Self-regulation of a mini economy

Answer 1

As usual Virtual Economy on wikipedia is a good starting point. Also "mmorpg economics" on google will be helpful. But what I noticed is that all the efforts that most of what you list somehow try to artificially extract money out of the game, via taxation or other means. This can easily be viewed as "unfair" only one of the items that you denote gives an incentive to spend money.

Not having played the game I can't tell what methods would be feasible, but it all comes down to balancing the flow of resources into the game with what is spent. This is a piece about Ultima online during its first year describing some of the things that happened and the measures taken to remidiate problems with the economic cycle.

-- Edit: added Ultima Online Link

Answer 2

It would help if you mention how money is being 'recirculated' in your MMORPG.

Your game balance depends on whether you have any central NPC (non player character) or not. An NPC could be a bot, a real player or a bank/government. Also one of your goal should be - keep it simple.

Has a central NPC

• All goes back to the central agency IF it creates/controls money supply.
• Auctions assets. But it comes with complexities. Hey you can auction them for REAL MONEY, the one who buys them starts from where the other person left.
• In Monopoly it either goes to bank on bank owned properties or goes to players on player owned properties.

No central NPC

• The consummated part is lost and left overs stay there to be worked upon by other players. (AOE or UT)
• If its a zero sum game, then advantage/bonus could be given to other players. It may be distributed in proportion to their wealth as compared to the entire economy.

Comments on your approaches

1. Don't decay values directly but introduce a factor like inflation that does it. Anything that player 'earns' should never be decayed.
2. Taxes might make things complex, keep it simple.
3. That's kinda bot I discussed above.
4. Yeah its good, players get recirculated money and they can buy new stuff.
5. No, this might be a slap on game players. They might get irritated by the fact that their efforts are not yielding expected gains.
6. You might loose some extremely loyal players. These are the players which pay you money.
7. and 9. No, please don't directly control game elements. see 5.

To sum up, I'd say keep it simple, always reward people don't impose conditions. Surprise them but don't shock them.

Answer 3

Drain in real-life tends to occur naturally as you accumulate wealth. In theory as your wealth goes up so does your drain because:

• Excessive wealth encourages waste. You have too many assets to manage effectively.
• Hiring people to manage waste is a drain in itself.
• High wealth makes you a better target for theft, embezzlement, fraud and lawsuits.
• Hiring security/lawyers to protect against the above is itself a drain.
• High wealth and luxury items attract more taxes.
• Markup on luxury items often grows out of proportion to the items actual production costs.
• Expensive items tend to have high storage, maintenance and running costs.

You could simulate the above "balance" simply by finding realistic ways to increase costs as wealth goes up.

In truth most "value" in a virtual economy is prestige. Having millions of dollars isn't worth much if nobody cares and you can't buy anything that would make them care.

If wealth in your game represents little more than your "score", then any kind of drain is silly. Very few games artificially reduce your score.

Answer 4

No one in here will be able to give you the 'best' answer, because the best answer is learn economics.

I recommend a few basic courses in economics; barring that, I provide you with this:

• Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, by Robert Murphy

The problem is, your basic underlying understanding of economics is flawed. That is:

• The recirculated quantity has to grow from season to season in order to keep the game interesting.
• Money mustn't be distributed unfairly: It can't be permitted that 1% of the teams own 20% of the money.

First, why must there be quantity inflation? Why is that what is needed to keep the economy growing?

Take a real life example: a sufficiently rare commodity (Gold) doesn't grow very much at all, because there's only so much of it in the world. Yet Gold still buys the same amount today that it bought in 1905. There has been no price inflation in terms of Gold -- it has remained constant and stable.

Your challenge is to create a sufficiently rare commodity that players will see inherent value in, and will use that as both a means (digging it up to get other valuable stuff like armor) and an end (can be used to barter in of itself).

Regarding the second point:

Why will a 'fair' distribution of money be equitable? If the top 1 percent are doing 20% of the economic activity, then the market is simply reflecting what is actually happening. That's also true in the Real World. The guy that lives next to you probably doesn't have the same economic output you do, since your skills are entirely different. A factory worker doesn't have the same economic impact that a software developer does, and the wages reflect that. Why would an in game world be different?

Answer 5

I play the hattrick game for several years. A few questions one needs to ask.

What's the purpose of money in the game? 1) Limiting all users somehow to ensure that they compete with the same resources. 2) Just like real world, allowing better exchange of production.

In this particular game, a big part of team growth is training. You have a limited capacity for it and you generally produce about 2 times more than you want to keep (you train two sets of players each week) - so every now and then, you sell your product (i.e. striker) and purchase somebody else's product (defender). Money just makes it easier than having to barter players.

There are some more or less fixed costs, and more or less fixed income. Before implementing any "approaches", we should agree on what the problem is - and to start there, I don't think that more money has to be recirculating to make the game interesting. Way up in hattrick is not "more money", but planned team development, mostly through training. Having less money in circulation means that the general price level will be lower for players - but that doesn't affect your power to swap training product surplus with another manager. The only impact is that for higher-level teams where player wages become a significant factor, life is tougher... and that makes the game more interesting because a new user will catch up with the teams above quicker.

Viktor

Answer 6

All game economies will self regulate. They just probably won't self-regulate the way you want them to.

What people usually mean when they talk about regulating economies in games is preventing cash inflation. While you can talk about sinks and faucets (and there's a lot of good information in those discussions), the first thing you need to talk about is what the value of your currency is - or, more accurately, what its utility is.

The two problems that tend to tear apart game economies are:

1. Higher "level" players get exponentially more income (in terms of pure cash from the system) than lower level players.
2. Cash is of limited use at higher levels.

The combination of these two is deadly. The best thing you can do for a game is to ensure that you currency has actual utility to the players, and has effectively infinite utility to high level players. If you look back at Diablo II, gambling was a very smart (though insufficient) form of this - it could suck up infinite amounts of money very quickly.

If I was designing an economy for a game, I'd start with the assumption that all players generate a roughly equivalent amount of "cash" per hour. However, higher level players can make more cash by selling their goods to lower level players, giving both a reason for social interaction as well as dampening the cash inflow into the game.