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
MMO Distributed Fiscal 'Growth' As A Deflationary Pressure (a.k.a. multi-sinking)
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
A core problem with any open world type game system is that, unlike the real world, NPCs exist, and mobs just spawn (maybe in Ashes they don't, and just eventually stop spawning, creating barren content wastelands).
As long as NPCs exist with the ability to give a player some amount money for an activity or item without hard cap, the inflows and outflows of capital must be very carefully controlled by developers. This post is about one specific thing that is difficult to maintain proper control of (while also having the game be stable otherwise).
It occurs when a rich or powerful player, or small player group, desires something enough to throw their investment capital at it, and the capital is spread out to multiple economically lesser players who have any reason to spend money on advancement. This requires three general assumptions:
1. There is a currency sink that exists for lower level players, the money doesn't go to a different player, it's removed from the economy (e.g. stable fees, repair costs, tool purchases, etc)
2. The larger, 'lesser' group has a very large or conceptually infinite incentive to keep doing whatever the rich and powerful want them to do, in order to obtain money.
3. The result, for the rich and powerful player, is an investment and not an item with a cash value which can then be easily liquidated later.
Ok, preamble done.
If a rich and powerful player divests their capital into the hands of 100 'economically less invested' players, who normally are 'playing around the idea of not having enough money to just do whatever they want', then suddenly, they are likely to use it all. In a game with the currency faucets and sinks tuned to 'low', this is a positive mostly (just economic stimulus).
In a game with the faucets and sinks tuned to medium or high, the general experience of a less invested player is that they are conditioned to spend capital in large chunks whenever they save up enough for whatever they want. This usually means that if they suddenly get a lot of money, they will also instantly spend it, it removes a 'strain point'. If the sinks are tuned to 'high', then the player often responds to a big influx of money by 'stopping worrying about saving money by not grabbing X easy thing at the NPC'. Liquid capital drains out of the economy rapidly. Even moreso in games where tax rates are variable, or direct sinks.
So you have 100 players with more money that they are pouring into the sink, but whose time is being devoted to generating something that a single or much smaller group of players at the 'top' want. That player, in most designs, cannot possibly use any faucet quickly enough to counter this. Situations where a large number of players are devoting their time to gathering materials or items to achieve a single goal which then consumes all those items, leads to this.
Basically, the rich player is pouring 100x as much money into the sink as they can by themselves normally. There are designs where this is fine. I'm not making any claim about it being 'not fine' in Ashes. Just talking about it. I think that a game system that builds this in, with a tuning around it, or a 'builder-spender' economic model where there are long periods of high production and inflation followed by investment deflation of this type, is inherently unstable.
This post is just for practice, and being made on the off chance it helps Intrepid somehow... maybe others can take something from it.
As long as NPCs exist with the ability to give a player some amount money for an activity or item without hard cap, the inflows and outflows of capital must be very carefully controlled by developers. This post is about one specific thing that is difficult to maintain proper control of (while also having the game be stable otherwise).
It occurs when a rich or powerful player, or small player group, desires something enough to throw their investment capital at it, and the capital is spread out to multiple economically lesser players who have any reason to spend money on advancement. This requires three general assumptions:
1. There is a currency sink that exists for lower level players, the money doesn't go to a different player, it's removed from the economy (e.g. stable fees, repair costs, tool purchases, etc)
2. The larger, 'lesser' group has a very large or conceptually infinite incentive to keep doing whatever the rich and powerful want them to do, in order to obtain money.
3. The result, for the rich and powerful player, is an investment and not an item with a cash value which can then be easily liquidated later.
For anyone who isn't clear on why the above are likely, there's some other base principles of MMO economy that set it up.
1. Players can't be allowed to 'print money' in a sane economy game, basically, NPC pricing has a limit that's set using a formula for how many things individual players need to buy, to take currency out of the economy. This is tied to number of players
2. Economically less invested players in MMOs do not strongly like games where their financial progress can't be converted into growth or power, or where someone else controls that.
3. It is in the interest of the developer to keep it so that the economically less invested player also tends toward saving money, rather than having a surplus of money (I don't have time to go into why this is, if you disagree with this one, can just ignore the post)
1. Players can't be allowed to 'print money' in a sane economy game, basically, NPC pricing has a limit that's set using a formula for how many things individual players need to buy, to take currency out of the economy. This is tied to number of players
2. Economically less invested players in MMOs do not strongly like games where their financial progress can't be converted into growth or power, or where someone else controls that.
3. It is in the interest of the developer to keep it so that the economically less invested player also tends toward saving money, rather than having a surplus of money (I don't have time to go into why this is, if you disagree with this one, can just ignore the post)
Ok, preamble done.
If a rich and powerful player divests their capital into the hands of 100 'economically less invested' players, who normally are 'playing around the idea of not having enough money to just do whatever they want', then suddenly, they are likely to use it all. In a game with the currency faucets and sinks tuned to 'low', this is a positive mostly (just economic stimulus).
In a game with the faucets and sinks tuned to medium or high, the general experience of a less invested player is that they are conditioned to spend capital in large chunks whenever they save up enough for whatever they want. This usually means that if they suddenly get a lot of money, they will also instantly spend it, it removes a 'strain point'. If the sinks are tuned to 'high', then the player often responds to a big influx of money by 'stopping worrying about saving money by not grabbing X easy thing at the NPC'. Liquid capital drains out of the economy rapidly. Even moreso in games where tax rates are variable, or direct sinks.
So you have 100 players with more money that they are pouring into the sink, but whose time is being devoted to generating something that a single or much smaller group of players at the 'top' want. That player, in most designs, cannot possibly use any faucet quickly enough to counter this. Situations where a large number of players are devoting their time to gathering materials or items to achieve a single goal which then consumes all those items, leads to this.
Basically, the rich player is pouring 100x as much money into the sink as they can by themselves normally. There are designs where this is fine. I'm not making any claim about it being 'not fine' in Ashes. Just talking about it. I think that a game system that builds this in, with a tuning around it, or a 'builder-spender' economic model where there are long periods of high production and inflation followed by investment deflation of this type, is inherently unstable.
This post is just for practice, and being made on the off chance it helps Intrepid somehow... maybe others can take something from it.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
1
Comments
I.e. a normal player doesn't buy those consumable because he's saving up for better gear/mats. His earnings pace is relatively low w/o those consumables, but the savings are growing steadily so the player feels fine.
Then there's a "buy order" from a rich guy and the normal player knows a spot where he can fulfil that order to the best of his abilities. He does so, gets a nice influx of money, buys the gear/mats he wanted and has leftovers. Next gearing step is ways off so he "sinks" the money on some consumables.
These consumables would now help him progress his own char/capital faster, so the sink is counteracted somewhat by a turning of the faucet.
Or is this the exact thing you're talking about and in your experience these kinds of players would instead spend those consumables on trying to fulfil new buy orders instead of progressing themselves? Then what happens if the buy orders stop coming in for a while?
This is actually 'what I'm talking about', yes.
There's lots more bits to it, but that's obvious, right? Otherwise MMOs wouldn't need to pay econ designers, they'd just throw some basic itemization at the problem and hope for the best.
This is a possible design, yes, but it's unstable and narrow in certain ways. I wouldn't recommend it. I absolutely wouldn't recommend it for Ashes, because Ashes has cooking.
Either the NPC consumables are better than crafted ones, or all you've done is throw money at cooks instead, now you have money that is spread but not sunk. If the sink is set to med-high, it doesn't matter whose hands the money ends up in.
If anything, it's worse because now half of it gets spread out to another 20 or so cooks and now you've got 120 instead of 100 in your multi-sink variance.
Though I feel like if players can provide both, the better tools and better consumables, then the overall cycling of money would go around players, rather than get fully sunk, no? Or would this be the exact good economy design that you'd be advocating for the game?
Cause to me that kind of loop remind me somewhat of the L2's soulshot economy. Everyone uses them as a consumable to enable bigger money faucets. Part of that money gets thrown back at soulshots and part goes into crafting (both mats and the crafter services). The soulshot part was usually spent on either on direct purchase or on crafting soulshots. Crafting required a part of the money to be sunk (npc bought item) and a part either sunk or given to another player who got the required item from a faucet.
From my experience the amount ultimately sunk was, iirc, ~1/4-1/3, but usually depended on the price of the second part of the recipe, which in itself was floatey and supply-dependent.
Would this be considered a mid-high sink or a high one? And if instead of soulshots it was simply some other player-made consumable - would it lead to a weaker multi-sinkness?
I count 1/3 as medium sink. For me personally anything around 50% or higher is high sink.
But, it's relative to the faucet state.
The FFXI faucet is almost ridiculously low, it used to be like 800 gil adjusted average* per player per day, and the sinks are taxes and transportation costs which come out similar (slightly higher, about 1000). This is hard to control in a different way, but it's not swingy, so you get more leeway.
The BDO faucet has gone from I think about 400,000 silver per hour when the game was generally stable to 400 million per hour nowish. I literally do not know where BDO even sinks all this, but I'm sure it's there somewhere because the economy is just bad, but not necessarily unstable, and doesn't necessarily automatically explode every 3 months (as much as I'd expect it to).
The L2 data you have helped me to collect, matches what you said, but Ashes' design has some things in it that seem as if they will be bigger sinks and detractions (things that cause players to spend a lot of time generating something other than money when they would otherwise be generating money).
And as long as Glint and Caravans stay as they are, approximately, design wise, we have no concept of the faucet strength tuning (my complaint about Glint is that weak faucet tuning + Glint will feel bad/stupid).
Relative to the other thread that caused me to post this, therefore, a Siege of any kind is currently explained as though it will be either a multi-sink trigger or a massive detraction when a strong incentivizer is active. This works in the low and superlow sink designs because 'only time has real value' and people are often on the borderline of outright bartering, or at least interacting with the NPC price floors constantly.
Yeah, I'd expect absolutely massive multi-sinks because castles will be getting a ton of buy orders from guilds (either for castle node build up of for siege scroll needs, if there are any) and node sieges might be both, close to castles in buy order and also have a ton of other stuff that needs to be pulled together to prep for the siege.
Once again, A2 can't come soon enough.
So if AoC stays true to the resource scarcity concept and the world manager will create fewer drops from NPCs to maintain the scarcity, then the core problem does not exist?
We have also the land management, which is supposed to give less when players want to take more.
The more peaceful servers will have more resources.
No, what that does is change where the players want to get the resources from and the relative cost of single instances.
Did you play BDO?
The land management is important when the map is full with players. Then yes, those who want to harvest a lot would try to take from neighbors too, who might want to restrain themselves on collecting in their ZoI. That will cause disagreements and war.
But on a half empty server, or even less, with only 20% population, there must be resource scarcity because that is artificially generated by the game. AoC has no choice but to either not spawn mobs or to spawn them but to prevent them dropping anything. Maybe with a visual indicator that those mobs are less rewarding.
So players will get resources in the ZoI they play but less than enough for everyone and even less if they start fighting for the limited resources.
Actually the nodes which are level 1 because nobody plays there, will not have high level mobs or dungeons.
I didn't played BDO.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just telling you that even if they do this, it doesn't actually change the thing I'm talking about unless it's enough to grind the Incentivizer's goal to a full halt.
If Ashes wants to take that bet, that they can make a game where players can go out to gather a material and come home with 5% of their usual because 'too many people were gathering before' no matter where in the region they go, I personally am fine with that.
Just note that you're making a (valid) assumption that goes against what most people consider enjoyable MMO design, as a constraint of Ashes of Creation. It's fine if they also see this constraint as clearly as you do. It's a problem maybe, if they don't.
The wiki said
"Economic systems require scarcity. And in a game, all scarcity is artificially created in an attempt to simulate supply/demand structures or as we would call them points of player friction."
The rest of the sentence seems to go away from such details but to me this part is a hint they might indeed create the scarcity artificially and dynamically based on heat map.
And will of-course marge servers eventually but their algorithms will have to work even below the limit where they merge.
There are different players with different tastes.
Some like linear/constant progression toward an achievement. Those games create more and more achievements every expansion.
But fun may come from oscillations too especially when are caused by players.
Death in PvP, the loss of a caravan and the loss of a lot work placed into the node leveling is definitely not for those who want constant progress.
Building peacefully will cause a desire to destroy and then to build again.
I can see this a fun activity if next building phase happens somewhat differently.
Players will keep their gear but those might be just empty shells, memories of a past glory, if there are no resources to repair them.
And that sabotage could potentially lead to even more monetary sinks
Are they even relevant to the economy of the server?
I don't want to speculate, this would involve knowing far too many details:
1. Is there anything one can buy with Node Currency that has a good conversion to hard currency?
2. Is there a danger of being flagged as RMT if you spend your Node Currency on something that someone else requests and they give you hard currency?
3. Can Node Currency somehow be used to assist in declaring offensive actions against castles or other nodes, even just helping pay for Caravan runs in some way?
4. Does Node Currency 'dry up' because of the Land management system, i.e. if your node runs out of Commissions it can reasonably send you on, can you now have a full-halt or high scarcity situation with regards to earning more of it?
5. Does Node Currency pay an upkeep cost for a production function, and can that function be disrupted?
6. If a player changes Node without their node being destroyed, can they use the currency?
7. At what level (of Node) does the first useful Node Currency purchase unlock, can players build NC in one node and then migrate to quick-push a distant Node, and more importantly, anything related to Castle nodes?
None of the above require Node Currency itself to be tradeable, but all of them have varying levels of impact on the thing being discussed.
So, more details are needed, but I think that's my best answer, 'I don't consider them to be single player, with certainty, until I have more information'.
For reference, when I asked about 'RMT in the form of paying people real money to do things like escort your Caravans' the response was that 'any form of RMT falls under their policy', which is why I perceive that one can be flagged for 'taking an action with your Node Currency that appears to be influenced by another's goals'.