[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Ross Nicoll]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, 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:
[snip]

Actually, a thought occurred to me. Everyone is assuming that just the
players and the cities they're in are given an economy. What if you give
everything an economy? Let's say the players start hoarding massive
amounts of gold. There are a dragon in a mountain nearby that suddenly
discovers it has much less gold than it would like, so it flies off,
attacks a nearby village, and grabs whatever it can.

Or, in the case of more sentient monsters (orks, kobolds, whatever), you
could have a whole economy for them too, and they could organise raiding
parties against human cities...

> Now we hit the problem. The player goes and finds an expensive item that's
> abundant. He buys several, making them very scarce. Then he sells them at
> the scarce price, making them abundant again. Then he buys again at the
> abundant price. Looking at the math above, you can figure out reasonably
> quickly that every time he buys the items, he buys at half normal cost C,
> and every time he sells them it's at full normal cost. 
On the other hand, if you have a very rare item, they're not likely to be
in just one shop. In fact, the player should probably have to travel most
of the game world to find all of them, IMHO...
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