http://www.atitdhosting.com/thegoods/manifesto.php

In a nutshell, the value of an item goes down the more of it they have in stock. So the more something is farmed, the less it is worth. And it really does work!

What we need is an integrated system wherein everything is interconnected. If a vendor buys a sword, he should keep that sword to sell. Resources should be limited in such a way that there is no effective farming of them. Every item a crafter succesfully makes should be useful, not just a filler used to increase skill. Gold shouldnt just fall out of the pockets of each and every thing you slay.

It’s not an easy task, and certainly not one suited to the Amusement Park type MMOs, but if you want a living, breathing world for your MMO, you’ll have to start thinking beyond the MMO concepts that are prevalent today.

Horizons had a pretty cool crafting model, where basically _everything_ was PC crafted. You could even craft recipes IIRC. Unfortunately its combat model wasn’t different enough to make it compelling, and its XP system actively discouraged grouping, AFAICT.

I am definitely not an expert on this, but from what I can tell real-world economies solve these sorts of problems in a number of different ways, some of which are:

- increasing/decreasing taxes. The analog would be increasing/decreasing loot per drop and increasing/decreasing the cost of in-game money sinks. AFAICT, without banking this is the only mechanism a game has to balance the economy.

- increasing/decreasing the amount of money loaned within the economy, by increasing or decreasing the interest rate. This is by far the main mechanism in real-world economies for manipulating the money supply. Unfortunately there’s no MMORPG analog for the way banks create and destroy money through loans.

- increasing or decreasing lending institutions’ reserve requirement. This one doesn’t get used much in RL, because it’s such a crude mechanism compared to manipulating interest rates.

If you coupled player-crafted items only with high barriers to entry in crafting and adventuring (gear purchase), and added lending institutions to serve as the main control of the server money supply, you would then have all the relevant RL mechanisms for monetary and fiscal policy.

BUT.

If a given resource has a short lifespan and regenerate spontaneously, it infuses wealth into a closed system, causing inflation. How do you get around that problem without lengthening the lifespan of the resource and trigger its repopulation to some fixed real-world quantity?

Now that I think about it, the idea of “investing” real money into a virtual world came up during an implementation discussion on the Mud-Dev mailing list for how to start an MMO centered around RMT - with bidirectional conduits between in-game and out-of-game currencies - without taking on massive amounts of liability. The quantity linked to repopulation of resources doesn’t have to be “dollars” at all if your game doesn’t center around RMT. A better quantity may be “total number of in-game hours spent by all characters this week”, since in-game activity by necessity involves harvesting, transformation and destruction of resources.

Still, it seems to me that a game with relatively long periods between repopping of resources and having that repop directly tied to the activities of players that transform or destroy those resources would be a very effective way of dealing with inflation, and if something that’s ridiculous works and something that’s sane doesn’t, I’d go for the ridiculous myself.

As for farmers owning the world, here’s an eye-opener - they already DO, under ANY system. In fact, if resources are abundant, repop frequently and at semi-fixed intervals - and yes, by resources I’m also referring to cash-dropping WoW mobs, not just ore veins - then the macro-farmers will be the ones holding the cash. If resources are rare, repop rarely and at unpredictable intervals, MMORPG-farms in Latin/South America and Asia who can cycle sweatshop labourers to keep them online waiting for the repop 24/7 will have the advantage. Under the former system, you can make considerable quantities of money with minimal expenditures if you’re in a popular game. Under the latter system, your overhead will be much higher, but you can still make some cash if the RMT market for the currency is strong. Under the former system, RMT demand translates directly to in-game inflation as gold farmers increase their production capacity. Under the latter system, the developers have every opportunity to limit inflation despite RMT demand.

It’s a very complex question and I don’t have any clear-cut answers. However, I do believe that combating concentration of wealth by flooding the in-game market with gold in an effort to keep casual gamers interested is a poor design choice and exactly why we’re having this discussion. It seems to me that an obvious solution to the problem is to severely restrict the amount of resources entering the game. Will that lead to an in-game merchant class that makes a ton of cash and effectively lords over the game’s economy? You bet. What better way to make a believable fantasy sim? :)

1. Make a game where all items are built by PCs. This necessitates PvP but that’s a different story for a different time. The important point for this argument’s sake is that all goods come from resources manipulated by PCs - no NPCs with an infinite number of torches for sale.
2. Set a Real Dollar price on a natural resource - i.e., any given tree is worth $0.02. A player can chop down the tree, cut it into pieces, and craft the wood into items usable by players. The tree will not “pop” back into the world until another $0.02 is invested into the world.
3. When a player signs up and pays his $14.95, the entire Real Dollar amount of that transaction goes towards populating the game with resources.
4. During subsequent months, a given fraction - let’s say half - of the monthly fee is set aside to populate the world with resources.
5. Thus, the world becomes “richer” the more people settle there and the more time people spend in the game. On the other hand, this additional burden of higher population spending more time in-game require these additional resources.
6. The developers can, of course, “cash in” on the money invested into their virtual goods - but only by destroying them. That is, if an item that cost $4.00 in virtual raw material to make wore out or otherwise got caught in the “gold sink”, the devs could cash a $4.00 cheque.

I know absolutely diddly-squat about real economics, but it seems to me that would stabilize the in-game economy against the Real Dollar. While inflation is certainly not unheard of in the real world, it tends to be a fair share better than in its virtual counterpart.

Alright, that’s it - hack it apart! :)