Basic Roles of Economy

[snow_RAveN]

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

[Cyberchu]

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.

[Aeterus]

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.

[rifft]

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.

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.

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.

[snow_RAveN]

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
you dont have to fill forms in game

[icebr4kr]

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.

[dfryer]

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.

[Kuiper7986]

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.

[rifft]

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.

[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.

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

[snow_RAveN]

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

[Aeterus]

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)

[Kuiper7986]

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.

[dfryer]

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.

[Kuiper7986]

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.