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Removing gold from the economy
Nightbringe1
Member UncommonPosts: 1,335
It is an old problem, seen countless times in MMO's. Endless gold accumulates in the economy with no way to exit. With ever increasing amounts of gold available, inflation spirals out of control and the few npc services and goods offered quickly become trivial in price, leading to special currencies.
What should Pantheon do to remove gold from the system and keep the economy from swinging too far off kilter? What kinds of services and goods should be NPC vendor specific?
Some ideas:
- Housing
- Tradeskill fuels: similar to EQ2
- Corpse recovery: make it expensive and based on character level.
- Equipment repair
- Additional bank space: ie in game rental cost for additional bank slots.
- Broker fees: I enjoyed the City of Heroes broker system, hate the auction houses used in most games.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Comments
You are right, it is an important topic and one we have covered in small doses in our Developer Roundtables, Brad and Chris have both spoken about mudflation, the importance of the economy and there has been some hot topics on our developer forums with community input on these topics, including gear degradation, death penalty etc.
You can check it all out at our Pantheon Dev site
In the real world, there's always a government handy to soak up any excess coins, even those that the owner might not realize are 'excess'. There's any number of taxes, tariffs, fees, licenses, tolls, penalties, fines and other effective methods.
Some of the easiest to implement in an MMORPG could be:
Entry / Access tolls. Cities need to support themselves. Have a fee to enter or exit a city, 1 coin per person, animal or wheel, living or otherwise.
Business licenses. Want to set up a vendor to sell something? There's a set charge for each time the vendor becomes active plus a charge per hour, plus any taxes or tariffs on goods sold.
Import fees. Materials produced (or collected) in foreign lands are, well, foreign. The government wants to keep an eye on how much they import from other places. Traveling with bulk commodities or smaller luxury items are met at the docks or gates (or airport / space terminals, in modern/futuristic settings) and the government officials take a reasonable fee.
Hunting licenses. Special licenses that give characters special permission to hunt 'protected' creatures for a period of time. Being caught trying to sell that backpack full of wolf spleens (or even carrying them around) without a proper hunting license will lead to a lot of questions, and invariably, fines.
Whenever you need to part a character from his money, just look to your local friendly government for ideas. (P.T. Barnum is a secondary source of inspiration, sadly).
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I appreciate the link, but I am already familiar with Pantheon's official forums. While I enjoy them, participation is limited. MMORPG provides for a much broader base of participants.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
One of the best systems I saw was on an eq emu server. They had a charm slot that could only be filled with vendor purchasable charms. They ranged in price from aroune 20 platinum to over 1 million platinum. People constantly saved and dumped money into charms. That idea alone pretty much removed all excess platinum from the economy.
For all I know, this could have come from live EQ or another game, but I don't remember seeing it anywhere else.
Just add a cap on the amount of gold people can hoard.
Then add in a bunch of ways people can spend their gold once they get close to cap. Capping gold has so many benefits and very little negatives.
Hard caps on character progression are generally a bad thing, and some people play the game simply to accumulate wealth.
Accumulation of wealth on an individual basis is not a bad thing, as long as the overall economy remains balanced.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
The concept of a hunting license is interesting. It could be enforced by zone wide pat's looking for non-hunting flagged characters by KOS. In most zones the currency gained vs, lets say, average hourly income would be 3x greater than the cost of the time to hunt there for the equivalent time. This could also have interesting implication for exp hot zones for example, where the formula would be reversed (the cost would be x3 greater vs the income).
I guess the concern would be the complicated implementation as well as possible exploitation of the higher exp zone (gold buyers paradise). But its a new and interesting concept for mudflation.
Make gold have weight so you can't store it all on yourself, then have a tax on what is stored in the bank. The kicker, the more you own the more you are taxed every interval. If the curve was great enough it'd basically function as a cap but maybe a cap is too harsh so scale it back a tad and make it extremely difficult to hoard large amounts unless you were logging in everyday to grow your wealth. Also the tax should function while offline so if you are not logging in the tax keeps hacking away at your banked gold.
Then I think we would see items acting as a "store of wealth" because the items would be tax free, it would be interesting to see how that would develop.
Its bad enough that the govt wants to take all your money in RL, I'd rather not have that exist in a game as well.
Easiest way to deal with removing money is to give people a reason to spend it. Reagents for spells, poison, pets etc. Repairing armor. A single item slot reserved for a piece of equipment that can only be purchased with money. Food, drink and other consumables are generally enough to keep the average player down to a reasonable amount of money.
Theres no reason to implement anything beyond that. The freedom to play a game with different goals should be promoted. I think the whole idea behind classic mmorpgs was that you could play the game however you want, and there were no pointless artificial restrictions that push you back into another form of gameplay. If you want to play the market and amass wealth, go nuts. I just hope theres a reason to do so.
+1
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I would have to agree with these statements. No matter how hard you try... some people will just mass huge amounts of wealth.
Well, start with a player driven economy and have player run stores. it makes prices more varying and shoppig a more fun experience for both the seller and merchant.
It wont help as a good money sink though even if you can add things that storeowners need, like rent, shelves and furnitures and so on but that is easy to add.
Those stores will of course needs to pay taxes to the king (or whoeever who runs the place) and there you have a great and realistic moneysink. The king need to hire soldiers and guards, repair the roads and so on(not to mention having banquets and living a nice life).
Now, adventurer shouldn't pay taxes for killing mobs, it would be impossible to enforce but farmers, crafters, stores and taverns do and there you get an easy 25% tax. It is a pretty huge money sink that any adventurer who doesn't craftor loot all his/her gear will have to pay,
Then you add guildhalls and player owned houses, both good money sinks that many players want.
That is stuff that wont affect the games balance at all. And of course can you sell stuff like mounts that look different (a unicorn might be similar to a horse but way more expensive), some players are always willing to pay some gold to look good.
If there will be any ways of fast travel (ships, griffons, teleporting and similar) it is also a great moneysink, you can of course walk but if you save time many people will cough up some good money.
That is indeed true but it is not bad that some people get rich, it is a big motivation for some players.
The important thing is that you don't get an insane inflation in the game, not that some are rich while others are poor and you do need some moneysinks for that. But you also needs to be careful, after all the game needs to be fun and the game needs to be about more stuff than just becoming rich.
Agreed and my bad for my shallow thought process on this subject. I know next to nothing about economy. I just know it's important to make sure gold is worth something, so I shall leave this to those more knowledgeable than I lol...
I understand the core question here, and it is one beyond the individual's right to get rich or not. It is one to do with not creating a barrier to entry in your game in the long term, among other things.
Creating artificial limits on gold ownership won't work. The players will just assign a value to an item in the game and use that to trade instead (GW's Ectos are a good example). The amount of wealth stored won't change.
Taxes and other gold sinks ofc are essential, but alienating the player with crushing taxation will only cause bad feelings.
I think what a lot of it really comes down to is not limiting the amount of gold a player can achieve, I think a lot comes down to giving the newbie a way in to that market and a means of recycling that stored wealth back down into the lower levels.
The answer to this is actually in classic EQ.
All that needs to be done is put mundane drops with value to high level players in low level zones that high. Drops that levels would rather pay for than farm for themselves. Bone chips and bat wings are a good start, as are honeycombs and bear pelts, all of which are examples from EQ. But the idea could be taken much further.
Another way to recycle money from high levels to lowbies is the use of indirect mechanics. In classic EQ, restarting as a newb, I worked for other players with bad faction as a runner to town to sell off their heavy loot for them, and in return I made coin. Enough coin to get me more than rolling in the market. Faction, in this case, was a mechanic that allowed for the recycling of wealth back into the game's lower levels.
So, in short, what I am saying is that the problem isn't that the wealth barrier is in these games as they mature. It is the fact that the wealth typically has no reason to travel once created.
All we need to do is give the newbie the means to climb over it and get into the market in a reasonable time through their own efforts.
And there is nothing bad about people amassing huge amounts of wealth.
It is a play style. Modern games limit play styles enough. Please let Pantheon not fall for the same.
Giving reasons to spend money is enough. If a person wants to skip those and see his ingame wealth grow... LET THEM. They won't ruin the economy anyways, since they will keep it. But PLEASE don't remove a whole style of playing a RPG just because other games miss reasons to spend money.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
No. That is simply a horrible idea. Not only does it not prevent mudflation, it makes participation more difficult for anyone not sitting in /auction spamming messages all day.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
I believe that is the point.
+That those who are frugal, and craft their own rations, will get a head of those "who have no time for that stuff" and simply buy off NPC merchant, or off other players.
+I suspect the cost of armor repair in EQ will be immense, due to the levels of mastery (& rare components) it takes to bring nearly back to it's original state vs halfway through it's life. Some people will like their armor and not want to part with it, after it's natural use (ie 1.8 years) and through Grandmaster Smiths, and magical means has kept his Prized piece alive. (& a part of history)
+ I think death alone, will be a massive money sink in Pantheon. I am looking forward to the "inner challenge" and never-ending inner screams of "Don't do it.. " and then regretting it. Only to find that even i death, looking at your text, your attempt revealed a weakness.!! So, how does One head to sleep or attend to work, with such an ever-looming and crazy 2nd "Don't do it...", hanging over your head.? (Knowing you may have just unlocked this mob's racial secret ?? )
From what I can gather, it seem this new Visionary Realms (inc) team has a great framework and backbone to work with (VG & EQ mechanics). I am certain, that with the focus they are giving this Pantheon project, VR will have a good finger on their economy and running away won't be a problem.
Digging deeper (I am becoming a fan), you will see that amassing money without an "Action House" will be difficult and competitive. And even moving that amount of coins can be painful, burdensome and have it's own logistics if regional banks are indeed implemented.
Again, even something like Housing can suck a lot of big-time-money out of the economy when/if implemented. Etc.
Ideally, bad players will cost themselves a fortune, if Visionary Realms does it right.
maybe i am interpreting this wrong... Does this mean if im high level with not enough money and i die ill have to uninstall the game if i dont want to create another character? i usually am not a trader/AH seller so i wouldnt have enough money even at high levels if a corpse recovery is expensive as you suggest. i am a slow money maker and if i understood your idea correctly then i wont have a reason to play this game.
I believe with their(poster) proposed idea; if you didn't have any money to summon your corpse, then you would have to do a corpse run.