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[William Broom]

I had a great idea for an MMo, this  being a Dying Earth MMO. Dying Earth is a sub-genre of sci-fi which is basically set during a very slow apocalypse, a gradual death of the Earth as opposed to a sudden one. Now, I hear a lot about MMOs like Second Life where the economy is not well built so money undergoes a fairly rapid process of inflation - because there are more ways to move money into the world than there are to move money out of it. This Dying Earth MMO would do the opposite. For whatever reason, there are more money 'sinks' than money 'wells', so the amount of money in the gameworld becomes less and less, and the value gradually rises. All other elements of the game are tied to money, so you will also see less items because people can't afford them, more monsters because people can't kill them, and more PKing because people are getting desperate for money. Eventually the gameworld runs out of money and has to be rebooted. This destroys all the characters in the gameworld. However, there are multiple instances of the gameworld, all at different levels of decay, and players can travel between instances, for a price. Of course this price is also a 'sink', so the more people abandon the sinking instance, the faster it sinks! To balance it out, there will be many rewards for those who choose to stay as long as possible in a dying world. The most prominent is that high-level monsters only appear in the latter stages of a world's decay, so high-level players will need to travel there to get their grind on.
(also there are dynamic exchange rates between instances)
I think I would need to consider the economics a little more closely to make sure it all hung together, but the basic principle should work, right?
(btw I don't ever plan to make this, but it's nice to dream)

[hroon]

This sound like an excellent concept. How do you create money sinks that make sense in terms of gameplay?

I think one way would be to put all players in random alliances - maybe city states - that are wealthy and peaceful at the beginning. Players can fund new projects (a simple voting system should do the job) for their cities and go out into the wilderness to hunt and gather resources. As these limited resources can be put into intersections between the factions conflicts will arise, taking their toll on the economy of the single states. Eventually there will be no natural resources and all that is left is to plunder the weaker cities. Now you bring in some apocalyptical beasts and natural desasters to keep players entertained.

For added flavour there could be revolutions within the cities (different classes could have their own representation in government and try to gain control over the others), maybe the need to eat once in a while (+ burning the fields of the enemies) or a world government that breaks apart in the course of the game (there would be pros and cons if the players can keep it running till the late game).

Actually thinking about it makes me a little sad because I know there will never be enough people that are interested in such an endeavour (especially because you are bound to lose your earned stuff sooner or later).

[Xion]

This sounds cool. The cyclical nature of the game reminds me of A Tale in the Desert. I tried playing that once but quit after ~30min because I couldn't find anyone else/the game sucked. But I digress. Your idea:
The migration from one instance to another would also have other problems if done en masse: overpopulation and therein inability to support the new arrivals on the now even quicker-depleting resources. Could this create an effect where there's a sort of cycle of people essentially going around leeching the rich places until they're unstable, moving to the next, and repeating? By the time they get back to the first instance, it will have already reset and regained its prosperity...maybe.

Curious idea though.

[PenguinHat]

It's a shame this will never be made.

So, would this have a limited amount of resources then? When all the space oil has been mined, it's gone forever? That would be a new way to do things. Right now, MMO's are based on a constant cycle of character improvement through repetitive tasks. This would be more like a constant battle to keep what you have.

What if the only way to create a new instance was for players to fund it? Maybe if x amount of resources are gavered, then a player group will be able to travel to a new planet, and new planets only be found by doing this.

I wonder if you could mix it with player lead in-game governments. Instead of having NPC's, just allow players to make groups. Like EVE does.

[Nate Kling]

Its a really cool idea to have player run governments and such things but I can't see them ever working because it seems it would require players to play all the time.  If you didn't play more than the other players you would quickly lose.  I guess this is true in all mmo's but much more so in this game. (What if there was a peasant uprising and the weaker players stormed the castle only to realize that none of the players with government powers were online to overthrow :D)  Maybe if it was a new brand of mmo where it was like a single day event people signed up for. Happened once a month or something.  And the game started at the beginning of the day but the gameplay was set so that the world would quickly be destroyed nearing the end of the day.  I don't really know but I like your idea a lot, pretty interesting.

[joshg]

I had a great idea for an MMo, this  being a Dying Earth MMO. Dying Earth is a sub-genre of sci-fi which is basically set during a very slow apocalypse, a gradual death of the Earth as opposed to a sudden one.

Where's the "fiction" part come into the picture, then?
 

[William Broom]

This sounds cool. The cyclical nature of the game reminds me of A Tale in the Desert. I tried playing that once but quit after ~30min because I couldn't find anyone else/the game sucked. But I digress. Your idea:
The migration from one instance to another would also have other problems if done en masse: overpopulation and therein inability to support the new arrivals on the now even quicker-depleting resources. Could this create an effect where there's a sort of cycle of people essentially going around leeching the rich places until they're unstable, moving to the next, and repeating? By the time they get back to the first instance, it will have already reset and regained its prosperity...maybe.

Curious idea though.

Hopefully the price of travelling between worlds would be high enough that people couldn't just jump between them constantly. But certainly I would like to see scenarios where people fleeing from one world are not welcome in another one because they overpopulate it. They would be hated like illegal immigrants are in America.
On the other side of the coin, if you landed on a world with a relatively low number of players, it would be fun times all around... until everyone else hears about this world and it ends up overpopulated again 

The most obvious money sink would be food, but if it wasn't handled properly it could get really annoying. Then again people playing this game are already resigned to the possibility of permadeath if they don't keep on their toes so I guess having to buy food constantly really wouldn't bother them that much.

Also, at the very end of a world, there is an uber-powerful Antichrist sort of boss. If the remaining players can coordinate to defeat him, they get to carry their characters over to the new world with a hefty reward, perhaps even becoming the kings of the new empires. But being killed by the Antichrist results in permadeath, so few players would dare to face it. Thus, powerlevelling isn't enough to reach the top of this game - you also need to be brave enough to risk all your hours of powerlevelling on a shot at the endboss.
The top players in WoW are fat nerds with nothing else to do with their time. The top players in Dying Earth are fucking badasses.