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0 pointsjerf9y ago0 comments

Rather than avoiding printing money, I'd suggest considering using feedback loops to try to control the economy.

One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than the economic issues themselves.

For instance, in the real world, there is no such thing as a fixed price. You can't wake up one day, harvest a bushel of apples, and take it down to the fruit stand down the street to sell for $5, regardless of all other economic conditions. That bends the economy. In the real world, you can't buy an unbounded number of apples for $10 a bushel. That bends the economy. In the real world, if you sell a bushel of apples, it doesn't essentially disappear from the Prime Material Plane, it has to be transported to someone else who wants it, without destroying the apples, before they go bad. That bends the economy.

The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop where things get more expensive as more people buy them, and get cheaper as fewer people buy them. If done correctly, this would also prevent the problem where you have to explicitly create and manage sinks; you let the economy figure out the sinks for you.

It would also almost certainly be dynamically unstable, with some things being under- or over-priced all the time in various cycle... but this can be seen as advantage for a game as much as it can be seen as a disadvantage. Some very clever thinking might even let you exert some control over the cycles and do things like try to ensure they don't all end up in sync (i.e., consider the equations for simple harmonic motion and how you can affect the "k" constant for different commodities).

The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.

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FreezerburnV9y ago

If you're talking about fixed prices in EVE's economy, you possibly don't understand it very well. There are very few fixed prices in EVE, most of which are things like skill books which by necessity have to be generated by the game systems. Or commodities, which have no real use outside of buying and selling for some small profit.

All useful items in the game are sold to other players, and the price changes over time based on supply and demand, or other traders just being cutthroat about selling their items. I made a decent chunk of money by putting up buy orders for items to get from actual players, and then selling those items to actual players for several hundred percent markup. (that was just how the price was at the time) Occasionally a single item could become entirely worthless to sell because other traders would get into price wars to make sure their items sold first by modifying their sell price down by a small amount. Or buy price up by a small amount.

Recently there was a large war, and the price of a lot of the popular ships went up because the large alliances were buying large amounts of them. Possibly the price of manufactured items went up by some amount as well due to minerals becoming more scarce from alliances consuming huge amounts of them to fuel their war.

All that is to say: you don't sell apples for $5 every time ;) Though the price of certain base goods, such as a common mineral, might only vary by +- 0.10 of an ISK in general.

stcredzero9y ago

That bends the economy.

This is exactly what I've been thinking! (Actually, some of this thought fully coalesced in this very discussion!) It's a truism that mechanics tend to get deeper if the AIs have to play by the same rules as the players. I think this goes for the economy! The way to solve a lot of the silliness of MMO economies is to eliminate as much as possible the fake parts of it!

The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop

If you ground the economy in a simulated "nature" then this provides an inherent feedback loop. This also solidifies my thinking around how to coalesce everything that fosters emergence into one game! The point of Genetic Algorithms in my game shouldn't be to design new ships, or new content. The point should be to provide the substrate of an ever changing and evolving ecology to ground its economy.

Another thing I could do would be to make the economy mostly an information economy, with the physical economy being vastly simplified. (It will fundamentally have to be vastly simplified no matter what.) This also fits in with my notion of a procedurally generated tech tree.

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