Economics in PlaneShift

[rtrentc]

I have been playing in planeshift now for awhile and one area that I believe we can all agree needs work is that of the economy.

One of the things that I see plaguing the economy is its money supply. You have one official currency and several unofficial ones. They are (Gold, Silver, Monster Drops I don't count the ores that have a very low price cause they aren't sold to npc's) The reason that they are unofficial currencies is that there is a set value for each and every one of these items thus making them and trias effectively the same. This causes the true cost of all npc supplied products and services to rise and fall in cost based on the supply of the a for mentioned items. In effect you economy isn't stable cause its money isn't stable.

I hate to say this but your money supply will never be completely stable but you can keep it from swinging so wildly and create a richer economic landscape in the process.

1 ) Have the source of money be one item. The metal or crystal  that tria's are made from. Set a value in tria's for the production of said raw material. This will be your money supply. Make it the only place that new trias come from. IE this is the only thing that a npc will be able to use to inject trias into the economy.  This gives you a single place to increase the money supply.

2 ) Have training be the drain on trias as it is now. if you add in player houses then you can add the sink of rent on said houses. This is the point at which trias leave the economy.  This is important because the supply of raw materials is only limited in rate of supply. There is no set amount of any given item unless you change the structure of the system. Note that not all of the trias charged by the npc's has to leave the economy. This value can be set along with the mining % on the raw material that makes trias.

3a ) Everything that an npc can buy that isn't a finished product must control the supply of finished products. Thus the number of hides purchased will affect the availability of leather armor. The amount of metals sold will affect how many swords, and metal armor is produced. Thus for every finished product in the game you need to have rules on what raw products go into it and how much of each is required.

3b ) The amount of raw materials and finished products that an npc can sell is controlled by what the npc's bought. Thus we take the all the npc's that sells leather armor.  The number of sets of leather armor they have will be set according to the raw materials purchased by all npc's. And the amount of raw materials that all npc's can sell is controlled by what was sold to them by the pc's.

4 ) This will of course require an accounting of everything that an npc has bought and has sold. The npc's will keep an account of the trias from all items that they have purchased and sold. And prices for buying and selling items can be set according to supply and demand. As far as items purchased and sold, as well as tria's in the hands of npc's I am proposing that there be one account where all items are placed and any given npc merchant has a % of the items that he sells available to be purchased in a given hour. The reason that I say have one account is it makes it easier to calculate the prices. Prices should be set according to availability. It doesn't take into account local supply and demand but is a global supply and demand. And would be easier to implement than having each npc have rules about what it buys and sells from other npc's, time for supplies to be delivered as well as transport costs. Making the npc's have their own accounts could be done later.

5 ) The number of raw materials in the account that are turned into finished products will of course be based on the current supply of said finished products. Thus if say pc 1 sells 100 shortswords, and pc2 sells 900 iron and 100 coal, then most of the iron and coal should still be available for another pc to buy, but if say 20 pc's buy shortswords and 2 pc's sell 900 iron and 100 coal then the npc's should consume a portion of the iron and coal to replenish the stock of shortswords. The replenishing of swords shoud take time, and the prices of all available items should be changing over time as the raw materials are consumed and turned into finished goods.

6 ) This relates to #3 above. All raw materials that a pc is able to aquire must have a use. IE must contribute to some finished product.

7 ) Finished product decay. In some form or fashion all items must wear out.

8 ) If set up this way, you will effectivly have a more stable money supply and the availability of various items in the game will not increase or decrease the supply of money but rather just the price of the items with the exception of the source material for trias themselves.. And production of items will find equilibrium's based on item decay and number of pc's in the game.

[bilbous]

The problem with a money economy is that money is an abstract notion and as such does not really exist. It only exists by societal agreement. I would think a barter economy would be more stable and driven by supply and demand. In the real world governments futz with their economies by arbitrarily printing or destroying currency or rather by directing such action from the private companies which form the banking system. To some extent currency is always being created and destroyed, i.e. replaced when it wears out, but it is my impression that the greatest pool of money does not exist outside of various ledger books. It could theoretically be called in for currency but then the whole banking system would collapse. I would much rather see currency completely removed from the game in favor of some kind of barter system. It would allow for pc's to act as peddlers going from place to place trying to make a favorable exchange. In a system like this each npc would have a list of preferred items which they need for their professions for which they would pay a premium -- say a better rate for training. Items not on this list would be accepted at a lower rate, depending on who their npc customers are and which items they prefer. Probably too difficult to code anytime soon.

[dptr1988]

If the the game followed these rules, it would be awesome!! I sure hope it gets done sometime.

[Pizik]

I personally like the ideas suggested in the 1st post. But i think that is over complicating matters. I would  love to see (at first) a system where if Player A sells 20 Gold for 4800 trias, when Player B comes along and tries to sell 20 Gold (to the same NPC) He would be offered, for example, only 4000 Trias. Reasoning is pretty simple, If NPC has already bought Gold from Player A he will have less need to purhase Gold from Player B.

To increase the amount that the NPC would be willing to pay, a system of gradual increase in purchase cost would also be needed, for example, each merchant in the game is charged a rent by the local authorities (initially a simple method to avoid adding extra complications).

You could add to this (at a later date after seeing how this worked) the idea of increasing purchase price by calculating the amount of goods bought (as suggested in the 1st post) Say Player A comes and buys a Short sword, this could correlate to say, 2 Gold, 6 Iron and 2 Coal (just some random figures). With the purchase of the sword the NPCs current stock of those resources would decrease and thus increase the price NPC would be willing to purchase these goods for.

To make it easy on the Devs there is no reason that it could not be initially implemented on certain resources (gold would be perfect) to see how it worked before being expanded to other resources.

I believe this would make a fairly unique, interactive, economy similar to the real world that would really set PS apart from other games in the genre.

(My appologies to the original poster if i have just gone over what was already said but i had small issues working out what some of it meant and i thought it was overly complicated.)

[bilbous]

I think if you want to do this kind of thing (not my barter suggestion) it might be good to have an NPC jobber who would act as a clearinghouse for contracts. This would allow players some control over their incomes as you would go to the jobber and look thought the contracts he has on offer and take the ones that suit you. For example a miner could go to him and see what orders he has for iron ore take the one with the best price if he wants and then fill it. It might be that he has the ore on hand or he might need to go mine for it but depending on the size there could be bonuses for early completion or penalties for lateness but all this would be spelled out in the job contract.

A system like this would enable the settings team to flesh out the major players on the other levels and have interactions with the players long before those levels are added to the lands available. Perhaps tin is a major component used in the manufacture of currency, for example, and the mints on the 4th or 5th level issue contracts for its production. Certainly the military might have standing orders for equipment or produce.

[Jotese Erotere]

I am afraid one thing is being overlooked. An economy is basically driven by supply and demand as we all know. However most players simply sell stuff to NPC's. I, for instance, almost never buy anything from NPC's as most I need I either already have or loot from monsters. If this is true for most players than the proposed economy would collapse rather quickly having a lot of supply but very little demand. If an economy were to be introduced. A demand must be created. I suggest the devs start out be experimenting with food to get an economy going. All players could easily be required to eat food to sustain them self. For instance to regenerate there physical stamina which can be made to not regenerate without food or only regenerated partially and requiring food to regenerate fully. In this way there will always be a demand. Taverns can then be made to sell prepared food and players could sell basic ingredients to taverns. Though to make things not too complicated we could start out with just meat in the economy. Other kinds of food like apples and bread would simply be left untouched and would have litte effect on regenerating your physical stamina.

Off course a few more things must be thought out before this could work. The danger and having any economy in a game is oversupplying by players. Therefore supply must be limited somehow. Otherwise goods would loose there value and NPC's would be forced to sell goods at a loss and go bankrupted, so to speak. In the real world food is naturally limited simply because if to much livestock is killed there wouldn't be anything left. This concept could be introduced in Planeshift as well. By allowing only certain creatures to have raw meat to loot and to not have them respawn after they are killed, oversupplying the economy wouldn't be possible. Off course these creatures would have to be able to propagate. Also there should be some protecting against overhunting these creatures. Otherwise we will have no livestock and all get stuck. The best way to do this is to create safe heavens where these creatures can propagate and if to many are there to migrate to not so safe places for as to hunt. In this way there will always be creatures to hunt but if to many are killed the price for meat drops and afterwards increases because of little supply.

Safe heavens for these creatures could at first be virtual places. At a later stage these might be very difficult to access terrains with lots of rivers and mountains requiring players to have special skills to cross these and maybe very strong and powerfull monsters that are swift to kill anything in their domain. This would only allow skilled and strong players to hunt these players. The difficulty of entering the terrain could also be made to rise as you go further into it, to get some more realism.

[bilbous]

Seeing as how the upper two levels are supposed to have enough farms to supply all the levels' food needs (or do the bottom levels practice aquaculture?) it would seem more logical implement a few of them rather than to have the populous depend on wild game. Again I think this would be a good situation for an order clearinghouse where pcs could get orders for delivery and provide the service, going to the farm, buying the needed supplies and delivering them to the customer if available or the jobber if for a customer on another level. Items made on another level might be available from the jobber if the contract is accepted.

[rtrentc]

I am afraid one thing is being overlooked. An economy is basically driven by supply and demand as we all know. However most players simply sell stuff to NPC's. I, for instance, almost never buy anything from NPC's as most I need I either already have or loot from monsters. If this is true for most players than the proposed economy would collapse rather quickly having a lot of supply but very little demand.

I think a lot of work needs to be done and rule #6 I think will be critical.
6 ) This relates to #3 above. All raw materials that a pc is able to aquire must have a use. IE must contribute to some finished product.

The more usefull finished products that can be produced in game, the less you will need drops from monsters. In fact if you have enough usefull products in the game, then the monster drops can become mostly raw materials to be used for usefull products. I am not saying that this will be easy. It will require a lot of thought and planning by the devs to implement, but I think it is worth it. After all if the best swords you can get come from monster drops then why do you need crafters. I am not saying that the humanoid monsters shouldn't have some good drops, but that the very best swords should come from crafters and only an extremly rare sword should come from a monster drop. But a character that specializes in a specific method of crafting should be able to produce a sword of comprable quality and power. Or a set of armor of such quality. This type of product should take a very, very long time to make and require the character to be at the very top of his profession. After all a lot of armorers could make plate, but only the very best could make Maximillian Plate.

The main thing is that as long as the monster drops are providing the majority of items in the game, you won't see an economy grow. We need to have things that are made by the crafters and these items need to draw upon raw materials available in the game and they need to be varied and provide a fairly large percentage of the non raw material items in the game.

[Jotese Erotere]

Though all if this is true, i really think an ecomony should be introduced gracefully. Right now we dont really have an economy based on true supply and demand. But since this is rather hard to get right it is best to first gain experience using something that doesnt effect game play in a too big a way. If monster drops or mining where to be altered to would have a huge impact. That is why I suggest the devs start with something not really relevant to game play. The food suggestion is this one way. I thought it would fit in nicely with what we have.

[Attersson]

I happen to pass by, take what you like from my words and discard I accidentally say, that doesn't respect your view and you dislike.
From a poet, philosopher, but mostly from someone who took 30 (max grade) on Economy, allow me to skim and get blunt to the point without many disquisitions and circles of rethorical words.

Bilbous said that money is an abstraction, it doens't exist but as a social standard. Just as law and common religion (for the false believers). Abstractions needed to legitimate a cohabitation.

Such discussions are useless, my dear children. Yliakum is a system, think about a box. Or a dome. Add a coin to a piggy and the total number of coins in it raises. And equally each coin in it looses value. Inflaction and risks, decrease the value of the money over time and raise prices. Having the money soon means being able to invest it soon, so all these factors contribute to wanting money SOON and not later.

So, if you wish an economy, close the box. Don't let any more money in. The side effects of this bring severe problems. Let me list few of them, without trying to solve them:
1)Adding players at some point would make money dramatically little.
2)Even a little raise to the "total money" brings abuses. Fake accounts to rise total cash?
3)Deleting players should reduce total cash, but once allocated in market, you can't fraud it back from people pockets.
4)Sitting accounts of riches who then log off for months and the rest of the world is in misery?
5)Minerals: mints pay less than their worth, but only way to produce cash. Complex Yliakum coinage system required.
6)Only purpose of mint is replace broken coins, while costs manpower to run: waste but necessary.

I cannot be blamed for listing problems without a solution. I wrote the solution to this, but someone in the high quarters inherited his ears from a merchant.
Sit and wait, dance around the fire to kill time.

[Jotese Erotere]

I have been thinking on this subject a bit more and would like to make a few comments.

A barter system would properly violate the settings in PS. Since Yliakum is already pretty evolved socially, having a strong goverment and a lot of trading, not having currency would be illogical. As far as I know, though not being a historian, all societies at this stage of development had currency. It remains a nice idea but I don't really think it would fit in with the current settings. Ultimately this is off course up to the settings team.

A closed system: there is no need to have a closed system. In real economies, money flows in and out regularly through import/export. Also money is lost and new money is created. Someone not logging in for a while is pretty much the same as having a savings account. Though it is always better for an economy if everyone simply spent most of his/her money, this isn't necessary. An economy can deal with it. In the real world this contributes to inflation.

My only question is wether the development team wishes to have a self-regulating economy or rather work with fixed prices. If the lather is true all that needs to be done is balance the prices. Though this is a bit tricky. A self-regulating economy is more difficult to implement but has the benefit of regulating the prices. The only thing is that supply must be limited (like oil) or supply must spoil/wear out (like for most goods) or be consumed/converted (like the hours you work, or through by producing products) and there must be demand. But this has already been stated. Note that an economy is nothing more than an elaborate way to divide resources between the participants wether this is a barter economy or using reference resource (money).

I guess at this time it is pretty much a question of which way the development team wishes to go. Several practical suggestions have been made for a self-regulating economy. So I leave it at this for now.

[bilbous]

I do not think that a barter system would be too OOC as such systems are pretty common even today. Certainly having it as the only system would be unlikely, but some provision could be made especially among the merchant class as they might be more willing to trade product they are having difficulty moving for other product that might not be any better but at least they do not have too much in stock. Especially if they think they can get the better of the deal.

[ftravela]

I'm not sure I understand what the problem is exactly with the current economy. Granted, I just started so I haven't seen too much, but typical economic problems in MMOs are:

P1) Inflation.  Players that have been around a long time have tons of currency units (Trias in this case) so buying things from other players is expensive.  This is only a problem if things that are worthwhile are only available from other players and cannot be purchased from NPC vendors.

So the question is - is there bad inflation? If there's no inflation, then I don't see any trouble. Having "unofficial" currency isn't a big deal at all.

Now, if inflation is a problem, this has a very simple fix:  do not have currency drop off mobs or be quest rewards.  Have the only source of currency be trading commodities with NPCs - specifically, a single commodity to a central bank.  For instance, iron ore.  Have this exchange at a fixed rate, say 100 Tria per kg.  This way, the amount of currency in the game is directly related to the amount of iron ore currently on deposit in the bank.  Players can either trade tria or goods among themselves, but if they want more Tria they will have to either mine and trade with the bank or give more goods to miners to trade.

This isn't a fiat system, but it's the only way to really combat currency inflation.

It's a little odd to have currency not be a quest reward, as this is very common.  However, if you use the concept that currency reflects an actual chunk of wealth somewhere this makes sense (and is why money was NOT fiat for most of its history - fiat money is actually fairly new).  It will be "different" than what we're used to, but it can work, and it will prevent inflation.

Now, if you want to offer Trias as quest rewards, you need to make the NPCs actually do work to get money from others so they can trade it :-)

[bilbous]

The problem is that npcs have an inexhaustible supply of money to buy loot of which there is an equally inexhaustible supply. This means that players gather great amounts of wealth so that the price of those desirable items whether crafted or looted which are in a short supply are inflated as the seller tries to get as much as he can from the buyer. If the only way to get new tria was to sell iron to the bank you would see the iron mines worked 24/7 much the way the gold mines have been. The crafters would get none to craft with or have to charge insane prices (similar to now) for finished goods to justify wasting the iron on weapons instead of tria.

All in all I do not think it would work as players would quickly get filled up with stuff they cannot get rid of.

[ftravela]

The problem is that npcs have an inexhaustible supply of money to buy loot of which there is an equally inexhaustible supply.

I guess I should have extended my "don't have money drop off mobs" a bit - my comment that even NPCs can't get money without trading for goods is also the case - they can't buy goods with money they don't have.  Fixing the NPCs so they *don't* have infinite money is the same as keeping money from dropping off mobs. (infinitely-saleable rat pelts counts as money dropping off mobs).

I don't think the miners could infinitely just stash ore in the bank in exchange for currency either, because people will have to sell to the miners - if the people don't have the ore or whatever, they won't have anything to sell, so the miners won't be able to pay tons of currency for it. This of course also requires that mines are not infinite - they have to be such that there are lots of "surface" mines that can be exhausted rapidly, but after that, it becomes more difficult to mine - diminishing returns and all that.

Basically, you have to make resources be truly economically scarce and not infinite.