Gold Availability/economy

[Kakarat]

Slamz's Crafting topic gave me the idea to start an economy topic.

Some people know the ins and outs of economy in video games(richer than beyond belief). So don't have a dime.

The struggle to acquire gold for some people just rely on gold sales from websites real money for in game gold.

There are always quests, and selling weapons/items to gain money. Or just straight up farming.

This topic basically ties in with crafting and rare items.

Are items bind on pickup?Are items bind on equip?
These two questions reflect on the economy.

[Slamz]

I would prefer to go back to UO (or EVE). Nothing "binds" because there is no permanent gear. Whenever you die, whatever you had goes with you. If we're talking about our heaven vs hell RPG then maybe the manner of your death reflects what happens to your gear.

Death by werewolf: if you took enough damage to die, odds are you took enough damage to turn most of your armor into scrap metal.

Death by fire breathing dragon: everything on your corpse got burnt to a crisp. There's probably not even much scrap value left.

Death by falling into a crevice: you lose everything because nobody can reach your corpse anyway.

Death by gunshot: most of your gear is probably intact.

Death by grenade: see "death by werewolf".


And some gear would be more durable than others. Like a sword is probably damn hard to destroy. Maybe getting caught in an explosion or particularly hot fire would warp/ruin it but fighting the werewolf probably wouldn't hurt the sword. On the other hand, it probably doesn't take a whole lot to damage a modern lightweight rifle. Maybe some "magical" items would be particularly difficult to destroy (e.g., Sauron's Ring) but standard gear would be something you'd probably purchase in bulk.



But anyway, I'm not sure what can or should be done about gold buyers/sellers.

Perhaps one interesting answer, though, would be "transparency". What if someone was killing you repeatedly with awesome gear and you could go to an NPC broker and basically "bribe" (pay) him to look up that character's bank transactions. You would see a list of his recent transactions and here's a delivery of 100,000 gold from YaoXinGan 2 weeks ago. You research YaoXinGan and see where he gets HIS money from and eventually you can trace the source of this player's money and then go kick the crap out of them because it's an open world PvP game.

Players would basically be able to do their own research to find out who the farmers are and then go dismantle them. It would be like finding out who is shipping weapons to the Taliban. Maybe you can't stop the Taliban from buying, maybe you can't hunt down the Taliban, but maybe if you could do something about the supply if you could trace it back to its source.

Roleplay wise, the game would be full of NPC "spies" and with the right money put in the right places you would be able to find out who is supplying who with what. Ostensibly this would be a tool of intrigue during wars (where is your opponent buying all his steel from?) but it would double as a counter to farmers, because "gifting" an enemy a bunch of resources (due to an out-of-game transaction) would basically turn that farmer into your enemy as well.

Farming would end up being a risky activity. Nobody likes it when their enemies start getting presents.

[Diggles]

Permanent gear is a recipe for economic inflation

The items should have a quality rating that affects how fast they take damage and how many times it can repaired. Ie...how many hours of play can this item sustain.

Most of the money should not be spent on replacing the gear, but upkeeping it.

[Hoofhurr]

What if the game had a fixed number of resources depending on the number of players on the server? Let's say the resources are tokens. Tokens would come into the system through pve until the server maximum is reached or new players joined the server. Tokens are turned in to NPCs for weapons, items, titles, and structures. Tokens are transferred by killing players/structures who's token bought items turn into tokens that are then lootable. Players have to turn all tokens into items/structures within 24 hours or the tokens would be re-distributed to NPCs for gain by PvE. While maybe the character could log out with a maximum token-items in his possession he would have to spend the surplus on structures before time runs out. These structures spawn NPCs that defend the structures but they stay up even if the character is logged out or until they are destroyed by other players.

There are probably a lot of problems with this but it is an interesting concept and would kill gold farming because no farming company is going to farm npcs when they stop dropping tokens. It wouldn't be cost effective for them. Limited resources are the catalyst for good pvp. Going with Slamz' transparency idea maybe there's a tab that shows exactly which entities (structures, characters or NPCs) have tokens and how many tokens. Basically the tab would be an accounting of all the value on the server so if it wasn't obvious who possessed the tokens by the quality of items or structures the person possessed then the tab would make it abundantly clear. In this way, the people with fewer tokens would know who the rich folks are and would band together to fight them.

The only huge problem I see so far is a balance of power one. Perhaps we could use Aion's idea and have an NPC race attack those player entities with high volume of token-items. This would create weak intervals that player organizations could capitalize on. Just brainstorming.

[Vllad]

Tokens become the new gold though.


I would eliminate gold altogether.

What the hell is gold worth in the Heaven vs. Hell scenario anyway? Players make, trade and fix things. Hoofs Token idea works if they work with NPC functions only but not tradeable by PC's. That puts the value of the guild back into the game.

You want something made? Go collect up all of the resourses yourself and bring them to me and I will make the item for you. If you don' then I want "X" in return for gathering all of the items. Ahh, you don't have X? Then I will bring you the materials to make me "Y" in exchange for making you "X".

I would give a shit load of bank space and eliminate the auction house. If you want resourses make people fight over them. The Auction house eliminates PVP.

A true player run economy runs off of goods not gold. It also creates more pvp.

GOLD MUST GO!


Vllad

[Hoofhurr]

I think you missed my point. There would be a fixed number of tokens. Once those tokens entered the system the only way to obtain more would be to take them from other players or to return them to the system by destroying structures. The number of tokens in the system would be directly proportional to the number of players on the server. Conceivably there would be long stretches where no tokens would come from NPCs at all. Because of this, the game would be very unfriendly to gold farmers.

On a side note I find it really interesting that you would solve the gold problem by returning to a barter system. I wonder what the real world parallels are.

[Dustie]

I think you're both missing the point. You don't need tokens or Vllads archaic barter system, you just need a central banker who moderates inflation in whatever the in-game currency happens to be. =p

[Hoofhurr]

It's uncharacteristic of you to hijack! You owe this thread an apology by way of a serious consideration of the posited suggestions.

[Dustie]

I am being serious. You guys are really just talking about moderating inflation of the in game currency. If you don't like when I use the word currency, substitute "means of storing value" or something like that.

[Hoofhurr]

Hmm. Well if you're serious how do you see the central bank being implemented?

[Dustie]

Hmm. Well if you're serious how do you see the central bank being implemented?

Well, you already have half of it above. You need to match the amount of money in the system to the amount of production/output in the system. Income needs to equal output plus some moderate level of growth and inflation. The problem with a lot of these games is that players can generate resources indefinitely but resources do not leave the game at that same rate. As new players enter the system you need to increase the money supply commensurate with the new output level, not some arbitrary amount. This isn't really tough, games have done this successfully before - EVE, POBS, etc (POBS cheated a little bit so it wasn't perfect, but it worked in the short run anyway). That's not to say that these game economies don't have "shocks to the system" when a certain resource becomes less valuable over night. Maybe some patch notes come out and health potions are nerfed so they sell for less. That happens, but in general, you can't have a system where the bronze sword of death costs 1 gold on Monday and 450 gold on Tuesday, and 1000 gold on Wednesday.

[Kakarat]

I sorta see where you are going with this Dustie. But instead of a 'central banking system'. Just allot a player say 25gold at level 10, 50 gold at level 15 etc. It doesn't drop from monsters. The gold is always in the system,more of it comes available at levels. To gain more gold you simply craft gear and sell to players, do a service of repairing items for players or sell that epic weapon you got that dropped off player 'X'. This allows for gold to be produced with player base.