One of the hardest parts about designing an MMO (massive multiplayer online game) economy is that people, myself included have a difficult time defining the scope of the economy they wish to design. It's not common to design a real world global market with all the ins and outs of our real life economy and then plop this into an MMO. Your players/consumers are not likely to be economists (though some may very well be!) so one should aim for a system that has an elegance to it. By this I simply mean a system that is robust, allows for players/consumers to approach it in various ways and to sink or swim based on their own merit, instead of predetermined choices.
I will define the economy my staff and I are currently working on in general terms. Please bear with me that I run an Ultima Online Server....and thus am biased towards this flavour of things. I will try to generalize where I can (as we are all not designing UO servers....which is a pity as the world would be a better place).
Classic economic engines especially on nearly every UO server work on the same Resource Generation vs Item Black-hole design. That is resources or items are generated as players encounter them from nothingness, and at the end of their lifecycle they are deleted and removed from the game world. This works in theory, but is often plagued by pitfalls such as item farming, item hoarding and game soloing. All of these severely undermine the economical engine of the game, and often lead to a malfunctioning economy. This is known as an open economy. Content is generated from nothing and fades into nothing over time.
What we on TLEA: The Life Ever After are attempting to do is to create a more closed economic model.
The Closed Economic Model for MMOs
The closed model differs in a key way from the Open Model described above. The closed model attempts to allow the world to run on a set number of resources. For example there may only be 1000 minted gold coins in the game. They don't decay, they don't go away. So it's up to players to interact in whatever way they can to attain wealth. This way some will be rich, some will be poor, and whoever is offering services can make coin, while those who are consuming services will spend coin.
It's a very interesting system as it allows different layers of control to be exerted. If you want to simulate a depression, you can do that but affecting the circulation of gold in the game. You can stop trade between cities, or declare a war. And as bridges are burned, money will stop circulating. You also have more power to "fix" a crashing economy (hey it happens in real life too. America's main man Pres Barak Obama is currently dealing with this....and I thought I had a difficult task ahead of me to get an economy functioning on my shard! sheesh). You can inject money into the mix, you can maximize interactions and allow the money to flow freely again. This will soften up the economy and get things moving once more.
Originally this was the sort of engine we set out to create. Sadly MMO players like to "do" things with their spare time....and don't always like to work. (Why play a game then!? :P). Players love to dungeon crawl for loot, or interact with eachother, or craft things for the hell of it. This is where the problems of a closed system come into play. Loot is a huge problem. Players love finding interesting things. Remember Diablo? Well I do...and I loved seeing what each monster dropped. You want loot to be dynamic, and at the same time you cannot sacrifice your economic model...or you risk economic collapse. What we are exploring right now is having "loot" simply be non-combat role consumables, or various collectables. This way players are not directly adventuring to "farm" cash. Instead they are acquiring resources which they can later sell....and because it's a resource and not coin they have....their sales will be subject to supply and demand. The beautiful thing is...you don't even really have to code an engine to deal with this. Players will automatically work on supply and demand. Buyers will only pay what they think something is worth, sellers will have to drop their prices to accomodate. No one is going to pay 1 million gold for a heap of dirt....especially if you can dig it up anywhere on the map.
But...you can't opt to NOT give loot to players. You also need to allow people to save money. So inflation will just naturally happen. You can't mint 1000 gold and let that be that. Player-bases grow (hopefully ...right?) and as it does more money will be required.
Thus the pure closed model may not quite fit in an MMO environment. But what about a Hybrid?
The Hybrid Economic Model for MMOs
So...open models and closed models both have their problems. What if we combine the two concepts?
My staff and I are currently moving in this direction, to develop a hybrid model on which we can base a robust and simple economy off of. Under this model we allow for some content generation, and we implement a few black holes....but by and large we attempt to keep currency in game and constantly moving.
Here is a quick picture modelling the flow of cash and services.
Under this model cash originates from our "Royalty" or simply put, the town Rulers. This allows a strong foundation, and one that makes sense rp-wise (always a bonus). The system needs to be kickstarted by having Royalty purchase services from the playerbase. They may purchase resources from gatherers, or items from crafters or hire mercenaries from the adventurers...whatever you may think of. At this point small taxes are installed. Such as renting a bigger bank box, or accessing valuable crafting tools or resource areas, also things such as House rentables. This ensures that money is constantly being drained from the playerbase as they acquire services, and is being supplied back into the town leadership. This way players have a constant drive to continue to supply services.....and this equates to "things to do" in game.
We're very close to implementing the system...and it's quite shard specific at the moment so there's no use for me to go into much detail.
But...being a new blogger, I'd love feedback if you read this. Let me know what you think of the ideas, do you have ideas of your own? We can address them in future posts. I love to hear what other MMO developers are thinking, and what they've tried.
Cheers everyone and thanks for reading!
Mideon Quo
Administrator
TLEA: The Life Ever After
http://www.tleauo.com
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