[Mud-Dev] Money supply in game economies (formerly Broken eco nomies)

[Freeman]

> From: Timothy Dang [mailto:tdang at U.Arizona.EDU]
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Matt Mihaly wrote:

>>   b) Has anyone implemented systems in their worlds that allow
>>   players to act truly entrepreneurially? I'm sure someone else can
>>   come up with a better list of requirements for this, but I'd
>>   think that it would at least need:
  
>>     1. Multiply your efforts by employing (almost certainly) NPC
>>     workers.
 
> Didn't Jeff say he'd done something like this in Ackadia?

In a fairly simplistic form, and I never "finished" it, in terms of
adding in all the frilly extras that I wanted to add in - like network
dependencies that would have increased their productivity based on
satisfying their needs (miners supplying ingots to smiths, farmers
supplying veggies to cooks, and so on).  Also the NPCs don't actually
*do* anything, they just walk around pretending to do things, and then
pay their owners cash.  Their title is "apprentice" and the idea was
that the player "taught" them what to do, they earned money for the
player by doing it, but the players just immediately started refering
to them with the more accurate appellation: slaves.

The excess wealth, incidentally, didn't particularly bother me.  It
sped-up advancement and recovery from death, but I hate "newbie hell"
and most aspects of "character-building" anyway.  People don't kill
monsters for the loot so much as they kill them in order to keep the
things out of town.  And with eventual permanent death, it doesn't
matter if it's easy to recover from a temporary death anyway.

That said, there's still a bit too much wealth on Ackadia, people
"trade only" for high-end items, and some key components are only
created/sold by NPCs, and some real popular items (enchanted tools,
used to make magic items), are only dropped by mobs - so the players
"farm" dragons and the like...

Anyway, the main thing with the apprentices that makes them NOT meet
the criteria for entrepreneurialism (IMO) is that there's absolutely
no risk involved.

Now if you could drop 100k gold to setup a business which might very
well FAIL... that would be interesting.  Hoard a mass of gold, invest
it in a business, try very hard to make the business "work", fail, and
lose the mass of gold you'd invested.  Fun!  (or maybe succeed, and
make even more money, which would be even more fun than losing your
shirt).

Hmm... 'Could be a pretty interesting game in there somewhere.
'Competing with other businessmen to maintain profitibalility at least
long enough to recoup your investment, sort of thing.  Yeah, I'd play
that.

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