Okay so I'm an economics major and what has really interested me about MMOs is, not surprisingly, the economy. As such I have come up with an idea for an economic system of an MMO. Because the economic system of an MMO is so intricately tied to the design of the rest of the game, I have non-economic ideas fleshed out as well.

I am simply looking for some feedback on these ideas and whether they would work. Please be mindful of the fact that I am aware that I will not be making this MMO. This is more of an academic/creative exercise that I think is interesting and wish would be made, not a hardcore idea that I believe I am going to immediately work on.

THE IDEA



Territory-based PVP

The crux of the idea is based on the following mechanism. The MMO would contain 3-5 nations. Beyond the normal monster-killing quests and such, a major aspect of the game would be each nation fighting for control of a lot of different "territories" (there would be somewhere between 25 and 100 of these territories). Gaining control of a territory would likely involve something like taking a keep in an important part of the territory. Territories could have different conditions for takeover instead; it doesn't matter though.

The main point is that each territory owned by a nation provides the players of that nation with a resource and money stream at given time intervals. The resources will be the means with which all items are crafted (more on that later). The type of resource provided will depend on the territory, thus making it important for a nation to have a diverse territory set. You wouldn't want to be left without a territory that would provide you with the resource necessary to make health potions for instance.


Resource System

A money stream is fairly straightforward. Players of a nation would get more money over time the more territories their nation held. The only issue with that is whether to give money to players who haven't logged in recently. My thought was that money would be given every 24 hours. If you've logged in and played during that time, then you get the money. If you haven't logged in, then your money goes in the government's coffers (more on that later). This would encourage people to play frequently, but still provide their nation with money if they don't.

Anyways, the more complicated issue is the resource system. Every territory owned will provide a stream of resources every day. Unlike money, these resources will not go to the players immediately. Instead, they will go to various warehouses/vendors/etc around the nation, and can be bought by the players for set prices. So for instance, holding Territory A might provide you with 1000 Iron and 500 Wood a day. This 1000 Iron and 500 Wood will appear and be sold in certain locations around the nation, where maybe Iron will be sold for 10 gold a unit and Wood for 15 gold a unit.

It will only be with these resources that items can be crafted. Thus, a nation that holds more territory will have access to more resources and thus also better/more weapons, armor, potions, etc etc.

The Role of NPC Shops

Mostly, players who decide to craft will simply buy resources their nation has earned, use those resources to craft items, and then sell those items to other players for a far greater price than they paid for the resources. The only problem with this comes if an item is so easy to craft that there is truly a free market for the good (ie. the price is driven down to a level at which almost no profit is gained from crafting and selling). We don't want this, because we want it to be profitable to craft.

Thus we create the institution of NPC shops. NPC shops will not have any of their own goods generated. Rather they will simply buy unused items crafted by players at a set price and sell them. So let me give an example. Let's say the resources needed to make a dagger cost 30 gold. Since it is so cheap/easy to procure these resources, the going market price for a dagger might be only 30-32 gold. This makes it virtually useless to craft and sell, especially for a new player who is trying it out (since they're new they wont have much money and will have to make low profit items like that). We don't want this, so the NPC shops may be programmed to buy a crafted dagger for 40 gold. This will ensure crafters get profit, by making shops always buy items for a reasonable amount more than the resource cost of the item.

It is likely that only low priced goods will be affected by this policy of NPC shops though. The number of suppliers of low priced goods is high enough that it is basically a free market, pushing profit towards zero. On the other hand, if we are talking about a crafted +10 Greatsword with 50% Stun Chance, then there will be very few people able to craft it (in fact it will likely take a group of people; more on that later). Thus each person who does craft it will have some level of monopolistic control over the price, driving up prices well above what an NPC shop would buy it for.


Taxation and Intra-Nation Conflict

In any case, the other element I would introduce would be intra-nation conflict. Each nation would have a "King." This "King" would be the head of a guild that controls the nation. A guild could wrestle control from another guild through an organized attack on the King's stronghold, which would be possible every week (I basically stole this stronghold attack mechanism from Aika Online, so look it up for more info).

The power of the King on economic matters would actually be rather high through the mechanism of "taxation." The King doesn't actually tax the players, though. Rather he will tax the people who live in the territories he controls. For these purposes, the players are in the King's army. Thus, the more the King taxes, the more gold the government gets from the people, and therefore the great the money stream given to the army (the players). However, as any economist will tell you, high taxation lowers the incentive to work. Thus, the trade off with this is that high taxation leads to lower output by the people in the territories. This translates to less resources.

Therefore, taxation provides a trade off between the money stream and resource stream which the King must control. Too much taxation and there won't be enough resources to craft great items for the players in the nation. Too little taxation and the players won't have the money to buy the resources/items that they need. Of course, there will probably be disagreements over taxation policy, making attempted overthrows of the government have an actual point.


Mercenaries and Assassins

As I said before, I was thinking that players who hadn't logged in for a while wouldn't get their share of the money stream. Instead their money would go to the government. It is possible the King could be given the power to allocate some of the money stream away from players and towards government coffers as well.

In any case, I think there could be some cool ways of using this money. The King could use money to pay Mercenaries (who could be either players from other nations or NPCs I suppose) who could be bought to fight in battles against other nations or against those trying to overthrow the King.

This money could also facilitate an assassin system. I was thinking that, like Aika Online, the King and his guild would be given pretty large stat bonuses. Furthermore, the territories themselves might provide some passive stat bonuses to all players in the nation as well, or there could be a separate system such as the Relic system in Aika, where control of certain areas with "relics" provides the nation with stat bonuses. Either way, I was thinking that Kings could use their government money to buy an assassin (other players who agree to it) to kill another King within a certain timeframe. If the King is assassinated (not just killed on a quest or something), then his guild and the nation as a whole loses their stat bonuses for a certain period, making it both easier to take their territory, but also easier to overthrow them. They could also assassinate rival guild leaders, stopping them from attempting a coup for a certain time period etc etc.


Trade

Anyways, the last part was a bit off the economic topic, but is relevant in that it would be part of the economic powers of a nation's king. Trade between nations would also be an important part of the King's powers. As I said before, each territory would provide different resource streams. Thus, a nation could be left without a territory that would give them a resource they really need. As such, it would be possible for Kings to negotiate nation-to-nation trade agreements. If Nation A really needed Iron from Nation B, and Nation B really needed Wood from Nation A, then they could create an agreement where Nation A provides 10,000 Iron a day to Nation B, and Nation B provides 8,000 Wood a day to Nation A.

Furthermore, if two nations want to be allied, they could even provide completely free trade between nations, meaning players could buy resources/items from nations that aren't their own. The King could also put tariffs on goods from other nations, making them more expensive (and thus only worth buying if you really can't get it at home). The King would have to watch out with trade though, because a trade deficit would basically mean gold is flowing out of their nation and to the other nation.

Crafting Guilds

I alluded to this earlier when I said that an item might need to be created by a group of players. In order to encourage new players crafting, there would have to be a limit on the amount of resources a player could buy in a day. This would stop super rich players from quickly buying up all the resources every day, stopping new players from getting any.

However, the result of this would be that one player has a limited crafting potential when it comes to super expensive items. This would require the creation of crafting guilds. Let me give an example. Let's say there is a limit of buying 1000 Iron a day. Crafting a 'Super Sword' might take 1,000,000 Iron. Thus, a single crafter would need, at the least, 1000 days (almost 3 years) in order to make that object. Thus, the player would probably never make it. However, the player could make a crafting guild of 20 players. If each of them bought the max Iron every day, it would only take 50 days to acquire the resources to make the 'Super Sword.' Thus it could be made and sold at massive profit. This encourages the creation of crafting guilds.

Inflation

Rampant inflation is present in many MMOs. Farming of resources and players doing quests provides more money in the economy constantly, inflating prices. Inflation isn't the same problem in game as it is in real life. In real life, inflation discourages savings and other things that are not relevant in game. However, it still makes a game economy seem silly if its constantly inflating hugely. The other big problem is it discourages players from coming back to the game. So we don't want massive inflation.

How would this game deal with that? You are probably thinking about how there's a constant flow of money each day, thus creating huge inflation. However, my system provides a huge money sink in the form of buying resources. Every time a player buys a resources, he pays an NPC, and that money leaves the economy. Thus, the balance of resource and money streams determines inflation. For instance, let's say there are 100 players in a nation and taxes are set by the King such that each player gets 10 gold a day. 1000 gold is entering the nation each day. However, at the same time, the nation is also getting a resource stream of 100 Iron a day, with Iron costing 10 gold per unit. Assuming all of that Iron is bought, then 1000 gold is leaving the nation each day as well. Thus, the money supply stays constant.

Through this mechanism, the King of a nation actually can use the taxation system as a means of dictating the monetary policy of his nation much like the Fed does in real life. Effectively, the King can control the inflation/deflation rate in the economy, which could have some large implications.


Dealing with Certain Problems

- I said that NPC shops will always buy goods for a certain price. Well that won't always be true. If they did, players could farm them for money constantly, and that isn't realistic behavior. It would also create more inflation (which you don't need in an MMO) by having the NPC shops constantly giving money to people and not selling the item back to other players (thus getting money back out). Thus there will be some kind of limit on the number of a given item that a shop will hold at once. Thus, they might not hold more than 1000 daggers at once, for instance. Therefore, if no one buys daggers, then someone can't keep farming crafted daggers.


- You don't want one nation to dominate. One of the ways I would try to stop a nation from dominating is through creating a system where they can get overstretched. Each territory that is controlled carries with it the fact that monsters will attack given areas in that territory dynamically. If the monsters are not destroyed each time they attack, then their attack on the territory will be "successful" and the money/resource stream of that territory will be lessened for a certain time period. If one nation controls a huge amount of territories, these attacks will get overwhelming, and they will lose their advantage from having all that territory.


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I know that was long, but what do people think?

You have some very interesting ideas right here, as you said economy is a big aspect of mmo games and unfortunately in most of them it doesn't have the depth it should have. The most interesting part of your idea the way economy is tied up with gameplay.
If I understood well the king is a human player. If thats the case instead of a king you could have a council of players, the number of which would depend on the number of players in the nation.
On thing I didn't understand is how this system could support classic quests and "monster killing" which provide a steady amount of gold to players and thus causing inflation.

I’m not sure if the giving cash to players aspect is good idea rather instead you could have the taxation level simply determine the influx of goods and resource from the territories to the nations capital.

Further rather then a fixed amount of a resource available to all players you could use the influx of a resource to as part of formula to determine the availability and price index.

For instance a small iron mine might produce 10 iron a day with 100% taxation and the base price of iron is 10.

r = resource
b = base price
v = hourly variation (+- 20%)

The availability formula might be as simple as availability =r*Trader Skill, and price index formula could pi = 1.02– (r/500) – v

The price index would apply to all iron goods so having a daily income of 10 iron would mean player paid between 8 and 12 gold for a unit 1 iron and could buy up 10 times their trader skill.

The price index would bubble up to apply to all goods made from that material as well so a dagger that takes 1 unit of iron to make might have a cost of base cost of 30 and so with current iron supply would have price of 24 to 36.

As iron is fairly cheap it would take a lot of it before the price was affected to much effectively under this system every 40 units of a resource a nation receives a day would decrease the cost by 10%

It also creates a bit of an incentive for players to travel, as if they want to make a good profit on their goods they need to sell them in area of resource scarcity.

The other thing you could do it have the taxation level effect the development of the territory. The more resources the king leaves in a territory the more development points it gets a day which are used to buy improvements, upgrading the iron mine from small to medium increasing the daily output, setting up a lumber camp, etc…

In this way territories can become more valuable over time and thus appealing targets for international warfare.

Rather then having roving monster attacks what if the king needs to appoint a vassal to govern each territory? The vassal gets certain perks and bonuses but they also can get involved in political machinations if there is the ability for them to defect to other nations bringing their territories with them or depose the king.

Lastly the 1000 man hours to gather enough iron to build a single sword, sounds like a really bad idea to me. Especially as other members of the craft guild will probably have their own plans for items they want to build, in essence a crafting guild just becomes a resource clearing house. What if instead the craft guilds have access to shared work areas, and they trade in sharing skills? If there was a number of different skill sets that could be applied to the completion of single item that would encourage co operations and guilds working together. For instance the super sword might require 100 units of meteoric steal so you need some with metallurgy skill high enough to turn meteoric iron into meteoric steal. A smith with enough skill to build the basic sword template, an enchanter to apply some high level enchantments to the weapon, and finally an artisan to add a few final touches of sharpening an polishing to get the weapon in its finest state.

What's the incentive for a player to actually play? They could log in once every day and get the same rewards than someone who plays 24/7.

Do you have a resource sink? You may not get gold inflation if gold earned equals gold spent on resources, but you will have resource inflation if items are permanent. For a crafting system to work and be interesting, you need a high volume of small transactions with a little volume of exceptional transactions. In the process of creating swords, the smith will create a lot of average swords with a few exceptional swords. The average swords are there to cover the costs and keep the smithy alive. The exceptional swords bring the smith to the next level by allowing a large influx of money to train. Also, it brings interaction because you can auction them or make a deal with players since it's a rare item. The common swords you can sell in bulk. For this to work, you need the resource sink. Players need to buy swords on a constant basis, else the exceptional sword has no value. If everyone has access to the exceptional sword by simply waiting for resources to pile up, it becomes a common item and is no longer exceptional anymore. And once everyone has their exceptional sword, you need an expansion which will bring in even more awesome items to make players miserable for farming for months for their old items.

Have a look at the economy of Eve on line, or even Second Life.

In SL, "players" (and I use the term loosly in relation to SL as many don't see it as a game), come in two type: Casual and Premium.

With causal players they don't have to pay any monthly fee but the don't get any money other than buying with real money or through what they can make in SL by their own efforts (similar to crafting in MMOs). They also can't hold yerritory (land), but they can use territory of other players (rent).

With Premium players, they have to pay a monthly fee, but they get a constant stream of income (a minumum amout that amounts to about 1/2 the amount they would get if they just bought the money with real money), but they also are allowed to own land (initially a small parcel, but they are allowed to pay more to get a larger amount of land).

In SL, the players are the sole creators of the content, and the main activity in the economy revolves around this (however, land ownership is another big aspect, and actually is what the economy is based on). In a way, this can be seen as a very good crafting system as the players have to create the itmes (clothing, building, etc) that fill the game world. For most MMOs, this amount of control over the items in the game is not really necesary.

This brings us to Eve. In Eve, all items in the game can be crafted by players (but not necesarily are), it is the exchange of these items and the raw materials needed to make them that has created the Eve economy. Players need to make an effort to locate new sources raw materials, but these are in unploiced areas which makes their gathering a dangerous undertaking.

Because loss of a ship in Eve is a loss of the resources that the player spent to get it (and the players who defeated them can scavenge the remains for some of the resources of that ship), then this risk is a more substantial risk than is typically experienced in most MMOs (when you resurect you get all your stuff back). Because of this risk, any player with a lot of resources becomes a target as killing them gives a much higher reward for that effort. This creates a balance where players with a lot to loose will need to spend more and more on defending their valuables.

What lessons can be learnt from these games?

Well one of the things is that players must be able to loose what they have. Too many MMOs have the player only really able to gain and not loose their holdings. This inevitably creates an Inflation and this is why MMOs so often have inflation problmes (in Non MMOs inflation is not a problem as the game just gets more difficult the more the player has and the amount the player can get is typically highly controled).

By allowing the player to loose everything, this creates real risk and give the player a reason to work to defend what they have.

The other lesson is that players need to have control over the buying, selling and creating of as much (if not all) of the items in the game and resource collecting in the game as possible. It allows player to choose where and how they are going to work in the system.

How can this apply to your game?

Well, if you allow players to rule the various kingdoms (and it does sound like you will be allowing this) you will need to give the players as many opertunities to be involed in this.

I would drop the idea of pre-set nations being main actors in the game world. Have them, instead, as safe zones where new players can learn to play in saftey, but then have boarder regions where players can own territory themselves and have to work to defend it (maybe by paying other players to defend it for them).

Players should not get any money just for existing in the world, but allow them to get money by either being a subscriber (premium member or buying money directly - you can have one or both) or by putting effort in (acting as a mercenary, etc).

Like with Eve, have the reason players are fighting be for the resources. Don't just give them resources (monet and items) for defeating oonsters, but allow the players to sponsor other players to go into the wilderness and defeat the monsters (or protect a caravan, lumber miss, mining opoeration, etc), or, even allow player to sponsor others to disrupt these activities of the other players (yes, give griefers a role in the game!).

This will allow players to create quests for other players by creating a risk system (loose all your equipment if you die) that discorages players with a lot to lose from taking risky endevors and then allowing players with less to lose profit from it.

To make an economy, you ahve to create a system that allows player to develop new ways to work. You have to allow players to create jobs for other players.

The types of crafting systems that occur in MMOs are very shallow, and this does not create enough job types and so the number of players rapidly fills up all the available jobs which leaves no room for other players to get jobs. Also as there is then not much variety in these jobs (the player skill set is typically just get the materials from a vendor, click a button to craft), then the players don't actually feel that they are contributing to the production in any significant way.

Eve solved this by having thousands of different items available for crafting and each one requiers a special character skill to make, they essentially created thousnads of differnet job types, but they didn't address the player skills needed. Where as in Second Life, the ability to craft (make things) is entierly dependednt on the player's skills.

If you made a happy medium, where player skills are necesary for crafting but also have thousands of crafting object each requiering character skill too, then you can make an economic system that is both deep and broard, and provide a truly unique experinece for the players.

Sounds like you've been reading about Land Value Taxation and Citizens dividends (geonomics)? I also think it would be a good base for an MMORPG.

http://www.progress.org/geonomy/

and best of all it's supported by the father of capitalism* Adam Smith.

Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground. More or less can be got for it according as the competitors happen to be richer or poorer, or can afford to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of ground at a greater or smaller expense. In every country the greatest number of rich competitors is in the capital, and it is there accordingly that the highest ground-rents are always to be found. As the wealth of those competitors would in no respect be increased by a tax upon ground-rents, they would not probably be disposed to pay more for the use of the ground. Whether the tax was to be advanced by the inhabitant, or by the owner of the ground, would be of little importance. The more the inhabitant was obliged to pay for the tax, the less he would incline to pay for the ground; so that the final payment of the tax would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent.

– Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 2, Article I: Taxes upon the Rent of Houses


Don't forget David Ricardo on the laws of Rent either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Rent


Best of luck with the game.

*Sadly confused with corporatism.

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Original post by lessthanjake - I said that NPC shops will always buy goods for a certain price. Well that won't always be true. If they did, players could farm them for money constantly, and that isn't realistic behavior. It would also create more inflation (which you don't need in an MMO) by having the NPC shops constantly giving money to people and not selling the item back to other players (thus getting money back out). Thus there will be some kind of limit on the number of a given item that a shop will hold at once. Thus, they might not hold more than 1000 daggers at once, for instance. Therefore, if no one buys daggers, then someone can't keep farming crafted daggers.

So the shops' quotas are going to fill up and stay full of beginner-craftable items, making it annoying/expensive for new people to begin learning to craft because they either can't sell their product at all, or have to run around to several NPC stores trying to find one which will buy?

Territory based PVP is not that easy to pull off if it is extremely important to your economy. Zergs, problems with changes in population over the course of a day, a need to provide diverse gameplay options, and other issues have to be considered. I think territory based PVP is a good starting point though.

Resource System

Free money is a bad idea. Instead I think you want to require players to do something or invest something to get resources out of the land. For example if there is a mine in the area then the player must mine it or pay an NPC to mine it. The mine itself will also need to be defended.

The ability of the players to get value out of the land should be something they have to invest time in. For example if you use NPC miners the miner could be skilled up. Also the number of miners a player has access to may depend on them paying for them or accoplishing some task or both.

Access to a territory could just open up a dungeon like DF in DAOC. There are a lot of different advantages you can give for holding a territory.

NPC shops

Personally I see nothing wrong with the WOW method. NPCs act as a way to turn goods into gold quickly and easily but it is not an efficient way to get gold in terms of time invested. Then you use an AH for player to player trading.

You can include goods that are localized as well and leave the world wide AH for non localized goods. (For example large amounts of grain may be needed to feed an NPC population around territory X. That grain would have to be moved physically to that location. But if a player buys a sword on the AH they can have it mailed to them wherever they are)

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If I understood well the king is a human player. If thats the case instead of a king you could have a council of players, the number of which would depend on the number of players in the nation.

That's a fairly good idea as I have given the "King" of each nation a lot of power, and that would be really fun for that one player, but not as much for others (who would only derive fun from this mechanism by trying to overthrow the King). I have some other ideas to replace the King part, I just didn't talk about them in order for my original post to not be too long

1. As you said, the ruling guild(s) could have a council of players that make the decisions. This opens up macro decision making to more players.
2. A guild could rule a nation, but all decision making could be done by democratic vote within the guild. This is similar to the council of rulers, I suppose, but an entire guild voting likely means more people with power.
3. The other thing I thought of was that there might be the following mechanism added on, whether there is a King or a ruling council. Before every attempt at overthrow (which would only be possible maybe once a week), the entire nation would be asked to voice their approval/disapproval of the King/Council. High approval would mean high stat bonuses for the Kings guild in the coming internal battle; high disapproval would mean high stat bonuses for the attacking guild. This forces the King to adhere to people's desires, and also gives everyone some passive effect on policymaking.

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On thing I didn't understand is how this system could support classic quests and "monster killing" which provide a steady amount of gold to players and thus causing inflation.

Well, I am undecided on this. Obviously the game could easily include tons of quests and even a player-story to go through, as well as the dynamic monster attacks on territories. Gold from quests would, of course, add to inflation, but the effect should be manageable given the considerable levers players have to limit inflation. Furthermore, giving players items from quests (which could be made quite common) would decrease demand for player-made items somewhat, and thus lower prices. This would reasonably offset the inflation created by the extra gold.

Will there be inflation in an MMO with tons of quests? Yeah, of course. Hypothetically, inflation could be averted in my game if the King chose not to tax and simply got resources whose purchase would lower the money supply. But inflation in an MMO is different from inflation in real life. It is not a huge problem, in my opinion, unless there's such hyperinflation that someone who stops playing for a little bit suddenly has a disincentive to start playing again because his wealth is worth nothing anymore. My system averts that with a HUGE money sink in the form of resource purchasing, as well as the opportunity for the player base to actively fight inflation with a form of monetary policy.

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The other thing you could do it have the taxation level effect the development of the territory. The more resources the king leaves in a territory the more development points it gets a day which are used to buy improvements, upgrading the iron mine from small to medium increasing the daily output, setting up a lumber camp, etc…

I have sort of thought of this, but in a slightly different way. I talked earlier about the King having money in the government coffers. I figure that money could be used for such things as mercenaries and assassins, but also to improve the territories he owns. I suppose monster attacks could destroy these improvements.

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Rather then having roving monster attacks what if the king needs to appoint a vassal to govern each territory? The vassal gets certain perks and bonuses but they also can get involved in political machinations if there is the ability for them to defect to other nations bringing their territories with them or depose the king.

I like this idea, and I thought about it in some way (though not the defecting thing, which is cool). There could be some level of a feudal system, whereby a guild or person rules each territory as well as a vassal. This would be great as it would bring in a lot more people into the macro-level politics.

The problem I have is I'm not sure what powers to delegate to vassals instead of kings. I want the king to have the taxation power, as otherwise it would become impossible to have a uniform monetary policy, which I see as important as it gives players the ability to stem inflation if they want to.

Maybe in keeping with the idea that the King could use government money to make improvements, he could simply allocate money by territory, and the vassal could use it as he pleases (for mercenaries, assassins, improvements, etc etc). The vassals will want money from the king; if they don't get it then they might defect. BUT if they do get lots of money, they'll become powerful enough to raise mercenary armies or pay assassins to kill the king if they want to.

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What's the incentive for a player to actually play? They could log in once every day and get the same rewards than someone who plays 24/7.

The incentive is the same as in any MMO. You want to level up your character and get the best equipment in order to make him epic. You won't level up your character and make him awesome if you just log in to get the money. You'll just make money but it will be useless.

There is also significant incentive in the form of national pride. If well done, a player will WANT to fight for their country. They ALSO might fight for power within their nation etc etc.

This brings up another idea I had that I didn't include earlier though. I think that an MMO should have a system of recording 'renown' each player has gained in various ways, and have one be able to look up who has gotten the most renown in many categories. So for instance, if you like to craft, you might get a ton of renown for making a 'legendary' item, and you could look up a list of players sorted by crafting renown. You'd have an incentive to try to climb up the list. If, instead you like to fight PVP against players from other nations, there could be some sort of formula for soldier renown based on kills, damage, time you've disabled enemies, healing done in national battles, etc etc. A player who wants to be their country's best soldier would have incentive to climb up that list by participating in lots of battles. The same sort of thing could be done for monster fights, and for time spent in positions of power etc etc. I think this is a great way to foster incentives to play.

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Do you have a resource sink? You may not get gold inflation if gold earned equals gold spent on resources, but you will have resource inflation if items are permanent. For a crafting system to work and be interesting, you need a high volume of small transactions with a little volume of exceptional transactions. In the process of creating swords, the smith will create a lot of average swords with a few exceptional swords. The average swords are there to cover the costs and keep the smithy alive. The exceptional swords bring the smith to the next level by allowing a large influx of money to train. Also, it brings interaction because you can auction them or make a deal with players since it's a rare item. The common swords you can sell in bulk. For this to work, you need the resource sink. Players need to buy swords on a constant basis, else the exceptional sword has no value. If everyone has access to the exceptional sword by simply waiting for resources to pile up, it becomes a common item and is no longer exceptional anymore. And once everyone has their exceptional sword, you need an expansion which will bring in even more awesome items to make players miserable for farming for months for their old items.

Well first off, the idea is that the top flight items would take so much resources to create that the game would have to be around for a really long time for a majority of players to be walking around with the best items. If the game WAS around for that long, you'd have an expansion/update with a whole new set of glorious items.

Having items deteriorate could also easily deal with this problem as well. That mechanic would work very well in this instance. I tend to be skeptical of item deterioration though because it really doesn't provide any fun; its just an annoyance. So if it were possible to avoid it and have the game mechanics still work, I'd want that.

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So the shops' quotas are going to fill up and stay full of beginner-craftable items, making it annoying/expensive for new people to begin learning to craft because they either can't sell their product at all, or have to run around to several NPC stores trying to find one which will buy?

Ideally, new players would ALSO be buying the beginner-craftable items from the NPC shops, making the quotas not full anymore. You could say that higher level players would simply sell more daggers at that point, but most likely, higher level players would have a better incentive to sell high profit mid-level items at that point.

Also, if NO ONE is buying daggers, then they shouldn't continue to be made. That's not economically realistic at all. You don't create that for which there is no market. If new players are buying daggers, then other new players will have room to craft and sell them. If new players are buying more expensive items instead, then other similar new players will surely have the ability to craft more expensive items.

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Free money is a bad idea. Instead I think you want to require players to do something or invest something to get resources out of the land. For example if there is a mine in the area then the player must mine it or pay an NPC to mine it. The mine itself will also need to be defended.

Why is free money a bad idea? It doesnt create rampant inflation in this case. You still have to play to get the money, so there's no incentive to do nothing.

Its possible the free money could be dealt with slightly differently. There could be a certain amount of money given to the nation through taxes, and the money is given proportionally to people each day based on how active they were that day (either in hours played, or more ideally, how much someone actually did in game).

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Territory based PVP is not that easy to pull off if it is extremely important to your economy. Zergs, problems with changes in population over the course of a day, a need to provide diverse gameplay options, and other issues have to be considered. I think territory based PVP is a good starting point though.

I believe my game idea has some checks on the problems with a territory based PVP. For instance, lets take changes in population over the course of a day. This would make it easy for one nation to take over territory from another nation if they simply had more people around at that moment. However, a king can buy NPC mercenaries to cover his nation during a given time period if he is really worried about that. This provides an extra element of choice in that a king can risk being rushed at an odd hour and use his resources elsewhere, or play it safe and buy mercenaries. Furthermore, one king could create false rumors of an impending attack and trick another king into throwing money down the drain at mercenaries to fend off an attack that wouldn't come.

As for diverse gameplay options, I dont really think that territory based PVP limits gameplay options. It just provides another option. You could still have 1v1 duels, team deathmatch (and other modes) style battle modes in an instanced arena, random skirmishes with other players you run into etc etc. So PvP options are still there. As for PvE, you can still easily have a player-story that's not really connected to the territory battles, as well as lots of unrelated quests you can go on, and random monster attacks to fend off. These are a lot of options.

[Edited by - lessthanjake on September 15, 2010 6:18:54 PM]

I'm going to kinda reitterate some of the EVE online stuff that was mentioned above.
Some of the really key elements in that game are:

*Almost everything can be made by the players. (easy way to transmute "usless" items into more useful ones. Anything gets melted down to minerals, and then rebuilt as something else. There is loss of material in the transmute process though.)

*Everything can be destroyed. (BIG sinks in this game. Stuff gets blown up or cunsumed by almost any action you may want to do, sinking resources out of the game).

*Objects have a physical location. No magical banks/auction houses like WoW. (there is money in player trading and transport. Items have to be moved from drop locations to sell locations. Some routes are dangerous, since you can get blown up, so people will pay premium for shipping. This influences prices in different areas. )

*EVE is a Market, not and Auction. People can place and fill both Buy and Sell orders. This means buyers can influence the market by placing buy orders to indicate demand and value of different items. It also means you can fill a buy order, equivalently resulting in an immediate sale instead of putting up a sell order and waiting for the sale. Auctions don't allow the buyers to express demand or value, and all prices are driven by the sellers, who have to guess what the buyers think the value is. All market transactions are also taxed.

*Most player owned stuff requires constant maintenance in the form of fuel. This provides another basic tax on everything.

*Money isn't an all purpose thing. Item values tend to be related not only by rarity, supply, or demand, but by the resource values. If you can melt 1 medium blaster down and build 2 small blasters, then the prices will likely be closely related to that ratio. If they weren't someone would be making a profit by doing that transmutation from the undervalued of the two items. This means you don't see prices driven up just because everyone has 1Billion ISK in their wallets to spend.

Sorry if I didn't directly address any of your points in the above lists. I wanted to make some points to get you thinking about how to well balance things to fight inflation.

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Having items deteriorate could also easily deal with this problem as well. That mechanic would work very well in this instance. I tend to be skeptical of item deterioration though because it really doesn't provide any fun; its just an annoyance. So if it were possible to avoid it and have the game mechanics still work, I'd want that.

Yeah. In EVE you lose items all the time. It isn't an annoyance (ok, it can be. but it usually isnt), and it does actually provide fun. The key to the fun is that it provides a direct way to damage your PvP enemies. The physically lose stuff they worked to get when you go to war. Noone can fight forever, and someone walks away from the fight a loser. And, to top it off, not everything is blown up, so the winners can often walk away with loot from the people they just killed. At the end of the day, someone won. WoW PvP is a joke. Noone gains anything, and noone loses anything. Like a stalemate of TF2, you just run around popping eachother and waiting for the respawn timers. At the end of the day, nothing changed.

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If the game WAS around for that long, you'd have an expansion/update with a whole new set of glorious items.

EVE's items and characters defiantly scale over time, but not even close to WoW. This also helps the economy. A +5% damage amplifier is just as useful to a 2month old character as it is a 2year old character. Sure, the 2 year old character might be able to afford the top tier amplifier that gives him a 10% bonus, but that 5% extra costs a lot of money and he can still be killed by n00bs if he makes a bad move. In WoW, your so epic at level 80, a level 1 has no chance of killing you. The WoW way is so unblanced that it breaks the economy, since items are only useful at particular levels. This means super low demand for 99.995% of the items in the game. 00.001% of the items are cool items for level 80 characters, and the other 00.004% are there to get your trade skills maxed out. In EVE, a good 50% of the items are useful no mater how long you've been playing, and the other 50% are equally useful, but rarity causes their prices to be out of reach of new players.

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Why is free money a bad idea? It doesnt create rampant inflation in this case. You still have to play to get the money, so there's no incentive to do nothing.

Free money is bad unless there is a free sink. EVE has "free money". You can build on planets, and mine resources in the background. But it also has a "free sink" for that, since those resources only really ever go into the production of player-owned-station fuels that get burnt at a constant rate. So it can only deflate in value, since the only reason to get that resource is to spend it on your upkeep costs.

Free money without a sink is really bad, since it removes effort and risk from the equations. That results in money being worth a lot less.

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, I dont really think that territory based PVP limits gameplay options.

Yeah. Territory PvP is huge in EVE. Having different resouces only drop in different areas causes pressure from different factions to claim the richest zones. The rich zones, hopefully provide the resources you need to defend yourself, but there is also a good chance others will usurp your power in the area and claim the resources for themselves. EVE territory stuff hasn't been the greatest, but it has been steadily improving with the introduction of "improvement buildings" that increase the utility of the territory those buildings are placed in.

[Edited by - KulSeran on September 15, 2010 11:45:33 PM]