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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Economy in Ashes (Solving MMORPG Inflation)
king_fool
Member
Hello,
it's well known that Inflation is a big thing in MMORPG's.
The Reason is mostly very simple, unending increase of circulating currency from respawnable resources which are changed into gold/silver/copper.
Usually these are combated with small money sinks here and there.
Sinks generally don't have the required impact to combat an ever increasing rate of inflation.
What I'd recommend is to create an massive artificial sink, that either periodically happens or at a certain level of inflation. This massive sink should create a percentual deflation serverwide.
As an example you could implement a sacrifice to the gods, in which the gods care for Gold,silver and copper (for a reason), then proceed to cut x% of all currency and then proceed to give a serverwide buff or event.
This would force deflation and renew markets. Coppers would still have meaning, and new accounts could also have a bigger % of all currency in Game since the basic "kill and sell" would generate relatively more with same numerical value.
You could even go so far to make this a integrated part of the story and a partial reason for why Npc's and the players are coming to Verra.
All this would give more reason for continuous action. Progress appear slower, yet more meaningful (At least on a grand long term scale).
It would also shift focus away from Currency to items, professions, skills, etc. Also it would (kind of) indirectly combat gold trading. (Imagine buying gold from sellers, only to get a 90% cut and the really big items you can't get anyway because no1 sells them.) Essentially Items>Gold, because high end items don't deflate in value.
The importance of of currency then may be viewed as necessity, yet not the goal of actions.
Combine this with the usual money sinks and you can pretty much regulate the whole Economy on a server.
Thanks for developing what is shaping up to be the MMORPG of a generation.
King Fool
Edit: Grammar
it's well known that Inflation is a big thing in MMORPG's.
The Reason is mostly very simple, unending increase of circulating currency from respawnable resources which are changed into gold/silver/copper.
Usually these are combated with small money sinks here and there.
Sinks generally don't have the required impact to combat an ever increasing rate of inflation.
What I'd recommend is to create an massive artificial sink, that either periodically happens or at a certain level of inflation. This massive sink should create a percentual deflation serverwide.
As an example you could implement a sacrifice to the gods, in which the gods care for Gold,silver and copper (for a reason), then proceed to cut x% of all currency and then proceed to give a serverwide buff or event.
This would force deflation and renew markets. Coppers would still have meaning, and new accounts could also have a bigger % of all currency in Game since the basic "kill and sell" would generate relatively more with same numerical value.
You could even go so far to make this a integrated part of the story and a partial reason for why Npc's and the players are coming to Verra.
All this would give more reason for continuous action. Progress appear slower, yet more meaningful (At least on a grand long term scale).
It would also shift focus away from Currency to items, professions, skills, etc. Also it would (kind of) indirectly combat gold trading. (Imagine buying gold from sellers, only to get a 90% cut and the really big items you can't get anyway because no1 sells them.) Essentially Items>Gold, because high end items don't deflate in value.
The importance of of currency then may be viewed as necessity, yet not the goal of actions.
Combine this with the usual money sinks and you can pretty much regulate the whole Economy on a server.
Thanks for developing what is shaping up to be the MMORPG of a generation.
King Fool
Edit: Grammar
1
Comments
If this idea is integrated, you could actually, depending on designchoices, elevate the level of long term immersion.
Also if any1 from Intrepid reads this and you want to integrate this idea, you probably have to find a fairly unique person in terms of thinking, because you'd kind of apply reverse economics, at least in terms of usage + be able to predict Playerinteractions since markets are playerdriven in the end. He/she has to look at it as kind of a bubble of infinite resources with variable attributed importance values for different types of items in terms of monetary value, and then build based on this.
People will start to hoard items, so therefor prices for inventory storage on larger scale need to fit kind of perfectly, if overpriced, it would be a very bad situation. Also with this model you need to be careful not to make too many other sinks, since it could become too demanding on players in terms of required gametime to enjoy the game. Balancing this approach is a little bit of a headache, but if done correctly would be awesome.
There are, how ever, many others that are already planned for.
The golden question though is, is it enough?
Personally I don't think any amount of gold sinks will completely combat inflation, it's just something every mmorpg has to deal with sadly.
It's quite controllable, both FF MMOs and more recently New World have all had periods of controlled, slight deflation and then specifically needed to try to tune it back to even for specific player groups.
The difficulty in Ashes is the disparity in player groups relative to if they are experiencing it or not.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Even if you have a lot of sinks you have to make the gain via farming greater than the sink in any case since you would create a very negative experience if it weren't so.
Imagine having to constantly scrunch by with meager gains which you are forced to pour into all kind of sinks to keep playing, that would be really bad.
So creating a massive controlled and forced deflation would theoretically be a solution..
Since each server is essentially like a country with no import/export, completely isolated, it wouldn't technically matter to a citizen if he could buy 1 Million bread or only 10k since you cant eat that much anyway and the stuff you want inflates in price so that your 1mil. bread cant even buy an apartment somewhere.
In-Game you have the Situation where income is on the rise, yet the NPC-bread-price stays the same.
Solution: Reduce the value of all already earned income.
Consequence: Saving would be bad over long periods of time and you'd invest what you have into all kinds of stuff. Houses and Node citizenship are completely fought over, creating tension left right and center, more drama ensues the whole experience has more emotional volatility. Also leads to higher level of emotional investment into your inventory.
Idk if im overthinking, but it seems kinda good.
Im curious if the deflation in FF and New World was controlled or rather playerdriven? It makes a big difference.
In what way?, please elaborate. I'm trying to think this idea through and wonder if I have a logic error somewhere.
It depends on the game, in any case there's not much I can contribute to the discussion at the moment either because I'm still waiting on a roundabout answer to something.
Until I know what type of game Ashes actually is, discussing inflation is unfortunately all too speculative, even if I can agree with the basic principle that 'big inflation in closed system MMORPGs is bad'.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Then suddenly a post like this pops up, suggestions the game cuts away the one secure resource there is: gold, in intervals.
Honestly, for me personally, the exp debt, material loss etc is not a game breaker... But if the game starts eating away at the other resources as well (such as gold) "just because", then I very much feel like this game will be way too much of a hassle. It'll just feel like a survival game where you more or less start over and over, and that is not for me.
I totally understand this sentiment.
But factor in how prices would change accordingly.
Consider this: The Price of The Fighter armor is 100gold. You have 150gold.
50% cut Event occurs.
You have 75gold left.
Seller decides to keep selling for 100gold. No one buys.
Seller reduces by 50%, Price is now 50 Gold.
You can buy now.
Someone farms a mob and gains 1/100th of a 1gold.
How many mobs do you need to buy that armor.
The buyer profits essentially in a big roundabout way.
Also there would be an increase in demand, since items are easier to get, which then fuels the motivation of crafters to do more, at least in theory. Item relevance is hard to consider here.
Of course numerically it looks kind of weird. But the reduction is kind of irrelevant if you still own the same % of total economy.
Also I agree that you can't overdo it.
Edit:
The reason why doing all of this is simply inflation over long periods. Imagine a Server with a runtime of 3 years. The inflation is bound to be strong. It can't be otherwise without reducing some form of experience. It's merely a way to not have this problem at all. Killing mobs for loot becomes meaningless as inflation rises. You often see in games, that people don't even bother looting stuff anymore since its not worth it.
Alright, here’s the deal: people are working hard, farming and building up stuff, putting in loads of time in this, and then the prices will simply drop, making all their effort pointless. It messes up their whole way of making a living in the game.
In AoC, deflation would be way worse because it’s not a full loot game, so most people never lose gear. You really don’t want deflation in AoC.
Plus, a lot of farmers running RMT schemes would push the market down since they’re trying to grab as much gold as they can, as fast as they can. If you create an environment where deflation has to happen, the market would always be flattened at the bottom.
In another game, I do market stuff and it is only worth my time because the prices spike up.
Price Volatility still exists. 1 hour of farming would be worth more if there is serverwide insta cut on all existing currency.
Also don't forget that the goal is to increase the value of currency.
Its kind of the comparison of 1980 dollar vs 2020 dollar. If you have the option to work for 10dollar an hour in 1980 or 2020 you`d choose 1980 since 10 dollar has higher buying power. What this essentially does is setting the financial market from 2020 to 1980 standard. The only difference is you can't really devalue like this IRL.
As for RMT, consider this:
You know the gold you'd buy would be cut by (for sake of argument) 50%. You have now a risk of getting banned AND you need to get stuff for the money on a limited timeframe due to top to bottom economic shifts.
Balance it in a way so that the moneysinks are relative% to income measured by the amount of time you play ingame and you have a decent long-term economy. And not having to worry about some guy appearing with 10 Trillion gold. Ever.
Also don't forget this forced "deflation" is a bit unlike the common deflation. It's a total cut of all existing currency which only has the effect of deflation.
Without such function all moneysinks with static pricing become too cheap at some point sooner or later.
EDIT: It's essentially a question of if you want to allow lower level type stuff to matter or not. If "goldfarming" is something only high level can do then what purpose is there to gather low level stuff outside of becoming higher level in that particular farming activity. It's just that people are already used to that kinda stuff where lower level stuff really doesn't matter (since it has no impact at all).
Blown past falling sands…
Overall, again, this isn't true.
It only happens because games basically go 'you need money to progress, that money can be transferred between players and also increases indefinitely, so we will have mobs drop money'.
Games that fix this:
Option 1) Don't have most mobs drop money and have it enter from a different faucet (FF11, old FF14 sorta, etc)
Option 2) Make the money that drops from mobs and is used for progression the type you can't transfer (Onigiri, Throne and Liberty, maybe Neverwinter but I forget rn)
Option 3) Carefully set their item price floors and have higher money sinks, as well as separate currencies for progression (New World, Throne and Liberty, FF14 moreso)
Or all of the above.
Now, if one wants a game where the average mob drops Gold, then you might need to solve Deflation, but Ashes of Creation is already not like this. Glint can easily be tuned to be a relatively weak currency faucet.
The real question is whether or not the game is actually going to be mostly 'player controlled' economically or 'dev controlled' economically, not will we have inflation or deflation, so, for now, we're still going to have people who express both opinions about which thing should happen.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
sorry to say, deflation is what kills markets/games.
top teir gear selling for silver because there isn't enough gold to keep the prices up.
so when the market becomes soft, with lack of demand, and continuous supply, prices will drop, making it useless to even sell anything. I mean, ya make more selling it to the npc town vendor.
when that happens, then no one stays in the game.
I get people think, "ooo I need to be the only one with a lot of gold". when realistically, you want everyone to have gold so that they can buy and bid up prices.
would you want your legendary anything selling for copper? it is important for everyone to get gold, not just top guilds.
but a lot of people in ashes don't get this.
inflation is great, when you get that item everyone wants and it sells for a lot of gold.
deflation sucks, when you get that same item and you sell it to the npc for more silver.
this is why I never got high level players going after low level caravans. it does a lot of damage to the game.
this happens to any player market driven economy. a lot of games just give you a log in bonus, that has some coin. ashes has a system, but it is being abused which in turn will really hurt the game as very little coin is flowing around verra, and only flowing into the top guilds. new world market all over again. Just wait until they start to connect all the markets stalls because there's no buyers with enough gold. that's usually the 1st step in the domino falling.
But there also needs to be item sinks. I fear that the artisan system will face massive inflation if there is no item degradation or real item loss. The absence of character bound items will inevitably lead to a saturated market for crafted goods. Corruption only drops items without destroying them.
I know they talked about item degradation at some point and the need to repair stuff which probably will only have material cost attached. I think we need some system that physically removes items from the game and I would like to learn more about what Intrepid has planned in that regard.
And deny players the feeling of having THE Armor in the later stages?
To this I cant answer fully due to the references to other games which I don't play.
But from what I read here, essentially you either create some alternative from of currency in endgame or make other sinks. The idea here is, that you generally design how you would love it to be from a gameplay perspective and let the economy autocorrect itself by inducing a cut rather than some convoluted sinks or other weird stuff.
Not sure how much of a single digit event reward you expect to be selling when you need protections to run a universal caravan event. I have no sympathy if your mind only plays at current levels and not at max level. I realise people are not fans of min maxers but at least we don't moan if a twink needs to run (or tempted to fight) caravans. Its not always about the end, its about the journey. The limit merely time. First, spent like a wife beside a respawn point, second like a husband of the devil's hearth.
Rates would have to be adjusted, so what you describe doesn't happen. Going from 100g to 50 is different from going 100 to 10.
Deflation and Inflation can be bad, stability is generally what you'd want.
Lastly the caravan thingy. Why would a low level player run a caravan, when its harder to defend?
Generally speaking if a caravan has value it should be (possibly) up for grabs irrespective of level.
You could also look at it as changing the currency of the server from YEN to USD rather than a cut(essentially the effect would be the same).
I totally understand, just consider this:
If a weapon has higher repair cost, than the gold you would gain by farming with the weapon (not considering armor) then what would happen? People would get mad. So you essentially can't create such a level of sink. It has to be balanced in a way that gain is more than loss. After a year of this process you still end up with a lot more.
Enchantment I agree with you.
Yeah but note the reason I posted. I just wanted to clarify that the thing you said wasn't true, and give some examples.
This way, when someone else who has played those games says 'no, I don't like your idea' and 'I don't agree because your base assumptions are wrong', you'll be aware that they have an experience that doesn't match yours.
Your preference for this solution to MMORPG inflation is understandable. Some people just prefer other solutions. Some people prefer not to have any solutions at all because a stable economy in games doesn't feel good to some less invested types of players. Forced deflation cuts would feel worse to me than other solutions.
So I don't like your idea because I've played games with solutions I actually like.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
I'd prefer to see some NPC merchants of cosmetics things. And also merchant of potions that are useful but weak enough for having better craft potions.
I agree fully, there`s many ways , just like you said, to achieve stability.
The thing with alternative currency is generally, that it often is just equal to x amount of other currency. If you`d limit trade on this alternative currency, then it`s automatically not fully player-driven. I can`t imagine a system that where this can work with no downsides. There has to be some sort of downside, which logically should be by design some limiing.
Then again, i may not fully understand if there's some weird mechanic i can´t think about.
Also the idea here is to make it have NO downsides, not about like/dislike.
I truly can`t think of any outside of some guy complaining when he logs in once half a year. Also wether you drop sth else or gold generally is irrellevant, so long as killing mobs leads to gold, even in convoluted ways down the line.
Once again, I disagree with you, I don't know any way to explain it without just telling you to go play games that don't do this, though.
There is basically no need to have killing mobs lead directly to gold beyond the nominal amount required for progression-based interaction with NPCs.
The gold that we are talking about is not the same.
FF11 Goblins, above level 50, drop about 100 gil. Some drop onions that you can NPC for 79 or so. Reasonably speaking most people could, in that game, defeat about 100 of these in an hour if pushing pretty hard (most areas wouldn't even have 40 spawned at a time, respawning every 3-5 minutes, over a large area, full of other mobs that drop 0 gil).
If you wanted to buy one Onion from a shop, it would be a limited supply item costing 1700+ gil.
The downside is that some players complain when they don't get that 'selfish' feeling of 'They personally are doing something and get to feel like they are getting ahead and aren't just average or poor'. Ashes of Creation, FF11, Throne and Liberty, SWG, EVE... these are all games that have 'feeling like you are average or poor' as part of their 'design DNA'.
They approach it differently, and yes, right now, FF and somewhat TL are the only ones where you have to actually think about how to resolve this.
But the only downside of the model they use is 'lack of the feeling that you are constantly advancing even if the rest of the playerbase doesn't want to trade with you', and Ashes already has that effect for 90% of its content anyway. TL doesn't even have this effect because their economy designers figured out how to mask it, so that the player doesn't feel like they are limited (they can just go do the thing themselves, and at least initially, most people will find a group before they notice how slow it would be solo, or they enjoy soloing).
I feel like you 'assumed that alternative currency was the main solution' I was discussing. It is not. Most of those were only added in FF11 later. We really did just 'each find a niche, circulate the gil that was generated by Beastman drops and Treasure, and then drain it through NPC purchases and Chocobo rentals'.
I even know exactly when and why this failed for a specific period (I studied this for a college course for various reasons), and mostly it was because of a designer making the exact assumption you're making and messing up a balance point by trying to get rid of money, because it changes people's mindset.
That's a long story, and I'm not really asking you to believe me without evidence (nor do I plan to go into it, it won't help Ashes, given their design intention), but that's the reason why some will just continue to disagree with your conclusions.
Your previous reasoning was 'people will get mad' about having to manage their money, basically. Yeah, probably. If you don't want anyone to be mad, your best bet is to not make an MMORPG.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
If you want a working economy, you drill into players that gear and mounts are nothing else but tools, which can break or get looted. Titles like Ultima Online, Even Online, Darkfall and Mortal Online got that part right.
You make gathering, processing and crafting enjoyable and satisfying (a fit Ashes is FAR FROM atm) and you just took a step towards a living and breathing world, especially if Intrepid follows through with the promise of low "level" resources still being required for high level crafting.
Blown past falling sands…