[MUD-Dev] MUD Economy

[JC Lawrence]

On Wed, 7 Jan 1998 14:32:47 PST8PDT 
Shawn Halpenny<malachai at iname.com> wrote:

> I have been pondering the startup and sustenance of a MUD economy,
> some thoughts follow about moving toward a complete trade economy
> where no money is present, nor required.

Money is a great simplifier -- it need not be global (compare the
company scripts from the latter half of last century as in the song
with the refrain "Another day older and deeper in debt").  I'd
strongly suggest also looking at implementing something like a LET
system for currency:

  http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/
  http://www.ic.org/market/money/
  http://titsoc.soc.titech.ac.jp/titsoc/higuchi-lab/icm/
  http://espc22.murdoch.edu.au/~armlets/

Fascinating stuff.  

You might also want to look into the extremely interesting and very
wide-spread use of "trade dollars" as an alternative currency in
Australia.  In quite a few industries in Australia more trade is done
per day in trade-dollars than in Australian currency.  (Sorry, don't
have time to dig up much of a URL list:

  http://www.tradebanc.com/
  http://kite.ois.net.au/~btrcard/main001.htm?
  http://kite.ois.net.au/~btrcard/bart001.htm
  
There is some suspicion that the total volume of transactions in trade
dollars and similar alternative currencies/barter systems in Australia
will exceed the total volume of transactions done in the natonal
currency before the year 2010.  I wouldn't be at all surprised.

> All vendors could start out quite stupid (i.e. not having any idea
> whatsoever about what an object is worth): e.g. trading 1 kg of
> steel for 1 kg of flour.  Then, as the local demand for steel rises,
> the vendor would learn that he was initially trading steel for _way_
> too little and then raise his "price").  Now that price is what
> needs to be determined.  It's easy to say "You can have that sword
> if you give me three good milk cows", but where does the frame of
> reference for the comparison come from?  What makes the sword worth
> three cows?

A problem source is that you are not pre-defining the sales purpose of
each vendor.  Instead of each vendor knowing that his job is to "sell
swords", "be a blacksmith", or some such similar, you attempting an
evolutionary system where vendors attempt to evolve a purpose, and
from then evolve a sequence of methods to achieve that purpose.

Solving both problems at once can be a bitch.  I'd suggest by starting
with solving the simpler problem of taking deriving methods for a
vendor with a known purpose to achieve those purposes (simple matrix
iterations or neural nets would likely do), and then once that's done
attempt to solve the problem of deriving the base purpose in the first
place.

The nice thiong about pre-defining the purpose, is that you can then
have prices directly reflective of the difficulty in achieve that
purpose.  It gets to be pretty linear -- "its very difficult to get
steel to make the swords I need to make" == "prices are high" etc.

> I suppose this view could be summed up like this: shopkeepers do not
> really sell items to characters.  They act solely as distribution
> points and what they distribute depends on what they are asked for,
> what they have, and what they can get.  After all, what would money
> mean to a NPC shopkeeper?  Certainly, he could just accumulate it
> like everyone else and retire wealthy but is that interesting from
> any point of view other than simulation?  It seems that money
> wouldn't be required at all.

Programming a generic trader is a different problem as you also have
to solve the problem of the trader knowing what is needed and wanted
in each area.  

There are two basic sources of resource consumption that a trader may
attempt to supply: NPC's and players.  

NPC's are simple -- you can put all sorts of logging and needs/wants
code into the survery to give the traders extra data under the covers.
Players are more difficult.  I would suggest attempting a back-end
solution by having your system track the location of consumption of
all objects across the game, and then have the traders assume (usually
correctly) that point-of-consumption == sales opportunity.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...