I chuckled out loud at that pun.

..And then you realise that comodity values are subjective, and it breaks down.

Just because effective debt-slavery (what, you thought that called it a mortgage for nothing?) worked for a industrial economy does not mean that it works in a knowledge economy.

Take "Vista creates jobs". Well, yes...by creating deliberate inefficientcies! My response to THAT is "uh".

Anyway, an economy in a MMO is hard, yes. But a market? Perfectly possible, and for most players entirely sufficient. When you have a deacent model of faucets and drains, you can avoid the worst of inflation, and Eve's model "sell gametime and allow its resale for in-game cash" crushed any inflationary pressure from Ebay...

(Then the Eve devs wetn and made market changes which guaranteed inflation anyway, but that's another rant).

Do I win the "when does Crick show up and mention EVE" pool?

...I think I've been down this road before, so I'll say what I said last time.

Why, when Chuck asks for $900, does Betty not just fire up the printing press in the back room of the First Bank of Betty and run off $900? If she thinks Chuck is going to be able to pay back the whole thing with interest, that is.

When Chuck starts a business, he's not just redistributing money, he's trying to create something worthwhile where there wasn't anything before. So there has to be more money in the world to reflect that there's more value in it.

--GF

In theory, the faucets and drains could be tracked and manipulated. Developers would have to create Database reporting tools and someone would have to actually monitor them.

The problem there is that someone would also have to be willing to actually change loot tables, NPC and other money sink prices on a daily basis to keep the money supply in balance. You would have to find a way to do this without pissing off your players who have an expectation that prices will never change.

It's a simplified example. It might be easier to understand the example if you assume all money in the example is made of real silver. You are illustrating another issue, that people have to actually accept paper currency as a means of exchange.



I left out the value of the goods he sells because that doesn't directly impact money supply.

"Developers cannot try to mimic real world solutions for their in game economic problems."

Who are we talking about here? I thought these concepts - taps, drains and mudflation - have been understood and generally accepted as Truth for years now. Apart from Second Life, which is a bit of an oddball hybrid, the two MMOGs that most experimented with complex economies including natural resources, player crafting and auction-based trading (EVE and SWG), still never denied that their in-game economies were totally artificial and kept in a tight grip. WoW's economy is less complex but much bigger thanks to its massive player base, and I think they may have the most tightly controlled economy of any game I've ever played.

It's not even like the bloody thing's much FUN anymore. It just..works very dfferently, being based on Elite and Tradewars rather than Diku and D&D.

"In theory, the faucets and drains could be tracked and manipulated."

Uuuh, pretty sure they are in most MMO's. And yes, dynamically adjusted loot tables would annoy IF the difference was gross enough to notice. Like, the Sword of Foozlewhacking is now dropping 7% rather than 7.2% of the time.

There are ways this COULD be done with an automated system. I'm not sure if its actually been done, however.


Alrindel, I think the important point is economies in MMO's are per-server. Different WoW servers can have different prices for different player-made goods, which is interesting as a study in itself.

I don't think it's safe to assume quality reporting tools exists. In my experience, Database reporting is often an afterthought. Settng up the system to be automated could be done, but I would think this is something that would require manual control.

I don't see that. You can monitor the overall flow, and have a machine adjust things. A Human's hand might be better - but you have to make sure to track the changes properly - for balance but if its set up right I don't see it as being that time consuming. Likely weekly rather than daily anyway.

As for database tools being an afterthought, *sighs*. Yes, by now you'd of thought they'd of realised...

Actually, pretty sure they're not. SWG used to do a lot of cool economy metrics back in the day, but to the best of my knowledge (stemming from talking to a lot of people at game conferences), nobody's doing shit right now.

Mr Crick reminds me that I forgot about Eve. Given that their game is so driven by the economy, I would expect them to monitor it pretty heavily.

The funniest thing about tracking the WoW economy is that, as far as I can tell, the single largest factor in the cost of living on any given server is how many cheaters/exploiters/bots have been banned recently. After any large purge, the price of everything goes up for a while, and then creeps back down as bots reappear and increase supply. In extreme cases you can even extrapolate what is being exploited by watching for extreme price falls on specific items: when Dire Maul tribute loot suddenly flooded every auction house on every server it was pretty obvious what was going on.

Er..

When Blizzard announce a crackdown, the proces soar regardless if they actually banned any major RMT-purveyors accounts or not.

This is called "bonus money for the non-banned RMTers".

Announcing is counter-productive.

Eve's inflatonary effects are a deliberate design choice, not an emergent phenomenon that has unintended consequences. They deliberately increased the carrying capacity of the universe by adding more random content (and hand-written fixed content), in the process increasing the productivity of 0.0 in anticipation of Constellation Sovereignty (in essence, allowing alliances to really *own* turf, rather than just control it).

And frankly, inflation in a game environment may be a good thing, if it is carefully controlled (there are theories that say it's good in RL, but we won't get into that). The question is if inflation means too much money chasing too few goods, or more goods *and* money meaning more and better stuff is accessible to more players. For example, most traditional analysis models say we make less real money now than our parents did in the 60's, but our standard of living is higher, a paradoxical result that can't be accounted for simply by the "outperformers" that have gained the lion's share of the economic growth of the last 40 years.

Similar effects occur in Eve, everyone is flying better ships, fitted with better stuff, than they were a year ago, and likewise a year before that. Where a year ago funding an outpost or mothership/Titan was a major, alliance-wide project, many individual corps are now seriously within reach of the tens of billions of capital needed. While true "luxury goods", top-end ships and modules have remained relatively stable in price, essential goods of limited supply (such as the Heavy Assault Cruisers that are the best ships for running lucrative level 4 missions) *have* risen in price, in exactly the way you would expect when supply is exceeded by demand.

In other words, the rising tide is lifting all boats, supply-side economics really works when you can excercise *absolute* control over the underlying constants.

Overall the Eve economy is extremely stable, which is what allows the developers to monkey with it in this way, using the economy and manipulation of it as a design tool to create and influence gameplay.

--Dave

MahrinSkel,

Well, it's ironic that having hammered out the usual cases of inflation in virtual economies (and I agree with you) that they chose to inflate anyway.

The thing is, it makes no sense because the WAY they've done the changes has pushed constantly for a tiny number of ever-bigger hubs, which have been the cause of many of the constant server problems they've now had for over a year!

And you've also missed, I'm guessing, the inflating prices of many essentials for the average player (T2 guns, etc.). The mineral price hike will make this worse, and their removal of the basic-but-functional escrow system for the bloated, buggy, unstable and generally completely unusable (and very limited even if you CAN get it working) contracts system has ripped the heart out of much of Eve's industrial backbone.

I have to disagee overall - the Eve economy is anything BUT stable, and the inflationary pressure is making a bad situation worse. Slavaging and rigs has also had a nasty bubble effect which will take a long time to settle, and have the intended effect.

I don't think they ever wanted the centralized market hubs, in fact they've redrawn the map several times trying to get rid of the bigger ones. That *is* an emergent effect, players who want to buy go where they know they can get reliable prices and quanities, players wanting to sell go where they know they can get decent prices and quick turnover. The result is steady consolidation, Jita 4 M4 Caldari Navy Assembly Plant is probably 25% of the economy now.

The T2 large guns, specifically Tachyon II's, 425mm Railgun II's, and 1400mm Howitzer II's, was a result of the supremacy of T2 ammo for sniper battleships in fleet warfare, there was no substitute for the biggest T2 weapons (because only they could reach the 180-200km standoff range), so the prices just kept going up and up. You'll notice T2 long-range ammo got a substantial nerf in Revelations.

Escrow had some severe issues that were making it less and less useful, people were "gaming" the limitations of it to keep their escrows on the global and regional lists, and making it unusable in many regards. Contracts is a better system in a lot of ways, for example if you're trying to compare prices on factional/officer grade items, you can actually do that now.

Escrow already wasn't being used by most of the big industrial players except as a way to asynchronously deliver goods to buyers that had been arranged through other channels, something it still does quite well.

If the Eve economy was perfectly stable, it wouldn't be interesting. But compared to the typical MMO economy, which generally breaks down almost completely every year or two and is turned upside down with every expansion, it's solid as a rock. The economic distrubances are no greater than you would expect in a rapidly developing country with a major "boomtown" frontier effect. Which is, after all, what Eve is supposed to be.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But compare what Revelations has done to Eve to what the latest WoW expansion is already doing, even though it isn't out yet. Mineral price fluctuations are nothing compared to gutting the value of *all* of the most valuable goods in your world.

--Dave

"I don't think they ever wanted the centralized market hubs, in fact they've redrawn the map several times trying to get rid of the bigger ones. "

Uh...they got rid of ONE hub yes. But their subsequent efforts haven't shifted the hubs one bit. This is nothing, really, to do with the map. It's due to multiple other factors - the main one being buy/sell order limits. When they first introduced them, the maximum you could have (after a months training) was 150. Given people previously had hundreds and hundreds, this made most of the big sellers pack up and either quit selling, or quit the game. A skill later on expanded this, but its still quite limited (I have 125 and hit it on a regular basis just from PvP loot sales).

Now, given these limits, the surviving builders did the obvious thing of putting their orders up where they would do the most good, and people would fly. The hubs. And it's self-sustaining. It's not really much to do with the customers so much as the necessitys placed on the sellers. And the replacement of escrow with contracts has done the same thing - shifted them to being hub-based.

There's also the entire issue with the 1890's parallel production system they put in place over the modern JIT system they had before, which basically means an industrial character cannot stray far from their production site, or kepe things in production constantly very well.

And who said T2 *large* guns? Yes, they've allways cost lots. The prices soaring now are for the medium and small T2 guns, which far more people use.

"Escrow had some severe issues that were making it less and less useful"

Uhm, for the seller? Yes, individual escrows were only on view for about 4-5 hours in general. But for the average buyer, there was usually a good range of items. You could see the items on there, and compare the prices. Contracts makes it utterly impossible to SEE prices on anything easily, because the regional nature means a simple price check can take 10-15 minutes and the limits on using it mean very few of the higher end items are being sold via it.

"Escrow already wasn't being used by most of the big industrial players except as a way to asynchronously deliver goods to buyers that had been arranged through other channels, something it still does quite well. "

No, it does NOT! You're dramatically limited in the number of private contracts (the posts on it specifically said that private contracyts, unlike public ones would NOT be limited...this was incorrect!), you cannot claim them outside the region and there are major reliability isues with the system (I cant even MAKE a contract...it sits there when I try to make a perfectly valid one). Even NAGA have given up private selling because the only viable delivery mehod was direct trade! (even the end user making a contract which had the correct details - something I think would ob been fraud-prone - dosn't work because you cannot create a contract at a station at which you don't have items!)

The inflation in Eve is rapidly taking prices for the more commonly used T1 and T2 items upwards, and they'll stay there. That the highend comodoties have not been majorly affected isn't inflation - you track inflation from the baseline.

Contracts are nothing short of a disaster which has ripped the heart out of most of Eve's industry. When you have a complex supply line for T2 components which has now broken down entirely because there is no easy escrow for getting the ice products to the people who spend most of their time in 0.0 and just carrier jump them out, and getting them back to the sellers is now requiring people to meet and direct trade, and...

I'm INVOLVED in some of that, and it's a train wreck which is going to power inflation upwards and onwards.

Umm, cool? Because I'll tell you, anywhere in the market there is ineficiency, there's an opportunity for profit. Maybe I'm just seeing it from a different perspective than you are, since I tend to be a market opportunist with no particular commitment to a particular market structure, this has been a great week for me, I have had nearly a doubling of my net worth (more than triple since the patch). Some of that has been from one-time only profiteering on things like the stock of named Inertial Stabilizers I built up before the patch, but mostly it's been because I've been watching the market like a hawk and picking off some really great deals I could turn around quickly. Now I know to check out the T2 component market, thanks for the tip.

As far as doing price checks on contracts: Check The Forge, it's the baseline.

People will adjust to the new circumstances. Again, compared to the collapse and stagnation of the WoW economy as it waits for the expansion, this is nothing. Things are still getting built, still being sold.

--Dave