Economics, the difference between success and failure

lusiphur

I'm not saying that economics is the be all end all for a mmorpg, but it is a huge part. I hope that Intrepid brings in a professional economic advisor who went to all the right schools to design a system that works.

When you are juggling, crafted equipment, drops, auction houses, and npc vendors you need a professional to make sense of it all. That is before some neerdowells try to break the system.

So I hope that there is an economic advisor on this project that doesn't turn up his nose at an mmorpg and just take the money.

tiltowait

I believe this falls in the Done and Done category, like EVE they have! One of the most exciting things about the game!

Here's a toast, To gold-sinks done right!

grisu

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Rocco_Scandizzo

Wandering Mist

EDIT and rewritten:

Thinking about this more, one thing has me a little concerned. According to the wiki, a node's mayer decides how much players in that node get taxed for various things. This is huge and I think it's the only game I know of that allows the players to control this. Even in games like Eve Online, the amount of tax players pay is controlled by the developers, not the players. It's entirely possible for a mayer with very little business sense to crash the in-game economy on their server.

Will there be any safeguards in place to make sure this doesn't happen?

grisu

Tera, BDO can set taxes for things when they controll stuff.

I would say the safeguard is "You are a shitty major, noone will vote for you again next month."

Wandering Mist

grisu wrote: »

Tera, BDO can set taxes for things when they controll stuff.

I would say the safeguard is "You are a shitty major, noone will vote for you again next month."

I never got invested enough into those games to notice how the in-game economy worked. As for the whole "shitty mayer" problem, the only node type where players are elected are the scientific nodes. In military nodes, the mayer is the person who wins in the combat arena. For economic nodes, the mayership is bought by the person with the most money, and in divine nodes it's whichever player shows the highest faith to the church. So unless it's a scientific node, there is no guarantee that a rubbish mayer who ruins the economy is going to be gone any time soon.

And as history has shown us, it's relatively easy to screw up the economy, but very hard to put it back together again. Now of course, if things get really really bad the devs can just wipe out all the gold on a server and start from scratch, but I can already imagine the amount of rage that would accompany that from players who worked hard to get as much gold as they can.

unknownsystemerror

We have seen these arguments before on the old forums and most, if not all of these are not new concerns, and have been addressed. Node mayors cannot loot a treasury for personal gain. They can only use the funds generated for node improvements. There is no incentive for them to "crash" their economy. Node mayors control the tax rate for a node. There are over 100 of them so no one is going to be impacting stuff "server-wide". Anyone who does act like a fool will find their head on a pike. Tough to govern or run for re-election in any node type if every time you log on there are packs of citizens looking to kill you repeatedly. Will there be the occasional edgelord who manages to get to mayor status and tries to burn down their own stuff for shits and giggles? Sure. But there are just as many checks and balances in place to render them toothless once they start shenanigans.

Professor Posh

unknownsystemerror wrote: »

We have seen these arguments before on the old forums and most, if not all of these are not new concerns, and have been addressed. Node mayors cannot loot a treasury for personal gain. They can only use the funds generated for node improvements. There is no incentive for them to "crash" their economy. Node mayors control the tax rate for a node. There are over 100 of them so no one is going to be impacting stuff "server-wide". Anyone who does act like a fool will find their head on a pike. Tough to govern or run for re-election in any node type if every time you log on there are packs of citizens looking to kill you repeatedly. Will there be the occasional edgelord who manages to get to mayor status and tries to burn down their own stuff for shits and giggles? Sure. But there are just as many checks and balances in place to render them toothless once they start shenanigans.

Gotta love the way you explain things 😁. It's quite uhh... unique 😂.

Wololo

yeah xd if the mayor messes up the things he does has influence over, for own greed or just pure trolls, he will surely be remembered by account name for ever on that server as someone not to trust or KoS XD

Plateau

I think the game will still be just as fun if the economy is in ruins. Well, maybe not for trade-focused players. But I mean, if Intrepid isn't going to hold our hands for any of the other systems, and is going to let us literally destroy each other in massive wars, then why wouldn't they also let use drive the economy into ruins? It's another large-scale problem we'll have to solve together or suffer through individually, making every economic win that much more satisfying.

TBH though, I just like to see the value of items change over time, because it gives me reasons to go new places and collect different stuff, so economic chaos seems kinda fun. And I guess I have no empathy for large-scale traders. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Atama

One advantage of having open world PvP, if a mayor is too much of an a-hole you can literally lynch them. That gang of angry citizens can literally murder the mayor. (They’ll respawn and everything so it doesn’t solve the problem but I’m sure it would feel good. )

aileric

I might be wrong but I think SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) had mayor determined taxation rates. They certainly broke a lot of interesting ground in that game with respect to game mechanics.
One thing I liked about EVE were the quarterly economic reports ... they were as least as sophisticated as many reports IRL.

Jahlon

wanderingmist wrote: »

EDIT and rewritten:

Thinking about this more, one thing has me a little concerned. According to the wiki, a node's mayer decides how much players in that node get taxed for various things. This is huge and I think it's the only game I know of that allows the players to control this. Even in games like Eve Online, the amount of tax players pay is controlled by the developers, not the players. It's entirely possible for a mayer with very little business sense to crash the in-game economy on their server.

Will there be any safeguards in place to make sure this doesn't happen?

Yes, some of the tax rates in Eve Online were dictated by the Developers, Eve Online also left it up to the CEOs to figure out how much the corporate tax rate was, and station owners to determine their taxes.

Also, how does the mayor of 1 out of 103 Nodes crash the economy of their entire server?

Third, if you are going to make a statement like

lusiphur wrote: »

I'm not saying that economics is the be all end all for a mmorpg, but it is a huge part. I hope that Intrepid brings in a professional economic advisor who went to all the right schools to design a system that works.

It might be good if you actually did 5 seconds of research to discover that they in fact do have a PhD in Economics on staff.

T Elf

jahlon wrote: »

wanderingmist wrote: »

EDIT and rewritten:

It might be good if you actually did 5 seconds of research to discover that they in fact do have a PhD in Economics on staff.

Glad you said it, because I was just about to post it.

grisu

Not like the 2nd post in this thread already did that @elf

I think we have been around long enough to know that people dont.