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The broken MMO economy
Lerxst
Member UncommonPosts: 648
This is the number one thing tat will eventually kill a game for me and I have yet to find a game that even comes close to trying to simulate a real world economy. I mean, the second mobs spawn with loot, the economy can be considered broken. Some details are unavoidable though.
It’s the games that don’t take these things into consideration that have me about ready to give up playing MMO’s. Details like, for every random object spawned, there need to be ways to “despawn” or consume other objects so the supply and demand are always changing and the balance is kept intact.
Some games don’t even try the basic laws of supply and demand, especially those where you can sell the same loot to the same vendor for the same price over and over again. Games need their NPC merchants to work off of some simple calculations to figure these things out.
Honestly, Minecraft is probably the only game I can think of that does it right. Mobs rarely drop complete items, only components and for the items they drop, you also consume a huge number as well (shovels, pickaxes, etc.). Too bad it’s single player!
Comments
While I agree on most of what you said, however, I don’t believe that the problem is in mobs dropping loot, but that items are meant to be endgame, always repairing them and we only replace them when we loot something better.
gear needs to be able to break and players need to be able to make replacements, but with high stat gear being the goals of mmo’s these days that will only bring out the haters because that gear plays less of a impact on their uberness and its not as shiny or a certain color on their char screens.
Sounds like FFXIV honestly. But, the gear breaks fast in that (but can be repaired of course). And, well mobs really only drop components in less you're in a dungeon. It's also got a very in depth crafting system which is why mobs drop components.
I liked the economy of the Runescape classic but then they changed it and ruined it.
TOP MMORPG GAMES
EVE Online this way >>
I agree that games need to have the "loss" factor for players. Lots of ways to do that, and I think a good game needs all of them. Losing items at death, gold sinks, items wearing out/breakage, maintenace, etc., it all needs to be in the games. That way, no one factor needs to be overdone or "too fast".
Once upon a time....
This, definitely.
Coming from EVE and then playing WoW was like a slap in the face. Even with an Add-on like Auctioneer, its still very primitive compared to EVE.
EVE is a pretty good simulation of an economy. they even hired a fulltime economist to analyse and balance their market.
another one would be Entropia. the ingame currency has a fix exchange rate to the $. so the economy has to be balanced or the publisher goes bankrupt.
the goal of a theme-park isnt a world simulation. it is just cheap entertainment. so you have to try sandbox-games.
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
Mobs dropping loot is just a problem if the running cost of your character is a lot less or more than what you get from looting. If it stay close to the same the economy will work.
You could of course have the mobs drop only crafting materials and some few items (too many means a lot of vendortrash) and have the player earn her salary some other way, like questing instead.
But you can't have a real economy, if some guy gets rich like Bill Gates and then quit then the game would loose a lot of the money it have.
Some system without drops and where the server have a bank that pays players percentages of what it have for questing and stuff might work but it is not something I would be money on. The bank would have to get as much money as anyone who quit have on them, and lose the same amount if they start again.
Actually, the problem is that monsters do not drop ENOUGH loot not that they drop too much loot -- the thing is that they do not drop logical loot.
Oooooh -- I just killed a displacer beast and I got this uber broadsword -- TWEET -- no, wrong... Animal kills should provide pelts, alchemical parts, etc -- but not an uber broadsword -- ever... The only time you might get something like a shiny would be if you fought it in its den and then it would be much more likely to be a ring than a sword.
I just killed the orc champion and I got a blue mages bandana -- Wrong Wrong Wrong -- If you kill the orc champion you should generally get a pretty much FULL SET of armors. Assuming this is a mid-level semi-elite mob you might be looking at a fair mix of really bad, poor, and maybe one average piece of armor, the weapon the monster hit you with, and maybe some coins. Yes you could still sometimes get a good weapon or a good piece of armor -- but it is going to generally be either something the orc is wearing and using against you. Most of these would only be worth breaking down for materials.
I just killed the pixie king and I got a wonderful leather chestplate.... Well -- anything that pixie is wearing is probably too small for anyone in game to wear (unless you are maybe the smallest race in the game). Yes it may have a bunch of nice stuff -- but it is going to have to be recrafted... The same thing happens when you kill that giant -- any armor it has is not going to be wearable -- and yes a giant lieutenant might have 500 pounds of unwearable armor.
-----
Games need to stop having loot where a mob drops like 2 pieces of greyed out conveniently stackable always the same vendor loot, and rarely an armor piece when the monster was using a big 2 handed sword against you.
QFT
but no matter what way you look at it its game. The real economy has its surpluses and shortages as well as it s have and have nots. No matter what mmo you play learn to game the system and work it to your advantage. Cries over broken economies sadly usually come from players who cant figure it out and find themselves broke.If it were like real ife if you went broke youd be out on the street SOL and that would be end of story in an MMO go out kill a few mobs and even if it takes a while and your back .
NOTE: Almost any game economy can be played by arbitrage or a version of it any player willing to earn enough money to do it will likely see profits if they do it right.
EvE's THE mmo economy, no question there. It's intricate and strongly affected by whatever the player run political landscape or warfare landscape is like, with regional markets who vary based on supply and demand, investment, stocks, etc.
Other mmo's don't really have any economy, assuming one doesn't consider the standard 'auction house' and the activities around it an economy. Well technically I guess it is, but an economy for 7 year olds on the school ground, not business men and investors.
Hmm come to think of it Pirates of the Burning had the basis for a decent economy.. not sure how it is these days but back when it came out it wasn't too bad. My Hapless Ji pirate cornered a bunch of markets and very likely was the first pirate to breach 1 million on that server heh (back when it launched eh)
Pirates of the Burning Sea is actually a good example how not to design a game economy.
A few months in players realized that they really did not need an economy. The only thing you could spend your gold on was ships and ship fittings. As people leveled up the good ships became more and more expensive to make and required the output of multiple crafters over multiple days. WIth such high demand and low surplus, more and more players started crafting themselves. Then they started to figure out that it is more efficient to just build all ships inside the guild as a cooperative rather than sell off the raw mats and buy finished ships.
In a game where PvP is the primary and only well developed activity, having a scarcity economy will kill the market since players will focus inward and try to make as much of the stuff as they can themselves.
A way to balance an economy 'medieval style" I have thought of a simple bartering system.
*Coin is hard to come by.
*Most goods should be obtainable from the environment.
*NPC vendors throw away coin for mats depending on how much they need (Cheapskate vendors)
*To balance rich rich rich players have a daily tax for the city he is resting in (5% of coin for poor, 10% of coin for rich folk, double the percentage if these players have been inactive for more than a week)
If his goods are not in a city he will simply lose them a few days later and have a "items waste away" system where they last around 1 week to 5 weeks depending on type and care.
This way poor players won't have a hard time getting money, rich players will want to buy things with their money, and rich players that didn't play the game for a month can get some money to start off again without all their resources being hogged for 1 month jsut standing there.
Economies are hard to design :S, but I think I came up with a "decent" solution even if it isn't perfect. (Money wouldn't last long, but big items would last a while).
Hello! Minecraft is multiplayer and there and many servers running.
Multiplayer info and server administration stuff: http://www.minecraftforum.net/index.php
I'm sorry but EVE economy is just like any other economy where loot drops from nowhere from mission enemies.
Wurm
There are so many threads like these and I don't understand why more people don't try Wurm.
**goes back to making a door for the mine he just made**
No reason the game had no loot drops thus it only make sense that EVE has them as well.
...Because its abysmally slow.
Making a door should not take you longer than it does in real life, neither should making a hole.. However, in wurm it does.
It tries to be so realistic that it isn't, its just slow and BORING.
I'm not asking for handholding nastiness like WoW but for the love of god you'd think they could at least make it somewhat faster, it was just WAY too slow for me when I tried it.
Between having to scout for a flat area of land (all of which was taken, I only started finding things 2-3 hours out) and then having to spend 3+ HOURS flattening the land (Because all the flat land is already taken!) and then having to spent 30 minutes trying to make the tool to make the parts to make the door which goes into making a house... Its just too much.
/endrant
I agree with some things you say but not in tax. People would just have gems, resources or gear instead that they sell when they need money so they would usually be poor b ut still have loads of stuff.
Items waste away is not bad with certain stuff, like food. But it would be both annoying and illogical if other stuff wasted away. Good idea if you use it right. Players would either have to hunt their food and cook it or visit a tavern instead of buying stacks and that would be good for the economy.
I could actually imagine a guild based economy instead where a certain guild mint their own coins, have their own crafters, merchants and similar stuff. That would mean you could have player merchants that visited different guild villages buying and selling goods depending on what a certain guild does best.
With some good crafting system some guilds could be specialist weapon crafters or similar and be famous over the server.
Add something that a certain guild villages will have some resources closely (you can let the guild leader choose them) like mines, fields that grow herbs or food, cattle and so on that generates a lot of resources for the guilds crafter but if you want something the guild don't have you will have to trade for it or go out and adventure to get it.
Add so that when you trade more stuff than a little outside your guild village you need to travel there with a caravan and you will can hire in people as guards for those caravans and I think things would be interesting.
Economy and crafting go hand in hand.
Wurms graphics are abysmal as well... This is coming from someone who absolutly adored the Skinner Box that was EQ Classic with its blocky graphics. Something about Wurm's graphics just make me wanna gouge out my eyes!
Meh. Game economies arent like real economies. If a real economy collapses, the result is unemployment, crisis, at worst hunger and death. If a game economy is bad, no real damage is done to anyone. Especially, a game with a broken economy can still be fun; players just cant use the market, but as long as they can self sustain themselves, its OK.
Also, there are basically just two scenarios of bad game economies:
Prices are too high, nobody can afford items
Prices are too low or nothing worthwhile buyable
Scenario 1 is usually caused by goldbuyers, scenario 2 is a result of lacking game challenge, too high item droprates, bad item drop properties, or other game balance errors.
I know three ways of "driving" a game economy:
Decay: Items break over time. The game is a treatmil.
Soulbound. You start a new alt, you need to start over. Results into a "meh, who cares about equipment, I'll just rush to the endgame where I can raid for the real thing" mentality.
Overenchantment: You can try to enchant excess items. If you have bad luck, they break. If you have luck, you have a better item. You can always try to get even better items.
Personally I wouldnt accept a game that does 1. If you do that, just count me out. I'm not going to play your game. End of discussion.
Strategy 2 is painful. Items are massively devalued. The only kind of items that one still cares for are those in the "endgame".
Strategy 3 is my favorite. It means you can always get even better.
Oh, and why exactly would that be the case ? I fail to see the issue here. Game economies dont need to emulate anything, they just need to work for the player. Fixed prices is the simple example for a game economy that will definitely serve its purpose. Especially if NPC Merchants only work one way - you can sell the item, but then its gone for good.
Its also a good example of how to not make a game.
A few months in players realized that they really did not need an economy. The only thing you could spend your gold on was ships and ship fittings. As people leveled up the good ships became more and more expensive to make and required the output of multiple crafters over multiple days. WIth such high demand and low surplus, more and more players started crafting themselves. Then they started to figure out that it is more efficient to just build all ships inside the guild as a cooperative rather than sell off the raw mats and buy finished ships.
In a game where PvP is the primary and only well developed activity, having a scarcity economy will kill the market since players will focus inward and try to make as much of the stuff as they can themselves.
Yea.. that's true.. well at first the economy was viable, not that many people took the time to do it (all that transporting stuff from one port to another was lots of work heh). Actually come to think of it, I kind of figured as more people got into it the market would bust, I kind of saw it happening at the time, when I started with basic stuff, then a bunch of others started selling them, so I moved on to slightly more complex stuff, then people got to that point, and so on.. So I'd corner a market for a while, then move on to the next level of market, and so on.
Hmm.
I guess EvE is really the only complex realistic economy in an mmo these days.
I blame central AH's, part of what makes EvE work is the many many many separate market hubs with individual price fluctuations. One could buy low, transport it, sell high, rince/repeat.. good times.
Games based on killing stuff to acquire value are retarded.
Said economy models cant work by design.
Yet they do work. Amazing, isn't it?
As opposed to real life economies based on killing stuff? (Aka massive massive military budgets.. hint hint)