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Fees & Taxes
One common way to deal with this in real economies is to add a periodic fee that redistributes hoarded wealth back into the community. A few forms this can take:
Wear on gear items that requires they be repaired periodically, so even a player who's hit a steady state and buys no new items still needs to pay NPCs (or other players) for ...
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There is a critical flaw in your system. You assume players will play forever. In the real world, this is the case. "Players" keep "playing" the game until they die, and then their remaining wealth gets redistributed to their heirs.
Not so in an MMO.
Players play until they get bored. Then they find a new game and forget about yours. Then their wealth ...
58
The problem with this system is that it just fights the symptom, not the cause.
Inflation means that money loses value, because players have too much of it. It's not the items which become more expensive, it's the money which becomes less valuable.
When nobody needs money, they won't sell anything to the trading house (I won't call it "auction" house, ...
27
Publilius Syrus clearly stated it already in ~100 BC: Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. Adam Smith explained why: prices represent an intersection of supply and demand curves.
You ignore the basic fundamentals, with a result we know all too well from failed non-capitalist economies: there's simply excess demand or excess supply. What'...
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Gameplay reasons
Many players would like to have online games as a fair competition where the most skilled (or most determined) players are most successful. Other players buying their way to success by using money they acquired outside of the game could be seen as detrimental to their game experience.
Economical reasons
Many games have an item mall as one ...
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Some suggestions to bring more cards into the game:
When a player wins a match, reward them with two cards: One from the losers deck and one newly created one. You might also consider giving a generated card to the loser to compensate for the loss, otherwise they would progress backwards, which is a real motivation breaker.
Reward players for playing by ...
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Background
In the real world, there are (almost) no Scrooge McDucks. Instead rich people invest most of their surplus money, i.e., they lend it to other people.
Suggestion
Let x be the amount of gold available per player (1000 or 10000 in your examples).
Every piece of gold that a player has above x is available for lending to shopkeepers, i.e., your ...
12
This basically boils down to basic economic theory, more specifically the concept of market transparency.
When someone wants to buy or sell a fungible good (like most items in a common MMO game), they will look for the best available offer on the market and take it. In order to find this offer, they need to obtain full market transparency by looking at all ...
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Nickson104 already wrote a pretty nice summary in his comment.
I've been playing the game since early beta and I prefer the small AHs, so this might be a bit subjective, but overall the most important points have been mentioned already:
A global AH makes it far easier for players to find the item they want at the cheapest price (which they usually want as ...
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My question is why are there not more games which take this approach
of a game economy tied directly to real money?
I think the answer lies in what a game is. To most people, a game is something where you relax and can have carefree fun.
Some people will have more fun if game money is real money, but others will have less fun. So inherently it seems ...
8
When you allow players to not just pay you money but also get out money, your game can easily fulfill the definitions of both banking and gambling which are both heavily regulated in many jurisdictions. While some game companies might feel comfortable with managing a gambling business, very few possess the know-how which is necessary for operating a bank in ...
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A far simpler, easier to implement and easier to balance solution than the other one I proposed before (although with less gameplay depth):
Have a function NpcSellPrice(stock) for each commodity where stock represents how many units the NPC currently owns. Any implementation would do as long as more stock means that the NPC sells at a lower price. It doesn'...
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EDIT: Since you added to your question that the resources are static, I’ll talk a bit about that specifically. I’ll leave the previous answer below the line as it might be useful to other people.
If your resources are static, there is going to be some limiting factor on them. This may be your starting resources or worker count that determine how many ...
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Provide your Scrooge McDucks with an alternative commodity they could hoard instead of money. E.g. sell super-expensive unique items from time to time, or give people visible achievements for acquiring a certain amount of useless goods which cannot be sold back to the shopkeeper.
As for money lost in abandoned accounts, you could do the following. Every ...
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Having a single currency is not simple at all for monetization. This is because you would have to implement many efficient money sinks in the game to stop players from grinding their way to unlocking all content/items. Without good sinks, there is no incentive to buy IAPs. I suppose in terms of coding it might be slightly more complicated, but with a single-...
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The most easy is to empty the market, wait for the price to adjust, then sell everything back.
This implies that if the price for a unit of coal while there is 100 units left in stock is at 50 gold, and you purchase the whole lot of 100 units, you'll pay 100 * 50 = 5000.
That's not the correct way to look at it.
Games such as Port Royale 3 have this as a ...
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New answer
Due to the comments, I will assume that network latency is not a problem, and forget about the server side.
At the end it depends on whatever or not the developers facilitate (or enforce) player migration.
There are few reasons for the developers to want to keep multiple servers despite not having hardware or network limitations.
And yes, ...
5
The reason is often that the crafting process itself has no cost. If crafting is nothing but pressing a button, then you can not expect players to pay each other just to press that button.
If you want crafting to create value in your game economy, then you have to make crafting itself more expensive for the player.
Make crafting more complicated than ...
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Most RPGs provide a ton of loot to sell. In 'Gothic', you didn't have money, but traded magical ore as hard currency aka sound money. But if the supply of tradeable items with a vendor was up, tough luck. Nothing to get from that person anymore. (Ignoring exploits like waiting for swords to spawn in the blacksmith's inventory so he can play his sharpening ...
4
Keeping in mind that in a perfect market, one has to know everything about the market (this includes of course price and quantities available):
With a local market:
More chances to get ripped off (because you don't know all the prices)
More possibilities to rip others off (because they don't know all the prices)
More chances for a local monopoly (because ...
4
Well why not model your economy system after a real economy? Maybe have a supply variable that for each item in circulation (i.e. if you sell ten bushels of wheat to one vendor, 17 to another, and 2 to a third, then this supply variable for the wheat is 29) and have another variable, demand, that fluctuates based on some sense of demand that your citizens in ...
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Look at the Circular flow of income model used in real-world Economics.
One of the best ways to redistribute money is to look at supply and demand. Do the players with most of the wealth have an incentive to spend their money? If not, they won't.
Another way to redistribute wealth is to use Fiscal policy (taxation). By charging a small amount of tax at a ...
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The average winrate between a player who loses all their pieces and one who gains all those pieces is 50%, but the player who loses all their pieces then goes on to make a new account, so now amongst those two people there are three complete sets of pieces, and you have inflation.
As for the middle and high-rank players accumulating more pieces over time ...
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Put a limit on how much money there is in the game. You can accomplish that by avoiding any sources of money which can be exploited over and over again (like respawning enemies which drop money or sellable loot). Now you know exactly how much money the player can collect at most during their playthrough.
Make sure there is more stuff the player would like to ...
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Note that Diablo 3 had the real-money auction house. (before it was removed)
How it worked: Players could purchase in-game digital items from other players using real money. There was a similar, but separate, auction house doing the same thing using in-game gold. The items are sold similar to how many MMOs have some version of an "auction house". A small ...
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You can calculate all the income and all the costs (money that sinks) from every user in the game
This is correct. You might also want to consider what players quitting or becoming inactive does to the amount of circulating currency as well if that is possible.
I believe that having a small positive percentage is not inflation
This is not correct. Any ...
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You can do this quite effectively with the following approach:
Give each product an "attribute vector" (quality variables such as amount of crunchiness, whatever....)
Create pool of 1,000 customers or so to represent the market
Give each customer a "taste vector" - i.e. how much they value each product attribute
Each customer evaluates all products, and ...
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Both methods definitely result in large gameplay variations, so it depends what you're looking for. Here are some thoughts, based on common implementations:
Shared
Basic necessities should be accessible to everyone. If the shops can be bought out by other players, then there should be an alternate means of acquiring the items (such as crafting). Otherwise ...
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