[MUD-Dev] Containing automation?

[Timothy O'Neill Dang]

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Katrina McClelan wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Timothy O'Neill Dang wrote:
> 
> > I'm largely concerned with automation of trade skills, 
> 
> Well the trick to this is a realistic economy.  If you manufacture 1
> billion long swords, then suddenly everyone has or can get one, so the
> demand plummets and you have lots of worthless swords, that you spent
> materials trying to make.  Of course the supply of the material as you
> make the swords becomes more scarce, causing the price of it to go up.  
> As you can see the curves both shift unfavorably to the would be bot.

Actually, rather than having realistic economics to deter bots, I'm
looking to deter bots in order to have realistic economics! We're looking
at creating a game specifically for economic research. I'm concerned about
bots because the possibility of automating production removes one of the
main barriers to production--opportunity cost.

I certainly do plan on having realistic resource constraints, which will
lead to the dynamic you're talking about of higher costs for making goods.
This isn't enough, though. For one thing, think about it this way: If I
leave a blacksmithing bot on all night, I'll eventually wind up pushing up
the price of raw iron. But I'll push it up for all the folks manually
working their blacksmiths as well. The manual smiths might be able to
react more intelligently, but they'll still be forced out of the market.

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang/Cretog8
timothy at nmia.com
H: 505-843-6966
W: 505-244-8803
One monkey don't stop no show




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev