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Before we start, a big thank you to Nick Dewitt for tackling guest art for this episode. Today, we're gonna talk about economic balance in MMOs. It's one of the most complex things you can wrestle with as a designer. And it offers a fascinating view into where real-world economic theory and the inherent strangeness of running an MMO collide. Now, this topic could easily be an entire series unto itself. But today, we're gonna dive into one of the most important issues that MMO economies face: The tendency toward hyperinflation https://gallerilarsolsen.com/. Pretty much any of you who have played an MMO for any length of time have seen this tendency in effect. The value of a Gold piece in the game drops and drops as time passes. In the first month after launch, you could buy great items for 20 gold pieces. Fast forward to three years later, and those same items are costing ten thousand gold pieces in the auction house. This is why players eventually improvise by adopting alternate currencies... ...such as Stones of Jordan in Diablo 2, or Shards in Asheron's Call. But why does this hyperinflation happen in the first place, and how can we prevent it? Okay, so let's start by defining "inflation". When the buying power of a given amount of currency drops, we call that "inflation". So, for example, a nickel buys a lot less in the United states today than it did in 1850. As you probably know, whenever you print money in a real-world economy, you inflate the currency. Print too much money and you hit hyperinflation - an economic state where the currency effectively becomes worthless. That's essentially what's happening in all of these MMOs. You see, in the real world, governments control how much money is printed in a given amount of time... ...so that they can regulate how much currency enters the economy. And thus control the rate of inflation to some degree. But where does currency come from in an MMO? Well, monsters. Every time a monster spawns, you're effectively printing money. Every time you kill a mob in an MMO, you either get money directly or you get loot that can be exchanged for money. But to keep the game engaging for the players, these monsters have to respawn in a timely fashion... ...with an amount of loot and currency similar to what they had last time they spawned. If they didn't, you just end up with big empty zones with nothing to fight. Or people feeling cheated when the first players to get to his own swipe all the good loot. It would be a great way to kill your MMO in a hurry. So over time, more and more currency is being added to the world as, in aggregate, the player base is killing and looting huge amounts of mobs. This effectively devalues the currency and leads to runaway inflation... ...creating the worthless currency scenario that I described before. So how do we combat this problem as designers? The standard answer is to find currency sinks. Places where you can use game mechanics to take currency out of the world. The obvious go-to is your death mechanic. Every time you die in World of Warcraft, your equipment takes damage. Eventually you have to repair it, which costs money. And that money goes to a vendor, and not another player. So you're giving money to an NPC without getting any resellable goods in return. Effectively taking the full value of that repair out of the world economy. It's a great design idea, but it's not gonna single-handedly solve your problem. The trouble with death sinks is that it's almost impossible to make them effective enough by themselves without feeling onerous. The amount you'd have to charge for repairs would really start frustrating your players. Especially those playing tank classes. The only devs I've seen come close to controlling inflation solely through death mechanics are the folks at CCP with Eve Online. In that game, the economic cost of dying is so staggering, it becomes a strong tool to rein in inflation. They also encourage large-scale player wars as a key element of the game. These wars destroy so many goods, which then must be replaced, which helps to keep inflation in check.
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AuthorMike created this blog to help people in finding a good job. Mike is a guest writer and online gambler player at Crasinoslots https://casinoslots-sa.co.za/ . He likes hunting, hiking and extreme sports, esport, poker. Archives
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