Hey guys!
Here is this month's Dev Roundtable featuring Brad McQuaid, Ben Dean and myself - Ben Walters
https://youtu.be/Kl-IxcCNNBw
I hope you all enjoy!
Awesome thanks!
And yes, ben, Start with 7 dwarfs kind of thing. people are used ot it. and if that kind of sub level of faction is in game it will work, the NPC's will become real.
I am only 3 min in. heh. Post launch also makes sense and will not taske away form immersion, where the NPC was indifferent, and is now snobbish after a year(maybe after a release)- makes sense in a living world.
Thanks! Always great to hear from you, but really the main thing I got out of this was that VR has a dedicated economist helping to balance the in-game economy. That's really important and something that I think most companies don't bother doing. Glad to see VR understands the need for long-term health in the economy. They're really cutting no corners.
But what are the qualifications of the economist? What school did he matriculate from? What are his publications? Neo-Keynsian, Neo-Classical, etc.? What if he is a supply-sider? Then we're all screwed.
Mal
You can have 10 economists, but as long as mobs drop equippable items and currency directly.. the economy will end up the same as every other game that suffers from infinite taps and not enough sinks, EQ1 and Vanguard included.
I'll be interested in seeing what mechanics they implement to directly address this issue, or if they just ignore it like everyone else. So far, without any details revealed, it's no better or worse than any other hypothetical exercise.
vjek said:You can have 10 economists, but as long as mobs drop equipable items and currency directly.. the economy will end up the same as every other game that suffers from infinite taps and not enough sinks, EQ1 and Vanguard included. I'll be interested in seeing what mechanics they implement to directly address this issue, or if they just ignore it like everyone else. So far, without any details revealed, it's no better or worse than any other hypothetical exercise.
I do not agree, I had many friends in EQ that were forever broke in game, hence why gold farmers made a lot of money from various games. Now it should not swing so far as to be like a certain other game from a frosty company where gold is next to useless other than repairs. I have not really found a need for gold over the last few expansions, and even playing some FF14 seems gold is not needed at least for leveling beyond repairs, and travel. So I like the detail and thought behind VR's concept of economy.
vjek said:You can have 10 economists, but as long as mobs drop equippable items and currency directly.. the economy will end up the same as every other game that suffers from infinite taps and not enough sinks, EQ1 and Vanguard included.
I'll be interested in seeing what mechanics they implement to directly address this issue, or if they just ignore it like everyone else. So far, without any details revealed, it's no better or worse than any other hypothetical exercise.
Realistic economy where time spent farming does not equal ingame money will simply bore and turn away players from the game. Asking for people to be rich only if others are poor is not what I would call an enjoyable game for everyone, it would just be like RL, and we're not playing games to feel the very same rules in it.
Slowing the process of inflation, maybe. Cutting it to a finite amount of goods, is just like making sure the game will not last long.
Agreed, and that isn't a solution I've ever suggested.
There are many better solutions than the logically flawed premise of a finite amount of goods or currency.
Sounds like we need another kickstarter to give Brad some time off. He sounded very, very tired.
Edit: Kilsin, your audio was very low compared to Brad and OtherBen(tm), for whatever that's worth.
vjek said:You can have 10 economists, but as long as mobs drop equippable items and currency directly.. the economy will end up the same as every other game that suffers from infinite taps and not enough sinks, EQ1 and Vanguard included.
I'll be interested in seeing what mechanics they implement to directly address this issue, or if they just ignore it like everyone else. So far, without any details revealed, it's no better or worse than any other hypothetical exercise.
I see it like that too . It doesn't need an economist to find out that in a system where monetary creation is proportional to time and the monetary mass tends to infinity while monetary destruction is largely inferior , the result is high inflation .
So unless they find a way to destroy money in a creative way and fun for the players (nobody found it sofar) there will be a high inflation in Pantheon like in every other game where killed mobs drop money and items that can be sold for money to NPC .
Any MMO economy has multiple aspects you need to consider:
Most obvious of course is faucets and sinks. You have currency entering the economy, and you need a way to take currency out.
However you also want that currency to actually circulate between players once it's there. So, you need to think about supply and demand as well. Oversupply or overdemand situations can exacerbate problems caused by currency bloat.
Finally, what's probably most important for any MMO is the ability to track currency circulation so that the game can be adjusted if/when needed. If you don't have the capability to spot that supply of a particular item is trending upward at an unsustainable rate, then you won't know about the problem until the value of that item has completely tanked, and the ripple effects of that have started impacting the value of other items.
I imagine the economist they're working with is helping them to think about how they can monitor, manage, and maintain the game's economy over time in all respects.
Link to autotext from Reddit Post.
(not mine, but it's a reasonable facsimile of a transcript)
I'm not terribly concerned with the ficticious economy although I know it has its place... if I'm a broke master blacksmith or a super wealthy goblin slayer I won't care much. I'm better dealing with ficticious money sinks as opposed to real life time sinks because I don't mind being broke in an imaginary world as long as my time spent in that world doesn't adversly affect my real life wealth or health.
There's been a tremendous number of good ideas to encourage that behavior presented on these forums (and others) over the years.
Succinctly, they come down to three main categories. donation, salvage, and sacrifice.
Sacrifice is where you take your item and place it on an altar to a god, it's consumed, and you recieve a benefit from it. Typically something like faction, deity currency, no-sell-value crafting fuel/other, temporary abilities, skills, or spells, no-rent powerful consumables, or powerful buffs lasting for extended periods of time.
Donation is where you give the items to NPCs to satisfy their needs, desires, tasks, quests, or to gain faction. Rewards are typically things like access to consumables, services, gear, equipment, buffs, access widgets, quests, maps, training, or whatever other thing you want. This is significantly diffferent from sacrifice in that a god is specifically not involved, although NPC factions almost always are.
Salvage is of course, pretty straightforward, you salvage the item and depending on what salvage skill you use from your profession, you get different raw materials out of the object. What you get could either be enchantments, components, raws, interim objects, refined objects, fuel or any other crafting widget except a finished product.
For all of the above (and other similar mechanics) desirability is trivial to adjust by adjusting the rewards for the actions. You could, for example, make it so incredibly overpowered that everyone would sacrifice all their gold and items at the start or end of any/all play sessions. ( if buffs only count down while you're offline, and persist through server restarts or zone crashes.)
The concern about economy comes into play as soon as a rare items is a demanded item. As soon as one guild corners the market on a raid zone or boss that drops the loot all of us peons can't get. Thats when the gold starts to inflate. I saw it first hand in EQ2. First few years. 100 plat was a lot, last few years 100 plat is what we threw at the drunks and watched them fight for it.