Crafting

[Dustie]

I don't know how you can make it real without making it more complex. Someone or some process would have to actually print money in the game and somehow manage it in a real world fashion. It would certainly add complexity to the design if not necessarily in a way the player sees.

e.g., you go kill some hobgoblins and they drop gems and you take the gems back to town and sell them for 23 Kinglets each, and those Kinglets didn't just appear out of nowhere but rather, the NPC vendor had a finite supply of them which he got through the usual routes and somewhere there is actually a central government manufacturing Kinglets in addition to collecting taxes and redistributing wealth.

And then if you're talking about a factional game, who is the central authority that prints Kinglets? Or would every faction develop its own money?


It's easier to just have money fountains and money sinks...

Economies do not need to be complex. By definition, economy really just means the management of resources. It's not like I'm suggesting that these games implement lending (not a bad idea though) and set central bank fund rates to be "real." I'm simply talking about matching input with output. Having money fountains and money sinks does not mean the economy isn't real unless the fountains and sinks are based on something arbitrary and are disconnected. The only reason you need the "central bank" in these simple economies is to increase money supply to meet the demand for money and maintain stable price levels (i.e. I'm glad there were fairly stable price levels in EVE so that when I came back after a year, my 20 million was still worth something).