When I started driving, gas was 68 cents per gallon. Now, its almost $6 a gallon. But I am older and able to make more income so the inflation is somewhat proportional and (relatively speaking) it costs me about as much. If gas was still under a dollar today, buying gas wouldn't even be an economic contributor it would just be an annoying nuisance.
In MMORPG's a level 2 player might spend 4 gold to buy a port stone or pay an NPC for some service or buy an item. They have to work for an hour to afford those items. So the cost should be in TIME not money. A level 20 player that needs those same things can buy them with a minutes farming work and it is just an annoyance and time waster. So perhaps inflation should hit each player differently, based on their level. Services cost level X 10 or something. A formulaic approach (exponential is more accurate). This slows mudflation, makes all those things still matter and doesn't harm the low level players.
The maths of economic systems hurts my brain, even closed systems, so I won't try and come up with a fix here!
But the concept of money being time-related is interesting.
Not so much charging more for higher level characters, but maybe not giving high level characters more cash, so they tend to earn the same at any level.
Nope. Still hurts my brain.
Slowing mudflation is good and any service that is generally needed by players of all levels might well benefit from a 'coefficient of level' in their cost. While I see a challenge in how to calculate that cost, it would be good to do if a solution was found.
The problem is that the 'range of wealth' between players of a given level can be much higher in an MMO than in the real world. Players do not 'need a job' to survive in an MMO and so can play the game enjoyably & successfully with just the money they acquire from adventuring. Other players can spend time grinding for wealth and become magnitudes richer than those in the first example, to a greater degree than most people can achieve in real life.
The higher up characters level, the greater this disparity can become. Which leaves me wondering how to set a price that doesn't force a significant number of players to grind money just to afford a fairly necessary service or item, while being a significant cost for the uber rich.
I think the best approach is to attempt to limit the growth of player wealth to begin with. VR has suggested that they are trying to do that, whether they succeed only time will tell.
Jothany said: ... I think the best approach is to attempt to limit the growth of player wealth to begin with. ...
IMO:
Agreed, yet..
I've never seen a development team with the appetite to actually implement the wide variety of solutions that accomplish that design goal.
In fact, I've never seen a dev team even seriously discuss the possibility of limiting the growth of player wealth.
It ends up just being: tradeable coin currency and 'everyone is rich', and in-game wealth is a factor of time spent or RMT.
If you don't design the core of the game with the economy in mind, and have the limits there from the start, it will be a broken/wrecked/artificial/RMT/ML economy from the word "Go!", as history has shown in every fantasy-themed MMO that has done it that way. Gold farmers, gold sellers, gold buyers. Guaranteed.
I want...Someone with the attitude of the comic shop guy in the Simpsons, but with a good heart, who is paid enough by VR to be happy and who has enough people around him/her/they that are impressed and eat up the ...stuff...they lay down when they talk about their job which is managing the economy of ths MMO. As banks dry up I want busniess week to do an article on VR using an economist and have MBA's and middle aged professionals look at the career opportunities trailblazed by Pantheon and go -wut? to the point where resumes come in from like Ex-Fed chairmen wanting to "dabble" for a fee of course to which the team at VR can sniff at them and say- we'll see and take them down a peg or two because it is the very foundation of consolidating all the crypto currencies that are outthere similar to consolidating confederate currency into one national currency after the civil war or perhaps as Brexit allowed Brittain to leave the EU which was a consolidation maybe the model of EU can be used to consolidate all the cryptos but I digress. or maybe the model of the ECU, remember that? anybody still have the ECU coin? no? why not? *points, smiling confidently, knowingly and kindly just to the right and behind*
Implement a tax upon sale based upon a formula that is tweaked by some omnipotent overlord. Factors are player level, items in the world, current economy health, whether the player is dressed nice, how many loaves of banana nut bread they bought from StoneFish. Any time a detrimental exploit is discovered, thank the exploiters for finding it and tax them but provide a token badge or trinket as reward. Social manipulation is a fun and enjoyable task if you are on the side of angels.
I was very, very good at making money in EverQuest. For example, I wanted an Earring of Living Slime that only dropped for less than two weeks before it was removed from the loot table. I created an alt on every server old enough to have it dropped, and evaluated the major guilds on each one.
I chose the server most likely to eventually yield the Earring for sale, and started eith a 1st level Cleric, with bone chips and spider silk, bought and resold hit point and focus gear until in less than six months I had amassed over one million platinum pieces. The very next morning, the Earring was for sale for exactly one million platinum. I bought it, and transfered my trader and all he could carry to my home server, where my Magician equipped it, one of only a few on that server.
It's not a tale of slaying monsters (other than skeletons and giant spiders), but it is a triumph over great odds.
I use the skills I honed, in Faydark, East Commonlands, and the Bazaar every day, buying, pricing and reselling Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. The story of making gold is a story worth telling. Just ask Rumpelstiltskin.
The way Pantheon minimizes inflation is player interdependence. Slow travel, limits on crafting, regional distribution of materials, dependence on group content and raids, combined with a judicious count of money and material sinks, with Visionary Realms keeping their hands on the knobs, should be good enough.
Throttling individual players from making money is a poor way to manage an economy.
This topic has been promoted for my CM content, please continue the discussion and have fun! :)
"Hot Topic - Inflationary Services - How do you think inflation should work in Pantheon? Have your say in the fan-created thread on our official forums. https://seforums.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/13816/inflationary-services #MMORPG #CommunityMatters #games"
Inflation is something that is extremely difficult to prevent in an MMO. I honestly don't even know if it's possible to prevent it without doing something extremely limiting to the player's experience.
I think gold sinks are probably the best way to attempt to circumvent inflation.
These gold sinks should probably include:
1. Repair costs
2. Bank expansion cost
3. Trading post fees
4. Some extremely expensive items that have lasting player value (mounts, legendary item components, reputation vendor rewards)
6. Player housing
7. Guild management fees: possibly a fee to increase roster size, guild bank expansion, a guild rewards vendor with rewards tied to guild level/ guild achievements. Maybe every month there is a fee that a guild has to pay to a fee to keep perks active, or to have access to certain features.
The issue with online games is that, with infinite respawns, scarcity ceases to exist as a factor in resource distribution. You could make plat completely meaningless by having level 1 mobs drop a million of it, or remove it entirely from the game, and it won't matter because there will always be something of relative scarcity and value that players will accept as the default medium of trade, e.g. Stone of Jordan in Diablo 2.
In a game where each individual player has the potential to achieve every feat, and obtain every piece of gear in the game they desire, any attempts to control inflation will feel artificial and hamfisted, because that's exactly what they will be.
WolfySins said:This strikes me as unnecessary complexity. Dealing with mudflation is one thing. But the idea that a top level character should spend an hour to buy a basic bag is ridiculous to me.
IMO:
I agree with you, WolfySins. It's also probably not Fun for the average potential customer in the target demographic. If your character can't accumulate currency, wealth, reputation, faction, or some other "thing" of value (in some form or fashion) then that's a form of tangible personal player progression that is lost.
Depending on implementation features:
Sliding inflation, personal inflation, or similar dynamically adjusted costs are generally un-fun, and i'm not aware of a prod MMO (made in north america, fantasy themed 1st/3rd person) that utilizes global currency generated for all time as a modifier for all or personalized NPC costs. Why not? Because new players would either be unable to obtain their necessities in the case of a non-personalized implementation, or alts/alt accounts would simply be used to purchase without penalty, with a personalized implementation.
It also potentially lets other/a small number of players negatively impact the gameplay experience of a vast number of players, over time, if inclined. (by increasing/hoarding the coin currency supply)
And it would potentially make the oldest servers the least attractive, as their economy would be the most skewed.
Emergent player behavior (as a consequence of having fixed resource output per enemy from the combat loop, but rising costs for necessities) would likely be negative. :)
And likely many other 'gotchas'.
There are better ways, but it would require some very simple, transparent and direct public design goals or scope or context first, before iterating on the details of implementation options.
As you grow in level and power the same items should be easier to obtain a basic bag may be an hours work for a level 2 but should be trivial for a level 20. that being said, the economy should represent the wealth available in the game. vendor prices should adjust as more money enters the game and bigger ticket items should enter the market.
Macro economics is tough and there are a lot of theories out there, but i think we should look at the rate of sale of items in the game from NPCs and adjust the price to match the rates we want to see these things purchased at. while at release a high quality backpack may be a somewhat difficult item to obtain, 2 years in, it'll be pretty common. that's to be expected. as money enters the economy, the things you can do with it should improve as well.
since this is largely a player-driven economy and less what the NPCs have anyway, it's mostly a moot point since supply/demand will kind of sort itself out. in a perfect system you'd have money sinks that nearly equal the amount of money entering the market after accounting for labor and new resources. without a system for items to deteriorate and need to be replaced (a bad idea imo), it'll be hard to manage an always growing market.
just my thoughts, i don't really know much about econ.
Screw it, institute a progressive wealth tax at regular intervals.
FatedEmperor said:Inflation is something that is extremely difficult to prevent in an MMO. I honestly don't even know if it's possible to prevent it without doing something extremely limiting to the player's experience.
I think gold sinks are probably the best way to attempt to circumvent inflation.
These gold sinks should probably include:
1. Repair costs
2. Bank expansion cost
3. Trading post fees
4. Some extremely expensive items that have lasting player value (mounts, legendary item components, reputation vendor rewards)
6. Player housing
7. Guild management fees: possibly a fee to increase roster size, guild bank expansion, a guild rewards vendor with rewards tied to guild level/ guild achievements. Maybe every month there is a fee that a guild has to pay to a fee to keep perks active, or to have access to certain features.
These have all been tried and would have to be prohibitive to new players to have any effect on old players.
The only method to limit inflation is remove gold farming. No vendors buying items, limited cash drops from mobs, no spam crafting for skill (they said they are doing this). Remove the ability of bots (and over zealous players) from farming excessive cash. It will make trading difficult, as people will prefer barter (which some would love).
Heebs said: There are plenty of ways to reduce mudflation, they just need to be monitored and controlled. Having higher repair costs as you level and get better gear or having expensive reagents for higher level spells are two easy and oft-used examples. If VR really wants to get experimental and creative, they could code it in such a way that the more money that exists on a player's account or even on the entire server, the more money these commodities cost. Tis no longer 1999. These problems are known, as are solutions to them. It's just a matter of fine-tuning.
How do you differentiate between someone repairing top end gear that can barely afford it, or stops using items because repair is too high, and a player that can play 12+ hours a day and has 100,000,000 gold?
To the extent the issue is viewed as money becoming irrelevent because high level characters have so much they can afford anything that NPCs sell - that is one thing.
To the extent the issue is that they have so much money that they bid up the price of items sold by other players to the point where a new player without high level alts cannot afford anything on the broker/auction house - that is another.
To the extent that a high level is so rich they can "twink" a low level alt or friend with all it could ever want - that is yet a third thing.
I see no solution to points two and three. High levels will always have wealth beyond the dreams of avarice from the perspective of a brand new player. Make sure NPcs can sell all that a new character really needs at affordible prices. Otherwise - that is life.
Point 1 - come up with money sinks that cost enough to drain cash from the high levels and are essential enough that the great bulk of high levels will actually use them. For example - you cannot log off in the one high level "zone" without having a room at an inn. No loitering allowed. And inn prices are *really* outrageous. You don't like it - travel an hour to a cheaper area to log off.
Silvermink said:FatedEmperor said:Inflation is something that is extremely difficult to prevent in an MMO. I honestly don't even know if it's possible to prevent it without doing something extremely limiting to the player's experience.
I think gold sinks are probably the best way to attempt to circumvent inflation.
These gold sinks should probably include:
1. Repair costs
2. Bank expansion cost
3. Trading post fees
4. Some extremely expensive items that have lasting player value (mounts, legendary item components, reputation vendor rewards)
6. Player housing
7. Guild management fees: possibly a fee to increase roster size, guild bank expansion, a guild rewards vendor with rewards tied to guild level/ guild achievements. Maybe every month there is a fee that a guild has to pay to a fee to keep perks active, or to have access to certain features.These have all been tried and would have to be prohibitive to new players to have any effect on old players.
The only method to limit inflation is remove gold farming. No vendors buying items, limited cash drops from mobs, no spam crafting for skill (they said they are doing this). Remove the ability of bots (and over zealous players) from farming excessive cash. It will make trading difficult, as people will prefer barter (which some would love).
Silvermink said:How do you differentiate between someone repairing top end gear that can barely afford it, or stops using items because repair is too high, and a player that can play 12+ hours a day and has 100,000,000 gold?
Inflation is bad for every game. Artificial barriers to prevent the most ambitious players from making money is also bad.
It is a matter of keeping currency sources relatively low at all levels, while keeping the costs of upkeep relevant, and the costs of desirable milestones (mounts, entry fees, housing) out of reach in the near term price wise.
Exponentially increasing the per-kill value of mobs through direct coins or dropped item value as levels increase is a common mistake which leads to players rushing to max level before stopping to earn money. Linear value increases are far more stable. For example; If killing a level 10 mob yields 10 copper in value, a level 50 mob should yield 50 copper in value. This has to be layered with TTK adjustments so that it is not vastly more efficient for a level 50 to slay level 10 stuff all day rather than level 50 stuff. One solve for this is to stack most of the value at low levels in items rather than coin. That way a high level player killing extremely fast has to journey back to a city to unload full bags frequently compared to an appropriate level player who could spend an entire session filling his bags before returning. The item values should be vendor based, not player market based because player-to-player economies don't cause inflation since they don't add money to the system, they just move it around between players.
Poor economy design is one culprit of inflation, but one of the largest contributors to inflation in every game for the last 24 years has been hackers/exploiters obtaining in-game items and money unfairly and then selling them for real money in through third party websites. So along with good economy design, I believe that server hardening, hack detection, and exploit prevention are the most important factors to preventing unwanted inflation.
FatedEmperor said:So, basically, remove all gold from the game. I... mean you're not wrong. That would definitely stop inflation.
Is it actually a public design goal for the artificial economy to:
- Utilize individual wealth as a progression system? y/n
- Permit and/or encourage direct player to player trading? y/n
- Prevent RMT? ( https://itlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Real_money_transactions ) y/n
- Prevent Money Laundering? ( https://seforums.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/13362/community-opinion-rwt-gold-sellers-bots-and-spammers/view/post_id/257730 ) y/n
If you can get an official answer to any or all of those, then you can move on to:
Will the game have, as fundamental, core, or basic mechanics, as part of the combat or adventure loop:
- Coin currency drops directly from creatures? y/n
- Items (that can be equipped as gear, armor, weapons, etc directly, without any extra steps) drop directly from creatures? y/n
- Shared, competitive loot (not personal loot, not smart loot, not anything similar) for both quest and non-quest items? y/n
Will the game have, as fundamental, core, or basic mechanics, as part of the harvesting or crafting/tradeskills loop:
- Any coin currency value for any harvested, salvaged (or similarly generated or acquired) resource? y/n
- Any coin currency value for any object, item, subcomponent or similar between harvested resource and finished product? y/n
- Any coin currency value for any object, item, consumable or similar that is a finished product? y/n
(these three mean, can you sell it to an NPC and get coin currency)
And finally, will the game have, as fundamental, core, or basic mechanics, as part of any game loop:
- NPCs that purchase items in exchange for coin currency? y/n
- NPCs that sell items in exchange for coin currency? y/n
- Tradeable coin currency, between players? y/n
Answering each of those will get the community of interest heading down the right lines regarding the actual problems that need to be solved, but.. It's not a complete or even exhaustive list.
From what I've seen, it's easier to design the system with what can be done, rather than what can't be done.
A few years ago, I went through that exercise on Pantheon Crafters, with the help of the community there, and came up with this:
( https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hve7JLZcJVIc4XE9KjrPeNs6aPQ85p6y/ )
Now, while that is a design that solves many of the issues, it may not be appropriate for Pantheon. Especially in light of the developer responses to date regarding the economy. A pretty straightforward alteration to what is described in that document would be a hybrid model that used coin currency in place of social currency, but there would be consequences.
So far, from what I've seen from Visionary Realms, there is no official answer to any of these, OR the answers are such that they will simply permit RMT/ML/Inflation/etc, all the bad things, because there is no interest in dealing with it. OR the answers are vague and nebulous, and contradict every single video that's ever been shown and every single developer post on the topic to date.
What do I mean by that?
A good example is here, when I tried to get Brad to confirm just one of the above in 2017:
https://seforums.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/6907/proper-and-sustainable-implementation/view/post_id/127221
Nope, no dice. Every video shown from 2014 to 2022 that shows looting shows creatures dropping coin and/or loot directly, but.. no developer confirmation, because.. once they do, you will know for a certainty if their actions match their words. Once there is confirmation of each of these, stick a fork in it, it's done. Why?
On one hand, you'll have developers using buzzwords like "player driven economy" but there is absolutely no indication this is even slightly possible with the harvesting and crafting mechanics shown to date, in any meaningful way. How can players provide consumables for thousands of players per hour? If they don't, how is the consumable market, in any meaningful way, player driven? And, in opposition to such a goal, creatures will drop completed items, ready to equip directly, along with tradeable coin currency and possibly consumables.
So, hold on.. and re-read that. "creatures will drop completed items, ready to equip directly, along with tradeable coin currency." If that is possible? Your artificial economy is snafubar from day 1, and nothing is going to change that until one or all of those things isn't true. :)
History has proven it tens, possibly hundreds of times since M59 in 1995.
Yet, designers and developers keep repeating the same mistake expecting a different outcome, and.. it's a bit sad, given yet another missed opportunity.
That's why you see developers & designers hesitating to confirm these types of things, because it confirms their actions do not align with their tenets.
If you claim you want to address inflation, yet every eononomic-related game system & loop enables and promotes inflation, objectively, how is the original statement true?
I'll be explicit here, so there's no misunderstanding. As several other people in this thread and hundreds of others have noted over the years, on these forums, personal wealth is simply a factor of time, in MMOs. If you can make 100 gold an hour, then you can make at least 1200 gold a day, and at least 36,000 gold a month, and multiply that out by accounts, and then ramp it up by running 24x7. Similarly if you can make 10 gold an hour, or 1000. Whatever the value is, the creatures that drop the most sellable loot, the most lucrative items, the most coin directly, or any other thing, will be known long before launch. Or harvest bots, if any resource or any part of the crafting loop can be sold to NPCs for coin.
Then, the gold farmers start their 24x7 operations on launch day, and put their gold on their gold selling site, and start selling, on launch day.
The only way to even ATTEMPT to stop it is to start with something like making coin currency untradeable between players. That is not the whole solution, that's a potential start of many potential solutions. It's not a solution in isolation.
But, if you're not willing to start with something like that one simple step? Everyone is rich, enjoy your inflation.
And yes, the time to make such changes is in pre-alpha, because the exact same people that say "we need to wait until after pre-alpha before we design the economy.." will be the same people saying "it's too late to change anything, we're out of pre-alpha" when it's too late.
Duplication bugs can cause inflation or deflation, depending on what's duplicated, and transactional integrity avoids this.
A transaction is a series of changes in records that either succeed entirely, or fail completely. Transactional integrity requires that there are no partial transactions.
For example, if I deposit a check from you, the transaction is complete when my balance increases by the appropriate amount, and your balance decreases by that amount. It either goes through all the way, or it fails completely.
To prevent duplication bugs, every transfer of resources from one game location to another must be in the form of a transaction.
Not just between two players' inventories, or between a player and the bank or NPC merchant, but looting a corpse, moving stuff between bags, dropping items on the ground, giving equipment to a pet, putting crafting components into a workstation, or removing intermediate or finished products from a workstation. Everything.
Either the transaction completes, or if it does not, it fails, and is rolled back to its prior state.
This is worth spending code and CPU cycles on.
FatedEmperor said:Inflation is something that is extremely difficult to prevent in an MMO. I honestly don't even know if it's possible to prevent it without doing something extremely limiting to the player's experience.
I think gold sinks are probably the best way to attempt to circumvent inflation.
These gold sinks should probably include:
1. Repair costs
2. Bank expansion cost
3. Trading post fees
4. Some extremely expensive items that have lasting player value (mounts, legendary item components, reputation vendor rewards)
6. Player housing
7. Guild management fees: possibly a fee to increase roster size, guild bank expansion, a guild rewards vendor with rewards tied to guild level/ guild achievements. Maybe every month there is a fee that a guild has to pay to a fee to keep perks active, or to have access to certain features.
I tend to agree with this. There are certainly more aggressive ways to attack it but from what I have seen they tend to be more harmful to the general player experience than the problem itself.
I feel like repair costs, bank expansion costs (even to the point of having recurring fees beyond X capacity), non-player to player trading fees, and some very expensive desirable item fees (for crafting and adventuring) can be quite good for a decent amount of time.
I'd add to that mount fees being a big deal if owned mounts are a thing. Expensive to buy and recurring stable fees to own. Also I would like to see a lot more quests that COST money to complete compared to quests that dump money onto players, NPCs who want you to bring them X items + bags full of gold.