time, it would actually add value. (this is decreasing supply of the crafted item)

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Original post by Cpt Mothballs Players are going to go by priority. Supply and demand. Although, having any economy at all is going to leave you highly susceptible to gold farmers. Letting them own an economy is like saying you hate making money.

EVE countered this by allowing players to buy game time with ISK, and to sell game time bought with real money for ISK. In essence, EVE itself sells gold to players - which is extremely smart of them to capatilize on this market. Kinda like if the Government would just make drugs legal and tax the hell out of them, drug sells are going to happen anyway, controlling them with your economy though - priceless.

On a different note, I've always been unbiased and open-minded about what games I play. A few years ago I stumbled upon Neopets(laugh it up), and while alot of it was geared more towards small children, I did find that the stock market that they have on that game is much more adult oriented. I would love to see this sort of stock market in future games that is player-driven economy based, with the prices fluctuating based on the businesses and items in game.

I never realized that the Neopets Stockmarket was actually based on player actions. I always assumed it was just random.

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Original post by Storyyeller I never realized that the Neopets Stockmarket was actually based on player actions. I always assumed it was just random.

It's not, it is random, I was making the comment that I wish more multiplayer games would incorporate a stock market that was based on the player-run economy. I only got a the idea from Neopets, not saying they implemented it fully. Sorry about the miscommunication.

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Original post by Edtharan Quote: Can you completely hand over economy management to players? Yes, you can completely put the economy into the hands of the players. Some players will establish themselves as an authority and other players will defer to their economy rather than use their own (it takes time, effort and the ability to back up their currency - the value I was talking aobut), but you can give players the ability to do so. Quote: How do you handle quest rewards and loot drops? This is actually what I am arguing against. Loot drops and NPC vendors are part of the Sink/Source Model which does not work without constant maintainance (and even then can still go completely out of control). The real value of an economy is based on the effort that the members of that economy can put into it. The more efficient they are the more value can be created by them (this is what Adam Smith was talking about in his book "Wealth of Nations" - a good read if you are interested in economics, even for game economics). If you make things like money and resources drop through the normal activities the player would ahve to do, then the value of the effort put into these resources is 0. And, because the value is 0, the value of the economy is 0. Designers try to comensate for this lack of value by trying creating scarcity and haivng rare items that only occasionally drop. However, this is only a false scarcity and not real scarcitry, as this scarcity is only a matter of time, and any player willing to put the time into it can get it, then the actual value of that item is effectivly 0 because the actions of the players removes the scarcity. In a player run economy, the players have the ability to create curency. When they create currency, they devalue that currency. If the player then ahs the means to remove some of that curency from the game, then they can increase the value of that curency. The two restrictions you need to place on this are: 1) The currency created by a player does not directly benifit them. This way a player can't just create more curency to satisfy an imediate need before the knock on effects caused by the creation of that curency 2) The curency the player removes must come from them directly. This way a player can't jsut remove currency from the game to boost the value of thei curency that they hold. The decision to create or destroy curency should be based on the need to facilitate transations using that curency. This is what these two rules do. Any item can concevably be used as a curency, so these two rules must apply to every item in the game. One of the rules that also needs to be implimented if you are hainv crafting is that a player, with effort, can convert one curency into another. This is what crafting is all about.

This doesn't make much sense.

Time is the real commodity being bought and sold by players. Any thing in game has a cost to a player based on the amount of time it takes them to get it.

This is ultimately the basis of any game economy.

All economic models in a game are going to be based on things going into the game world and leaving the game world.

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Original post by Edtharan Quote: you need to make fun activities to burn up resources. In the real world this is called entropy. In EVE online, player's ships and equipemnt can be destroyed through the normal course of gameplay. When you loose something you loose it for good. In a way, this can be seen as a skin, but it is actually different than an economic sink as used in games.

You are wrong, it is a sink. Destruction of ships in EVE is not only a sink but a threat of a sink that encourages hoarding and the accumulation of value.

Ultimately game economics is difficult because you have to constantly give value to players in exchange for their time.

If you want to try and create an MMORPG economy the key is to decide how you are going to keep rewarding your players for playing. Or in other words you have to decide what the player is going to be spending their time to receive and how your game will be able to handle a constant inflow of value. The key to EVE's economy is the desire for players to continue to obtain more in game value, whether it is in the form of the currency or in the form of ships or in the form of a space station.

The next challenge is money and trade. This challenge is much easier if you figured out how to address the first hurdle because you then have a way of balancing the rate in which various forms of value leave the economy with the rate in which they are entering.

Another key is how value flows through an economy. Some game economies have suffered because all value flowed in one direction so it would just accumulate with certain players who are performing specific tasks who had to real need no unload the value they have accumulated or use for it.

[Edited by - Stangler on May 20, 2010 1:17:04 PM]

just wanted to say thanks to everyone for contributing - I need to sit down with a large cup of tea and go through this all carefully - there's some great comments been made here.