[MUD-Dev] Value in the Economy of the MOG

[Delphine T. Lynx]

I'm sure everyone's noticed it - in most cases, hard coded money has
zero value in these games. No matter how hard to obtain, or how
useful as far as NPCs go (healing, equipment, etc), money eventually
undergoes such inflation as to have no value whatsoever for
Player<->Player interaction.

The question is, why?

Personally I have two theories on the matter....neither accompanied
by a solution.

First, there's the 'supply and demand' theory. Even if each mob only
has a 1% chance of dropping a coin, you're still left with:

Newbie kills 1 lvl 1 monster/minute: 1 gold/100 minutes High level
kills 20 lvl 1 monsters/minute: 20 gold/100 minutes

In fact the scale is even more twisted than the above example. The
result is that there will generally be a *huge* difference in the
earning potential of the old vs the young. The result of this
portion of the supply/demand issue is that in order to balance
costs, things need to either cost more than a newbie can afford, or
too little to be significant to a high level player.

The next issue with supply is tied to locality. In most MUDs, one
can obtain the uber trade items from only one or two spawn
points. If you camp for the Uber Sword of Dragon Killing, a buyer
can be sure it's worth X. If I offer 5,000 gold for that sword, I
*may* have killed a super rich mob'but I may also have killed 5,000
poor mobs....the result? Who wants gold; it's not stable enough,
anyone can obtain it through time.....which ultimately also means
that, eventually, everyone's swimming in it.

More importantly, however, IMO, is the 'utility' issue of gold. What
does gold do? Not a thing in most worlds.

Lets look at Diablo II. The 'standard currency' is/was the Stone of
Jordan....a ring that, while not *perfect*, was standardized (unique
item, non-random), small, and extremely useful to a lot of character
builds.

Therefore, even if *no one* would take your SOJ in a trade, you had
it 'insured' by the fact that it was still useful to you, even if
you couldn't unload it. This is a key factor.

In a MUD, if I have a 'sword of dragon slaying', it may be worth
nothing *on the market* tomorrow, but it'll always (read: until an
expansion) be the best sword in the game. This means it retains it's
root value even if the market value drops. I can *always* slap it on
a character and kick butt with it. What can you do with gold if no
one wants it? Make pretty piles?

One way around this I'm looking into now is something akin to what
Herbert did with the Dune books....water as a currency on
Arrakis. You *need* X amount of it, otherwise you die.

If you have more than the amount needed to survive, you have power,
as you can 'give' it to people who have less than X.

Has anyone experimented with an economic system that can keep the
value of hard coded currency, assuming a game with an erratically
increasing player base?

I'm aware of the theories for a 'zero sum economy'....but none of
them really provide the key point, the desire to *use* money.


~Delphine T. Lynx

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