Virtual Economy Management

[Muuru]

With all this talk about item decay, I got to thinking of other ways to make the economy in everquest more versatile, and less balloon like. This is what I've come up with so faryeah, I'm bored and it's late, so what? :P)


The economy would need to be dynamic. VERY few enemies should drop cash. Scorpions, skeletons, snakes etc, should all have no money. Only mobs that actually might have some money on them should drop it(bandits and stuff...I guess). Beyond that, vendors won't simply buy infinite amounts of random crap that you find lying on the ground. "Hey, I found some more snakeskin, wanna buy it for 8 copper again?" "Sure, you can NEVER have too much snakeskin!" Well, in a dynamic game economy, yes, you CAN have too much snakeskin, and the value of the item would drop to the point where the vendor would basically not give you enough money for it to be even worth selling it to the vendor. Have items "decay" on the vendors themselves, to simulate other people in the economy buying and consuming the items.

The endless sale of crap to people for the same amount of money is part of what causes the economy to be flooded. That should only happen for some *particularly* rare items. This could be adjusted even to the point where vendors know what items other vendors have around them, and how many they have. If the guy next door has piles and piles of snakeskin, and the guy he's been buying them from comes trying to peddle them onto you, you're not gonna have that are you? On the other hand, if the guy next door has but one peridot, and someone starts unloading them onto you, you'll be willing to pay whatever is neceessary to get them, not only because they're rare, but because you'll be the only vendor in town to have them. That's where it gets tricky.

Vendors would adjust their prices up OR down based on what the vendors around them had. If you, as a vendor, had 80 periods, and NOBODY in the same zone as you had a single one, you're gonna charge a LOT more for them than if all the vendors in the area have a comparable amount. Why? Well, quite simply because you're greedy, like everybody else, that's why! Now, this isn't to suggest that vendors would happily share their stock values with each other. Perhaps a vendor who only has 5 peridots in stock will drop the price significantly on the other vendor, simply because he could lie, and say he had more. You don't want everyone buying their peridots from the guy next door because his are cheaper do you? 'Course you don't! On the other hand, when it comes to items like snake skins, vendors would really have no reason to lie about their stock. Does it really matter if you only have 5 snake skins? They're not exactly the hottest item on the market.

Then comes the issue of geography. A vendor in the middle of the desert should be willing to pay a premium for water if you had it to sell, as he could sell it to desert travellers for an equally high premium. Of course, trying to sell water to a vendor on the riverside would be a bit more difficult. Same thing with weaponry, armor etc. A vendor out in the middle of nowhere wouldn't be very likely to buy all of your fine steel, as he would have to travel a LONG distance in order to be able to sell it all. If he bought any, it'd be for a lower price than you'd get for it in town.

Vendors who sell items necessary for various tradeskills would also be effected by this. How likely is it that the vendor sitting 2 feet away from the blacksmith forge is going to simply sell you as much iron or whatever as you want to buy? Not very likely. They would have a limited amount, updated daily(in-game daily, not our days), based on shipments coming in etc. As their stock got lower, the prices would get higher.

Now comes item decay. Smiths, tailors, etc, would adjust the prices for their services based on a few things. #1, their proximity to places where people generally fight. If you're quite far from any common battle areas, you're gonna have to take what little business you're likely to get. On the other hand, if you're right next to a highly traffic'd dungeon, you can pretty much charge whatever you want. #2, their proximity to other "repair people". If you're the only blacksmith in town, well by golly, people are gonna pay whatever YOU think is "fair".

All of these things would allow for an economy that should reach a fairly stable state. This stability would be based on a few things, such as population, average level, etc, but it wouldn't be the balloon economy that everquest is today. Inflation wouldn't be the 1000% that EQ's is today. It won't solve ALL of the problems. Obviously things like item rarity come into play. Speaking strictly about luclin, a lot of the common drop equipment from the higher level dungeons that came around phased out most of the rarer drop stuff from the old world and kunark. (By this I mean to say the twink gear got replaced with new, improved, and cheaper twink gear). But aside from item upgrades being released by the devs, the economy would remain stable.

Hm...that ate up about 10 minutes...now what? :P

[Templor]

So for a starting player it'd be like being born into a world with no parents and no wy to mae money.

Sorry, broke my shoulder and on vikadin if that doesn't make sense.

[Muuru]

Well, it would be tough starting out, but not impossible.

Something that I neglected to mention is that, at least at lower levels, this would put a big push on quests. If you can't make money selling snake skin all day long, get a part-time job. A vendor will give you orders for various things he needs, you go out and get them, not only will he buy them from you, but he'll give you some extra coin just for making things easier for him(by giving him everything he needs all at once). Things like that would play a bigger part than they do now. It would become more like a roleplaying game, and less like a superhero hack'n'slash game.

[Wrathcaster]

Very very very exploitable, If I read thru correctly.

Think about it.

I go into a place with vendor, that NOONE ever goes to, go to vendors after early morning patches... You sell 1 item to every rarely used merchant ever, they pay you phat cash every time... Everyone goes and buys water from river merchants, sell to desert merchants, more phat cash... Buy Armor from one town, go to the next and sell it... The list goes on and on and on.

Eq players are too greedy for something like this too work, youd have people that only farmed pp every single day they got on, doing the same fuckin routine day in and day out til it got nerfed.

You can't have items that you can buy from a merchant and sell to another merchant generate too much profit.. Or items for that matter. Anything that's remotely easy to do, and generates platinum without having to hunt, kill, or deal for it, the typical casual Everquest player will eat up. Why do you think they nerf all the tradeskill items that you can make big profit off of by selling to merchants? It's because they want the players to be the economy, not the NPCS. Thats why its called Player-driven.

[Muuru]

Originally posted by Wrathcaster
Very very very exploitable, If I read thru correctly.

Think about it.

I go into a place with vendor, that NOONE ever goes to, go to vendors after early morning patches... You sell 1 item to every rarely used merchant ever, they pay you phat cash every time... Everyone goes and buys water from river merchants, sell to desert merchants, more phat cash... Buy Armor from one town, go to the next and sell it... The list goes on and on and on.

Eq players are too greedy for something like this too work, youd have people that only farmed pp every single day they got on, doing the same fuckin routine day in and day out til it got nerfed.

You can't have items that you can buy from a merchant and sell to another merchant generate too much profit.. Or items for that matter. Anything that's remotely easy to do, and generates platinum without having to hunt, kill, or deal for it, the typical casual Everquest player will eat up. Why do you think they nerf all the tradeskill items that you can make big profit off of by selling to merchants? It's because they want the players to be the economy, not the NPCS. Thats why its called Player-driven.

As I stated, vendors won't endlessly buy your items no matter what they are. If the desert vendor has eight cartloads full of barrels of water, and you want to sell him your little bitty cask, he's gonna tell you to go fuck your mother.

"I go into a place with vendor, that NOONE ever goes to, go to vendors after early morning patches... You sell 1 item to every rarely used merchant ever, they pay you phat cash every time... "

That's the same as saying that your starting food/water should have no monetary value, because you COULD get infinite money from it. Sure, you could do that. Of course, you'd get less money than if youo played the game legitimately. I mean think about the amount of time it would take to do that. You'd obviously have limits on what vendors would pay. Another thing to keep in mind is that vendors that are almost never used, wouldn't pay you nearly as much, for the simple reason that they're going to say "well, if I pay you 500pp for that, it's gonna be MONTHS before I can sell it, so once again, go fuck your mother".

Something the developers need to get their heads wrapped around is that infinite money is not a problem in and of itself. Infinite money at a comparable rate to other methods of getting money IS a problem. I mean, if you could sell your starting food/water for 1pp total, by golly jeffro, the cash influx would be INFINITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course, In the time it took you to make/sell/delete enough characters to make 100pp, I'd have 1k from fighting in a high-end dungeon, or killing hill giants, etc.

Another issue at hand: What exactly is the problem with buying an item from one vendor, and selling it to another at a profit? That's how the economy works people. Someone has something that you need, and you have something that they need, so you trade. But what if you're too far away to trade? Well, saddle up that thar camel jimmy, we're goin caravaninin...in. Buy some water in town from a guy who has lots, to sell to someone who needs it, and doesn't have very much. As long as effort is put in to BALANCE these things, there's no problem. The reason why things get nerfed so often in EQ that take on this form is that they're unbalanced to begin with, and the devs go "well, I could spend 20 or 30 minutes fixing this, or I could just nerf it so you can't make ANY profit. That takes what, 20 or 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm way too fat and lazy, and full of spray cheese to fix it, nerf away!"

[Worfless]

Another issue at hand: What exactly is the problem with buying an item from one vendor, and selling it to another at a profit? That's how the economy works people. Someone has something that you need, and you have something that they need, so you trade. But what if you're too far away to trade? Well, saddle up that thar camel jimmy, we're goin caravaninin...in. Buy some water in town from a guy who has lots, to sell to someone who needs it, and doesn't have very much. As long as effort is put in to BALANCE these things, there's no problem. The reason why things get nerfed so often in EQ that take on this form is that they're unbalanced to begin with, and the devs go "well, I could spend 20 or 30 minutes fixing this, or I could just nerf it so you can't make ANY profit. That takes what, 20 or 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm way too fat and lazy, and full of spray cheese to fix it, nerf away!"

npcs have no sense of supply and demand

and the reason nothing makes a profit any more is because of me and people like me

[Muuru]

Originally posted by WorthlessMufuka
npcs have no sense of supply and demand

and the reason nothing makes a profit any more is because of me and people like me

Yes, you see, the fact that npc's have no sense of supply and demand is kind-of what I'm getting at here. They need one. Without one, the economy simply balloons forever as there's an infinite influx of cash, and very little to spend it on.

[Wrathcaster]

Regardless of what concepts of NPCS buying and selling your goods, you miss the fundamental point that the Everquest economy was, is, and will be intended to be player driven, Verant has stated it more than once, hell, its one of their selling points of the game.

Ok, lets say EQ wasnt supposed to be player driven. Let's say that NPCS are the new economy. There are still dozens of ways to exploit your system that many people would use to break the economy.

[Concerned Psychologist]

The thing about his system is that, if everyone tries to exploit it, it won't work, so if someone does through methods of buy/sell, surely others will. If others don't exploit it and one person sticks to it. More power to the one! It's a self fixable economy.

[Dr. Funkenstein]

What are these many ways, Wrathcaster? He set down a rough sketch (one that has been on the table for a couple games, DAOC and EQ2 that I know of...both considered it too difficult to balance and too resource intensive to be of value at this generation of games). It's easy to find fault in rough sketches.

Simply put: NPCs/creatures provide the "money" that players use to create a player-driven economy, either directly or by buying loot. Create a supply and demand system to control the influx of items/money into the economy rather than introduce the annoying practice of item decay. If done correctly, this can create a whole new level to the economy and to the game within a game that the economy provides.


And don't take any buzzwords (such as "player-driven economy") that SOE throws around as promises too seriously. They have gone back on just about every promise they have ever made. If it works and they think it will bring in/hold on to more customers, they will do it whether they promised not to or not.

[trib]

A vendor will give you orders for various things he needs, you go out and get them, not only will he buy them from you, but he'll give you some extra coin just for making things easier for him(by giving him everything he needs all at once). Things like that would play a bigger part than they do now. It would become more like a roleplaying game, and less like a superhero hack'n'slash game.

no, it would become less like a roleplaying game and more like your job.

if you want to kill dragons, you play EQ.
if you want to deliver packages, work for UPS.

[Wrathcaster]

You say that his system is foolproof, and that exploiting it is impossible. That it is self fixing.... I'll believe it when I see it. Not trying to flame you for posting your ideas, I like many of them, they'd work cool in another game probably. It all really does sound awesome in theory. Put the changes on a live server if after 2 months it still functions, I'll vouch for you, Hell, I'd help you start a game to place it in.

Perhaps it's just my extreme distrust of most eq players.... But Saying that something CANT be exploited is almost dooming yourself for exploits... It's like saying that you can't cheat at Everquest.

[Lord Thanos]

This sounds like, if not exactly like Earth & Beyond's tradesman class (any class can do the trading actually), what you do is, you buy items from an NPC merchant in Galaxy X, these items are in demand in Galaxy Y, so you make the delivery to a NPC merchant in Galaxy Y, and you make a decent profit, the higher the demand for the item, the higher the profit

The catch? the supply and demand vendors are pretty far away from each other, takes about 5-15 minutes to get there depending which places you're doing the trades to and from

You can teleport in Earth and Beyond to make things go faster, but there's a catch too, when you teleport, the quality of the goods you're delivering goes down by 50%, so when you try to sell them, your profit is much smaller

Overall, not a bad idea, but it gets boring quickly

[Mithra]

Player driven economies don't work and I highly doubt they ever will.

The above example just makes it harder to make actual cash off vendors. This will be compensated by people farming the mobs that do drop actual cash, regardless of how much they drop. There will always be mobs that drop better cash, and those will be farmed to death.

1st: If you have a game like EQ where everything is skill based, and you have the ability to train in any trade skill you choose, you will just see people training up all their trade skills. Thus ruining your player driven market, as everyone can make/fix their own shit.

2nd: If you limit how many trade skills people can take, (enter UO style gimps).

3rd: If you want a way to take cash out of the game, then the only way to do that is with repairs, or item breakage, or both. If you do this then you have to make weapons less valuable and easily replacable. Which further decreases the value of your player driven market because everyone "again" will make/repair their own shit, to save what little cash they can. The only other way is to make NPC's charge to repair items, which totally negates any hope of a player driven market.

If you make items easily replacable then you ruin the whole MOB/loot factor. Why go kill a god who isn't going to drop shit, and if he does, it is just going to break anyway. If you can repair that item then it "again" doesn't do shit for the player driven economy.

4th: You want to stop tweeking? Put lvl requirements on everything. Problem solved.

5th: The best way to incorporate trade skills into a game is to make them a "must have" from day one. You want a set of leather armor, then go kill enough shit for enough hides to make yourself a set. Once you make a set it would have lvl requirements just like anything else. This way you don't give it to CoOl NOooB and have him rape everything with it. Do this with weapons and everything basically.

I believe that the best items in the game should be crafted. I also believe that what you craft for yourself should have diminished results when used by others. If you made yourself a leather tunic with say 10 ac on it, then it should have 7 or so if someone else uses it. This way, not only do you have a lvl requirement for items, you also have items that are ment for one player. You want player driven markets then make players have the ability to make armor specific to the character that is buying the item. This way vendors aren't going to give you much for an item because it doesn't fit them right or whatever, and it encourages everyone to take up trade skills or trust their shit to a friend to manufacture said item.

Sure, some high lvl items should drop from gods/dragons etc. but for the most part, you should be able to use items/parts of the mob to create something. The higher you get, the more complex pieces are, the more rare craftable reagents get etc. If you were allowed to craft the most powerful items in the game specifically ment for your use, with lvl requirements etc. it would drive virtually everyone to use trade skills.

I agree that only things that would normally have money, carry money. There shoud be a limit to how much cash soloable mobs carry and a very small increase in cash the higher the mobs get.

Why would a god even carry cash? On the other hand, dragons should drop 800- 1000 gold/pp , or drop a key/map to his treasure room or whatever. 1000 gold divided up between 30 players isn't all that much, so it stays in balance. I'm using gold, but whatever the fuck your money system is on is fine.

You should be able to sell certain items you find on mobs to certain vendors. A taner should by all the snake skins you have but at a low amount. An amount that really doesn't do much but to keep you supplied with the basics food/water etc. But a blacksmith should not buy the snake skin what-so-ever. This system would work better.

Could you still farm moss snakes and get rich? Not really. because you are burning food/water/time/equipment etc. farming them and your not going to make much profit on top of all that.

It's like collecting cans in real life. Yes, you can make cash off it, but you'll never be rich doing it.

[Concerned Psychologist]

I don't think he's saying it's not exploitable. Everything is exploitable. Even in Real life. Look at Enron.