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[synapse]

Economy management ends up being a balance between a couple key factors:
1) Resources in
Earning gold from killing monsters
Looting items from monsters

2) Resources out
Spending gold on repairs
Taxes
Giving items for quests/etc

3) Resource conversion
Crafting


Has anybody dealt with multiplayer/MMO economies and come up with some decent rules of thumbs for balancing the transactions?  It seems extraordinarily complex but I'm sure there's some good advice out there.

[tergem]

If you allowed players to set up stores you could allow the Free market to decide. This will help ease your burden (balancing wise), but will be harder to program.

[synapse]

Well, my plan is to let players throw stuff on auctions at whatever sell price they want.  The problem isn't the micro-economics (which will no doubt settle on specific prices for individual goods) but the issues of the macro-economics, like managing inflation.  I probably didn't give near enough to go on, but really any ideas will move the discussion forward.

[tergem]

If inflation happens then there will no doubt be a recession at some point, which would be very interesting to see in an MMO.

No you didn't give enough, how much inflation? Minor inflation the market should handle by itself, post-WWI Deutschmark inflation however is a major issue.

You could calculate the average price of an item at the marketplace, determine what creatures are viable to fight with said item in possession. Determine how many monsters to kill to get to a new level, and what new monsters you can fight at that level. You should modify costs based on those factors, to make a growth in power of equipment while still allowing the lower creatures to not be a viable source of income (without epic grinding). Then again I'm no economist, so don't take my word that this would work.

[antymattar]

Our economical system(For our real world) is not built to "economize". In fact, it is built to generate scarsity and to purge you out of every single penny. Any economical system should be unfair and tough as hell if you want to make a "good" economical system.

[starsrift]

I think a good way to set up controls would be stores that buy/sell basic crafting goods and/or equipment and that way you have some standards - player economy can still go crazy if you for instance only have magical swords available from crafting or lute drops, but no store will buy or sell a magic sword, just plain ones. Ergo, a player will not sell for less than the cost of the items required to craft it, and a player getting it from a lewt drop has no reason to drop much beyond the crafting price (they want the most they can get). The issue here is that scarcity fucks over the crafters because of their cost to get it, while lute-finders get it for free, more or less.

You could further control currency value by -allowing- NPC stores to buy/sell crafted/special lute items, and setting up marginal prices for buying/selling as controls so that game theory would dictate that a player would sell an item for auction if they can recieve > store buy price but < store sell price. Scarcity here is just the number of players who can make these items vs. the number that want them, and crafters can always sell for a decent market price.

NPC store scarcity is a hard thing to implement because it all depends on how many players of what level are active - naturally an MMO will progress to be top-heavy over time, that is all high-level players, and if your scarcity control dictates, for example, that while vorpal+9000 swords sell for 20,000 gold at the store but there are only 5 in NPC store circulation on the whole MMO, scarcity alone will inflate the price to exorbitant levels for players who can lute-drop or build the swords, but on the flipside, it assures players that can craft these items will almost always be able to sell them (and so they won't have 'wasted' skill points).

...(For our real world)...

Which MMO is this?

[Derakon]

Economies are tough to model. You have the basics there, but getting them balanced so that there isn't inflation or deflation is going to be fiddly work.

The only two MMOs I know of with well-developed economies are EVE and Puzzle Pirates; of the two, Puzzle Pirates is far more accessible, but EVE has more detailed publications on the status of their economy (that said, I'm pretty sure I've seen some PP articles on economies on their various servers). It'd be worth checking both out to get some idea of how their economies function.

[brog]

Rethinking Gold as a Currency these guys have an interesting approach to an MMO economy.
The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp and this is an interesting discussion of a simple emergent economy.

What do you want out of your economy?  Stability?  Emergent behaviour?  Inflation?  Do you want to actively encourage and reward trading or just have it as an option if people want to do it?  Do you want someone to be able to get rich just from trading, or do you want them to have to play the rest of the game too?  Can anybody trade with anybody else, or are there restrictions such as geography and language?
Answer these questions and hopefully it'll become clearer.  There's no one simple solution for how an economy should go.  You're designing the game, you have to design the economy as well!

For a simple brute force approach, you could try modelling it with a simulation - have a thousand (or however many) virtual players trading stuff and see what that does with different numbers.  Probably hard to make that a decent approximation of what people will actually do in practise though.

[antymattar]

Economies are tough to model. You have the basics there, but getting them balanced so that there isn't inflation or deflation is going to be fiddly work.

Do you even pay attention to the world you live in?

[Theophilus]

I'd just let the players control the economy,. They'll eventually have standard buying/selling prices for things.

[brog]

I'd just let the players control the economy,. They'll eventually have standard buying/selling prices for things.

But if there's inflation or deflation, the standard prices might keep changing according to that.  Or even if the prices converge to constant values, they might not be ideal values for player enjoyment - they might be so high as to be unaffordable for a new player, or so low that a new player can immediately access stuff that the design assumes they don't get until later.  Is it better to spend some extra time planning the economy, or to risk having large sections of the game (which you spent time making) go unused because you didn't?

[Derakon]

Do you even pay attention to the world you live in?

Yes. Are you going to sling insults, or do you have something constructive to do like point out where you think I went wrong? Economics is a hugely complex field of study filled with irrational actors. If you think you can model that easily you're delusional.

To take one example, Puzzle Pirates has crafting stalls that players can buy, which basically enable access into the crafting portion of the economy -- they can buy raw materials, store them, use them to make goods, and sell the goods to other players. A naive economic model here would have users buying and running stalls so long as they could make a profit or at least break even.

What often ends up happening, though, is that players buy the stalls and run them at a loss for extended periods of time, propping up their stalls with their own "supplemental income" from the rest of the game (i.e. where most non-crafting players get their money). Because they're more interested in participating in the crafting aspect of the game "as an owner" than they are in running a profitable stall, this still makes sense to them, even though it's completely bonkers from a macroeconomics standpoint.

Of course such behavior still makes sense from a microeconomics standpoint, since the player is deriving non-money good from running the stall (satisfaction of participating in the economy) sufficient to make up for the extra cost they have to contribute. On the other hand, the players running at a loss are also harming the economy by undercutting players who are trying to run a stall "properly" with no outside infusions of capital after getting set up. Arguably, irrational economic action in the game is a form of griefing; certainly it's worth considering trying to set up your economy so that poorly-run stalls can't exist for long.

[SirNiko]

I've always wanted to see a game economy in which the majority of resources cannot simply be generated by killing an infinite array of automatically respawning NPCs. Instead, there are a limited quantity of non-consumable resources and the players must carefully balance consumption with generating resources such as growing trees to chop them down later, or having a fixed currency you can only obtain from trading with other players. Our own economy is based on a currency that must be obtained from other humans who either will part with their own currency, or are among the few with the power to print currency. (Or banks, which sort of unofficially make currency through loans)

The economy of Kingdom of Loathing is one of the more interesting MMO economies I've ever seen. There's a huge array of consumable items and frequent events by the developers which unexpectedly create demand for unusual things. One particular event even created three totally one-of-a-kind items which the devs had expected might circulate the playerbase for a bit before any one person would collect all three and unlock an event (but it turns out they were discovered and brought together very quickly by a combination of wealthy players and dedicated spades).

As far as balancing the transactions, because this is an MMO (and therefore an online game) you have the added ability to wait and watch how the economy behaves and alter the game mechanics later to introduce balance. Examples might be to create consumable vanity items that consume resources but do not alter the resource generation model, or alter the amount of currency generated to match the resources being consumed by NPCs.

[_Tommo_]

I'd just let the players control the economy,. They'll eventually have standard buying/selling prices for things.

Then the emergent prices could mash with the gameplay rules that are set in stone, thus generating too much frustration and making the game not fun.
For example a very important item could become too costly due to an unbalanced rarity, forcing players to repetitive work to obtain them.
Or something vital to some class could become worthless, and who chosen that class in the first place finds himself underpowered.

Games have to be fun, and real economy isn't... some (or many) directions are needed to avoid exploiting and frustration, imo.

[tergem]

The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp and this is an interesting discussion of a simple emergent economy.

This was an extremely good read, just one question. What does RMk.s (EDIT: currency) stand for?

[brog]

This was an extremely good read, just one question. What does RMk.s (EDIT: currency) stand for?

I'm not exactly sure, but I'd guess it would be the German currency of the time, which was called the Reichsmark.

[Moczan]

Really good example of Multiplayer economy can be seen in Dofus. This is pretty old game with player-run economy, there are nearly no items in NPC shops, everything must be crafted or looted. Crafting system is pretty robust, including a lot of professions that gather resources and crafters that can produce and upgrade gear. I haven't seen better economics in multiplayer game yet, really worth to check it out (and I think that Dofus is really underappreciated MMO)

[gimymblert]

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Well, my plan is to let players throw stuff on auctions at whatever sell price they want.  The problem isn't the micro-economics (which will no doubt settle on specific prices for individual goods) but the issues of the macro-economics, like managing inflation.  I probably didn't give near enough to go on, but really any ideas will move the discussion forward.

i've never made a game with an economy but i did play one (dofus, a flash mmorpg) and noticed something: i feel that inflation is largely caused by the accumulation of wealth (savings) -- people save money over time, and because the average amount of money that someone has saved increases over the game's lifetime, prices of things on auctions go up gradually over time as well. the game thus rewards people who started the game early, because they were able to accumulate wealth when it was worth less than it is at later points. it reached the point in dofus where there were an elite of superrich people who were there since the beginning, their friends who they gave money to (who were also able to afford good items), and everyone else, who couldn't afford anything.

i'm not sure how you could avoid that, except perhaps by limiting savings somehow (like having a reverse interest % when money is stored in banks) but that would probably annoy people.

[gimymblert]

from paul eres answer:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6205/virtual_economic_theory_how_mmos_.php?print=1

worth reading before picking my first link (see before paul answer)
http://www.jorisdormans.nl/article.php?ref=machinations

It will help you see and conceptualize economy in game



Risk diagram with that technics.


 (it may loop complex but once you know the pattern (like feedback type and engine) to look for, it's simple)