[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Greg Miller]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> I started thinking about this sort of thing for UU to make up for the
> open-ended playerbase, but I saw some problems when I really examined the
> concept:
> 
>   Allow every player a cash value of 20m where m is any random constant.

Congratulations! You've just invented the pyramid scheme! Well, OK, the
first few levels contribute nothing, so pyramid schemes actually involve
slightly less, but the general formula (ignore the previous exception)
is $5 times the number of players for a "Send $5 for the person at the
top of this list..." type of thing. What amazes me is that people see
"This works and it's 100% legal!" and actually believe it. When was the
last time you saw an effective, legal program point that out in its
description?

>From a purely mathematical viewpoint, this approach will *never* work. Even
> if the player is forced to put money back into the system, he does so
> primarily to increase and extend his earning potential -- the warrior
> spends the 50m on the powerful sword that allows him to kill three monsters
> guarding 20m each, and now you have a 10m deficit.

Primarily because the overall technology available doesn't increase. If
you could spend 100m for the powerful sword, version 2.0 later, 3.0
after that, etc, the problem would be solved. In the real world, we keep
getting richer every year, and have more stuff to buy. 

Here's a law for Raph: Infinite upward spirals are only countered by
corresponding infinite downward spirals.
--
http://www.classic-games.com/
Conspiracy theorists mistakenly assume others think before acting.
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