Improving Economy in MMORPGs

yewsef

 

A lot of MMORPG developer use money sink mechanics to reduce inflation. It's funny because they help escalate the inflation problem by making every monster, even a rat, drop some sort of game money currency.

I think game currency should not be looted off monsters or wild animals. Heck nothing should drop any currency when killed unless town folks and their money-loot-table should be random (sometimes they have something in their pocket, sometimes they don't). So, criminal players and thieves are not guaranteed money every time they kill their victims.

Now, how do players get their money then?

I have some an orthadox ideas that might be worth implementing.

Jobs

Players can choose to do some labour jobs in towns or cities to make a living. They can do it either online or offline and the payment is per hour. Your character has a limit to how much they can work a day and the payment in general barely covers the basic needs of your character.

Jobs like guarding a gate will make your character transform into a guard (Guard NPC graphics) but they will keep their name (So, when another player enters the gate he sees Bob, his friend, guarding the gate!). These jobs are limited (there can only be two guards at the gate for instance) but contain different vareities. You may gain levels doing it too. First you guard the gate then you get promoted to guard the Mayor's Mansion. There are also other jobs like Sweeping, Salesperson, and what have you.

Trading

Crafters will love this. As you know crafters can craft things for other players. But that's wrong. In this game nothing come out of thin air. You will not see unlimited number of Arrows for instance. Crafters must create the basic arrows and then the city state can buy these for a tag-price (that may change on demand and suppply basis). The city has limited budget for arrows and can never buy arrows for a specific price of gold. So, you cannot flood a city with 1mil arrow maybe it can only afford 500,000 arrows that are 1copper each. The good thing is there should be a healthy vareity of basic items that crafters can still earn a living selling it to the City. They can sell it to other players directly using shops but that's another story. The city needs to buy these basic items from crafters so it can sell them (with a 10% profit) back to players who needs them.

When the town reaches its maximum need/storage of a specific item it closes the purchase option. The option will go back on when the item reaches 50% or less of what the city needs.

Mining

There are no "nodes" or "veins". There are mines. Big ones. With huge number of supplies. They do get depleted but very often. Say, a mine has 10 Million lb of Iron every month. Once the 10 Mil lb was mined it get depleted. A Miner can let his character mine all day but a character can only carry specific weight. So, they either need a carriot/mount or need to carry what their strength allow them to.

Farming

Farming is a complete game on its own. A player may log in solely to take care of his/her farm. Sell the raw materials to the town/city or other players.

Stealing/Murder

A player may choose to become a thief and pickpocket NPC merchants or Murder them for money. Remember the money is random and not all humanoid NPCs carry money on them. If they player get caught too many times stealing they will be Killed on Sight in that city/town and is also vulnreable to other Players (some kind of PvP going on here!). As long as the KOS thief is around the city he's labeled Free For All. People can kill him and loot his stuff if they can.

Thieves can picklocks at night, avoid Player Guards (or NPC guards) who are patroling the city. Pick the Lock enter the house sneaking in to pick more chests for a bigger reward than simply picking pockets. That's, however, is risky and require good skill. Other guard players can spot him and attack him on sight and if a thief is attacked after doing a crime his money and any one item he's carrying is returned to the city. The Guard will be rewarded 10% of what the town recieved from the thief.

So, there you go. Some of the ideas I always want to see implemented in an MMORPG that takes economy into consideration. Look at these dimensions we added to game play just when we took economy seriously. More ideas can be thrown here but I don't want to make this post big.

Now imagine all this and add PvE content on top of it and dungoen crawling and PvP Politics/City States. You get one bad ass MMORPG.