[MUD-Dev] Managing MUD economy

[Freeman]

> From: Vladimir Prelovac

> But the second question still remains unsolved. The cost of level
> 30 item compared to cost of level 5 item. We do not want newbies
> to be able to buy it very easily, yet we do not want it to be too
> costly so if you sell thousands of various items you gain
> enourmous quantites of money.

This is a problem that scaling enconomies (or whatever the proper
term is: Economies in which low level people deal in pennies while
high-level people deal in Unobtanium Nuggets) will always face.  It
has a huge impact as the MUD matures.  People that start on Launch
Day go through the steps the designer envisioned: Saving their
pennies, leveling-up, saving their nickels, leveling-up, saving
their dimes, leveling-up...  People that start much later just get
handed a chunk of money by an oldbie which utterly eliminates their
need for cash for weeks, if not months: A trivial sum for the oldbie
player, a mere platinum piece, say, and the newbie won't ever need
to loot-n-sell until he's no longer a newbie any more.  Makes one
wondered why the newbies were forced to suffer through selling rat
whiskers for pennies in the first place: The gameplay doesn't seem
to be harmed (and strikes me as being better, to be honest), when
the playerbase finally does away with the designers' grand vision of
impoverished newbies.

  Questions that spring to mind are: Is it really necessary that the
  economy scale that way in the first place?

Also, perhaps a different approach to the economic model than the
hoard-n-spend d&d-ish thing: An economy based more on cash-flow.
I'm thinking of a situation in which don't really benefit from
finding a big chunk of money, and can't just outright buy much that
is worthwhile.  The object would be to increase your income, so that
you could afford the things that allow you to make more money, which
you need in order to maintain that standard of living.
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