+- The Lurker Lounge Forums (https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums)
+-- Forum: Lurker Games (https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/forum-6.html)
+--- Forum: World of Warcraft (https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/forum-16.html)
+--- Thread: The Economy of WoW (/thread-7366.html)
The Economy of WoW - Professor Frink - 01-15-2005
It's not terribly surprising that a world full of vendors who can conjure money from thin air to buy anything offered to them would have a runaway inflation problem.
Wouldn't simply having a single, common NPC account, initially seeded with a fixed amount of gold per player on the server work better? Players would still be able to earn and spend many times that amount, in the same way the US does about $12 trillion a year in business with less than $800 billion in US currency total. Then you could have a fairly simple, more or less automatic, and centrally tweakable adjustment to the only recurring "source" and "sink" of money in the game, the NPCs. (although it wouldn't really be a source and sink since it's now a closed loop.)
An example of one way this might work:
The Item Vendor Cabal posseses a machine which can convert almost any item in the game -- even vendor trash -- into a quantity of Mysterious Goop (proportional to the items value). Fortunately, they also posses a machine that can manufacture certain items out of said goop. The vendors of the world pay players cash out of the NPC fund for any item, turn the item into MG, which is then used as necessary to manufacture goods to keep all the stores stocked. The IVC adjusts the two variables (how much they'll pay for 1 MG worth of stuff to destroy, and how much they'll charge for one MG worth of stuff they've created) in order to keep a workable supply of cash to reward players with, and as much 'profit' in goop as possible.
In that scenario, gold turns from a perticularly weak fiat currency to something more like an ideal-world company scrip, every mob-farming player getting paid in necessities and luxuries made by part of their own labor.
Then all they have to do is tweak the level of inflation, just high enough that few if any players have enough money to retire and stop slaving away in the item mines, but low enough that the proles don't rebel and sieze the means of production for themselves (ignoring the official gold economy entirely and depending on direct trade in item-drops themselves, as in D2)
-- frink
The Economy of WoW - Trucidation - 01-26-2005
Quote:As money piles up for the level 60 players with lvl 60 mounts, they'll buy lower level stuff in the auction house for any new characters they or their guildies/friends make, causing the value of all items to rise to varying degrees.
This has already happened on my server, to some extent. Linen cloth sells for 20-25s a stack and wool cloth for 80s-1g. It was nothing like this during the first few weeks of the game.
A week ago I sold Widowmaker, a level 42 blue dagger for 150g. It's hard to imagine a level 42 rogue having that much gold, considering them have to buy a mount as well.
The Economy of WoW - Cryptic - 01-26-2005
Trucidation,Jan 26 2005, 12:33 PM Wrote:A week ago I sold Widowmaker, a level 42 blue dagger for 150g. It's hard to imagine a level 42 rogue having that much gold, considering them have to buy a mount as well.
[right][snapback]66455[/snapback][/right]
Wow, I just bought Widowmaker for 40g. Clearly the economy is scaling quickly, dependent on the server population.
My mentality is that I spend money as if it were water. What if I save it all and it happens to devalue 50% over the next month? With a mount and mostly blue/purple gear, I have little I *need* to spend it on. But I spend regardless, because it's easy to get back and I can't see a reason to save it.