Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Money sinks

    • 48 posts
    July 27, 2018 9:26 AM PDT

    Let's discuss and come up with interesting ways to solve the problem of long term inflation that nearly every MMO and RPG eventually suffers from. 

    Tavern games? How about VIP rooms? Not to be confused with the pledges, but just some area that requires continuous payment to get access to that has some sort of interesting stuff inside. 

    • 3852 posts
    July 27, 2018 10:18 AM PDT

    Appliances made out of gold or platinum that cooks use for the washing of food in order to craft.

    Don't glare at me as if I am crazy - it was your idea to have money sinks!

    Taxes - taxes on income, taxes on property, sales taxes, VAT, taxes on use of banks, taxes on use of the auction house, taxes on the air we breath, taxes on ...well let's not go there ((blush)) but endless taxes.

    • 1315 posts
    July 27, 2018 10:35 AM PDT

    What if there was a set amount of coinage in the game and no more could be created?

    Now a large chunk of it would be in the background float account for the server, especially at launch.  Only humanoids and other lore logical situations will reward currency and will only do so while the background float account is positive. 

    The rest of the money will be on the vendor NPCs. They will have starting assets and will keep track of cash balances from buying and selling.  Once their balance hits 0 they will stop buying and will likely offer less for items as their cash gets low, if their on hand cash is very high they may actually pay more for your items. After a certain amount of time their accounts will be refilled from the background float account and conversely if they have too much money it will partially return to the background float account.

    Service NPCs that are not also vendors will have their fees go directly into the background float account or the account of a linked vendor.  Additionally I would have currency banked over a certain level be taxed back to the background float account to prevent hording.

    By limiting the amount of platinum and gold available in the game it will actually make silver and copper relevant as prices for stuff will actually be low enough that people will consider using lower increments.  It’s possible that certain high value commodities might actually become the go to trading currency for very high value item trading.

    Not sure if all of this is worth the effort involved but it would be an interesting in game economy and would go a long way to prevent money hacks as most depend on endless looting or vendor selling.

    Trasak

    P.S.  All items could have a globally tracked buy/sell value that Vendors could use as the basis for what they offer to buy and sell for based on their current cash on hand.

    • 1785 posts
    July 27, 2018 11:28 AM PDT

    dorotea said:

    Appliances made out of gold or platinum that cooks use for the washing of food in order to craft.

    Don't glare at me as if I am crazy - it was your idea to have money sinks!

    Taxes - taxes on income, taxes on property, sales taxes, VAT, taxes on use of banks, taxes on use of the auction house, taxes on the air we breath, taxes on ...well let's not go there ((blush)) but endless taxes.

    LOL dorotea.  Awesome response :)

    As to the topic at hand, here's my thinking based on what we know/suspect from dev conversations so far.

    1) Training costs for new spells/skills/crafting recipes - this provides a money sink while leveling up but does not help past a certain point

    2) Fees associated with buying/selling in regional marketplaces or operating a vendor NPC.  These help, but won't be enough on their own.

    3) Fees associated with fast (not instant) travel between distant locations - e.g rented mounts, etc.  As with sinks on economic activity these help but won't be enough on their own.

    4) Relatively tight controls on character earning power at least at higher levels - but the truth is that money will be farmed no matter how tight the controls are

    5) Possible costs for game-assisted corpse retrieval (I died somewhere and simply can't get back to where my body is, so I can pay to have it summoned).

    Even with all of that it's still probably not enough to be an effective money sink once a large portion of characters have hit the maximum adventuring level.  So there probably needs to be more, but I don't know that more can really be done until an expansion adds some new forms of gameplay for higher-level characters (like housing).  This is a consequence of the design that VR has chosen to use.  We should expect that on older servers as time goes on, there will be more and more money in the hands of players at the top of the economic ladder.  Ideally, in each expansion, something compelling can be introduced that helps drain away some of that money without penalizing newer/poorer players.  If that occurs, the inflation will likely still happen, but at a slower rate than it would have without.

     

    That said there are some things that won't work:

    1) Requiring crafters to spend large amounts of money to enable crafting (EQ style).  This only works in situations where everyone is forced to buy/use crafted goods, the rest of the time, it only punishes the crafters or those who buy from them.

    2) Item wear/decay and repair costs.  In order to matter in the long term, the costs need to be severe, and pushing costs that high, players will rebel.

    3) Adjusting the money rewards from quests and sales of items to NPC as the money supply in game gets larger.  This hurts new players who haven't had the opportunity to earn money, especially without an economy that insures that money circulates.  The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

    I realize I probably come across very cynical here but I'm just being realistic.  Without a provision to actively remove items from the game economy and/or require players to spend significant amounts of money to maintain what they already have, we can't possibly hope for a zero-sum economy.

    • 1479 posts
    July 27, 2018 11:42 AM PDT

    While thoses topics are relevant and legitimate concers about the ingame inflation we all know, the main problem are the consequences of money limitation/sinks of some sorts :

     

    Players play game to be successfull, out of any IRL advantage they would have, they want succes at some level and money is part of it. If money is limited, either player will trade with something else or clever players will find loops or markets where they can slowly drain all the money, hurting everyone's experience, not even talking about inactive players with money on their characters.

    Overall, if there is little to no inflation, for every rich player you will have one, two, or 10 really poor players, and they will end up leaving the game because of that. Of course inflation imply a price increase from player to player (dynamic market), but every static price (merchants and quests) won't be affected and thus, inflation make player wealthier in a big part of their experience.

    • 768 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:02 PM PDT

    A general thought here:

    There are still parts in the real world where actual money has no use and one has to trade in order to get their desired goods.

    Why would this in some regions of the ingame world or for some range of gear/items/tools not be able to work out similarly? I've seen games where a trade window opens up when trading with an npc. And the npc refuses certain items, as he's not interested in them. So why not design certain things so that in order to get that special item/recipe/piece of gear, one has to hand over items instead of a bag filled with coin?

    The items required to complete the trade could be costly etc. 

    Money could still be a part of the game, but Trade on itself might be a part as well. It could help balancing things out in the end. So prices or bankaccounts aren't going out of scale too much?

    Just a thought really. All in all it's going to be one hell of a pickle to keep the monetary side of the game well balanced throughout the years.

    Tokens and such could help but might become redundant with new content. 


    This post was edited by Barin999 at July 27, 2018 12:03 PM PDT
    • 48 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:14 PM PDT

    MauvaisOeil said:

    While thoses topics are relevant and legitimate concers about the ingame inflation we all know, the main problem are the consequences of money limitation/sinks of some sorts :

    Players play game to be successfull, out of any IRL advantage they would have, they want succes at some level and money is part of it. If money is limited, either player will trade with something else or clever players will find loops or markets where they can slowly drain all the money, hurting everyone's experience, not even talking about inactive players with money on their characters.

    Overall, if there is little to no inflation, for every rich player you will have one, two, or 10 really poor players, and they will end up leaving the game because of that. Of course inflation imply a price increase from player to player (dynamic market), but every static price (merchants and quests) won't be affected and thus, inflation make player wealthier in a big part of their experience.

    There could always be some sort of optional/useful mechanic that is designed in such a way to take money away from people to keep the economy stable. This wouldn't affect an attempt to be rich or successful in any way. You wouldn't have to dump money into these things, but the benefits of doing so should be enough incentive. Being that this is a virtual economy, there is much more flexibility in making money go poof for a variety of reasons. The less money in the world, the better.

    • 844 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:16 PM PDT

    Money sinks are not needed if careful economy/harvesting/crafting/tradable drops designs are created.

    Most MMOs get into trouble due to:

    -Dupping/Hacking

    -Bad code from designers that add later content without understanding the initial design, which unbalances the economy.

    • 768 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:20 PM PDT

    Madae said:

    There could always be some sort of optional/useful mechanic that is designed in such a way to take money away from people to keep the economy stable. This wouldn't affect an attempt to be rich or successful in any way. You wouldn't have to dump money into these things, but the benefits of doing so should be enough incentive. Being that this is a virtual economy, there is much more flexibility in making money go poof for a variety of reasons. The less money in the world, the better.

    Lovely idea, perhaps a player needs to pay a fee to the town in order to be able to be allowed to sell or buy there? Another idea would be to pay a broker's fee in order to sell your goods on the local market for a lower price?

    Or perhaps patrolling guards will not "investigate" the player on route when that player has payed his fee towards the town relating to the guards? This ties in neatly with toll fees. It used to be a thing back in the day, to pay up in order to have safe passage etc.  The higher level content you encounter the higher the risks and equal to the amount one needs to pay up to pass through safely.


    This post was edited by Barin999 at July 27, 2018 12:21 PM PDT
    • 1315 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:31 PM PDT

    Nephele said:

    *snip*

    That said there are some things that won't work:

    *snip*

    3) Adjusting the money rewards from quests and sales of items to NPC as the money supply in game gets larger.  This hurts new players who haven't had the opportunity to earn money, especially without an economy that insures that money circulates.  The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

    *Snip*

    Bah in my copy/pasting I lost my bit about coins over a certain value being taxed.  For a “gold standard” style of currency you would need to have some way to break up huge stockpiles.  In P99 terms I would say something like 10% of any coins over 200k pp would decay every month and return to the background fund.

    I know there are economist PHDs who could possibly design the right balance of drops vs rewards vs sinks vs taxes to have effectively a net zero cash flow without having it pool up too much in too few of hands.  What will likely happen is that the super traders will end up keeping items of huge value to evade coin taxes as a way to build up wealth.  Stockpiling large amounts of very high value items is not necessarily bad for the economy but it’s dangerous for the person as a patch could drastically change the value of some of the items.

    If nearly all coins come from vendors or humanoid NPCs it might be much easier to control how much coinage enters the game.  I would also limit the amount of junk items to clog up inventories or to just sell to vendors.  Vendors should pretty much only be interested in items that have intrinsic value or crafting value.

    • 48 posts
    July 27, 2018 12:43 PM PDT

    Limited coinage would actually cause the kind of problem Mauvais was talking about; 1 rich person, 10 poor people. You don't need to apply real world problems to a virtual one; the possibilities are nearly endless here, and there just has to be one good idea to remove wealth from the pool to fix it. Finding that good idea is the issue.

    • 363 posts
    July 27, 2018 1:48 PM PDT

     

    1. Periodic random bank robberies

    2. Super high taxes the wealthy players then divide it amongst the rest of us every month in the form of tiny bags of gold in our mailbox. ;)

    3. When you die the npc's that killed you take a chunk of your money. Kill them to get it back.

     

     

     

    • 48 posts
    July 27, 2018 1:50 PM PDT

    Bronsun said:

    1. Periodic random bank robberies

    3. When you die the npc's that killed you take a chunk of your money. Kill them to get it back.

    I like these, but they would probably be a little too painful for the majority. Pantheon socialism gets a hard pass, though.


    This post was edited by Madae at July 27, 2018 1:51 PM PDT
    • 2138 posts
    July 27, 2018 2:24 PM PDT

    Trasak said:

    Nephele said:

    What will likely happen is that the super traders will end up keeping items of huge value to evade coin taxes as a way to build up wealth.  Stockpiling large amounts of very high value items is not necessarily bad for the economy but it’s dangerous for the person as a patch could drastically change the value of some of the items.

     

    And they will feel the pinch of running out of bag space and maybe have a catharsis that its all really just for fun and become like scrooge on christmas day. But if they persist, with limted chars and bag space? it will be a nice blocker for they would not be able to get the uberest raid item because they have no room! so they will make room, by selling to  a merchant, or dropping the item.

    I can see taxes in entering a city if the city happens to have merchants that have a variety of goods for sale. Where all "silk-roads" lead to this city- or from player driven silk roads.

    I think they should hire an economist, who must also have a char and be required to play x amount of hours per week outside of his "job" of watchig the Terminus economy.

    And I think Mail could be made to be important here. like delivering mail could be like the action fo the federal reserve. If mail is delivered, the township has a boost in funds with which tu buy goods from intinterant travelers. no mail, and things get dry or switch to barter. I would like to see the mundane mail delivery have this sort of impactfull but hidden effect. if the town does superbly well, then NPC's can offer Players to deliver mail for them with a substantial monetary reward (or mount? Pony express!) but it wil only be available spradically, not something that you can predict.

     

    • 752 posts
    July 27, 2018 3:21 PM PDT

    Trasak said:

    What if there was a set amount of coinage in the game and no more could be created?

    Now a large chunk of it would be in the background float account for the server, especially at launch.  Only humanoids and other lore logical situations will reward currency and will only do so while the background float account is positive. 

    The rest of the money will be on the vendor NPCs. They will have starting assets and will keep track of cash balances from buying and selling.  Once their balance hits 0 they will stop buying and will likely offer less for items as their cash gets low, if their on hand cash is very high they may actually pay more for your items. After a certain amount of time their accounts will be refilled from the background float account and conversely if they have too much money it will partially return to the background float account.

    Service NPCs that are not also vendors will have their fees go directly into the background float account or the account of a linked vendor.  Additionally I would have currency banked over a certain level be taxed back to the background float account to prevent hording.

    By limiting the amount of platinum and gold available in the game it will actually make silver and copper relevant as prices for stuff will actually be low enough that people will consider using lower increments.  It’s possible that certain high value commodities might actually become the go to trading currency for very high value item trading.

    Not sure if all of this is worth the effort involved but it would be an interesting in game economy and would go a long way to prevent money hacks as most depend on endless looting or vendor selling.

    Trasak

    P.S.  All items could have a globally tracked buy/sell value that Vendors could use as the basis for what they offer to buy and sell for based on their current cash on hand.

    Too much can go wrong and its should really be a player based economy. 

    • 1120 posts
    July 27, 2018 3:22 PM PDT

    What economy issues do other games have? 

    • 752 posts
    July 27, 2018 3:28 PM PDT
    Economics come down to supply and demand. While i agree we need ways to spend our cash to put it out of the player based economy i think the biggest things we need to look out for are simple. Keep gold farmers from selling thier gains for IRL money. Do NOT introduce anything similar to Kronos, ever. Give us options for level specific loot. By increasing variety and supply you lower demand and lower the cost. Don’t allow for crazy BIS items from low level mobs that promote farming and item hoarding.

    Really the solution is to disallow certain problematic areas to increase the supply so that the demand is lessened. Econ 101.
    • 363 posts
    July 27, 2018 3:34 PM PDT

    Regarding this topic as a whole. The dev's have addressed the subject a little in the live stream. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - CohhCarnage plays the Rogue in Dec 2016. Its around 40:42.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slWD1F7_WUM

     

    • 207 posts
    July 27, 2018 4:56 PM PDT

    If guild housing is in the game, You could have basic up keep charges or taxes on the land. Player storage could also require a small fee....(not such that players won't be able to afford!!!)

    • 1315 posts
    July 27, 2018 5:24 PM PDT

    kreed99 said:

    Trasak said:

    *Limited available amount of currency*

    Trasak

    P.S.  All items could have a globally tracked buy/sell value that Vendors could use as the basis for what they offer to buy and sell for based on their current cash on hand.

    Too much can go wrong and its should really be a player based economy. 

    Bah now you made me think of something else.  Should cash really come from monsters at all then?  If the only way currency should matter is through a player driven economy then the only thing mobs dropping coin does is cause inflation.

    We are still stuck with how to get the money into the market to begin with if it does not drop from monsters directly.  Assuming that you are player Zero and there is no one else with cash it could be as simple as you need to sell dropped items to vendors.  If vendors will buy an unlimited amount of junk then you have the same problem of the monsters dropping cash endlessly.  You are then back to part of my original idea where vendors will only buy a certain amount before they run out of money though if players buy from them the money replenishes.  The vendors with consumables become the go to vendors to sell stuff too as their cash is constantly refilled.

    I am also working on a more complicated NPC Trade Guild idea for crafting and trading focused characters over on PantheonCrafters: NPC Guilds, Another way to play. ( https://www.pantheoncrafters.com/threads/npc-guilds-another-way-to-play.150/ )  The basic idea is the NPC Trade Guilds compete for kingdom contracts by players doing smaller crafting contracts or raw material delivery contracts with benefits for the player if the Trade Guild they support does well.  These trade guild contracts could be a major source of in game hard currency which filters through the other vendors and players.

    • 258 posts
    July 27, 2018 6:57 PM PDT

    I rather like the idea of being able to destroy items (armor, weapons, bags, whatever) for temporary relatively minor but long-lasting "blessings" (bonuses), or to "bank" the visual pixels for cosmetic purposes. I'm on the fence regarding cosmetic gear, but if people have to destroy an item in order to "bank" its appearance for future use, I'm good with that.

    Additionally, both of these things could require a generous donation of currency to some NPC(s).

    Just a thought. Was discussed a bit in another thread iirc.

    • 646 posts
    July 27, 2018 9:36 PM PDT

    I think multiple MMOs have proven how successful a gold sink wardrobe systems can be. So long as the cost to apply appearance skins/dyes isn't too exhorbitant, it's something that people will make use of constantly. For example, I'm always dropping multiple plat on new dye jobs in WildStar because I just can't seem to stop creating new outfits. xD

    • 1860 posts
    July 28, 2018 4:34 AM PDT
    I'm sure baz will be by shortly with links. This has been discussed repeatedly in some fairly long threads.

    There even have been official comments from VR with ways they will minimize mudflation. Off the top of my head, one was that there will be npcs who will offer buffs in exchange for gear/item turn ins.
    • 44 posts
    July 28, 2018 9:46 AM PDT

    Hopefully they dont make crafting overally complicated... I would sink money into crafting if its fairly easy to do.

     

    • 1785 posts
    July 28, 2018 10:03 AM PDT

    Porygon said:

    What economy issues do other games have? 

    Here are some obvious/common ones for you Porygon :)  As a note this isn't all about money, but any time supply/demand get out of whack in an economy, money circulation suffers.

    1) Oversupply situations caused by player farming activity that gets worse over time.  This is true both for rare drops from mobs as well as rare resources from harvesting nodes in most games

    - The effect of this is that over time, "rare" becomes less and less rare.  Given enough time, it generally gets to the point where no one even wants the not-rare versions of things anymore.

    2) Oversupply of low-level/common items from player grinding activity.  This is true both for crafted/dropped items as well as resources.

    - In many games if you look closely enough you can find items listed for sale by players for prices less than NPCs would pay for them.  Essentially, the market for that item is so oversupplied that people are selling at below vendor price.

    3) Reduced demand for lower-level equipment due to natural player progression.  As players level up, naturally their demand shifts to higher and higher level items.

    - This is the sort of problem that hits a game 2-4 years in, when enough of the playerbase reaches high levels that the number of active new players is no longer able to sustain demand for those low-level items.  Usually, demand will drop faster than supply will, because people are still making/looting those low level items, they just have fewer and fewer people to sell to.

    4) Secondary markets overwhelming supply.  In games that allow "used" equipment to be sold to someone else, without some method to pull these items out of the economy, over timeg oth supply and demand will be impacted.

    - Supply impact comes from more and more people putting their old stuff up for sale, and Demand impact comes from more and more people who might want those items getting them from a different source - twinking or gifts.

    5) Currency inflation from player farming activities.  In many games players can and will farm increasing amounts of currency.  Prices are set by what the customer is willing to pay, so over time, the most invested players have more and more buying power.  This has a trickle down effect on the economy as it causes prices to increase not just for those players, but for other players (who might not have a lot of cash) as well

    - Given enough time, this can cause problems for new players entering the game as they simply won't have the buying power to get anything, even things meant for their level.  Games usually band-aid this by increasing coin rewards from lower level coontent, but that is only a short-term relief in most cases.

    To some extent some of these problems will happen in any level-based game.  The trick is how much you can mitigate it up front.  There's a big difference between having the game economy run into problems in the first 12 months vs. having them take 5 years or more to really show up.