Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
What would happen if an MMO had a fixed money supply?
MrPockets
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Let's say that a game starts with X amount of gold that is given to players by the typical means: mobs, quests, npcs, etc. But once X reaches 0, those systems temporarily no longer give out gold rewards. The only way to get them to payout again is by cycling the gold through the game's gold sinks: taxes, fees, etc that would feedback into that initial pool of gold.
What does the game's economy end up looking like with a system like this?
Do you think this is sustainable through close control of the gold sinks?
Would market prices actually be stable? How would player greed influence the economy?
Do players just hoard money? does it become extremely difficult to gain wealth as a new player?
Do materials/items constantly lose value, since the total amount of materials is increasing?
I'm genuinely curious of people's thoughts on this, as I don't know of any game that has/had a system like this.
***EDIT***
Seems like the general consensus is that "players will just hoard money". So let's move beyond that point and assume there is an automatic tax system in place that prevents players from hoarding forever. This system would tax X% of every players total currency amount and put it back into circulation on a regular basis.
Does this solve the hoarding problem? do other gold sinks need to co-exist with this tax system? what other types of consequences does this tax system have?
What does the game's economy end up looking like with a system like this?
Do you think this is sustainable through close control of the gold sinks?
Would market prices actually be stable? How would player greed influence the economy?
Do players just hoard money? does it become extremely difficult to gain wealth as a new player?
Do materials/items constantly lose value, since the total amount of materials is increasing?
I'm genuinely curious of people's thoughts on this, as I don't know of any game that has/had a system like this.
***EDIT***
Seems like the general consensus is that "players will just hoard money". So let's move beyond that point and assume there is an automatic tax system in place that prevents players from hoarding forever. This system would tax X% of every players total currency amount and put it back into circulation on a regular basis.
Does this solve the hoarding problem? do other gold sinks need to co-exist with this tax system? what other types of consequences does this tax system have?
1
Comments
have you played monopoly?
In real life if a country stops printing money a few things will happen, a couple of them are possible inflation decrease and slow economic growth.
Hard currencies will be reserved for trading with NPCs.
Some drop items would probably become more valuable than their use would suggest if they were easy to trade to NPC merchants for gold.
Better start collecting sea shells folks.
I never thought of this, it is a good point. But would this really be a bad thing? would it drive away players? or would it be a unique selling point that brings in new players?
I know a lot of players want to bring the social aspect back to MMOs, and this helps in that endeavor, right?
how is trading an item for an item more social than trading an item for money?
It works if you tie the upper bound value in some way to known active/registered accounts on the server, such as 'allowing an upper bound of 40,000,000,000,000 if you have 40,000 registered players.
However, since enforcing it changes the options and behaviours related to NPC activity, it's not necessarily a good way to do it in terms of player engagement and fun.
Source: Me, a 'thesis' paper I wrote years ago. I have no other hard evidence so yeah.
If gold was limited, I think people would directly trade materials and items directly with each other.
People would also hoard materials and items in general.
People with unique items would be able to ask any price they want and there would be people paying for it in gold.
So, what would really happen is that most of the items woud be devalued and the really important items would become way more expensive.
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
Rule #1: Once you have their money, you never give it back.
Rule #2: The best deal is the one that brings the most profit.
Rule #3: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
Rule #16: A deal is a deal, until a better one comes along.
Rule #38: Everyone needs something.
Rule #66: Double the price, then sell it half off.
Rule #108: Don't buy what you can't sell.
So, all gold consumed by the NPCs would have to be returned to the game somehow.
The concept is that once you sink some, the faucets turn back on.
Theoretically fine.
It must be a in person trade, rather hard to implement in an automated player shop. And both parties can haggle for the exact term.
from OP:
It is quite crazy that there are so many MMOs with people mining gold, but the option of minting more coin was never there.
edit: What if minting was a skill? You would bring your minerals to a player who can mint an he could make coins of many kinds. So, your node could actually have it's own coin, a guild could have it's own coin and so on.
There would be people making money by exchanging coins
People would start using a different currency, eg certain crafting materials.
While this is good in theory, the most recent game I can think of that had anything similar to this is Path of Exile.
The game sort of had currency, but only sort of, as the "currency" was consumable items.
What tended to happen in that game is about 65% of players just didnt bother trading at all.
It worked well enough for the remaining 35% or so. It was indeed more social for that percent that bothered with it - though an argument could be made that the 35% didn't need any assistance in socializing.
To me, this means that if your purpose for having a currency and trading system is to facilitate the easy and frequent trade between players, anything that removes basic currency from the picture is a negative.
If your reason for having currency and a trading system is different to that, then perhaps that outcome may change.
I think this brings up good questions about player psychology. For sake of argument, let's assume we want to try an avoid players using items as a currency. One option to accomplish that is to just make the main currency infinite, as almost all games do.
But what if another goal we have is to prevent infinite inflation of that currency? I think than then leads to the most common practice of "gold sinks" - remove currency from circulation to curb the infinite influx of money generated by the game itself.
I think the next line of thought is then: How easy is it to manage/design those gold sinks? Does a fixed money supply change this at all? I think the sinks just turn into "gold recycle systems"....and now that I'm thinking through this, if a game had perfect gold sinks, would that be equivalent to a fixed money supply?
Yes. It's difficult but not impossible, because taxes in most games are percentage based, applying counterinflationary pressure if the faucets are weak.
Easier to tweak the faucets than the sinks anyway, for most games.
Problem is that MMOs are games mostly made to appease carebears, this means that they don't want item destruction and loss set to 100%....but they want to farm infinite gold, carebears demand infinite gold faucets and infinite material faucets and demand infinite hoarding and infinite protection.
So, in games where the economy is more realistic you will have 100% item loss by destruction or loot drop, being your gear and player buildings. Those are the real and natural sinks, these sinks are the sinks that can effectively fix economies and balance things out.
If a game had these natural sinks and had real coining, then you could turn off the infinite gold faucets.
People would be able to mine gold and make coins, also would be important that in such a game, all players would have to carry gold in their inventories and the loss rate would have to be 100% too (having gold in the bank would be ok).
That's it!
That's how you can disable infinite gold faucets.
In this example, is the raw gold resource infinite? if it is, then it is no different, it just takes longer, no?
Even with infinite gold to be mined, it would be fine, if there's item destruction... it would be a problem if people stop dying and most deaths usually come from PvP.
Any game can have a scarcity system and dimish the spawn of gold veins in areas where people are over mining. In AoC there is something about this in regards of fauna and flora, I don't remember if minerals are included in the land degradation system.
inflation actually isn't caused by a surplus of money, its caused by a surplus of goods. Restricting money, or adding gold sinks only increases inflation, if you don't have enough good sinks. With node development causing a lot of goods to be consumed, and those nodes beeing destructible, inflations will be a lot less
I feel like one can spot economists and EVE players from 6 threads away sometimes.
Pretty sure this is a thread about currency inflation specifically, though, not 'labor-inflation' or whatever the correct term for what you described is? A fantasy MMO, even with an underlying trading system, probably shouldn't have to care about anything other than currency inflation since the production lines aren't static and don't have large startup costs.
According to all the literature I checked, this isn't true. Different things can cause inflation, but a surplus of goods would cause deflation.
Essentially, what inflation boils down to - is an increase in the price of goods. This could be caused by production costs or increase in demand/decrease in supply.
you can also do that with gold ?_?
To return to the OP's point, a fixed amount of money could have different impacts depending on two related other factors: number of players on the server and strength of the economy on the server.
If the server population grows then we need more money in the server economy or the economy lacks liquidity. If the server economy grows (more crafting as the population levels up to more complex gear, for example) then we need more money in the economy for the same reason. The population and the economy may both grow (need lots more money), may both shrink (need to take money out of the economy to prevent inflation) or move in opposite directions (need to manage money supply even more carefully).
Fortunately for games, monitoring the situation is easier than in the real world since we know the population through live-player-hours, the money supply, the price changes for most basic goods, and anything else we need to know through queries. They can tweak drop rates of gold and materials to maintain healthy server economies (however they end up defining that). Incidentally, since prices should differ from server to server, this is another reason that server transfers should not be allowed.
Ideally IS will be able to hire someone with a PhD in Economics and experience in the Federal Reserve to do all this, but they may have to settle for someone with a MS Econ and some game experience.
It would also mean that the material lost upon death/caravan raids/node sieges would matter more. I had already commented before that if one can easily lose materials but gold remains save in the player wallet, then most players will convert materials to gold asap - but a limited coin system would make that much more difficult.
Double edged sword for sure. It would most certainly encourage/force more player interaction, but it might not necessarily always be in a good way. "Life-skillers" and casuals would suddenly be much more important to the game economy - but it would also increase the benefit of being a bandit (aka, red), if you get away with it.
That's a mechanic in Wakfu.
You can mint money from ores, early in the game economy it was actually a very important source. They had to change the amount you can mint to account from inflation from other sources at some point, because the price of the raw materials became higher than the amount you could mint with it.
Fixed money supply with a growing player base = less and less money to go around per player, encouraging keeping the gold and not spending it, creating imbalances and other unwanted consequences like hoarding, and an economy more easily controlled by whales. Its also not possible to have a fixed money supply when you will most certainly have daily/weekly/monthly quests/tasks for gold.
On the other hand, infinite money supply also has its consequences like infinite inflation, thats why you have to have realistic money sinks that somehow try to balance the overall money supply. In the case of an mmorpg, the money just dissapears or gets transformed... or in our case with AoC, a money sink like node taxes will be used to generate buildings, which can also be destroyed in node wars, which is a much more interactive way to manage the gold lost from a gold sink!
Perfect balance is not possible in a game or in real life. But you do want to have active mechanisms to pursue somewhat of an imperfect balance.
Fun thing about a game is you actually have a closed system where you can test so much and try out things without necessarily the real world consequences of making mistakes
Would it? I guess if somehow the RMTers obtained a majority of the money supply...but I'm not sure how that happens in the first place? How would they maintain their supply of gold? Typically this is done via botting, since there is always gold to be made with it. But if bots eventually can't make money...does that dry up the RMTer's main source of income?
Either way, I think it is an interesting problem to think about.