PlaneShift
Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: Aeterus on June 07, 2004, 05:41:35 pm
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*Warning Long Thread*
*English isn\'t my primary language so excuse me for typos and mistakes i just hope i will get the main ideas clear.*
Introduction
During my long years of rpging, both with dices and in pc rpgs I\'ve stumbled on many flaws, the must serious flaws i have seen in online games were connected with the economy.
Economy is one of the 4 elements which form the atmosphere of an rpg, the other 3 being the environment (graphics and sound) character development and the general in-character roleplaying level.
Games with better economy have more player interactions a more living community, and in my aspect a better desire to roleplay.
I usually use the examples of a miners and blacksmiths here because it\'s easy to explain the relations between different skills - just note this topic tries to refer to every skill in games.
Proper Division
In real life medieval times (and today too) everyone had his job - blacksmiths, miners, glass workers, jewelers, herbalists, etc ...
Sure a miner could study forging for example, but learning and mastering something takes time, and time is money, so everyone stayed strict to his job, which evolved around a couple or more skills, and may have had general knowledge in other things but it was minimal.
Games seems to really screw it in this area, in about every game i know, a blacksmith could go mine for his own ore, a potion maker could create his own vials by creating glass from sand, etc ... and in the games that do have divided crafts the devision is done also between craftsmen and adventurers which i think is very wrong. when i first seen planeshift i saw that everyone had a job and i thought \"oh goody\" but of course i was very wrong ^^
The appeal for this is high, and many players would ask themselves now \"what\'s wrong with it ?\" - the answer is simple, it disencourages the work flow between a few people with different jobs, and it always create the unrealistic \"powergaming\" where (for example) a blacksmith would buy his ore very low because he might as well mine it himself.
Since this is a game, a minute in a game is like an hour in real life, and from there after a few months of playing must players can master mostly everything, sometimes it takes longer, like a year, but if the devision system is flawed, sooner or later players will reach this mastery of everything.
I have never really seen this area solved in any game, maybe in a very few uo shards, but it was still not implemented that well. In my opinion the best way is to let people have a very basic taste of all the skills, but only be able to pick one job, and the job evolving around 2/3 familiar skills which can be mastered.
Further more people can have a few characters and each have a different job, that\'s nice and answer the need for this appeal, as long as muling (transferring items between characters) isn\'t allowed since it is nearly as bad as having the avatar characters.
Countering mass production and monopoly
In ancient times thousands of weapons and armors would be made by a workshop of blacksmiths (around 10 blacksmiths) in a city in a few days to answer the high demand in times of wars and such, where the measuring of troopers were in thousands.
In an online rpg this doesn\'t happen, the blacksmiths ratio in the community is around 10 times more percent that what it was in real life.
That means the system should be based for it (of course X times more people would usually mean the same proportions of different jobs, so this system remains good)
so there has to be a way to counter price collapses which results from mass production with no demand.
Countering is done in three ways :
1.minimizing mass production : in the example of weapons and armors, many games allow a blacksmith to create a very insane amount of these arms, they usually do so because they prefer (as it should) slow skill improvement, which forces the need to make a lot of arms to advance even a tiny amount in skill.
The way to counter it is by making the forging process more tedious, instead of making say 5 claymore swords from X materials you make 1 claymore sword from the same X materials, (and of course give more xp to compensate for it) which works well for mining too (the miner smelt iron ore requires a lot more ore to make one bar, so he can mine a lot of ore but it won\'t flood the market with bars, yet bars will be worth more so they won\'t be bought in insane quantities)
instead of just putting the materials and making it there\'s also the idea of longer process, whereas the miner should smelt iron ore, the blacksmith (as it was in gothic1/2 and likewise) tampers the steel, overheats the blade waters it in the bucket etc (nothing too crazy, but if you break this skill to 3-4 processes, it creates more value to each sword, and instead of making 4 swords, you make 1 sword but at the same time get xp for each process which is good xp wise :] and heavier arms can require longer forging time to farther cut high-end production)
2.forcing market rates : in real life there are rates for many things, but they form by themselves and they cause some people to be poor, and some to be rich.
In a game designers wouldn\'t like this to happen of course (though it usually seems like they don\'t really care ^^), so there\'s a simple way to force certain rates - NPC\'s.
NPC\'s buy items at infinite quantity, but they buy them low and they sell those items rather high.
So let\'s say an iron bar is sold to npc\'s at 5gp, is bought at 8gp, that would lead players to buy and sell them somewhere in the middle, and it would give a certain flexibility as of how the rates would go, but also it will keep the rates safe in minimum maximum.
The biggest help it gives is to keep weapons at certain values, a blacksmith won\'t be inclined to sell his weapon cheaper than the NPC rate because than he actually loses money, and also if no NPC would buy/sell them, blacksmiths could jump their weapon prices sky high, nice for high-end tenth of arms but not so nice when a dagger costs like a house ;] (and yes i did see that happen somewhere ^^)
3.large value difference between better items : let\'s say a blacksmith sells a dagger for 100gp, short sword costs 140gp, and so on, until the master darkness mythril sword costs 10k.
Sounds nice ? it\'s not ... because if the blacksmith makes 200 swords in say a week (we\'ll presume the material cost is 50% from value), he can buy the best sword in the game.
and once he can buy it, he is considered rich and has nothing much to long to, hence the need for a higher progression of value.
The better the weapon is, the more materials and more expensive ores are required, which forms a minimal cost, this cost should be quite higher between weapons, i saw nicely presented prices in several game\'s guides (such as eternal lands, but since it didn\'t follow much of the other rules, market rates went down and everything became cheap, plus i could personally buy everything in the game after only 3 days of gaming) for example a dagger costs 100gp, then a short sword costs 8-10 time more and so on, usually a range of medium swords have a similar price difference between them, say 1k, but in the heavy category they all go multiplied again until you get to prices like 160k or even few millions for the mega heavy doom swords. and to add variety there are weapons with close prices but they have different categories. (for example axes/spears/swords or even different type of swords such as falchion would have similar costs to a sabre, but different types of falchion would have huge value differences)
Balance of material and time consumption - (surrealistic world economic root)
Everyone knows there are and always were different jobs, some pay really crappy some pay annoyingly high.
The above said is realistic, however i doubt any sane game designer would like his rpg mechanism to be even close to that.
Hence a high skilled miner in a game can mine more precious ore with more chances etc (in the goldrush every skill-less bum \"rushed\" to mine gold, just to explain there was no real skill in that except for the logical minimum).
Here comes the balance of time consumption,
i\'ll start with the general worth of a job\'s time - the simplest way to describe it is to say a miner of X skill putting X effort (effort is usually time in games) should make the closest amount of money to say, blacksmith with the same skill who puts the same effort. (this is said without element of risk, risk being the chances to lose materials and that allows crafters to make more money in the risk they may also lose more money)
Why ? because unless you do so, people will always seek the same best paying job ;] (collapsing any chances for an economy of course ^^)
To explain it farther in an example :
Let\'s say a certain miner in an hour mine 200 units of iron ore per hour and smelt them to 30 iron bars (in the same hour of course) each sells for 6gp which totals at 180gp he roughly makes per hour in his skill.
now let\'s say a blacksmith of the same skill makes 20 daggers per hour (3 minutes per dagger for this example)
the value he makes from the daggers should be around the 130-230 gp, that means making say between 6-12gp value per dagger.
Of course there can be a bigger difference here, but the role is to keep from having one of them making 100gp per hour and the other making 500gp per hour (again both of them having same skill and putting same effort), these differences just appear in so many games, and lead people to change the classes\' job after a few days of playing because it\'s unfair in quite a serious way.
Even more, The minimal/maximum NPC rates explained in the previous role help set the minimum and maximum profit the worker makes. so in this example if the blacksmith buys his supplies from an NPC he\'ll make this minimal profit (considering he sells to an NPC of course) and if he buys them from a player he\'ll make a few extra gold pieces.
The miner can get better rates for his ore, just like the blacksmith can get a better price for his well crafted daggers from players - the miner gets smaller differences then the blacksmith, but since he makes bigger quantities it sums up.
And to keep the balance of workflow - if we presume a blacksmith has a steady miner supplier, the blacksmith would require about 30 iron-bars for this hour of work ;]
Just to remind, profit isn\'t the value of the item, it\'s the [value of item] - [value of materials].
In my opinion value of materials should be at least 50% value of item (in NPC rate).
The more jobs are involved in getting the materials for the item the higher this percent can go, and it can help counter situations where the crafter makes too much profit on expensive craftable items.
Conclusion - the not so optimistic truth
In my opinion, those are the basic and important rules for a living a stable economy.
An mmorpg should always have a skeleton where an economy can exist even with minimal number of players with the help of NPC\'s, where the more players establishes their hold on the economy, the more everyone benefits from it and the stronger community bounds form.
I have noticed all mmorpg\'s i played, even the p2p ones failed miserable in nearly everything that was said above, the closest thing to a good mmorpg economy i can recall was in eternal lands, but even there it was so miserably implemented that everyone could buy everything on their first week in the game.
I just wanted to share my thoughts so everyone who read that far (you are insane ;) ) will get some thinking and won\'t be surprised if people start whining about economic problems in 2 years when this game will be in a more developed version.
Having some experience with graphical and programming game development myself - when i first saw planeshift i thought and still think it\'s quite a remarkable piece of effort evolved, but when i think about how much demanding a good mmorpg is, i don\'t hope for much, it\'ll be quite extreme if PS will succeed in following even 1 role out of these three - and this is just the economic element.
Other than that i wish the staff best of luck, and nice job so far, you r0x ;]
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Definitely a great post with some thoughts put into it. Way above forum standards, that\'s for sure. :)
Anyway, let\'s get moving. You talk about giving good items a high value, well then I must say this is thought of already. A quote from the settings page:
a good steel sword 350 tria
farmer\'s one month salary 250 tria
healthy, trained pterosaur 45,000 tria
Don\'t expect blacksmithes or miners to make a LOT more than this, unless they\'re top notch and provide for a whole top-guild (or several of them) that pay full price for everything. :)
As for adventurers and so on... Well, I simply hope that magical and rare items will indeed be very rare, or simply so rare that people keep them to themselves (or trade for other magical items) so only the best can have them, and the best will get them. That\'s just a hope, though.
Anyway, good post. :)
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Thx for the feedback. (you actually read it ?? nsane ;] )
Well i was reffering to the money difference from buying the next better item (for example between silver and golden falchion), since if the difference isn\'t big you can just put a little more effort and you get the better item and so on.
for example if you played ultima online you could get a full plate set + best weapons in around a thousand or two, a house costed there 150-300k, that didn\'t really help the economy since you could make a few k\'s in a few days and then you wouldn\'t really need money anymore. (the house was just like a bonus) ...
that\'s why according to this role the temporary weapon prices they made for this pre-alpha (ye ye i know it\'s temporary but i\'m just noting it as an example), wouldn\'t really last long because the price difference between the weapons is very small.
And of course higher skilled workers should get higher pays in my opinion, that\'s what inspires progression, eh ?
(but that\'s about the character development element ;) )
As for the rare items, well said - i couldn\'t agree less :)
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I think that the economy will have to be fairly tightly controlled by NPC price setting - \"free\" online economies spiral out of control rapidly due to a lack of real world constraints.
What is a realistic timeframe for a hardworking and fortunate player to become a) middle class b) fairly wealthy and c) ridiculously rich? (In terms of either RL months of participation or hours of play)
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Honestly, a standard, hardworking player should only reach somewhere around middle class. Getting better than the rest takes skill, and if you don\'t have those skills, you\'ll always be one step behind, and 100,000 trias poorer. :)
A good economy is a bit like the real world. Once you get your first fair amount of money and you actually have what it takes to invest them in a project, then it just starts rolling and you make more and more, however if you make a mistake it can all crash below your feet. So you must be careful not to come falling down once you get up to the top. That\'ll hurt. :)
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I agree with Gronomist, most people should only make middle class, thats after all what middle class is, and good job Aeterus, its obvious u put alot of thought into this, and i agree with you all the way, the economy does need to be tightly controlled, having NPCs keep the supply and demand levels right is a perfect solution, and ive found alot of games too that everyone has ridiculous amounts of money, *cough cough *unescape cough cough*, and everyone has a rare item because sum idiot hacks and sells millions of \"rare\" items... man i hate hackers, by the way ( i know this is not really on the topic) but what security does PS have against hackers? i mean it looks like and amazing game but many awesome games have been flooded with hackers who made short work of it soooo, is it just an honour system, or is there a really good way that hackers are being controlled?
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Hacker security:
Rule #1: Don\'t give your password to your friends, roommates, parents, dog (or any other pet), brother, sister or any other person in the world.
Rule #2: Don\'t give your account name to .... look above.
Rule #3: Don\'t host uncontrolled FTPs, Apache servers, etc. on your computer, so people can gain access and somehow see your password.
If you do any of the above things, and your account somehow gets taken, then it\'s your own fault and you are the one responsible for everything. Neither the PlaneShift team nor Fragnetics will give you back your password, if you should forget it. There will be a password retrieval service that you can use. If you happen to forget your email password, and your account password, then it\'s your loss.
That\'s about it. :)
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Rule #4: Don\'t use the same password for everything.
Rule #5: Don\'t go to a security forum and start bragging about how 1337 you are.
Rule #6: Keep your PC updated.
And to actually answer your question:
Ps has a anti-cheat system called Paladin Jr, which should provide very good protection, and also most of Ps is server side, so hacking the game is very hard to do.
Back to the original topic:
Yeah, very good. I can\'t see much wrong with what you\'ve said Aeterus. :)
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Thanks for all the comments :)
I just noticed i mispelled in the topic and the body - \"roles\" instead of \"rules\".
*cough* *cough*
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Rule #7: Dont use Winblows.
:)
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It depends how your looking at the economy in general. Are you looking at it Microeconomically or Macroeconomically?
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Originally posted by Kuiper7986
It depends how your looking at the economy in general. Are you looking at it Microeconomically or Macroeconomically?
Is that a tricky question ?? ^^
Well, if i understood the question right, you\'re asking if my point of view on the economy is based on the general concept of economy, or the way mmorpg\'s evolve to through macros (mass production etc).
Well, the analyse is to both actually ... in the general point of view, macro simply allows you to do an action repeatitvly without being on the comp, so a macroeconomy isn\'t very different from a normal economy, since in most games people can mass produce (for example) without even using macros, therefore my roles were directed for both economies. (as both economies suffer from not \"following\" these rules)
However there\'s something i should mention, as i have written in the rules ... where craftable items should take longer to make and therefore have respectable award - where in most mmorpg\'s you craft a lot of items to gain skills/money, the number of items should be reduced and an added time and complexity should be added to the making of each item instead.
This doesn\'t only help stablize higher item prices, it helps to remove the unnecessary one-man massproduction seen in most games. (which encourages macroing in my point of view)
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the economy fails because theres no daily expenses like food, taxes, ect ect ect
with out a proper way of \"recycleing\" the cash players can always hoard huge ammounts of bling bling in their banks easily and this deflates the value of the currency thus makeing every thing more expensive.
classes which go monster hunting will have less gold ( by decreasing the drops) than players who choose to serve in the economy with less rare items ( sword of +5 or something) this means players will have to stick to certain unmagical weapons for sometime.
in real life soilders never become rich unless their generals they make just enough to age happily . in order to have a proper working econemy we have to model it after a working system EG. RL
Yes even with taxes you can still become rich just like in RL so you dont have to worry its just harder for PVP players to make cash than crafters
and this will encourage more player run guilds made out of crafters to fund/power their foot soilders
doesnt it sound better ?
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Then people will create an account and transfer all their bling bling to that one and rarely logging in on it so that they dodge tax.
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Well, it\'s true that people become too rich in mmorpg\'s because they have no real expenses (like taxes, food, lodging etc), while i agree with that, i just know only a very few games will force expenses, and my set of roles were designed to fit the general mmorpg.
Instead of having daily expenses, i have borrowed an aspect from mmohnh (massively multiplayer online hack n\' slash), where there are always better weapons and they cost a lot more.
this generally make advanced to the next \"better item\" longer, and like i mentioned unless it\'s used people become \"rich\" (able to buy the must expensive items) very quickly.
And to prevent crafters from getting too rich because of the gap of item cost, i have suggested that better items take longer to make. (so the added profit is proper)
From a certain point of view, having daily expenses makes a more realistic world, and therefore a more realistic economy, but like i mentioned in the original post, this is a double sided coin, because in a \"realistic\" world, there are rich and poor people, a miner will always stay poor for example, while a jewel maker will become richer quicker than most people.
So unless crafts are balanced, like i have mentioned in role number 3 (creating a surrealistic world economy), people will persue the better job always (thus is the nature of all mmorpgs), which means nobody will work in mundane tasks such as mining which will obviously collapse any hope for economy.
Therefore balance must be achieved (common profit/fun for all) in an mmorpg in the expense of realism.
And as it has risen in the tax thread, people don\'t play mmorpg\'s to encounter things we hate in realife (taxes :[ )
so things such as this will only appear in a very few games - and while personally i like daily expenses such as food and lodging, their effect on the economy is close to nothing.
In terms of fun and enjoyment, our real life economy is a disaster, people should pounder over that.
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Expenisve weapons dont work out in the long run it is necceray to make Super weapons as rare and just as hidden as iraq\'s biological weapons Most will be fabled legends and any one who can get his grubby hands on one will earn alot of respect
besides The idea is to Keep the Bling Bling moving form person to person even if they keep it in the bank the bank can charge service tax for keeping your money safe (even if you turn off your comp)
to keep the Cash flowing taxes for services like useing a sucure high way or entering a town or Level. this way more money circulates. also basic goods like teleport scrolls and land tax can be used to keep the game\'s economy incheck
so lets say there can be a FINE system which subtracts a certain ammount of Bling Bling form your Bank account and Exp points every time you type F*** , N00b ect ect ect
not to mention theres also a program to censor the words it just makes it less cuss-easy in game
Also by makeing the game more guild/town based players will have to mine to support thier closed community so you can have a miner who is working for a smith
the smith can only work on non-magical stuff unless he has a spell-caster under his pay roll to imbune the weapons
so you can have communities which become industrial power houses and to ship weapons of large quanties ,shipping Taxes will be chared thus riseing the cost of weapons and makeing the gap even futher
so you can have communites made out for warriors or mages or farming communities which can hire Npcs to do some dirty work
my above idea sounds nice but the only draw back is that it needs alot of space to make it work i say at least 500 square clicks
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During a guildwar would you not have to pay a smalll war tax to the guild leader for supplies, weapons, mercanaries and NPCs. also perhaps adding a small tax to most goods to increace the price gap.
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Expenisve weapons dont work out in the long run it is necceray to make Super weapons as rare and just as hidden as iraq\'s biological weapons Most will be fabled legends and any one who can get his grubby hands on one will earn alot of respect.
I hate to repeat things, but as i have said, super weapons cost a lot, but also take a lot of time to make, therefore they won\'t flood the market (not to mention the rarety and price of the weapons themselves).
It works well in the long run since not everyone can put his hands on a sword which costs 40k (let\'s say a dagger costs 50gold pieces ^^),
Farther more i was talking about normal weapons, magical weapons cannot be made, and they have nothing to do with the stability of the economy as long as they aren\'t common. (of course you are right here, they should be rare as hell, and in my point of view - unique and very powerful)
besides The idea is to Keep the Bling Bling moving form person to person even if they keep it in the bank the bank can charge service tax for keeping your money safe (even if you turn off your comp)
Nice thought, but i fail to see how this has anything to do with the economy, taxes aren\'t needed for a stable economy - taxes are a way to take little from a group of people in order to supply this group with expensive services.
to keep the Cash flowing taxes for services like useing a sucure high way or entering a town or Level. this way more money circulates. also basic goods like teleport scrolls and land tax can be used to keep the game\'s economy incheck
Circulates where ? isn\'t that the whole idea of a good economy, i don\'t see your point ...
Read the first rule \"proper division\", the more skills are divided the more circulation thus occours.
so lets say there can be a FINE system which subtracts a certain ammount of Bling Bling form your Bank account and Exp points every time you type F*** , N00b ect ect ect
not to mention theres also a program to censor the words it just makes it less cuss-easy in game
That\'s just a way to take gold that people have earned, this is useful if the economy system is built terribly, but following the above rules this won\'t be needed.
[/QUOTE]Also by makeing the game more guild/town based players will have to mine to support thier closed community so you can have a miner who is working for a smith
the smith can only work on non-magical stuff unless he has a spell-caster under his pay roll to imbune the weapons
so you can have communities which become industrial power houses and to ship weapons of large quanties ,shipping Taxes will be chared thus riseing the cost of weapons and makeing the gap even futher
so you can have communites made out for warriors or mages or farming communities which can hire Npcs to do some dirty work
my above idea sounds nice but the only draw back is that it needs alot of space to make it work i say at least 500 square clicks
There is no reason to put taxes on clans, since they are an independent form of government, what they do between themselves (be it daily taxes, or work taxes) is completely their own decision and has nothing to do with the 3 rules of a stable economy.
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Well, it\'s nice to refer to our real world economy, though if you think about it, a free market economy breakes down in the real world as well. Where we have sneakers that cost $3 to make, and are sold for $150, where the average person makes about $70 a day. This is what the western world and most of europe is like, and lets not even talk about what\'s going on in the 3rd world. So in that sense I think most MMORPGs emulate the real world almost perfectly, since the economic model that we use (the free market model) is only a nice idea, and is highly misleading.
In the world of PS, I assume that we don\'t want to see flooded markets with undervalued goods. Excessive and unnecessary taxes. Hell advertising is one of the reasons free markets break down. Just because it\'s made by Grok it\'s much much better!
Anyway, there needs to be some control over the economy, I don\'t suggest a strictly controled economy, but something along a centrally planned one, while this doesn\'t work in RL, but it could work in an MMO, since the system involved is much, much simpler and therefore, it can be centrally planned. For example if it is observed that the market is flooded with swords, and they become ridiculusly cheap, there would be some way to change the amount of swords available (ie. some natural disaster, or something like that), the converse is harder to deal with, but I leave it up to you to devise the mechanism. :P
I agree that item creation time should be carefully considered, but I also wouldn\'t want to see people having to work in order to adventure. This is a bad, bad thing! Since we\'re playing the RPG to escape real life, I think it would be counter productive to deal with all the headaches of real life. If you don\'t want to deal with them.
When Canada was being settled, fur trading was a really good way to make money. So people who went and cought the mighty candian beaver, shipped it off to Europe and became filthy rich. This could be a way to make a living in PS, hunting for critter fur and meat.
Food I think is something that all MMORPGs should have. You need to consume food to live, and if it isn\'t a very compelx or difficult task to get it when in town. For example if you have housing, then for some monthly fee of some amount of tria, you always have food in your house. We can assume your char does this automatically when you log off and you are in a city. Though if you play 24/7 then I guess you would have to do it yourself. :P
Especially if there are such proffessions as cooks, and hunters. I mean those are reasonable proffessions, not all food is farmed. Well in that kind of time setting.
Anyway, I think I ranted enough, I\'ll go read some more posts now. :)
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Originally posted by Aeterus
Circulates where ? isn\'t that the whole idea of a good economy, i don\'t see your point ...
Read the first rule \"proper division\", the more skills are divided the more circulation thus occours.
you got to keep the money moveing so as to slow inflation of the currnecy thus keeping your wooden dagger affordable for the newbies
I agree that item creation time should be carefully considered, but I also wouldn\'t want to see people having to work in order to adventure. This is a bad, bad thing! Since we\'re playing the RPG to escape real life, I think it would be counter productive to deal with all the headaches of real life. If you don\'t want to deal with them.
point but the head aches come form filling up tax forms :D
you dont have to fill forms in game :D
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If I\'m not mistaken, this game takes place in a medieval age. Therefore, it would be logical to model the economy based upon one existing in that time period. Of course, other elements can be intertwined to add fantasy aspects and excitement. I am no expert on this so maybe others can fill in. No one wants to play a game like RL. I personally think the quality of living has degraded in recent years and it would be awesome to escape to a past age, even if its fantasy. They need to be careful about adding things from everyday life or people will not like the game much.
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One justification for the prevalance of ridiculously rich players in any RPG is that they represent the \"elite\" and the \"heroes\", while the entire middle class is a faceless horde, possessing many clay pots which yield rupees and hearts when smashed.
In a MMORPG like planeshift, it seems there is a bit more focus on the \"ordinary\", although hopefully people who engage in wild adventures / labourious research will be rewarded by achieving some sort of exceptional status.
I think emphasizing a complete duplication of reality wouldn\'t be the best idea - it makes for a great \"sim\" game, but when you\'re playing the Sim games you\'re the controller of the world, not the little Sims inside it (who are stuck in traffic, paying taxes, etc.) The fun doesn\'t come from the realism, but from the fantasy (i.e. the power you have over this tiny world). What we do want is an environment where the extraordinary remains extraordinary, instead of sinking into the pass?.
I think it will be difficult to \"simulate\" a stable and efficient economy, and so it will need to be propped up by artificial means (the invisible \"NPC economy\", taxes, hordes of monsters overrunning your storehouses, etc.) but also by judicious balancing of \"maintenance\" costs with expected adventuring/crafting/trade income. The only way this will work out is by playtesting. In any case, we should look to other games and simulations to see where they\'ve gone wrong and where they\'ve got something right, and try to learn from them.
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If you guys are looking at it from a Microeconomic view than you guys are talking the Planeshift Economy from a small scale of inviduals and small markets.
If you guys are talking about Macroeconomically, you guys are talking about it from the point of large corporations and a larger scale of the economy.
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Kuiper7986, though we may use micro and macro economy, they aren\'t really effective in telling us how to set up a system, we may use those tools to learn something from and economy, but not to set one up. At least not a balanced stable one.
Anyway, I agree with dfryer, we\'ll have to playtest, there would have to be the concept of external people, or at least external economic force that come from the NPC\'s.
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Just wanted to clear something up for those who may have misunderstood, the NPC effect on economy in my rules, doesn\'t replace player economy, it helps sets standards so the economy stay stable.
for example (random numbers used here) let\'s say materials of a steel dagger cost 50 tria on avarage, the price an NPC buys them at is 100tria, therefore a player will lose potential profit if he\'ll sell them for less then 100tria (to players).
Now let\'s say buying that dagger from an NPC costs 150 tria, therefore the player will lose money if he\'ll buy it from a player blacksmith for higher than this price.
Therefore based on demand, the price for the steel daggers market ranges between 100-150, these values are important to keep the economy from collapsing.
However There is another safety mechanism, which is the cost of materials for the craftable item, the price for materials has a range too, since players can provide the materials (thus leading to cheap prices) and NPC can (thus leading to expensive prices), as i have mentioned in the rules, the way it can be administered is checking the avarage profit between the maximum and minimum profit :
[maximum item price - minimum material price] and [minimum item price - maximum material cost ]
and set npc rates accodingly so players make decent profit and not too much money like most games.
As for food, i think it\'s a cool idea, not only does it add to the atmosphere in the game, it helps adding expenses so players don\'t become too spoiled.
Just wanted to mention that unlike taxes its effect on rich people would be irrelevant while it will have some effect on beginners, on the other hand a nice example of converting taxes to food i\'ve seen in EL, where the higher the craftable item is the more food it required for each unit, thus making a sort of surrealist work taxes, which don\'t look too bad in the form of food :)
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Originally posted by Aeterus
Just wanted to clear something up for those who may have misunderstood, the NPC effect on economy in my rules, doesn\'t replace player economy, it helps sets standards so the economy stay stable.
for example (random numbers used here) let\'s say materials of a steel dagger cost 50 tria on avarage, the price an NPC buys them at is 100tria, therefore a player will lose potential profit if he\'ll sell them for less then 100tria (to players).
Now let\'s say buying that dagger from an NPC costs 150 tria, therefore the player will lose money if he\'ll buy it from a player blacksmith for higher than this price.
Therefore based on demand, the price for the steel daggers market ranges between 100-150, these values are important to keep the economy from collapsing.
However There is another safety mechanism, which is the cost of materials for the craftable item, the price for materials has a range too, since players can provide the materials (thus leading to cheap prices) and NPC can (thus leading to expensive prices), as i have mentioned in the rules, the way it can be administered is checking the avarage profit between the maximum and minimum profit :
[maximum item price - minimum material price] and [minimum item price - maximum material cost ]
and set npc rates accodingly so players make decent profit and not too much money like most games.
thing is that if i can produce an inhuman ammount of daggers i would crash the dagger selling economy In theroy.
And the sad thing is that this can be caused by a guild with nuff capital and members
Besides you have to note that the strength of a currency depends on how much gold is locked up in a bank (just like in RL). Over printing/produceing will lead to a drastic inflation ( EG. Banna notes )
So limiting the ammount of Bling Bling in criculation will slow down inflation. But it has to be portional to the NO. of players to keep things cheep
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It seems you are quite aware of how economy works in reallife (which is good :) ) however a game\'s economy is very controllable especially with npc\'s which govern final and base (material) product cost.
What you have mentioned is a case of mass production and monopoly this is a serious problem, thus i have wrote 3 sub roles of how to counter them, in my original post. i will include examples to clarify things for it seems not to be so ...
1. minimizing mass production : crafting takes time.
the better the item, the more time it takes.
Therefore making 1k daggers by a single blacksmith would be determined like this,
let\'s say each dagger takes 5 minutes to make, that\'s 12 daggers per hour, if he works 8 hours a day only on daggers that\'s around 100 daggers a day.
Therefore 1k daggers would take 10 days to make, considering he has someone who delivers the ingrediants, and virtually he doesn\'t move from his blacksmithy.
1k daggers in 10 days, isn\'t crazy - we aren\'t talking about swords, or axes, we\'re talking of something which is equivelant to making ceramic pots.
if it\'s a clan which makes them, it doesn\'t matter, since each blacksmith is supposed to get his cut, and quite the opposite, the more weapons they make, the less they have reason to sell it to players.
2.forcing market rates : the thing with 1k daggers, is that nobody is going to buy them. (unless he has some kind of contract with someone, which still doesn\'t make sense).
He can either spend time and try selling those to players, or use his time more efficiently to make more daggers and sell the current ones to NPC\'s.
This gets the market rid of those homoungous piles of daggers.
3.large value difference between better items : ok so the blacksmith/s just made 1k daggers, since each blacksmith gets his cut, we\'ll persume each blacksmith made a 1k dagger worth of profit for 10 days.
now let\'s substract material consumption, let\'s say the material cost is at around 0.75% from the item worth, which means he has made the money worth of 250 daggers in 10 days. (for the sake of this example let\'s say a dagger is worth 100 tria)
Now the 3rd sub-rule comes into play, if there would be a small price difference between weapons, making 25000 tria is a lot and he could probably buy a seriously good sword after just 10 days of, guess what, making the easiest to make weapon.
Therefore as i have mentioned in my original post, the prices of the weapons in the alpha of PS don\'t follow this rule and would cause an economy problem.
The prices need to be multiplied, where a dagger would cost 100gold, a better dagger would cost 500 gold, a rapier would cost 5000 gold, and the better rapier would cost 25000 gold, therefore after 10 days of work, the blacksmith can buy a decent sword, which makes sense.
Why should there be inflation in games ?? if prices have safety borders how can the dagger selling economy \"crash\" from an overflow of dagger production ??
and if prices are kept cheap, what would be the challange in playing the game (this is not real life, where people wanna get everything, this is a game where slow development is more pleasurable)
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Rifft that\'s very true but only because Planeshift does one thing like every other MMORPG, there are infinite resources. If ore keeps respawning of course there\'s going to be no real system of having a strong economy because, rare materials lose their value. Only reason why in our real life world something has value, is because we do not have infinite resources.
Of course if Planeshift did not have infinite resources, that would be interesting, because that would make every singly tria count for a lot.
But because in all MMORPGs there are infinite resources it causes an infinite manufacturing of items. Therefore your going to have a $poonscape effect. Take Bob for example (the spoonscape effect):
Bob is a high level player, he starts buying rune, then when he starts buying rune, he can sell the original rune he had for more money than the store will buy but cheaper than the store will sell to the players. So this causes players to only start buying rune for Bob. So now Bob can keep buying rune and keep selling it for more. Eventually he\'ll so much runite armor he can control the prices because since there\'s an infinite amount of resources, he can keep buying rune. Therefore he\'s a high level player whose always going to be rich, plus controlling the prices of rune. Now I think we\'ve met these types of players and not all but some are pretty much a-holes.
So Planeshift does have space for the application of macro and micro economics but only if and only if there are not infinite amount of resources or that money is sooooooo hard to come by, that it makes every single dang tria valuable.
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What you seem to be talking about is an economy with all \"source\" and no \"sink\". Infinite economies work, but there must be flow, not just accumulation. This needs to apply to items, gold and resources - stuff should be flowing into the economy about as fast as it is flowing out, with allowance made for new players and the development of rich characters.
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dfryer, yes very very very true. But are people really willing to give up ultra rare items? I mean why only have one when you can have multiple and save them all so you control a supply of that rare item.
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In our economy (and from what I remeber from those courses, yes I took some courses about econ, both macro and micro) we essentially consider our resources infinite. It isn\'t our absolute production that\'s important it\'s comperative advantage (if we look at it from the microecon perspective) So for example person A can produce 50 swords or 40 daggers, another person can produce 10 swords or 30 daggers or some balance in between. Person A can produce a greater overall amount of goods. But if he chooses to buy daggers from person B to supplement his own production and sell some swords, both will end up having a greater production. So Person A produces 40 and 8 daggers sells ten swords and buys 15 daggers, whereas person B only produceses daggers, we then have both players at an advantage.
Anyway it makes more sense if you draw it, or google it. The point is, though you can make everything better than the other guy, it doesn\'t mean you should. However, most people don\'t understand this and just call people who can\'t produce much n00bs and brush them off. However, I digress. Econ in itself is not entirely useful in an MMORPG since people don\'t always act in their own best interest. And collusion is much easier to maintain. Anyway all these things break down a free market economy. So in order for the economy to work, dfryer is right, you need to keep cash moving. If people horde it, then it simply doesn\'t affect the game economy.
So introducing at least the possibility for checks and balances is always a good thing. For example you could start out with some stable economy, and let players run from there. If the economy remains stable and sufficiently normal then you don\'t really have to do anything. However, if there is major problem if you don\'t have anything to deal with this possibility your screwed. If you do, then it\'s all good. Allowing NPC to set price margines is a good way to control an economy for some amount of time, maybe have traveling traders that show up in times of trouble.
Anyway, just my two cents, hope I didn\'t get too off topic...
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You brought up a lot of good points rifft. (and you didn\'t go off topic :) )
You have said money has to be in constant circulation - circulation obviously being the whole purpose of a stable economy. (therefore i have pointed rule number one, which forces crafters to depend on each other, even if it\'s depending upon npc crafters, the point is it avoids a powercrafter which craft goods from scratch thus resulting in obvious negative economy effects). however it seems you have talked about circulation in a player-run economy.
The question is why should the economy be completly player run in any point ?? this is nice to view, but it serves no purpose other then rendering it instable.
Forcing border prices doesn\'t force the prices themselves, it\'s only a safety mechanism to keep the economy standing.
The reason i\'m repeating this, is because i have played in numerous games where the economy was half or completly player ran, and the results were always disasterous, if it was a real world it might have been nice to have the best weapon in a game dropped to 2% of the original price, but being a game there has to be ranges or people become too powerful which makes the whole thing lose purpose.
I\'m sure you all seen games like runecrap or such, where very low characters ran around with plate+ armor, if the crafting system would be more demanding (making the plate crafting long, requiring large number of ingots, and having each ingot requiring a lot of ore to make) it wouldn\'t happen.
And since in player run economy there is no one to sell the extra wares to, the items drop to ridiculous prices.
Sooner or later, everyone get surplass wares, the demand is never enough.
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Kuiper7986, you raise an important point (cornering the market for a rare good), but it is the rare goods that we have to worry the least about. The tendency is for everything to drop in price as the economy gets flooded, so the occasional \"attempted monopolist\" will actually be a moderately stabilizing force.
In addition, controlling the supply of something makes for interesting guild activity. If it is a necessary item, there will almost always be somewhere else to get it, but I don\'t think monopolies will destroy the economy.
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At this point I have to say MOO! Well ok, not really, but we are all I think talking past each other. Everyone would like to see a stable economy where uber item X is not worth 1 penny, and we wouldn\'t want to see the oposite where shitty item Y is worth 3 million.
Though I think fluctuation in the economy is good, hyper inflation, or price crashing is not.
So for the sake of argument, if we allow trade only between npc\'s and pc\'s and not between pc\'s and pc\'s, in a game where players can craft items, that mechanism achieves nothing. Player can still trade outside the system by trading cash for items or services. However, if instead of burring our head in the sand we introduce some sort of control mechanism (with border prices maybe). I think we could contol such things.
When I mean player run economy, I mean player influenced, items vary in price depending on availability, but not above or below the roof and ceiling prices.
Anyway, I haven\'t really had time to think it through, just some ideas I picked up and put together. In essence we all agree that we want price variation but not crashing or hyper inflation. So what we have to achieve is system that would enforce such guidelines.
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Originally posted by rifft
At this point I have to say MOO! Well ok, not really, but we are all I think talking past each other. Everyone would like to see a stable economy where uber item X is not worth 1 penny, and we wouldn\'t want to see the oposite where shitty item Y is worth 3 million.
Though I think fluctuation in the economy is good, hyper inflation, or price crashing is not.
So for the sake of argument, if we allow trade only between npc\'s and pc\'s and not between pc\'s and pc\'s, in a game where players can craft items, that mechanism achieves nothing. Player can still trade outside the system by trading cash for items or services. However, if instead of burring our head in the sand we introduce some sort of control mechanism (with border prices maybe). I think we could contol such things.
When I mean player run economy, I mean player influenced, items vary in price depending on availability, but not above or below the roof and ceiling prices.
Anyway, I haven\'t really had time to think it through, just some ideas I picked up and put together. In essence we all agree that we want price variation but not crashing or hyper inflation. So what we have to achieve is system that would enforce such guidelines.
Ye it really seems we talk past each other ^^
Well i totally agree with what you said here, i just thought people here meant a completly player run economy. (aka no npc\'s)
i hope there will be proper division in the game, so people will depend on each other - i just hate to see powercrafters who do all the different phases of crafting, from fetching/creating materials up to the final product.
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Economists in the traditional sense rarely tried to impose their own systems - we have examples like Monsanto trying to impose patented seeds on farmers, leading to what might eventually become an iron grip over the world\'s food industry, or the bolshevik communists trying to design their economy from the top down, with disasterous results. Most of them just tried to analyze the economic landscape (and, for this reason, theorized that such things as the linux movement would be impossible to bring about). These two perspectives on economy - analysis and enforcement - are typically applied to MMORPGs as well. Usually, the smaller the things you analyze and change, the less the effect on the economy. A naturally stable economy (like the one people had in the middle ages) shouldn\'t be tampered with too much, but a MMORPG economy, which has about as much of a future as my first SimLife critters had.
I should mention that an unbridled capitalist economy naturally degenerates into state planning - just look at all the mergers that have been taking place in the last fifty years. If this trend goes on for long enough, the number of corporations will grow smaller and smaller... In the end, there can only be one. Nobody wants that to happen in the game world, where the individual player is supposed to have full economic freedom. Most attempts to imitate a capitalist or free-market economy have led deep into disaster - for good reason, as it has been pointed out. First, they were unsuited to the kinds of economy they were trying to emulate, and second, these kinds of economy shouldn\'t have been fully emulated in the first place.
The solution is to make an economic system that doesn\'t crash *because* of the way the gameworld is built, not *in spite* of it. For that, the whole economic process we encountered needs to be analyzed as well as changed.
Let\'s look at the typical ORPG: you get out of town, pick up a few rocks from the quarry of infinite supplies (getting skill points for it) and sell it to a stonecrafter. That stonecrafter builds a dashing stone club out of it, gets skill points and sells the club to an adventurer. That adventurer goes out and (to gain skillpoints) kills stuff, whose furs he then sells to the tanner, who makes a pretty leather armor, all for the adventurer. This way, even if no money were involved, the whole economy would rely on the poor adventurer, who has to get bigger and bigger clubs, tougher and tougher armor to justify the work of everyone else. Meanwhile, the quarryman is mass-producing rocks because it gives him skillpoints; the stonecarver is crafting clubs because it gives him skillpoints, and the tanner accepts furs because - you guessed it - it gives him skillpoints. Some products get through the system, but not all of them, and once they used up, they become part of the waste.
If nobody needs the end result of a process, but that process is useful for some reason, waste results are going to pile up. At this point, you might as well add a junkyarder profession, which can magically convert any sort of item into skillpoints... Throw in currency and an NPC market, however, and you get a convenient way for players to dump their extra resources and further destabilize the economy.
Problems in this setting:
-there\'s infinite supply, finite demand for goods. When every adventurer has a stone club and leather armor, that\'s it for sales. Suppose, though, that the player later wants to buy a stone club of stoning, as he\'s gone up in his skill and can finally use it... That still doesn\'t make the demand infinite - he\'ll only keep buying better and better club until he gets his hands on the best club in the world. By then, there will be mountains of clubs in the streets, piled up and waiting for the scavengers to show.
-there\'s infinite demand for skillpoints. If we lived in a world where ore was plentiful and easy to obtain, and if work wasn\'t so damn hard, we\'d craft sword after sword after sword to get better. This is no good. If, instead of twenty skillpoints in blacksmithing, a top-notch sword needed the joined effort of twenty blacksmiths to create it, we\'d see a lot more socializing and a lot less dumping.
-As it has been pointed out in countless economy books, the world\'s true currency is effort. In this case, it\'s very easy to produce, which leaves few deterrents for players. Some people in the ALFA PW argued that producing anything should be a necessary challenge, which you don\'t want to go through just for fun... People typically have few reasons to work in the real world; in most MMORPGs, people have few reasons *not* to work. In other worlds, real economics operate on the principle that nobody wants to work. While I disagree with this, it *is* partially true.
-When you throw in money, you\'re creating the equivalent of an infinite golden chain that comes out of a wall. Players can just tug and tug at it, with the miners at the end of the chain and the smiths at the front, until the whole room is flooded in gold (instead of clubs and leather armor). Money is nothing more than a more convenient waste product. Remember, as long as even the item-based economy heavily produces waste, the option of converting items into money won\'t make it any less wasteful.
-Everyone wants the Biggest Club. To make the Biggest Club, you need to waste a lot of resources on smaller clubs, which end up lying around or get converted into piles of gold. Why not simply introduce a recycling element, by which you can \"infuse\" the essence of smaller clubs into a bigger one, to give it bonuses of some sort, or a stacking element, by which a big club is made up of several small clubs? (this is impossible to pull off in a world like Planeshift.)
-The whole economy relies on the adventurer. This itself makes it profoundly unbalanced, but even if a repertoire of items were designed for crafters to own, the mounds of gold wouldn\'t stop growing - in fact, they would probably grow even faster.
Let me go over your ideas, Aeterus.
Proper Division - It takes four or five years, at most, for people to become decent at a complicated craft. For some, it only takes two years. The reason there was no homo universalis in the typical medieval village is because no one had the time to learn new skills. You had to work all day at your craft, and the harder you worked, the more prosperous (i.e. less starving) you were. In Planeshift, though, the characters\' lifestyle is leisurely enough for them to afford to take time off and enjoy themselves.
Minimizing mass production - by this, you mean *slowing down* mass production. It\'s still not quite effective... If you want to take away the player\'s ability to make 500 swords every day, just set a cap to the effort he can make, or make the production process viciously long. A crude shortsword might take an in-game day or so to make, while an elaborate one would need a week. One method I suggested in another thread is the use of \"labor\" points, determined by the character\'s endurance: for 10 labor points, you might pull a chunk of rock out of a wall. For 200, you might make a sword. Suppose that you only gained 50 a day... You would have to wait four days, or work in a team of four people, to make that sword.
(note: this system would also encourage people to hire workers of inferior skill... Throw in a rule that you need a skill level equal to the number of labor points left to be able to invest labor points yourself. So if you have 200 skill points, you can spend your fifty labor points in the sword, dropping the number to 150 - at this point, your buddy with a skill of 162 can pick up and lower it to 90, so his buddy... Well... You get the point. This system can really help out new players and spread money around, but doesn\'t truly solve the overall problem of mass-production.)
You\'re also not taking the players\' needs into account - if you want them to stop making so many swords, make it pointless for them to do so. Keep smiths from gaining skillpoints whe they\'re crafting something they already crafted before, or take away their option to sell to NPC merchants.
forcing market rates - this still means the golden chain keeps getting pulled out of the NPC economy. Sooner or later, people end up with too much gold on their hands. The only difference is that the whole thing\'s regulated, so that *everybody* ends up with the same ammount of too much gold.
large value difference between better items - again, this might only slow down the process to a certain degree. It certainly doesn\'t eliminate it.
While it might be pointless to discuss here, let me show you an interesting economic model: the githzerai economy. Basically, you have a certain number of \"materialization points\", which get higher every level and which you can use to create items - from shortswords to healing potions - based on your level. Once you\'ve devoted mat. points to building an item, they\'re gone for as long as that item remains in existence. You can destroy any item you hold in your inventory to reimburse its owner with the item\'s full cost... However, you cannot destroy your own items if they\'ve been dropped or placed in other players\' inventories. This makes trading a political affair: you want to give because it will somehow help you, or because you are coerced, or because you believe it will serve a greater cause (arming your champion and sending him off to battle, for instance). It\'s a remarkably simple and robust system that does away with most of the problems found in an ORPG, simply because it avoids the trappings of a real-world economy. There is only one resource - yourself.
The only two problem I can forsee with this system are players leaving with an item and never returning - in this case, a decay system that resets whenever the holder logs in would work most of the time.
Since we\'re playing the RPG to escape real life, I think it would be counter productive to deal with all the headaches of real life.
Who says everyone\'s playing it that way? If I want to escape real life, I\'ll just jump off the nearest bridge. A far more noble purpose for online games would be to *enhance* real life - provide experiences that we could later draw upon or give us something to ponder. Anyone who\'s playing games just to forget himself is missing out on a lot of good stuff.
Actually, I\'m almost tempted to start a new thread... \"Why do we play games, and why should we?\"
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Originally posted by Krissanasli
I should mention that an unbridled capitalist economy naturally degenerates into state planning - just look at all the mergers that have been taking place in the last fifty years. If this trend goes on for long enough, the number of corporations will grow smaller and smaller... In the end, there can only be one. Nobody wants that to happen in the game world, where the individual player is supposed to have full economic freedom. Most attempts to imitate a capitalist or free-market economy have led deep into disaster - for good reason, as it has been pointed out. First, they were unsuited to the kinds of economy they were trying to emulate, and second, these kinds of economy shouldn\'t have been fully emulated in the first place.
duh.
Originally posted by Krissanasli
The solution is to make an economic system that doesn\'t crash *because* of the way the gameworld is built, not *in spite* of it. For that, the whole economic process we encountered needs to be analyzed as well as changed.
Let\'s look at the typical ORPG: you get out of town, pick up a few rocks from the quarry of infinite supplies (getting skill points for it) and sell it to a stonecrafter. That stonecrafter builds a dashing stone club out of it, gets skill points and sells the club to an adventurer. That adventurer goes out and (to gain skillpoints) kills stuff, whose furs he then sells to the tanner, who makes a pretty leather armor, all for the adventurer. This way, even if no money were involved, the whole economy would rely on the poor adventurer, who has to get bigger and bigger clubs, tougher and tougher armor to justify the work of everyone else. Meanwhile, the quarryman is mass-producing rocks because it gives him skillpoints; the stonecarver is crafting clubs because it gives him skillpoints, and the tanner accepts furs because - you guessed it - it gives him skillpoints. Some products get through the system, but not all of them, and once they used up, they become part of the waste.
You miss the point that every crafter = adventurer in most mmorpg\'s including PS in the future, which kinda makes that paragraph pointless.
I judge you\'re not talking about environmental waste ...
Originally posted by Krissanasli
If nobody needs the end result of a process, but that process is useful for some reason, waste results are going to pile up. At this point, you might as well add a junkyarder profession, which can magically convert any sort of item into skillpoints... Throw in currency and an NPC market, however, and you get a convenient way for players to dump their extra resources and further destabilize the economy.
If you haven\'t read my \"Basic Rules of Character Development\" thread, it points out a rule which links with the economy rules, players should never use a skill only in order to improve it.
If this rule breaks (like in all games), you\'ll get waste products, because people aren\'t crafting (for example) for the products/money, it means they don\'t need it.
hence there should be a need for money, always something better to buy for everyone, and/or daily expenses.
Originally posted by Krissanasli
Problems in this setting:
-there\'s infinite supply, finite demand for goods. When every adventurer has a stone club and leather armor, that\'s it for sales. Suppose, though, that the player later wants to buy a stone club of stoning, as he\'s gone up ...
...profoundly unbalanced, but even if a repertoire of items were designed for crafters to own, the mounds of gold wouldn\'t stop growing - in fact, they would probably grow even faster.
Well, sooner or later people become rich, you can\'t escape it, and it\'s not all that bad if it happens after a year or two. that\'s why i would personally prefere to live in that kind of world than play in it - we have no reason to turn off the hyperspeed these games move by, because it\'s not the only thing we\'re doing in our life.
so a developer can control the time it will take to finally get the best equipment in the game (for your class), so with proper planning this can be changed from 2 weeks to half a year or so, and that\'s one of the purposes of a well-thought of economy.
Originally posted by Krissanasli
Proper Division - It takes four or five years, at most, for people to become decent at a complicated craft. For some, it only takes two years. The reason there was no homo universalis in the typical medieval village is because no one had the time to learn new skills. You had to work all day at your craft, and the harder you worked, the more prosperous (i.e. less starving) you were. In Planeshift, though, the characters\' lifestyle is leisurely enough for them to afford to take time off and enjoy themselves.
Your point is ??
I did not write these rules to make the game more realistic, i wrote them concerning economical stability.
The rule of proper division helps to ensure players relay on each other, and work flow accours.
Originally posted by Krissanasli
Minimizing mass production - by this, you mean *slowing down* mass production. It\'s still not quite effective... If you want to take away the player\'s ability to make 500 swords every day, just set a cap to the effort he can make, or make the production process viciously long. A crude shortsword might take an in-game day or so to make, while an elaborate one would need a week. One method I suggested in another thread is the use of \"labor\" points, determined by the character\'s endurance: for 10 labor points, you might pull a chunk of rock out of a wall. For 200, you might make a sword. Suppose that you only gained 50 a day... You would have to wait four days, or work in a team of four people, to make that sword.
(note: this system would also encourage people to hire workers of inferior skill... Throw in a rule that you need a skill level equal to the number of labor points left to be able to invest labor points yourself. So if you have 200 skill points, you can spend your fifty labor points in the sword, dropping the number to 150 - at this point, your buddy with a skill of 162 can pick up and lower it to 90, so his buddy... Well... You get the point. This system can really help out new players and spread money around, but doesn\'t truly solve the overall problem of mass-production.)
You\'re also not taking the players\' needs into account - if you want them to stop making so many swords, make it pointless for them to do so. Keep smiths from gaining skillpoints whe they\'re crafting something they already crafted before, or take away their option to sell to NPC merchants.
no, i meant minimizing as in scale.
It doesn\'t matter what method you take, the end result is the same, the *better* the item is, the more time it will take to make it.
In proper division i have broken the steps of crafting into several actions, in your system these people do not really work together (but rather pick up the working after each person cannot work farther), so it\'s sorta plastic workflow, in my system each person works on another element in the making therefore it emulates how a real workshop would look like.
Farther more i did not really tried \"solving\" mass-production, because if a guild wishes to mass produce an item, i think it\'s part of the game, the rule is it won\'t be as easy as in most of today games, but will require a lot of players, time, materials, etc ...
Read my other post regarding skills, where a player need to produce something which is close to his skill level in order to improve it. (therefore a good blacksmith making a lot of daggers won\'t get any skillpoints)
Originally posted by Krissanasli
forcing market rates - this still means the golden chain keeps getting pulled out of the NPC economy. Sooner or later, people end up with too much gold on their hands. The only difference is that the whole thing\'s regulated, so that *everybody* ends up with the same ammount of too much gold.
large value difference between better items - again, this might only slow down the process to a certain degree. It certainly doesn\'t eliminate it.
Did you read the other posts here before posting your own, because it certainly seems you didn\'t.
NPC rates help ensure borders in items prices, therefore making sure item prices don\'t drop below a certain value (thus collapsing the market for a certain item), and don\'t get an uber value (items which are very hard to make, skill and time wise, can be exploited by the crafter to sell them at ridiculous prices, even if it\'s realistic it will still make him too rich)
Yes large value difference between items slows down the process instead of eliminating it. than again if you eliminate it, it means you\'ll never get the good items. (and that\'s what you want right ? a game with good items, where nobody can get them ... :) )
Originally posted by Krissanasli
While it might be pointless to discuss here, let me show you an interesting economic model: the githzerai economy. Basically, you have a certain number of \"materialization points\", which get higher every level and which you can use to create items - from shortswords to healing potions - based on your level. Once you\'ve devoted mat. points to building an item, they\'re gone for as long as that item remains in existence. You can destroy any item you hold in your inventory to reimburse its owner with the item\'s full cost... However, you cannot destroy your own items if they\'ve been dropped or placed in other players\' inventories. This makes trading a political affair: you want to give because it will somehow help you, or because you are coerced, or because you believe it will serve a greater cause (arming your champion and sending him off to battle, for instance). It\'s a remarkably simple and robust system that does away with most of the problems found in an ORPG, simply because it avoids the trappings of a real-world economy. There is only one resource - yourself.
The only two problem I can forsee with this system are players leaving with an item and never returning - in this case, a decay system that resets whenever the holder logs in would work most of the time.
You know, an economy can stay alive without making it so extremely artificial ...
Originally posted by Krissanasli
Since we\'re playing the RPG to escape real life, I think it would be counter productive to deal with all the headaches of real life.
Who says everyone\'s playing it that way? If I want to escape real life, I\'ll just jump off the nearest bridge. A far more noble purpose for online games would be to *enhance* real life - provide experiences that we could later draw upon or give us something to ponder. Anyone who\'s playing games just to forget himself is missing out on a lot of good stuff.
Actually, I\'m almost tempted to start a new thread... \"Why do we play games, and why should we?\"
Everyone has its own reason to play a game, you are misintepetrating the word escaping to its physical meaning.
you are contradicting yourself by saying that we aren\'t playing games to escape into a setting we enjoy but rather enrich our own lives with this experience. (which is basically the same thing, they both bring joy to the person, so the only difference is the point of view of the person to what he does)
If a game would be exactly the same as real life, nobody would have a reason to play it, therefore we play games to achieve things we cannot in real life (be it through things which don\'t exist, are forbidden, immorall etc etc ...), and to have a environment which doesn\'t have things we hate (taxes, criminals, abusers, etc etc ...).
While some people would like to play a very realistic game which only has a different world (be it fantasy), some would like to play without worrying about deseases, taxes, crappy work pays, annoying people, disgusting behaviours, etc ...
And going back to the main subject, this means the majority of people (in a game where economy is stable, and getting rich is a matter of a year and not a few weeks) wouldn\'t like to spend tax money if the \"government\" isn\'t actually using it.
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You miss the point that every crafter = adventurer in most mmorpg\'s including PS in the future, which kinda makes that paragraph pointless.
Not really. People have different playing styles - one might want to focus on crafting, the other on adventuring. You\'re right in saying that everyone will want a shiny new club and leather armor, although the problem of finite demand still stands. It might be enlarged, but it\'s still finite.
Also, waste means clubs, money, whatever. If anything\'s not used, it\'s waste.
hence there should be a need for money, always something better to buy for everyone, and/or daily expenses.
Struggling for supremacy in a \"closed\" socioeconomic medium is better than struggling in an \"open\" one, because once you\'re at the top, you can\'t keep pushing higher and stay farther ahead. That allows you to concentrate on other things, like role-playing.
Now, getting rich can mean hoarding a lot of clubs or a lot of gold - it\'s still waste. Unlike other items, gold can\'t really be used up (unless you decide to melt it into a suit of armor, but that\'s beside the point), so if it comes out of the NPC economy, there should be a number of ways to throw it back in or remove it from the players\' pockets. Otherwise, if no NPC markets existed, gold would still be a waste product (it would have absolutely no use, although it could be traded around) and something like food, magical reagents, etc. would be best used as standard currency.
Associating every item with a one-shot effect might sound like a good, if wild, idea at first. Sure, if you could eat gold for mana, it would cut down on the number of GPs clinking around in players\' pockets... But that won\'t stop people from wanting to make a profit, and they\'ll still be able to hoard their cash.
players should never use a skill only in order to improve it.
If this rule breaks (like in all games), you\'ll get waste products, because people aren\'t crafting (for example) for the products/money, it means they don\'t need it.
It\'s not just the issue of improving the skill - if players gain an overall profit out of making two swords per second, they\'re going to keep doing it. In most MMORPGs, making a sword is almost always profitable, especially if it can be sold for a profit to an NPC market. Players should be prevented from constantly performing actions that provide a permanent benefit, be it cash, skill points, whatever...
\"Prevention\" can mean a penality or outright limitation. If you have to sacrifice as much as you gain in order to craft a sword, you\'ll think twice before doing it, especially if *you* make a sacrifice as well as your character. Again, in the real world, the reason people don\'t work all the time in real life is that they want to save their time and energy for more exciting things.
Well, sooner or later people become rich, you can\'t escape it, and it\'s not all that bad if it happens after a year or two.
Of course you can escape it! Even my teeny little githzerai economy can escape it. And I see no reason to assume that delaying a crisis is a way to solve it.
Let me give you three examples of economies that work a lot better than the typical pseudo-capitalism we find in most ORPGs: a communist/military economy, a pseudo-parecon and a democratic economy. In the former, most of the economy is invisible; you are told to work in a certain field (build X items of type Y, hunt X monsters of type Y), present the object of your labor to your administrator and get payed in coupons (mostly for perishables like food). Your ranking was based on how much you produced, and the equipment you were issued was based on your ranking: kill a lot of monsters for the month, and you\'ll be offered to trade in your measily cudgel for a fancy mace. However, if you slip up next month, you\'d have to hand over your mace and receive a cudgel again, simply because you\'re not fancy enough anymore. For things like custom equipment, you could requisition it, but you\'d have to pay a lot of labor for it, especially if you asked to own it for several months or a year. In this system, no one owns anything forever; what they own depends on how hard they work, but they can\'t stockpile anything. When you reach the top, you\'re compelled to stay on top by working just as hard... But there\'s no incentive to go further, because \"further\" doesn\'t exist.
A communist/military economy would have no need of money. There would be a bit of bartering, and favors might be traded around, but overall, nothing can be hoarded (not even coupons, unless the game allows you to forge them). If a c/m econ coexisted with a standard one, and the commisars/lieutenants didn\'t bother checking whether anyone was smuggling \"imperialist\" merchantise, the c/m econ would barely suffer a scratch from standard-econ influence.
A pseudo-parecon would work like this: you scribble down what you want to have at the end of every month. This can include furniture, a new house, food, whatever. The total gold value of this is calculated, and this value will be both your \"consumption quotent\" and your \"production quotent\". Namely, if you want to get your hands on a lot of stuff, you\'re going to have to produce just as much, or sell some of the stuff you already own back to the system. If you overproduce, you would either get some of your \"production quotent\" deducted from for the next month, or (more appropriately for an ORPG economy) some political benefit (like an extra vote). If you underproduce, then the \"production quotent\" will rise for next month, and you might end up not receiving some of the things you wanted.
Now, the public is going to be shown a list of how many new food items, houses, etc. are needed. Obviously, there will be too few blacksmiths to make enough swords, and too many potters for the ammount of pots needed. This interesting situation actually *requires* that people shift from one position to another and have a variety of skills, as otherwise, they might end up being useless for the economy.
In a democratic economy, everyone voted how resources would be distributed. The hard currency was votes, and economic power was political power. Crafters are still given a quota, and they have to follow it to the letter, because they\'re not given more materials than they need (presuming that all crafting processes were successful and resource efficiency was the same across the board). Waste would still exist, though it wouldn\'t be as excessive as in a standard economy.
Your point is ??
It would be against role-playing and realism to keep players from learning new skills. Lessons of any sort are actually quite fun when you\'re not herded into a classroom and told to absorb everything your teacher says.
The rule of proper division helps to ensure players relay on each other, and work flow accours.
Labor division would benefit role-playing, provided that the laborers would all be working together in the same workshop. I can\'t see how it provides any advantage to the economy, though, unless you take out the NPC element. Suppose you had no miners, only blacksmiths; suppose you could mine ore from the walls of your workshop, and you could sell your swords for fewer gps (to compensate the cash you had to pay for the ore). Nothing would change... Sure, there would be more blacksmiths in the world, but the same ammount of gold (waste) would be drawn from the magical NPC economy. The cash that used to be divided between a blacksmith and a miner is now divided between two blacksmiths.
I agree that there\'s potential for interaction when you can haggle, but otherwise, there\'s no beneficial effect on either the economy or the players when work is separated into mining and smithing (at least, if an NPC market selling iron ore exists).
There are lots of ways to encourage team play without forcing people into strict roles. Actually, as I pointed out in another thread, if you divide a task into several processes that must be well-synchronized, a single player won\'t be able to carry out these processes efficiently. It doesn\'t matter who runs which process, but people have to work together.
NPC rates help ensure borders in items prices, therefore making sure item prices don\'t drop below a certain value
They also provide \"welfare\" for those who overproduce, as they can give a lot of gold (waste) for a lot of useless items (note, also, that gold waste is lighter and more convenient to carry than item waste). Thanks to this economy, instead of trying to sell his uber sword of doom for an insane price, the average crafter will either mass-produce it and sell it to NPC markets, or (if the costs are too great) avoid making too many and settle for the most profitable thing. Sure, it doesn\'t boost his blacksmithing skill, but who needs blacksmithing skill when gold can buy you anything at the NPC market?
Yes large value difference between items slows down the process instead of eliminating it. than again if you eliminate it, it means you\'ll never get the good items.
There are plenty of better ways to get good items than building up your gold reserve by crafting, fishing or whatever. I can discuss them, if you wish (but it seems this post is already getting too big for its own good).
You know, an economy can stay alive without making it so extremely artificial ...
What would be so artificial about this economy? It\'s probably the most natural one anyone could foresee. Currency, NPC markets, these are artificial...
you are contradicting yourself by saying that we aren\'t playing games to escape into a setting we enjoy but rather enrich our own lives with this experience.
I\'m not. Joy and experience are vastly different (though not incompatible) things. Drugs can give you joy. A book can give you experience. The first is a means of escaping your life; the second is a means of enriching it. A bit of oblivion can help you trudge on through life with the same mental baggage, whereas what you learn from a book can promote and even determine your way of thinking, as well as your way of approaching different situations.
If a game would be exactly the same as real life, nobody would have a reason to play it
I\'ll answer this in the new thread. The title might be \"Is fantasy dead?\" or something like that, as I plan to discuss a variety of issues. Until I finish it, here\'s an exercise for you: Ask yourself why people would play a game that was identical to real life, and show me your answers. The only reason you haven\'t found any yet is that you haven\'t tried to.
I\'ll note here that you made a \"straw man\" fallacy: you took the scenario in which virtual reality is almost identical to real reality. It\'s not. You can\'t feel anything, smell anything or taste anything in the virtual world; you can\'t die in the virtual world (though your character can, if there\'s any permadeath); your reflexes aren\'t the character\'s; few if any of your ideals and beliefs come from the virtual world; you might not care about getting diseased and PKed all the time, because you\'re usually just logging on to chat; etc.
What all this means, among other things, is that you\'ll treat your character as something distinct from yourself. A lot of people I know laughed at their characters\' failures, and grinned whenever he got into trouble. Others enjoyed watching their poor character repeat \"I\'ll never tell you anything!\" while he was being tortured, well though he was suffering tremendously. Even if you want nothing more than pleasure, and aren\'t willing to RP or do anything beyond what the game directly offers, a \"tragic\" world can still satisfy you.
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i just came to this thread and i am WAAAY to lazy to read all this crap so could someone give me a summary?
:)
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Hi there, i wanted to add some of my thoughts. There is one game (hell i\'m talking about it again) where economy problem seems to be solved. Everything is based on some interesting rules, which fullfill most of the points you have stated.
1. It is very difficult to get rich, actually most of the players are very poor, and it\'s hard to afford proper equipment. And when leveling you continously need new equipment.
2. Mass production is non existent because of supply rarity, to craft uber items you need some very rare items. Crafting simple items is not very profittable and it gives you low xp.
3. Some uber items have prices which are unimaginable for a new player. Example, at lvl 50 you get about 20-30k credits for completing a mission. There are items that cost like 10-20 million credits. Most powerful items in game cost like 800 mil for an armor. So you\'re not likely to get best items in game, and if you want to try it will take you a long long time, like year of playing. Then you can start new character. :)
What i would like to see is player based economy, with large player base it should be possible to create such an economy. We need thousands of players to achieve that, but i think planeshift has a potential. :)
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I personally hate the artificial floor-ceiling methods created by NPCs because they only work while your economy is simple, or until player-player trading reaches a certain point (p2p trading I think goes up exponentially with number of players).
There are programmatic methods that can be used to force economic balancing.
1) inflation/devaluation: Monitor the ratio ( total cash in system / number of characters + NPCs ) devalue currency with inflationary pressures when it gets out of whack (NPC prices go up)
2) entropic forces: Infinite economies will always scale out of control without these. Want to make sure that raw materials are expensive? Make mining use up rock picks. Too many swords being smithed? Use up hammers. Too much monster loot? Weapon damage that costs money/materials to repair. Too easy to repair weapons? Have weapons degrade in effectiveness as they are repaired, and/or raise the costs for repair materials. Eventually, good but rare weapons will only be pulled out to destroy monsters that you couldn\'t kill with your day-to-day weapon because repair costs will be to high unless the loot drop matches.
3) adaptive drops: To encourage scarcity of high-power items, come up with the ratio of items/characters you think fits, and only let rare items drop when that many characters have been created. Allow a more favorable ratio for common weapons.
4) adaptive pricing: Drop prices for ultra-common items, and raise it for scarce items. Track both NPC2PC sales and PC2PC trades for your economic data and use it to adjust pricing. Have NPCs raise or lower their prices for scarce or common items. If an item is too common, it\'s \'new\' price should drop below the cost to repair it. Eventually the economy should effectively discard enough broken items to balance out the surplus (have NPCs buy the item for scrap value).