Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Deflating Economies: Sporadic Lessons From Other Virtual Economies
Immortalmage
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Game economies typically inflate over time. It's quite a simple way of doing things that simultaneously confers benefits to more involved players in the same way fair, non-inflationary economies do. When constructing the economic landscape, it's important to insure inflation provides no hindrance to new players. A mature, inflated economy necessarily bars new entrants and should be avoided lest a prohibiting in-crowd is fostered. Rather than talk about different kinds of economies, I'd like to look at deflationary practices as seen in other games.
Many games sloppily tie in one-time purchases for in-game money and expect it to depress the quantity of money held by players. The raw value injection into the economy is done by the game world to support player activity. If you loot a bandit and get silver pieces or loot a squirrel for its acorn you're creating money - and it's not out of thin air as people say, you're creating it out of time. In any game where players pay per-month, it's fair to expect that time put into the game acts as a function for money generation. Below are a few styles of temporal gold sinks.
1) Reagent Spells
In D&D, sometimes you literally have to use silver or gold pieces directly to power spells. Or, burn diamond dust (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Stoneskin). If approached with a more flavorful approach, I think this is a very good way to remove gold from the economy.
2) Goblinization
In MMOs, there's a rare subset of players that just like to play markets and sit on unending amounts of gold. This goblin archetype is difficult for me to understand the appeal of but I know quite a bit about it because my father hit gold cap on 4-5 characters at the same time in the original World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion and there is a lot to it. Economies of scale often filter through with the pareto principle - the top 20% tend to own 80% of the capital, for example. As long as this practice isn't discouraged, there will be some rare players who do the servers deflationary work for you.
3) Task Assistance
For all tasks, players self-select the tasks they're willing to do. In many cases due to friends or guilds, there are tasks people don't want to do but will participate nonetheless. Much of the time, people will take a less profitable course to completion including purchasing sub-optimal (profitability wise) assistance. If the task is combative: Purchasable buffs. Administrative: A subscription to efficiency. Geographic: Faster movement. Whether the task is a one time thing or repeating, a temporary desirable purchase can be offered to temporarily help the person or the person's group.
4) Procedural Power / Escalating Rarity
In D&D, it's easy to create procedural power, so I'll use an anecdote to explain what it is and it's deflationary purpose. Imagine a potion that costs 1g and makes you do 1% more damage. At times, players can opt to combine those for a potion that makes you do 2% more damage. Then, they can combine 3 of those for a potion that makes you do 4% more damage. Then, 3 of those for 8% more damage, and so on. The math here is that a cubing of the cost correlates with a squaring of the power received, which on the surface looks like it gets out of hand quickly but truthfully the cost gets out of hands way, way faster. This kind of curve is easy to write up and play out in paper RPGs, and programmatically speaking I imagine there is a way to replicate this with a simple system, but I am curious if a plain exponential gold sink would be easily spotted as a wolf unto your gold in sheeps clothing. The ease of understanding in D&D tends to play nice when 'saving up power', as players tend to hoard the activatable until there are special occasions. They may have an assortment tier 1, 2, and 3 potion all in their inventory and the time they spend ecstatically awaiting their additional tier 1 potion acquisitions, because they haven't had a tier 4 yet and it'll be *twice as strong* (wow!). It feels like watching someone who has a lottery ticket, despite it not being up to chance - they're sitting on their stash and waiting provides excitement.
Escalating rarity works the same way - something that is available to 1%, 0.5%, 0.25%, etc of the playerbase tends to take exponentially more money due to the typical Pareto Distribution of funds throughout the playerbase. Looking at Classic WoW, a cosmetic mount and title "Scarab Lord" which only about 1-5 players per server get ended up costing upwards of 50,000g in some places (The most expensive normal in-game purchase is 1000g, which takes 25 hours of farming to attain from raw creature farm, Scarab Lord traded in 625 hours of players farming creatures for one player to attain).
5) Pay-To-Explore Hill Climbing
From the perspective of game design, Hill Climbing has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing. Any time players may be literally exploring the map, or exploring a more abstract space, payment to continue traversing in one direction which will then reveal if it's higher or lower rewards after the fact.
Conclusion
In all opportunities, avoid one-time costs. Deflating fantasy economies has been an exercise in creating as many subscription or recurring-type fees as players will tolerate. The amount of inflationary or deflationary pressure in Ashes of Creation that will world best will be up to time to tell.
Many games sloppily tie in one-time purchases for in-game money and expect it to depress the quantity of money held by players. The raw value injection into the economy is done by the game world to support player activity. If you loot a bandit and get silver pieces or loot a squirrel for its acorn you're creating money - and it's not out of thin air as people say, you're creating it out of time. In any game where players pay per-month, it's fair to expect that time put into the game acts as a function for money generation. Below are a few styles of temporal gold sinks.
1) Reagent Spells
In D&D, sometimes you literally have to use silver or gold pieces directly to power spells. Or, burn diamond dust (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Stoneskin). If approached with a more flavorful approach, I think this is a very good way to remove gold from the economy.
2) Goblinization
In MMOs, there's a rare subset of players that just like to play markets and sit on unending amounts of gold. This goblin archetype is difficult for me to understand the appeal of but I know quite a bit about it because my father hit gold cap on 4-5 characters at the same time in the original World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion and there is a lot to it. Economies of scale often filter through with the pareto principle - the top 20% tend to own 80% of the capital, for example. As long as this practice isn't discouraged, there will be some rare players who do the servers deflationary work for you.
3) Task Assistance
For all tasks, players self-select the tasks they're willing to do. In many cases due to friends or guilds, there are tasks people don't want to do but will participate nonetheless. Much of the time, people will take a less profitable course to completion including purchasing sub-optimal (profitability wise) assistance. If the task is combative: Purchasable buffs. Administrative: A subscription to efficiency. Geographic: Faster movement. Whether the task is a one time thing or repeating, a temporary desirable purchase can be offered to temporarily help the person or the person's group.
4) Procedural Power / Escalating Rarity
In D&D, it's easy to create procedural power, so I'll use an anecdote to explain what it is and it's deflationary purpose. Imagine a potion that costs 1g and makes you do 1% more damage. At times, players can opt to combine those for a potion that makes you do 2% more damage. Then, they can combine 3 of those for a potion that makes you do 4% more damage. Then, 3 of those for 8% more damage, and so on. The math here is that a cubing of the cost correlates with a squaring of the power received, which on the surface looks like it gets out of hand quickly but truthfully the cost gets out of hands way, way faster. This kind of curve is easy to write up and play out in paper RPGs, and programmatically speaking I imagine there is a way to replicate this with a simple system, but I am curious if a plain exponential gold sink would be easily spotted as a wolf unto your gold in sheeps clothing. The ease of understanding in D&D tends to play nice when 'saving up power', as players tend to hoard the activatable until there are special occasions. They may have an assortment tier 1, 2, and 3 potion all in their inventory and the time they spend ecstatically awaiting their additional tier 1 potion acquisitions, because they haven't had a tier 4 yet and it'll be *twice as strong* (wow!). It feels like watching someone who has a lottery ticket, despite it not being up to chance - they're sitting on their stash and waiting provides excitement.
Escalating rarity works the same way - something that is available to 1%, 0.5%, 0.25%, etc of the playerbase tends to take exponentially more money due to the typical Pareto Distribution of funds throughout the playerbase. Looking at Classic WoW, a cosmetic mount and title "Scarab Lord" which only about 1-5 players per server get ended up costing upwards of 50,000g in some places (The most expensive normal in-game purchase is 1000g, which takes 25 hours of farming to attain from raw creature farm, Scarab Lord traded in 625 hours of players farming creatures for one player to attain).
5) Pay-To-Explore Hill Climbing
From the perspective of game design, Hill Climbing has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing. Any time players may be literally exploring the map, or exploring a more abstract space, payment to continue traversing in one direction which will then reveal if it's higher or lower rewards after the fact.
Conclusion
In all opportunities, avoid one-time costs. Deflating fantasy economies has been an exercise in creating as many subscription or recurring-type fees as players will tolerate. The amount of inflationary or deflationary pressure in Ashes of Creation that will world best will be up to time to tell.
2
Comments
I've played a game before where certain more powerful spells required an item (whether it was using a bullet/arrow to increase damage but still allowed you to shoot for weaker if you didn't have them, or a crystal sphere to cast a powerful spell). For the most part these were annoying to have, but easy enough to get. I wouldn't hate having certain powerful skills or abilities cost a component, I just wouldn't want it to be excessive to get them. Only thing is if there is a component it would need to be across classes as it's always obnoxious to find out the ranged classes are the only ones hit with this pay to play stuff.
I think this will actually be encouraged in some ways if the economic leadership ideas stay relatively the same as you'll basically be able to "buy" your way into the government of the economic nodes if you're rich enough in order to sit on the council: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Economic_nodes
I don't think this would mesh well with how node's develop vs how exploration is encouraged. I might be a little confused on the premise of what's being suggested though. I'd very much dislike thinking that I'd have to pay simply to explore more of a game. It'd be like an in-game DLC almost where you have to pay for content that should've been in the base game. However, if the suggestion is on an optional payment for reward types in the area I don't think this would necessarily work due to the leveling and de-leveling of nodes. If a person wanted to know the reward level they'd simply need to view what the node level has reached.
So hill climbing in abstract space has no obvious meaning and I should have expanded on that.
If I have a simple game where you get $X in a box that you open but you can't see inside, you might pay to play - let's say $5 a try. So you'd open up a red box, it'd have $0. A turquoise box: $3. A chartreuse box: 20! A white box: $0. You are "exploring" the box space and you visit different spots on the abstract "box landscape". A high dollar amount is a mountain - As in, it's a high score. After more learning you'd find that non-green boxes are valleys (low reward) and green boxes are the tallest mountains. Now, you can only move forward (greener boxes), left (lighter boxes), right (darker boxes), or backwards (less green boxes). This is the most common search-for-reward algorithm and is used in machine intelligence often because it requires core AI functions like remembering previous places, learning how moving forward or backwards, left or right correlates with higher and lower rewards, and learning patterns.
If you want to make interesting decisions, taking unsolved problems in mathematics and asking players to solve them is just good game design (as long as they don't know what you're doing). Heck, I bet a lot of people are interested in finding how to best connect goods through nodes but haven't read this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem. Or how your visits to trade chat and auction houses are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit problems. Yet they're fun until you disassemble what you're doing to its underlying components and the magic is gone. But that's game design for you!
I read the wiki article you linked before so I thought that's how it worked, but still not sure how exactly you want that to relate to payment vs exploration in ashes of creation specifically. The initial post made it sound like you're paying to literally just explore and be surprised by the information you'll get. Think my confusion came in since the post was about payment/money/economy but there wasn't an ashes specific example, I guess.
I like the idea.
Certificates are worth more the further you travel from the kill.
This system alone means the old gold grinds will not be so relevant. You can be killed on the way to your fortune and have your fortune halved or quartered each time you die.
Successful crafters will amass wealth irrespective of any designs to implement deflatory parameters. So far all of your suggestions hit the combat mechanics. I've known few combat mad players who have made a fortune from fighting. Repair costs and suboptimal rewards from PvP for example prohibit a PvPer to make a lot of money.
The only saving grace to your parameters would be from Caravan and Trade Ship conquests - these could make a pure PvPer wealth indeed, but, the system already has gold sinks in place and doesn't need more gold sinks until all we have is gold sinks.
There is no way you can balance the game between veteran players and new players. The gear differentials are a massive disparity for a start, yet, you want to add in mechanics to hamper the new player even further before they can match a Veteran Player. It boggles my mind.
Edit: Spelling Mistakes.
The fact remains, those with the gold won't feel the gold sinks half as much as those with little gold. It would effectively create a system where Veteran Players with extra gold will always be superior to new players with no gold reserves, simply because, to compete the new player would have to spend gold in more areas in one go, while the veteran player would only have to spend gold on certain items.
We see reagent costs in all MMOs through potions and other areas - Buffs from Doctors in SWG. It does not stop inflation or deflation, the prices remain stationary, but, for a new player to afford these it slows the new player acquisition of better equipment.
Equipment in Ashes will equate to 50% difference in power for a Fully Geared 50 compared to a fresh level 50. If you force players to purchase reagents such as Buffs or Potions, it further widens the gap not narrows the gap. I do believe we'll see potions in Ashes, but, whether they will relate to direct power advantage remains to be seen.
The system worked in WoW because the majority of gear for BiS (Best in slot) came from Raid Encounters or item drops which will be very rare in Ashes. You can't fit the WoW Dynamics into Ashes because not only are item drops rare, the items in WoW don't need the same level of upkeep at they will in Ashes.
It is an entirely different beast due to durability and degradation and I have the same issue as I had with temporary mounts. It does not allow players to expand in tiers and will only trap players in specific tiers or lower tiers.
I already have issues with the planned economy for other reasons (See the loot thread) but to compound these issues would be a mistake. You can't even translate Gold Guides into Ashes, because, the gold acquisition will be different than a simple kill rotation. Sometimes I wonder if the difficulties to amass large amounts of gold aren't already enough to limit inflation. The limited markets will also limit deflations but might not stop inflation.
People are greedy and people are opportunistic. The system has gold sinks already, the system has long paths to making gold and the system is heavily reliant upon Crafters who will have affiliations.
Edit: In BDO I amassed 15 Billion Silver. To purchase the BiS (Best in Slot) Accessories it cost 320 Billion Silver, to buy the BiS (Best in slot) Armour and weapons it was another 136.9 Billion silver. (Last I saw). This is inflation gone to the extreme thanks to the server merges. As a Veteran Player I could not afford the BiS (Best in Slot) items, but, a new player couldn't even afford the tier 1 items.
Repeated flat costs weigh heavy on the poor but are insignificant to the rich - their effectiveness also falls off as inflation sets in.
x% taxes maintain the ratio of wealth distribution, and somewhat follow the fluctuations in GDP - but they also make the rich sour and tax evasive.
I do think the rich are going to find a way to evade tax and the commoner in a node will be doing most of the lifting to pay Node Maintenance costs.
Diversity of the player base should be rewarded not punished in the name of mediocrity.
"A fool and his money , were lucky to get together in the first place."
I'm not saying "steal from the rich" exactly. Deflation is really important for economy maintenance - but there are methods that affect wealth distribution poorly.
Killing things and taking their stuff isn't where you make money in an MMO.
This is why I laugh at people that think gold sellers are running bots killing mobs - even in groups, this is inefficient from a profit per account per hour perspective.
Exactly - and just because it's possible to do it wrong doesn't mean attempting it is a useless enterprise.
Can you think of and share a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit problem? Bonus points if it's not lootboxes! (*Note* I'm going to take the night to think of one to share myself, it's a fun creative space to explore)