[MUD-Dev] Economic Growth: NPC pricing

[Paul Schwanz]

From: "Adam Martin" <ya_hoo_com at yahoo.com>
> From: "Timothy Dang"
>> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Bobby Martin wrote:

>>> My half-formed ideas regarding integrating NPCs into the economy
>>> are to have the NPCs know a local market price (by monitoring
>>> exchanges on the server) and scarcity.  For some default
>>> scarcity, they want to sell at e.g. 110% market price and buy at
>>> e.g. 80% of market price.

>> I've generally been down on trying to make NPC merchants active
>> economic participants, but at first glance I imagine something
>> like this could work because of player arbitrage. If NPCs each
>> keep separate measures of appropriate price, and adjust their own
>> prices independently of each other (which means using the
>> individual NPCs state, not the regional state, for information),
>> any individual NPC may get some prices out of whack.

>> However, if the prices get too out of whack, then you'd expect
>> players to arbitrage those prices between the different NPC
>> merchants. In order for this to work well, you'd probably need
>> each NPC to have unlimited stock and funds, though.

> My knowledge of what current MUD's are doing is scant to say the
> least, but I do know that Runescape has been operating this system
> most of the time it has been running...

> All shops have unlimited supply of about 5-10 items (the basic
> items essential for trade skills, or the 2-3 most basic
> weapons/armour/shields, dependent on the type of shop), so there
> are no chances taken with someone DoS'ing newbies from the basic
> activities.

I was curious as to why Timothy thought unlimited stock and funds
were needed.  Especially given that Bobby was talking about basing
an NPC's pricing on current inventory/scarcity.  On the other hand,
I can see why you would want to protect newbies against any sort of
Denial of Service.  How does Andrew (Runescape) handle prices on the
5-10 items that are unlimited in supply?  Are they fixed, or is
something other than scarcity used to make prices
dynamic/responsive?

Personally, I think I'd try to address the possibility of a newbie
DoS from a different perspective.  (I don't like the idea of
unlimited supplies.) For some background information on the
perspective, see this post from the archives.

 http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2001Q2/msg00649.php

In particular, I'm talking about the need to pursue certain
prosperity (and even population) goals in order to "level-up" your
community.  The prosperity goals for leveling from a village to a
town, for instance, could very well include not only having a
certain number of NPC shops in the village, but also ensuring that
some minimum set of basic goods and services were available to
citizens.

In addition, the need to meet population goals to level also
addresses the more generic newbie problems.  Since a newbie head
counts just as much as a veteran toward population goals, it
behooves the community to ensure that the newbie experience is
satisfactory.  Communities with better newbie retention will be more
likely to level-up.

Of course, rival communities might not be so keen on seeing yours
level-up.  They may decide to become actively involved in making
sure that you don't have access to the goods and services required
to become a town.  This should be very difficult to do at lower
community levels, but much easier as prosperity goals start to
include more luxury items.  In any case, the community takes on the
responsibility of seeing that citizens can avail themselves of the
items or services they desire.  The community that can't seem to get
this right will probably lose citizens to the communities who can.

In reality, there should probably be some pretty hefty barriers in
order to go from one community to another, however, it would be
important to try to ensure that those barriers were not so great
that players would leave the game before changing communities.

--Phinehas

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