My Corner of the Interweb

Warning: Esoteric Geek Blog Entry

Mood: Tired.
Music: This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us, Siouxsie.
Game: World of Warcraft (60 Rogue, 13 Priest.)
Book: On The Road, Jack Kerouac.
Muffin: Nectarine-Mango.
Punchline: "Gimme a beer and a mop."

[Ed. Note: This blog entry is about global economies in MMORPGs. If you're not down with theoretical game economies, then this might not be your entry. If you're interested anyway, feel free to follow along at home....]

I've been thinking again about MMORPG Economies again.

A long time ago, I designed an economy for Gemstone III (which is now Gemstone IV, I believe, by Simutronics.) GSIII was, and is, one of the largest text-based MMORPGs every created. Persistent world, been around for well over 15 years, at the time I was a GM there, we were revamping the game...adding things we felt were necessary. I was responsible for warriors, the guild systems, and to a small extent, coding weird little gizmos and trinkets for sale to players.

At the time I was planning, which would have been 1997, I was planning a trade skill system. The problem was pretty straight-forward...with an infinite influx of cash (dropping off killed monsters) players who'd been around for a huge period of time were accumulating WAY too much cash...and there was nothing to buy of any real value, other than "merchants."

Merchants were GM run NPCs who would charge serious dough for changing the appearance of an item, or sell unique or rare items. Doing so was the only way to drain cash out of the economy.

Having too much cash in the economy has the obvious problem...inflation. It results in prices going up, even though the items themselves weren't worth all that much, and there weren't even all that many items worth having in the first place. Forget the demand aspect at this point. People wanted new and unique stuff, and always would. We could remedy that part by making more stuff, and putting it in the world via shops and drops. But ultimately, why accumulate wealth if you have nothing to do with it. This is a problem.

The concept was to create a player-run economy. In order to do that, we needed to allow the players to "create" items that would remain persistent in the universe. It was clear that this was not a trivial exercise. Forget about all the legacy items...and forget about the fact that we'd have to create a very large list of items for the players to create. Remember that we'd have to "pre-create" anything that was to be created...or create mechanisms to allow players to create things when conditions were met.

The second problem was that in order to make the player-made items valuable (ie: have any value at all...) we needed to make sure that there was no other way to gain these items...ie: we needed to get rid of all the NPC vendors...or at least have them sell things that weren't as good as player made items.

The last was that if players could make items, what would prevent them from flooding the market? We needed a way to control the amount of items that could be made to keep deflation from occurring due to oversupply.

So what's the answer?

Curiously, in the past 8-10 years, trade skill systems have been implemented in many ways. But they all have the same problem...inflation. Because players can always go out and get more (gold, loot, items) you are bringing wealth into the environment...but can't force it to leave.

EQ's tried, SWG's done a decent job slowing it but not stopping the problem, WoW doesn't even try to prevent it, instead making trade skills for entertainment and cash sink purpose only.

They're missing the main point:

You need a global resource/cash pool.

If, when ore is found, it's removed from the pool, it decreases the amount that can be found in the rest of the world, you can force a supply-demand equation based on true scarcity...not randomly generated scarcity.

If you create a ceiling cash limit on the world, the more cash the players have, the less the monsters have...and drops decrease.

If a player makes 10 swords, and the NPC sword merchant has 10 already, he'll get less than if the sword merchant has none.

Example: The world pool has 10 units of metal, 10 gold, and 10 wood. At start, the player has a sword (1 metal.) He goes out and kills an orc, gaining 2 gold, and finding a shield (1 metal.) He does this a few times...and at the end of his spree, he has 7 items (7 metal) and 5 gold. He doesn't need all the items, so he sells them to a merchant, who has 2 swords, and 5 gold. The merchant has more gold than sword, so decides to buy the 5 items the player has for 5 gold. The merchant now has 7 metal, the player 2, and the world pool 1. The player has all the gold. Now, the merchant has no gold, and most of the metal in the world, so prices for the swords goes up...as does the price for his bows (1 wood each.) The player buys a bow (1 wood) for 3 gold (which is fine, since the player has gold and nothing to spend it on.) He goes out to kill orcs...but the orcs don't drop gold...they drop some wooden weapons and shields, and the boss might have the last gold.

So how do we get stuff back in the pool?

Breakage (where weapons and armor wear out over time), and have the NPC vendors "eat" half their stock when they buy. So the 5 metal the merchant bought, 3 are going back into the world pool for recycling, 2 gold is for his sale, and we can keep doing this indefinitely, by creating different/better items that use more/different resources. Items truly become rare because of how hard it is to make and item, and how many resources are used to make it.

Throw in player created items, where they can change their items into resources at a loss (a sword that costs 4 metal to make becomes 2 metal) and you have a self-sustaining economy that doesn't inflate. It can't...because there's a cap on the amount of money available.

It is not an easy equation to balance, especially when you start throwing all manner of raw materials into the mix, plus you need to decide on the "cost" of each item in raw materials...but once built, you can always balance by adding or subtracting from the pool.

I would argue that the pool scales based on the world population, with each new player adding x of each material into the world pool, perhaps on a sliding scale based on class or on a steadily decreasing scale, such that overpopulation puts a burden on the world pool.

Any way you do it, I believe that doing this makes trade skills necessary, as the conversion from item to material and back could be handled by NPCs...but by giving players the mechanism to do it themselves, you stimulate a necessary and enjoyable balancing mechanism.

I was thinking about writing a white paper on this, and perhaps developing a prototype world to prove the theory...then maybe selling it to game developers.

Opinions?

Posted by Glenn at March 2, 2005 11:34 AM