Controlling Currency Hyper-Inflation

[thelopez]

The players will hate it, but just don't have "monsters" with money running around. Or make them very rare, and/or make the number of monsters limited. But then how do you prevent the early players from killing them all? Make combat realistic. Seriously. Make character death fighting monsters very likely. Then have the monsters take the character's treasure, and Viola! You have your explanation for where the treasure comes from.

I agree, I have always thought that monsters running around with money in some cases was a silly thing as I point out in part of my response to erythromycin,

Really, where for instance, would a giant fire ant carry: 30 gold coins, a broadsword and a pair of Boots of Giant strength? I guess the giant fire ant could be wearing the boots (that would be a sight), the broadsword could be stuck in the ant and the gold coins could be in its guts.

?? You want to finish the design before you want to know what you want it to do?

No, absolutely not. Right now I am in my discovery and research phase. I am trying to gather my thoughts by exploring as many RPGs, CRPGS, MMORPGs systems, design documents, articles, etc. as possible. In parallel to that research I WILL develop a proposal/goal document where I will outline my goals, why I want to develop a new MORPG, etc. It will basically be a document that helps to me justify to myself why I am developing a new MORPG.

Mike do you want to see that document once I finish it?

[Callan S.]

This really seems to be a paradox.

We want to have money in the system, so people can enjoy earning lots of money (unlike real life, where we earn little for doing boring things. No one pays a subscription for a game of this).

On the other hand, so that money is meaningful and worth earning/having lots of, were going to make sure you can't earn/keep lots of it.

That's why I suggest having a fixed money number based on how many PC's you have in the world. This way you can ensure they can all earn a nice amount of cash, but when that total cash is higher than the fixed number, you raise prices X amount to start bleeding off money (they drop back once enough has been bled).

[Valamir]

Actually, Callan, I meant to mention earlier that I really like that idea...especially if the players don't know how it works.  You'll have fluctuating prices which is potentially really interesting.  If the game permits the buying of houses/buildings, it would be possible to set yourself up as a trader even without necessarily being of a trader class, just by buying needed items cheap and storing them in your house until things get more expensive.

Its not really an accurate portrayal of inflation, but is a reasonable illusion of it.  Someone kills a dragon, dumps a bunch of loot into the economy, prices go up.  Its reasonable.

To really work well, however, and not be a source of grief, the pricing scheme would have to be regional in nature.  You wouldn't want a situation where the price for a rusty tin sword in newby land goes through the roof because a bunch of 50th levels are camping Dragons.

By dividing the game up into regions the 50th levels would only be driving the price up in their own little corner of the world.

Even better, you could issue different currency by region...West Fallon Gold Pieces vs East Shire Gold Pieces.  That way if the 50th levels tried to take their dragon gold to another location they'd carry their inflation with them...the West Fallon Gold would be considered devalued (not exactly realistic since finding a horde of Dragon Gold doesn't mean that the gold content in the Coins suddenly drops, but close enough).

You could then have an Imperial Standard...like the old Mark or Pound (which originally weren't even coins).  If you take the West Fallon Gold to East Shire you'd have to convert it.  You'd convert it into Marks which would always have the same fixed value price everywhere.  So any item in a store would be quoted in Marks and Local Currency.  So a sword that cost 15 GPs or 10 Marks in the East Shire could be bought with 15 East Shire Gold....which would be worth .67 Marks each (a number easily displayed by each merchant).  When the 50ths arrive in the Shire with 500 West Fallon Gold worth .1 Marks each, they could convert into only 50 Marks.  Where as 500 Shire gold would be worth 333.

Or the 50ths could horde the Fallon Gold, hope other folks exchange theirs bringing the total Fallon currency down to acceptable levels, at which point, the Fallon Gold value would go up again.

I think that would be a unique and quite interesting game feature.  For most hack and slashers it would involve nothing more than a stop of at a convenient money changers to get everything converted into Marks, never to worry about it again.  But for others who'd enjoy messing with the system, you could get quite a business of player run currency traders.

Imagine players willing to Trade Currency at a rate that undercuts the official exchange rate because their willing to hold it until prices move again, and profit on the spread.  Some people are really into alternative ways of making money AND they'd be fulfilling a valuable service.  It wouldn't break the game at all, it would just establish a new equilibrium price in a good approximation of a free market.

Another side benefit is that if their were a limited number of prime camping spots per region, it would discourage long term camping...because that would just drive the gold value in the region down to near worthless.  Campers would have to move on to new ground until the local economy recovered...which in many ways would be a neat parallel to the devastating effect on the local economy a King making his royal progress through his lands (with a huge entourage) would have...only in this case its adventurer parties.

Most games have already instituted some form of devaluing XPs from repeated camps (DAoC gives bonus XPs for the length of time since the creature was killed last for instance).  This idea could be implemented for XPs and GPs both, only with XPs there is no hording or conversion...XPs are just automatically "converted" as they are earned at whatever the devalueing rate is.

Or if the game required training rather than just auto leveling like DAoC does, the conversion would happen then.  Meanwhile that experience would still be bloating the conversion rate for others.

Definite potential there.

[erithromycin]

Surely the point is not just that the price will vary from area to area, but from individual to individual?

Given how many systems have made vain attempts at including barter or thrift (though some, like D20 Modern, have produced interesting effects with their endeavours) I'd have thought that this would still be a goal.

Then, of course, one has to remember that there may be a near infinite quantity of wealth around, but with fixed cash reserves, there can be a position reached where liquid money is worth more than it's face value because it's mroe transportable - after all, which is safer? A big pile of gems and gold coins inside a castle, or an even bigger castle?

Anyway, by the time players have accumulated vast quantities of wealth prices should not only be fixed according to location (when lots of rich folk are in town, average prices paid will go up), but according to the buyer (when lots of rich folks are in town, the locals gouge them, raise prices amongst themselves a little, but not too much, because the rich folks will leave) - think of it as an approximation of tourist season in small seaside towns - it's all well and good charging a kajillion gold coins for a sword when there's a seamonster about, but the rest of the the year the only folks who'll be needing them are the local guard, and they only get seven farthings a year, and one of them's wooden and they have to share it.

Ahem.

So perhaps a system of pricing that was related to individual wealth (the mythical 'what the market will bear', for various values of market) would solve this local issue.

Or you could just find more ways to slow the spread of cash, which is the problem with hyperinflation - the signifier was not that it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, but that someone could accumulate a wheelbarrow full of money.

Primitive economies were notoriously illiquid - that's largely because things like gold were often stolen or given to the church to be stolen by viking, so other entities were used as currency - though a limited supply of banks might also serve to rein this in. Then, of course, you've got the pacific tribe who used giant stone wheels as currency, because each represented a unit that could be exchanged for fishing rights or farming rights or the like - that's a special case of a closed economy, really, because it had a relatively stable population.

I suggest Adam Smith's 'The Wealth Of Nations', anyway. That'll give you more information on the subject than you'd want.

As for game design, there are any number of mechanisms by which it could be avoided - the trick, however, as in government, is avoiding special cases of reward or punishment.

I think as I'm again crawling far outwith the realms of rpg theory, I'll stop, once more.

[Christopher Weeks]

I love reading this kind of lay-economics discussion.  I think that the situation Ralph describes can be simplified -- removing the different (formal) regions and their currencies by: having multiple resources that are value dense, eliminating the de rigueur NPC currency, and making the world really freaking big by removing the ubiquitous teleportation mechanisms.  And if you're going to have a strong NPC presense in the game, you can algorithmically shuffle wealth from one town (where it's concentrated) to adjacent towns over time.  Various places (towns or not) could be resource sinks (manufactories, etc.) that collect the resources for conversion, but don't generally spill them out to the neighbors.

This seems like it invests the players with more of the economy while still simulating reality in a more interesting way.

I favor the idea of letting the players deal with producing currency if they decide it has merit.  As the various schemes to back it (or not) get buy in and collapse, it adds a whole layer of friction and motive to the game that is lacking in most MMORPGs.

Chris

[contracycle]

This really seems to be a paradox.

We want to have money in the system, so people can enjoy earning lots of money (unlike real life, where we earn little for doing boring things. No one pays a subscription for a game of this).

On the other hand, so that money is meaningful and worth earning/having lots of, were going to make sure you can't earn/keep lots of it.

This is because, in my opinion, the economic systems in most games are built from the ground up rather than the top down.  And this is a serious error.   Arguably, money is TOO familiar, we all use it all the time.  furthermore, the basic principles are well and widely understood - tokens for transactions and what not.  But thats not enough; this money is also going to be a game mechanism.

The problem IMO is too much trying to do sim cash and too little attention to the game mechanical effects it will have on character interactions.  Many, many games use a dollar/cents model that is ludicrously finely scaled by comparison to many Medieval systems, and so to me fail serve to undermine the versimilitude.  And this I think is becuase the system is designed to be familiar and comforting rather than evocative, and this is a mistake.  I suggest that if you have multiple people running around exchanging a commodity, in a very sense you have a real market going on.  But the real world is much broader than a sim can be, and a simplistic sim cannot apply all the needed calculations.  I think the attempt to have a real, cash-based economy is doomed, and that the economic model employed should be selected exclusively for its play-triggering, -provoking, or -structuring effect.

[Mike Holmes]

I agree in principle, Gareth, hence my original request for goals. My point was that, without knowing what the goals are, you can't really design a system to fit.

That said, I think that MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer, that is) do have enough players to make a more "ground up" model work if well designed. To whit, people actually trade in-game items for real cash on eBay. Wherupon we discover the true player value of the items. :-)

Mike

[Callan S.]

Actually, Callan, I meant to mention earlier that I really like that idea...especially if the players don't know how it works.

Thanks man! :)

You'll have fluctuating prices which is potentially really interesting.  If the game permits the buying of houses/buildings, it would be possible to set yourself up as a trader even without necessarily being of a trader class, just by buying needed items cheap and storing them in your house until things get more expensive.

Its not really an accurate portrayal of inflation, but is a reasonable illusion of it.  Someone kills a dragon, dumps a bunch of loot into the economy, prices go up.  Its reasonable.

On a side note about accuracy: I have some severe doubts about being able to make anything accurate/realistic in a massive multiplayer. I mean, in RPG's we tend to get our kicks out of playing at least slightly not the norm characters, ranging up to extremly unusual characters. If you were to try and be realistic this in a massive multiplayer, you have to stop 95% of the players playing anything unusual to make that other 5% realistically unusual, rather than the norm.

Same with cash I feel. We often(not always, of course), love to pick up lots of money in RPG's, more than we do in real life. One has to have a bit of a silly economy so you can both have players able to do this, while the money is still worth something. So I think an illusion is a good idea too.

To really work well, however, and not be a source of grief, the pricing scheme would have to be regional in nature.  You wouldn't want a situation where the price for a rusty tin sword in newby land goes through the roof because a bunch of 50th levels are camping Dragons.

By dividing the game up into regions the 50th levels would only be driving the price up in their own little corner of the world.

Good call. So you stick the dragons in a region designed for higher levels and then they tend to stay there. Also, you make them so they can only carry so much money on them and the only banks that can store their uber wealth are in the dragon regions, that way if they slum lower down for whatever reason, they don't crash those economies when they arrive.

Even better, you could issue different currency by region...West Fallon Gold Pieces vs East Shire Gold Pieces.  That way if the 50th levels tried to take their dragon gold to another location they'd carry their inflation with them...the West Fallon Gold would be considered devalued (not exactly realistic since finding a horde of Dragon Gold doesn't mean that the gold content in the Coins suddenly drops, but close enough).

*snip to shorten my reply here*

Imagine players willing to Trade Currency at a rate that undercuts the official exchange rate because their willing to hold it until prices move again, and profit on the spread.  Some people are really into alternative ways of making money AND they'd be fulfilling a valuable service.  It wouldn't break the game at all, it would just establish a new equilibrium price in a good approximation of a free market.

I was going to mention the idea of different currencies existing to manage inflation (though those other ideas hadn't occured to me), but I have to wonder if the designers would have the skill to impliment that. But obviously it could impliment a rather intense money game, amongst all the normal frantic monster clicking.

Another side benefit is that if their were a limited number of prime camping spots per region, it would discourage long term camping...because that would just drive the gold value in the region down to near worthless.  Campers would have to move on to new ground until the local economy recovered...which in many ways would be a neat parallel to the devastating effect on the local economy a King making his royal progress through his lands (with a huge entourage) would have...only in this case its adventurer parties.

Most games have already instituted some form of devaluing XPs from repeated camps (DAoC gives bonus XPs for the length of time since the creature was killed last for instance).  This idea could be implemented for XPs and GPs both, only with XPs there is no hording or conversion...XPs are just automatically "converted" as they are earned at whatever the devalueing rate is.

Or if the game required training rather than just auto leveling like DAoC does, the conversion would happen then.  Meanwhile that experience would still be bloating the conversion rate for others.

Definite potential there.

Yeah, the lowered gold for monsters carries over pretty well too. Ie, if stuff costs more, the program also makes sure monsters will have less cash (in game justification is that cost rose for the monster too, or the people they killed for cash were poorer because of raised prices).

I swear though, just thinking up ideas and rough ways to impliment them in a massive multiplayer game is so stimulating and full of 'rules' that its basically a game itself you can play! :)

[M. J. Young]

I really like Ralph's ideas; let me suggest a modification that might work well in a MORPG setup.

Divide the world into regions, and attach wealth to the individual characters and to the region itself. Let all prices track to the amount of cash in player character hands within the region; have it do so on a current basis, so that total wealth in the region is calculated when someone asks for a price of something; if someone particularly wealthy enters the region, his wealth will raise prices immediately--thus he can't benefit as much from low prices, because he forces them up. He could, in theory, hire people to buy on his behalf, which expands the economic possibilities significantly. PC-owned goods are also calculated as part of their wealth; thus expendables will gradually be used up but items of relatively fixed worth will keep the value level high.

Money spent in a region vanishes into a sinkhole of sorts, and as the net worth of PCs drops the money finds its way back into treasure troves, to the degree that the sheet remains balanced--that is, expendables must be burned up before cash can return to the treasure troves.

Set a total value per character in play; split it into an amount given to the character in starting resources and an amount added to the economy in treasure troves. Don't let it be excessive; there should be a degree to which player characters are competing for the same treasure.

Also, create an inactive character tracker--if a character does nothing for an extended period of time, he drops out of the calculations, neither adding to the wealth nor counting toward the ceiling. This prevents players from flooding the world with dummy characters to increase the available wealth. Similarly, player character death should decrease the total available wealth in the world, reducing treasure troves accordingly.

These are rather disjointed, I'm afraid, but I think there's something interesting here.

--M. J. Young

[thelopez]

Here's another idea/issue to throw into the fray.

First the issue. For some reason NPC shops in most MMORPGs and MORPGS seem to have an endless supply of money and items in their shop. Meaning if 1000 players decided to go to a shop and they all decided to sell a sword for 1gp a piece all of those players would be able to get their 1gp each.

What if instead NPC shops had a finite amount of money and items in their shop. They could only buy equipment from NPCs if they have the money. And only sell the items they have in their shop. But if they do buy something, they can turn around and sell that item in their shop, with a markup of course.


What do you all think?

[contracycle]

What if instead NPC shops had a finite amount of money and items in their shop. They could only buy equipment from NPCs if they have the money. And only sell the items they have in their shop. But if they do buy something, they can turn around and sell that item in their shop, with a markup of course.  What do you all think?

I think... thats pretty much the only real way to do a ground up model, but then your engine has to track every single coin that what was ever minted as a distinct object.  Which I seriously doubt is do-able or cost effective.  And every single commodity.  And how every single commodity gets turned into other commodities at what degree of entropic loss.

[Christopher Weeks]

I think... thats pretty much the only real way to do a ground up model, but then your engine has to track every single coin that what was ever minted as a distinct object.  Which I seriously doubt is do-able or cost effective.  And every single commodity.  And how every single commodity gets turned into other commodities at what degree of entropic loss.

No you wouldn't.  You just need to give every type of ownable object (gold coins, rickshaws, whatever) a serial number (that the player never sees).  Every place that can hold stuff (every character, chest, house, tent) has the ability to contain a quantity of each serial number.  As a character takes gold coins from her chest, the quantity in the chest would decrease and the quantity in her inventory would increase.  The coins don't need individual tracking numbers.  The only problem like this comes when you spawn out lots of type of very similar objects (e.g. breeding scarab beetles in A Tale in the Desert).  Then they're all listed out by name (serial number under the code) and many more types of objects have to be tracked.  But a MMORPG has to track a bazillion objects no matter how you're doing it so I don't consider it a huge limit.

You don't ever have to know where a specific gold coin was minted and follow it's trail of ownership (though that would be a fascinating diagnostic tool for the economic model of a MMORPG).  Or am I missing something?

Chris

[Harlequin]

What Christopher said.  That's also part of why I suggested handling the NPC community as averaged gestalts when nobody is looking... town A exchanges X many coins with town B, over a month's time.  Just make sure you don't cause them to appear from thin air and it's not too brutal, it's just [type:] and [quantity:] variables for each commodity which might pile up, plus percentaged distributions for when you "crack something out" of the averaged state.

- Eric