Related to my “article”. This is Lum discussing economic systems in games. Precious:

Well, if there was ever proof needed as to my idiocy, jumping into this thread is probably it. That being said:

Every MMO economy is false. Duh. Trust me, you don’t want a real economy in an MMO. It will, with stunning rapidity, result in a tyranny of a very small minority. Much like, well, real economies.

Quote:
EQ, UO and DAoC prove this out. You can craft great stuff or you can buy it, and you can be both a crafter and a hunter either by virtue of having crafting linked to a combat template (EQ and DAoC) or with multi-character servers (UO).

The problem with the typical MMO economic model is that crafting items compete with dropped items. Literally: crafters are in competition with the items that world builders are crafting to make hunting attractive. The problem is that one “faction” in this equation is always losing; either craftsmen complain (justifiably) that the results of their labors are marginalized because the Shiny New Sword from Deepest Dungeon is better than anything they make, or everyone else complains (justifiably) that the stuff they’re getting from monsters is worthless, because it isn’t as good as the stuff crafters are making.

The SWG model (I don’t know if anyone else has as radical an economy so let’s use them as an example) is that players make everything. Boom, the end. Well, that certainly solves a lot of problems. It also makes a lot of people who are used to the kill-things-and-get-stuff metaphor (a metaphor, I might add, that is not unique to MMOs) unhappy. The economy may be far more realistic than most (in that it has a working model of supply and demand and requires a bit of resource management) but the guy who logs in for a couple hours to plink at things with a blaster is either going to be (a) twinked or (b) unhappy, because the player economy has progressed past a point where the artificial elements (quests, drops from monsters, etc) can keep up.

The same thing happens in kill-things-get-stuff games, of course; try playing EQ or DAOC for a couple hours, then taking the money you’ve made and buying anything in the player markets. You’ll find that the money you’ve made is an order of magnitude lower than anything you can buy – again, because the player economy has detached itself from the artificial one. However, in the kill-things-get-stuff game you can concievably live completely apart from the player economy – existing off of quest rewards, items that you’ve looted yourself, etc.

In an economy that is solely player driven (which, for reasons I’m about to demonstrate, very few actually exist), you don’t have that option. Your choices become – hmm, what low level menial tasks that other, richer players don’t want to do can I do that will give me a small amount of income, or what higher level players can I swear myself out to. Congratulations! You’ve created a feudal society! From an economic standpoint, it’s an accomplishment. From a standpoint of whether or not it is fun, not so much.

Now, I’m an advocate of, for lack of a better word, socialist tinkering in MMOs. (The spectacle of a radical libertarian in real life working towards the implementation of socialism never fails to amuse me, by the way.) There are things game creators can do to “tinker” with the economy that can create interesting challenges without completely making the game NotFun. Just for one example: track the total amount of money in your game (call it “M1” for giggles) and key the value of your prestige gold sinks off of that. Since, after all, the target of your prestige gold sinks is to soak some of the money out of the bank vaults of your wealthiest few, why not REALLY target them? Make the process transparent. Display the rise and fall of these prices (key it to in-game stock markets for even more fun). Watch your players game down the prices by flushing money out of their vaults… which is what you wanted to happen in the first place.

However, the significant portion of your playerbase that ISN’T level 50 RR10 or a Master Jedi or whatever isn’t a member of your player economy. More to the point, they don’t WANT to be, most of the time. They want to benefit from the economy, sure. Cheap stuff on the market? Yeah, gimme! Actually working to generate a small amount of value relative to their “worth” in the game world? Oh HELL no. At that point it becomes a job. And most of us already have one of those.

So the trick becomes allowing participation in the economy, without forcing full membership. Hm.