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The Allure of a Player-Ran Economy
CactusmanX
Member Posts: 2,218
I always have trouble understanding why people would want a player-ran economy. It does seem to be in pretty high demand, but from the few times I attempted to make and sell things in a player ran economy I didn't feel I got anything out of it except money, it was juat a so what moment, then again I never liked crafting in any game I have played so that may be the issue.
Since I spend nearly all my time adventuring I guess I don't get it, from my prespective it doesn't matter where I get my gear from and I don't much care about collecting things to sell, and really I am not big into items and gear in the first place.
Is it the fact that you are selling to another person, or the demand for your services, or simply the fact that someone needs the item you are making?
But rather than me being presumptuous, In your own words why do you like player ran economies?
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
Comments
Player run economy means that there would be an actual need for crafters. So far, most of the current MMOs don't put much use to those of us who enjoy crafting, resource gathering n such. Most items you can craft are not usually nearly as good as what quest loot is.
Player economy makes it so players rely on each other...actually need to socialize....(gasp) I know...scarey eh? A crafter then needs to rely on the person gathering. The gatherer then needs to rely on the adventurer to help find those locations for resources. And the adventurer needs to rely on the gatherer to get the good resources, and the gatherer needs to rely on the crafter to make use of those resourses. And the adventurer relys on the crafter to make quality items that he/she can afford.
So the game has decent priced items for many people, not outragiously overpriced items like is usually seen on the autions. And the community works together to enjoy the whole idea of an MMORPG. But todays games are little more than an online single player game with subscription.
I play EVE Online which probably has the only true player run economy now. I believe you need localized markets for one which most games seem to lack. The buy/sell order system is sexy and the graphs along with is well thought out.
+ - Pros
Adds a lot of depth to the game. Gives players a lot more to do then just pew pew.
Allows players to make income various ways like hauling from point A to point B and charge markup.
Seems to work well when there is constant destruction / decay
Some players are pure traders and they do nothing beyond market manipulation (buying and selling)
Allows guilds to build ships / weapons for their members and reimbursement programs.
Makes game more sandbox, now I dont have to go raid for items. I can merely just 'buy' it from market
+ - Cons
Due to complex driving factors, you might have to deal with markup frequently and get ripped off alot. For instance I used to buy Taranis ships for 11mil. Now, they appear to go for 18 mil. This type of ships is basically uninsurable so its a bit of a hassle when price shoots up
You also sometimes feel like you at the mercy of other players and may feel like you need to construct / haul things yourself to get a decent deal
For me, it's identifying trends on the market, finding what will sell well and where it will sell... and even getting it there. In EVE, I can make a nice profit selling my ships in low security space, but I also risk losing a transporter/freighter plus my cargo of ships just trying to get my goods to a lucrative selling area. It's a combination of the 'game' of finding the best places to sell and the challenge sometimes of getting it there to sell it.
A good player-run economy is more than just letting players make stuff and providing an auction house for them to sell it in. A functional player-run economy is supported by mechanics and tools that allow the players to both monitor and manipulate the supply and demand of goods.
If you're interested in why some people really get into player-run economies, check out this article on a drug smuggler in EVE Online.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
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What's the allure of playing Monopoly if all you get from it is Monopoly money? What's the allure of killing mobs if all you get from them is epic gear? What's the point of playing basketball if all you get is points in the game? The amount of money you make in an economic game is the way of keeping score and tracking how well you're doing.
There are a lot fewer people who like economic games than killing things, so a player-run economy is a niche thing. It's not synonymous with crafting, though a game that has a good crafting system is likely to have a good economy and vice versa, or at least a lot more likely than most games.
When you describe it like that it makes it sound much more interesting.
My only experience with player ran economy is taking hours to gather and make things and either setting up a kiosk or spamming what I am selling over and over.
But if it were about setting up trade routes then that would actually be interesting. Each city could have its own auction house type structure and such.
Because if economy were more about management and planning rather than making things over and over, I know I would find it more interesting and others would probably too.
I have this MMO idea buzzing around my head and I am trying to add a player economy into the equation that is more about desing rather than labour but I wasn't sure what people were looking for in one or why have one in the first place since I am usually so detached from the economy, is why I ask.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
Yeah in EVE crafting is nothing like other MMOs. You simply acquire a "blueprint" from the market or as a drop from PvE (or from another player). Then as long as you have the required materials, you can run off as many items as you'd like.
Instead of attaching timesinks to the 'reptition' of making things, they instead added this to the initial time based training ramp up. However! The good news is even a newbie can make tech 1 items easy w/o no skills. It's just that they will consume more mats then a vet would
Another brilliant thing CCP did. Tech 1 items are required to make Tech 2 items. So unlike other MMOs, newbie crafter will immediately find a market for their items. I still make Tech 1 items myself and ive played EVE a long time
It all works together- the destruction of items, penalty, etc to combine to make an incredible economy
first of all EvE markets are local based i.e. the market in your system sells missiles cheaply because they are produced more there by players meanwhile 7 systems away missiles are hard to get at a decent price so you can set up a trade route there selling cheap missiles at a higher price that still undercuts local missile producers.
Also all items can be destroyed if you die so this helps create the demand for replacement shipsship modulesgunsammo etc
From what i have seen inflation is kept under controll by the virtuall amrkets and there Buy and sell demands.
As a result the following professions are quite profitable.
Resource gathering
Farming NPC's [as even the best named items can be easilly destroyed by ship death the demand for these never run out].
market trader
mercenary Bodyguards [resource gatherers typically cant defend themselves very well due to module restrictions in Mining ships].
Pirates [feed off the trade runs and miners].
have to go now so no time to finish this
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
It sounds like you've never played a game with much of an economy, likely because it's pretty rare. Puzzle Pirates definitely has an economy, A Tale in the Desert kind of does, and my understanding is that EVE has a pretty deep economy, though I haven't played it. I'm not aware of any other MMORPGs that have a meaningful economy, though. Making the best items bind on pickup, as a lot of games do, pretty much guarantees that the game won't have much of an economy.
It may help to explain the basis of the economy in Puzzle Pirates to give an example. There are three main components: gathering raw materials, crafting more refined goods from them (both finished consumer goods and some intermediate steps), and shipping goods to where they are needed.
Each player gets labor hours in real time. If you let an hour pass, your character has one labor hour. There are some restrictions on this to prevent someone from getting effectively infinite labor, which would be problematic for reasons that will be obvious. The labor hours can be stored up until you have 24 labor hours. Beyond that, the game will attempt to automatically use them on a job, or failing that, they are wasted.
There are two ways that raw materials enter the game economy. One is market bidding. Islands with a market produce a certain amount of particular goods each hour. Players can bid on the goods by paying up front an arbitrary price for an arbitrary amount. When goods are created, they are distributed toward the bid ticket of whoever has bid the highest, or partitioned among the bid tickets in case of a tie. Someone who bids highly will outbid everyone else and get all of the item on that island as it comes in, filling his bid ticket very quickly. Someone who tries to lowball a bid will be outbid by others and take days or weeks for the higher bids to be filled and not replaced, or perhaps may never get what he bid on.
A player can withdraw a bid ticket when it is filled, or when it is only partially filled. If he withdraws a partially filled bid ticket, he receives whatever items have been allocated toward it, as well as a pro-rated portion of what he had to pay up front for the unfilled portion of the bid. The bid fee is a small percentage of the original bid and is lost.
The other way that raw materials enter the system is foraging. Players can go to an island without a market, use an hour of labor, and get an item from that island. Items spawn on islands without market just like on islands with markets, albeit at a slower rate. The item a player gets is chosen at random from what has already spawned on the island. If everything has already been foraged by others, the player gets no item, but still uses his hour of labor. If an island produces both a cheap, common good and an expensive, rare one, a player who forages there will probably get the cheap good and have essentially wasted the hour of labor, but getting the expensive one occasionally can still make it profitable.
Players who are familiar with the game might note that some items are pillaged from pirates. Kraken's blood is created this way, but for the most part, if players take goods from pirates, they're goods that pirates previously took from other players who fought them and lost. PoE (currency) is also created by defeating pirates in combat, but that's not a normal item.
Goods are produced in shops and stalls that are run by players. Any player can get a stall on a developed island by paying a fee (in PoE) to open the stall, and then paying weekly rent after that. Shops are harder to get, and are basically stalls with far more storage space and far higher labor throughput limits.
Refined goods are produced in stalls. The requirement to produce a given good are particular amounts of particular other goods, labor, and PoE (to pay a tax). A player can produce multiples of a good in a single order for cheap bulk items. The material goods and the PoE to produce an item have to be paid up front upon starting to build the good. The labor is added as the good is produced, and when the labor is done, the order is completed and ready for delivery.
Labor is obtained from players by the stall owner hriing players to work in his stall at wages that he sets. He can set the wages to whatever he wants at the time of the hire, and if he changes the posted wage offer, it does not change the wages of already hired workers. He can fire existing workers if so inclined. A player can take up to three jobs, that is, sign up to work at up to three stalls.
There are three grades of labor: basic, intermediate, and expert. I might have the name wrong on one of those, as it's been a while. Anyway, each good requires fixed amounts of each grade of labor. A stall owner can set the wages for different grades of labor to different levels, for reasons that will become obvious.
Each industry has an associated crafting puzzle, and the puzzles vary by industry. When I played, some of the puzzles weren't in the game yet, and I'm not sure if they're all in now. Regardless, a player can apply his labor in a stall by doing the puzzle once. How well he performs in the puzzle determines the grade of labor he applies. If a player does well enough to supply expert labor but no expert labor is needed, it can be automatically downgraded to a lower grade of labor. Labor cannot be raised to a higher grade, however.
If a player has a full pool of labor when he gets another hour, the game will attempt to automatically apply his labor at one of his jobs. It will try to use the labor whereever he gets paid the most. What grades of labor the player is capable of automatically applying is determined by his skill rating in the puzzle, that is, by how he has done in previous attempts. This is not a level grinding thing; someone really good at a puzzle could get his rating high enough to automatically apply expert labor in only a handful of attempts. A job can only automatically apply labor if the player has done the puzzle for that industry at least once in the past week. This only takes a few minutes, and prevents a player from providing months of labor after qutiting the game. Labor can only be applied at a given stall if it hasn't gone over the stall's labor throughput limit and has something under construction to which to apply the labor.
A stall owner's incentives to provide high wages are that it gets more people to sign up for his stall, and that it makes it more likely that his employees will provide labor at his stall rather than someone else's. Of course, offering higher wages costs him more money, so there are trade-offs.
Completed goods can be sold dockside. Any stall owner post buy and sell items on anything his stall can use. Any other stall owner or player with a ship on the relevant island can buy and sell at the posted prices. A player will normally wish to buy from the lowest selling price and sell to the highest buying price, but this isn't forced on a player who doesn't want to do things that way. It is thus easy to find everything for sale on a particular island, but if you buy something on an island, you get it on that particular island, which may not be where you need it.
For players uninterested in the game economy, the labor system basically provides some passive income. They can shop around a bit to find stall owners offering good wages, take a few jobs that pay high wages, play the relevant crafting puzzle once per week, and otherwise just go pick up their wages periodically. Wages paid to employees are held for the player in the stall; the PoE is added to his inventory the next time he enters the stall.
The third major component of the game economy is shipping. Most goods require multiple materials, and those materials often don't all spawn on the same island. For example, producing rum requires both wood and sugar cane, but only one island in the game produces both, and it doesn't produce much of either, making the prices expensive there. As such, a player who wishes to produce rum has to have wood and sugar cane on the same island in his stall. It's easy to pick an island that produces one or the other, but the other good must be shipped in.
The market bidding process causes wood and sugar cane to be more expensive on islands where they are in high demand. You can get them cheaply on a remote island where no one wants them, but then it's a pain to ship them to where they are needed.
All goods have both weight and bulk, and ships have a maximum amount of both weight and bulk that they can carry. The maximum varies by ship type, with larger ship types generally needing more players at once to operate effectively. The weight and bulk of goods varies widely. All the indigo that has ever spawned in the whole history of the game would likely fit on a single ship. Someone who wishes to produce a lot of rum may use a sloop full of wood and sugar cane every day.
Stall owners can post prices dockside to try to get others to sell them wood or sugar cane, or they can go get and ship their own. It's kind of silly to refuse to post even fairly lowball prices, as that can save you some shipping. That items are more expensive in some places than others makes it profitable for players to buy goods where they are cheap, ship them to where they are more expensive, and sell them there.
Players who go out pillaging generally need to refill rum (basically fuel) and cannonballs (ammunition) frequently. They generally want to refill whereever they are. If you're out of rum, knowing that there's some cheap rum halfway across the ocean doesn't do you much good. As such, there is considerable demand for both of these goods on every developed island in the game. Rum and cannonball prices can vary from one island to another, though, typically being cheaper to buy on islands where they are cheap to produce. Suppliers of rum and cannonballs thus have incentives both to produce them where it is cheap to do so and to sell them where they will fetch a good price.
Rum and cannonballs are both much easier to ship than the goods from which they are produced, so it often makes sense for a rum seller to have a distillery stall on many islands, most of which are not used for production. Instead, produce rum where it is cheap to do so, and then ship it to the other islands to sell.
Clothing and swords can be freely warped around, so players will generally prefer to buy those whereever they are cheapest. Ships have to be sailed to be moved, but are expensive enough to build that it's usually best to just buy a ship where it is cheapest and then sail it to where you want it. A lot of other items are intermediate materials that are produced in a stall and then used in another stall, often in a different industry. There usually isn't much benefit to shipping these around, as the finished goods are cheapest to make whereever the intermediate materials are most cheaply sold.
An average player may look at the amounts of rum and cannonballs sold dockside and conclude that there is a huge glut, with many thousands for sale on many different islands. It's far less of one than first appears, however. I once did some computations and concluded that the total amount of rum for sale dockside in the entire Emerald Archipelago (one of the two main developed areas) is about what is sold dockside in an average two days. Thus, even apart from hoarding, if rum stopped being produced, the game would run out in perhaps two days. Meanwhile, the miracle of free markets is that there are such vast supplies available almost everywhere as to seem nearly infinite to a casual observer.
There's a fair bit that I'm leaving out here, but hopefully this is enough that you can understand that there's a lot more to the economy in Puzzle Pirates than to the so-called "economy" of a conventional WoW-clone.
As someone said, player-run economies create a market for crafters, and are also another source of player interaction in a sense (especially if there is verbal haggling going on).
I do think that NPC vendors should sell worthwhile gear instead of the woefully inadequate gear that NPC's sell in most MMO's and that no one really ever buy.
To faciliate both of the above, I would probably set the quality of gear as follows:
Dropped Epics: best
Crafted Epics: near best
Dropped or Crafted gear: good, equivalent generally
NPC vendor gear: acceptable
You say that a player-run economy is supposed to provide a market for crafters and them immediately go on to say that mob drops should be better than crafted items? That is to say, you don't want a player-run economy.
I prefer EVE's approach whereas you might acquire 'epic' level blueprints from exploration/faction_mobs that a crafter can use to populate the market with high value named items. However, since these items can go boom upon death the average joe wont ever put this on his ship
If the challenge is getting mobs to drop the recipe for an item, that's a mob loot system, not an economic system with any depth.
I will say that back before Jagex decided to basically kill their game and move towards kids Runescape has one of the best player run economies i have played around with. I can remember going on the forums and seeing people advertising stuff like "1.5Mill Coal for sale 200gp each" and such. Whenever i wanted new armor i would have to venture to a city and scream out what i wanted or try to find someone who was selling it. I loved it. Another thing which made it great was that, especially with mining and blacksmithing, most of the ore was always in demand and needed. This made it so that players who had played for years and years where still looking for ore that a relative newbie could mine (as well as high level ore).
If you have it set up like that crafting still sucks....
have mobs all drop materials, the best boss for instance drops some crazy rare materials which a crafter can add to a piece of armor to make it super/uber or something. Or like a sword made from the tooth of some big dragon is the best. Basically for good crafting you need the best stuff to make its way through crafters, the adventurers are looking for certain materials.
You can get blueprints through research agents as well. CCP has economists on staff.
the less mechanics that are handled by the game itself (vended gear VS player crafted, AH vs Player Shops, etc) the better.
For many of us old-schoolers, a player-driven economy is one of the most essential pieces to a "living" virtual world.
Things like a realistic, fun crafting system, player shops, housing, etc all add to the total immersion factor of a well-made MMORPG.
Stripping these things out, and making the game into a linear adventure / combat experience is the difference between an MMO, and an MMORPG.
And this is one of the major reasons why games of this nature are failing to retain players, and becoming boring so fast....you can only kill so many boars and orcs, and deliver so many bear skins before you need something more. And if you have no investment into the world that you are playing in....well, it becomes just a game, and not a world at all.