Crafting Money (was: RE: [MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 characte r per server)

[Freeman]

From: Dave Trump

> When I played DaoC, for example, if I found an item that wasnt
> useful to me but might be useful to someone I knew I would keep it
> in hopes that I could trade it for something, simply because money
> had no value at all.  The total failure of the cash economy and
> emergent barter economy is the cause of much unneccessary
> hoarding.
 
> With DSO we erred on the side of making gold to almost too
> valuable.  This was intentional.  In their desperation to get cash
> many players will sell valuable items thier friends could have
> used to NPC vendors for pennies on the dollar.  Just like in the
> real world.  The money sinks are deep enough and common enough
> that every coin you can scrounge is quickly used up.

As a player, I can't decide which is more annoying: Ignoring money
and engaging in a barter economy because money is worthless, of
constantly living in poverty.

I rather like AC2's system where players use random loot items as
components in crafting.  I'm not sure how the 'convert stuff to
gold' aspect will work out, since there doesn't seem to be a great
deal of correlation between what an item is actually 'worth' and how
much gold you can get by converting it.  It leaves me thinking that
I ought not convert things into gold, because someone might be able
to use the thing, but you can't use gold for anything (and I don't
want to sell it to another player for gold, because, well, I don't
really need gold for anything).

But some of the crafting options require Stuff as well as Gold, so
maybe it'll all pan-out and 'cash' will more or less be the medium
of trade after all.  I like that it's tied into the crafting system
in any case: So it derives its value from its use and usefulness,
and isn't simply an unrelated 'medium' that players will wind-up
ignoring.

Still, what sticks me is the one-way conversion.  In my mind, it's
not really 'money' unless I can convert a thing into it, And convert
it back into the thing.

At least at the resource level, if not for more complicated items:
If $5 worth of Resource can be converted into $5, and $5 can be
converted into $5 worth of resource - Then players can trade the $5
and not trade (or hoard) the resources.

It's made me think that money, "coins", could themselves be
craftable, given the infrastructure to support this sort of 2-way
conversion.  In a meta-sense, the 2-way conversion is already there:
I can sell a sword for $5 and, if that's the going rate for a sword,
then presumably I can buy a sword for $5, too.  But the mechanics of
this are so abstracted and unreliable that it doesn't Feel like I
can do that, even if I actually can (ignoring the NPCs that
invariable buy swords for $1 and sell them for $50, because they're
about as much of the economy as a trashcan).

So I've been meaning to make some time to think about Money Crafting
- where money is actually representative of commodities (because
that's where money comes from), where players trade resources by
using cash as the medium of exchange (because that's what cash
actually represents, and because it's handier to tote around than 16
tons of unobtainium), and so on.

But so far every time I try to think about it, I get stupid and
overly complex systems budding in my brain which involve currency
exchanges and commodities markets and so on.

I enjoy approaching game design from the viewpoint of "Well, players
always wind-up doing X anyway, so let's just design a game system
around that."  So from the economy standpoint: Frequently an in-game
currency is provided by the game system, but players wind-up mostly
ignoring it and setting on some other form of (essentially
player-made) currency.  I'm curious if anyone knows of a MUD using a
system in which the currency is all 'player-made', so to speak (and
not just accidentally, that is, but as-designed).

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