[MUD-Dev] Managing MUD economy

[Adam Martin]

From: <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com>
> From: Freeman, Jeff [mailto:jfreeman at soe.sony.com]

>> 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.

> This is actually two edged, not only do newbies have the ability
> to beg for money and bypass the rat whisker stage, equipment
> deflation tends to allow them to overequip and speed through the
> newbie stage quicker, which accelerates the rate at which people
> reach the maximum level.

> Of course there are two ways around this, firstly level limit
> equipment. I don't really like this as it disadvantages those who
> like to trade and removes one the main motivations. After all the
> over-equipping allows them to catch up on some of the xp they
> missed out on whilst trading.

> The other approach is item decay, but I'm not certain how this
> affects player trade. I find myself intrinsically turned off by
> buying second hand gear that has been subject to wear. Until
> people know the system inside out, it makes pricing gear extremely
> hard too. Perhaps if there was a character skill to estimate the
> decay curves on gear it would be easier to stomach.

Interestingly, Diablo2 does both of these, the former to great
effect (and in a recent patch they added level requirements to an
item type that had previously not had any - Gems, which can be
placed into weapons/armour in order to give them additional magical
properties. Fairly obvious why they had to do this given the
existing level-limtis for equipment; its also interesting given
their particular implementation of gems - which enables you to
convert 3 gems of one type into 1 gem of a better type (good drain)
- that it took a long time before the "unwanted gems" market was
sufficiently buoyant for them to notice/correct the situation).

Sadly, D2 makes all equipment repairable fully in every town, using
the repair cost as another money sink (huge effect at low levels
1-5, very little effect at levels 5-20, and then increasing effect
for 20+ when the massively exponential scaling in armour-price
causes maintaining it to be a significant problem). If equipment
were unrepairable (they have introduced a new item type with this
property in the expansion - I suspect its partially an experiment :)
things would be a lot more interesting - suddenly any and all
equpiment would have value to high-level characters, although the
player-inventory size would HAVE to be increased (its painfully
small as it is at the moment. BTW, in passing I consider this one of
the meanest - and commercially clever - things I've ever seen done
in a sequel: Diablo2:Lord of Destruction makes very few changes to
the original game engine, other than one in particular: it doubles
the size of your storage locker. Talk about a reason to upgrade and
buy the expansion pack! For many people I know this justifies paying
for another full game (in order to get only 25% more levels) in
itself).

However, to get around to my point, another option you didn't
mention was not dropping items for high-level characters at
all. Huh? This occurred to me whilst thinking of D2's gems: one of
the massive problems with the game is that you can in general only
put 1 or two gems in any item, and they cannot be removed. If you
find a really cool piece of equipment, you know it is only going to
have finite "usefulness lifetime" mainly because its abilites won't
scale upwards, but your enemies do so quite brutally fast.  There
are special "set" items where you have to collect all the (unique)
items in the set to get special bonuses (if you wear them all at
once).  Sadly, by the time you've found enough special items/etc in
order to have half a chance at trading with other players for a
complete set, although its very impressive immediately, you
generallly know that you'll be dumping it within 2-3 levels because
the weapon-damage doesn't scale upwards, and the special abilities
don't either (many sets DO have scaling armour-class, i.e.
+X/character-level). As you progress through the game, magic
elemental damage (cold, fire, poison, lightning) from monsters
becomes more and more prevalent, and your character becomes more
prone to it, so that the special abilities of "Cold resistance +X%"
become critical. Sadly, the set items NEVER scale their resistances,
so they are generally useless to most people.  [NB in the
expansion-pack new sets were added that were MUCH more powerful -
presumably because people just weren't using them].

So, the thought was that if you re-jigged things so that characters
could use infinite amounts of some resource to bump-up their
equipment (and different equipment defined what could be bumped at
what cost), and the bumping was lost to the world whenever that
equipment was sold off (or, better, could be transferred to other
equipment you owned), then there would be massive incentive for
higher level players NOT to give away good equipment; just make
monster-drops predominantly these powerup-resource things where
before especially good equipment may have been dropped.

Finally, apologies this post is in reply to one from a month ago -
I've got somewhat behind :).

Adam M

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