[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:18 AM 6/4/99 -0600, I personally witnessed Timothy O'Neill Dang
jumping up to say:
>
>I'm looking at MUDs primarily as a possible
>platform for economic research relevant to the real world, but am also
>fascinated by the economies of the games themselves.

Ooh! I'm actually doing some work in this area on my game as we speak. I'll
go into a little more detail later in this message.

>So - I'm looking to converse with any and all about game economies. To
>start with, I figure I'll address one thing which I noticed in the
>archives. My feeling right now is that in-game economic behavior does
>not vary too much from real-world economic behavior *given the
>circumstances*. All of this is still tentative, of course.

No, not *too* much, but it's the "given the circumstances" part that's
hard. Supply and demand are definitely in effect, but the supply is a
little different. Consider some vanilla MUD shopkeeper. This shopkeeper is
marked as selling three varieties of sword. Within the game, his supply of
these swords is INFINITE. If I walk in with a whole lot of money and type
"buy sword; drop sword" over and over, I can -- if I feel like wasting that
much time -- stack the floor of the shop with tens of thousands of swords,
and the purchase price of that sword will never go up. Likewise, I can "get
sword; sell sword" until the shopkeeper has bought every one of them back,
and the sale price will never go down. Not very realistic. What this means
is that supply of many items is virtually infinite, so demand is primarily
keyed to perceived value. If a shopkeeper sells three swords, all identical
with the exception of price, the most expensive one will outsell the other
two until people start figuring out it's no better than the cheapest one.
Once that becomes common knowledge, the whole demand for the more expensive
swords drops to near-zero. This is clearly artificial.

My system uses limited supplies: each item is available in some shop, but
when they're gone, they're gone. In addition, when an object is scarce, its
price rises; when it's plentiful, the price drops. You can, of course, get
things that are not available -- there is a special-order service, so you
never really altogether run out of anything. But when you order through
them, you have to wait for them to make the delivery, and you also have to
pay a 100% premium and a hefty surcharge. Actual cost for any item ranges
from half standard cost (when there are over a hundred of them in stock) to
double standard cost (when it's the last one); once they're all gone, it
goes to twice standard cost + 40,000 (which could total to as much as six
times the normal price of the item).

Currently, there's a hole in the economic simulation. There are three major
ways to get money: by selling commodities, by reporting enemy forces to the
government, and by destroying enemy forces. (You can also earn interest on
commodities and bank accounts, but these are reasonably minor compared to a
little time spent actively trading.) When you destroy enemy forces,
however, you get a recurring daily salary dependent on how much of the
enemy's forces you destroyed. This salary goes away in two fashions: you
can trade 400,000,000 of it for a new device bay on your ship (which is not
a necessity, and is finite anyway: a ship can only have so many device
bays, and in addition you can earn a device bay much more cheaply by
conquering an enemy planet), or you can trade ALL of it for another ship
(quality dependent on how high your salary currently is). Of course,
there's a limit on how many ships you can have, too -- usually three is the
maximum. 

In any case, it should be obvious that -- like just about any other MUD --
there comes a point where your drain plugs up but the faucet is still
running. My anticipated response to this is to build a bigger drain: salary
earned for defeating the enemy will expire after several days, and I think
this game is way overdue for taxation. ;>

>Even if there's 10K players in a
>game world, my "random" generosity is much more likely to be socially
>acknowledged and reciprocated than similar random generosity on the
>streets of Albuquerque, for instance.

Hehehehe... I do this sort of thing... I've been known to camp out in front
of newbie areas and hand out large sums of money. The key there is that if
one out of every ten newbies I give money to sticks around, and one out of
every ten of *those* becomes a respected player, then for every hundred
newbies I give a stack of money to I'll have the respect of a respected
player. As Dr. Cat has so eloquently observed, attention is the currency of
the future, and I've personally found that attention is purchased primarily
with reputation. Basically, I've found a way to buy reputation through
brute force. ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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