What would happen if an MMO had a fixed money supply?

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?

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Arya_Yeshe

Since nearly all devs in gaming history suck, I never played a game in which you can melt gold coins into gold ingots. No game dev though this was important, because their games suck, suck with infinite sinks of coins and materials

Game devs suck, I guess this in horrible humanity, sociopaths become politicians and people with no creativity become game devs

Maybe this planet is some kind of hell where people purify their sins by being tortured under such contradictions

Someday we will have a game where we can melt coins into ingots

Noaani

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

Someday we will have a game where we can melt coins into ingots

There are MMO's where you can do this.

Good developers though, they avoid it because it just causes issues with the game.

It's one of the many things that while you may think you want it, you really don't. In this specific case, the game developers you are claiming to suck are literally protecting you from yourself.

Kilion

MrPockets wrote: »

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?

So the overall proposition is that of a limited currency unit model, based on the amount of players/accounts of a server. Obviously the transfer of currency to a newly created character could increase the overall currency supply of that server, but with characters per server presumably limited as well, there would be some kind of hard cap on how much currency there is in the system. With Ashes having also limited progression (we can't just innovate completely new weapons, discover new lands and expand the number of nodes) that would mean that the economy and its prices would somewhat stabilize on some level. Prices would go up if a significant enough Node gets destroyed and if an expansion would bring us new land, Nodes or items, the prices in the economy overall would go down as it tries to spread with the players.

Depending on how strong the gold sinks are compared to the rate of accumulation this will be either deflationary or simply ineffective (if replacing the gold I lose to sinks can be acquired easily, it won't have an influence on the overall economy).

Taking this all into consideration, I think it is not too bad of an idea to at least have a "soft cap" of sorts on the amount of gold a player can hold. But it would have to be designed in a way that it is not perceived as punishment for extra efforts. e.g. just raising more and more taxes on rich players ultimately would discourage them to earn that gold in the first place, or they will hoard it in assets that are unaffected by the tax, driving up the prices of whatever goods they decided to hoard. (Real life vibes 2012-2022, eh?)
Suffice to say: A cap is a good idea but it has to be a cap that makes sense and is not punishing.

Terrifying_Truth

I don't think RMT would work well in a game with limited gold. I think RMT players would try tough.

First of all, the RMT prices would skyrocket for sure, but such players would never amass large quantities of gold, because they would not find gold to be farmed. In the long run the gold farmers for RMT would go broke because they would never have a steady supply of gold.

Many RMTers are doing this to pay rent and for their basic needs, they would not risk spending too much time in a game where they can't have a steady source of gold, the risk is too great since it involves paying real life bills.

Depraved

Terrifying_Truth wrote: »

I don't think RMT would work well in a game with limited gold. I think RMT players would try tough.

First of all, the RMT prices would skyrocket for sure, but such players would never amass large quantities of gold, because they would not find gold to be farmed. In the long run the gold farmers for RMT would go broke because they would never have a steady supply of gold.

Many RMTers are doing this to pay rent and for their basic needs, they would not risk spending too much time in a game where they can't have a steady source of gold, the risk is too great since it involves paying real life bills.

or...they would just sell the items that you would buy with gold instead ._.

Xnate13X

MrPockets wrote: »

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.

@MrPockets
*Please read this for a perfect answer.*

You must never have played RuneScape. As a veteran who has played since 2003, I have been through all of the types of economies. The one you're talking about is most similar to the early days. People just find either common very high stackable items with a base vendor value or an item that is tough to get but slow to enter game so that way the price can't fluctuate much at all.

Example: "Mint Cake" -You can see the history of those in RuneScape and read about it on old posts/forums if you want. Someone also made a video on their history.

https://youtu.be/Fd02p2aNtbA

Example 2: "Spirit Shards" -For the steady value item. Read the "Storage of Value" section of this wiki page. https://runescape.wiki/w/Spirit_shards

MrPockets

Xnate13X wrote: »

You must never have played RuneScape. As a veteran who has played since 2003, I have been through all of the types of economies. The one you're talking about is most similar to the early days. People just find either common very high stackable items with a base vendor value or an item that is tough to get but slow to enter game so that way the price can't fluctuate much at all.

Example: "Mint Cake" -You can see the history of those in RuneScape and read about it on old posts/forums if you want. Someone also made a video on their history.

Example 2: "Spirit Shards" -For the steady value item. Read the "Storage of Value" section of this wiki page. https://runescape.wiki/w/Spirit_shards

@Xnate13X
After looking into both of those examples, my understanding is that these items were used to solve a specific problem - the fact that runescape has a hard limit on the amount of cash 1 character can have. Or is there something else I am missing?

I don't deny that players might start using items as a currency, but I don't see how the examples you provided showcase a similar situation. They just show that players in the past and/or other games have used items in place of a game's currency.

One of the underlying questions I have is: would the system(s) I've laid out actually encourage this behavior from players? Or could it be stable? I personally have no idea, and think it would be an interesting experiment.

Vaknar

Very interesting topic and thread to read through!

I found this intruiging:

Percimes wrote: »

If no coins are minted anymore and only those in game are in circulation, players will find another currency for as many things as possible (aka when with other players). Trading items directly. Used to see a lot of that in EverQuest on my server: trading this item and this item plus X pp against that other item.

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 had never thought about this idea before and thought this take was interesting to think about!

MMOAddict

MrPockets wrote: »

***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?

This would force players to keep playing, or lose their money if they decide to stop playing for a while Maybee their could be a wealth cap instead, this would keep prices more stable, prevent inflation

MrPockets

MMOAddict wrote: »

This would force players to keep playing, or lose their money if they decide to stop playing for a while

I think this is probably the biggest flaw with the idea. Feels bad if your money is gone when you come back from a break. And then the obvious solution to this is to "cash out" your gold into items instead. Then the entire economy just becomes items to avoid taxes.

There are probably solutions to these problems, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. I think it's probably best (and much easier) to just have solid gold sinks that keep up with the infinite gold coming in.

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