[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Adam Wiggins]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Koster, Raph <rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:
> > We did something like that on UO for a while--the total quantity
> > of gold in the system was tied to the total size of the
> > playerbase, and goods/gold on monsters (or issued by shops) was
> > tied to how much remained in the "bank" (eg, not in play, either
> > on monsters or in players' hands).
> > The system broke because players hoarded *everything*. Soon no
> > monsters were worth killing because they had no loot whatsoever,
> > and every shop was out of stock and out of cash.
> 
> How long did this condition persist and what norming forces were
> present to swing the pendulumn back the other way?

Just like any system, there need to be mechanisms that keep it from
getting trapped in one specific state.  I suspect that, due to the
nature of UO (both restrictions of the Ultima world and the target
audience) that these wouldn't be doable there.  But certainly
a free-play mud could get away with them.

Some ideas:

- There's no good place to store things.  Players can buy houses or
castles, but the walls can be knocked down and the bodyguards killed.
Banks can get robbed from; and perhaps they charge a good sized
percentage for storing your money with them (say, 1% per RL day).
Perhaps there's even a limit to the amount of money you can store there.

- Make money-detection spells and items reasonably availible, such that if
there is a huge hoarde of money somewhere, it will be calling like a beacon
to every player in the game, and regardless of how strong your walls are
they will eventually fall to such an onslaught of wealth-seekers.

- Bands of NPC pirates that are generated on-the-fly when large amounts of
money sit still (either in someone's inventory, on the ground, or in a house)
which go after it, take it, and then disappear once reasonably beyond player
view, returning that money to the global "pot".

- Levy taxes, and have tax brakets.  The highest tax bracket could be as high as
  40% per RL month.  Then allow players to "invest" in businesses or something
  which benefits other, less rich players.  They still have the same relative worth,
  but since the money is in active use they aren't taxed on it.  Then they get
  a steady trickle of revenue in return for the business they sponsored, which they
  can just spend slowly and not be heavily taxed.




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