*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.* IntroductionDuring 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 DivisionIn 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 monopolyIn 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 truthIn 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 ;]
