01-15-2005, 02:44 PM
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
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
