[MUD-Dev] [News] Virtual goods--Oh, the controversy!

[Douglas Goodall]

At 03:02 PM 4/11/2004 +0100, Marian wrote:

> However there is an even more insidious and potentially more
> serious problem: inflation.

> In fact there are three kinds of inflation involved, though they
> are largely caused by flaws in the game design of many games.

> First of all there is the inflation of character power. This
> happens when low level characters get equipment that is meant for
> higher levels. This will normally occur in a game (unless it is
> actively restricted somehow), but the ability to buy items will
> increase it. The resulting problems are that low level players are
> racing through the game and both make balancing impossible and
> likely take away content (monsters to kill) from other players who
> do not have twinked equip ment.  The other problem is that such
> players remove themselves from the intended areas for their
> 'age'. This means that those who do not buy/get gifted high level
> gear are left behind in mostly empty zones that they can see
> others race through. It diminishes their experience and likely
> fosters resentment

This can be reduced (though never removed) with level or skill
requirements. I prefer skill requirements, as they allow a degree of
twinking, but not an excessive degree if the requirements are
reasonable (and if buffing items also have skill/level requirements
and buffs themselves have skill/level requirements for the target).

(Although a system that had a level cap for how much a skill could
be buffed might make low-level twinking more fair... If a high level
buff can raise a level 100 player's skill by 100 points, but when
cast on a level 10 player it can raise the skill only 10 points and
does not stack with items or other buffs, then low-level characters
would not need an inventory full of buffing items to compete. A
common buff would fill the buffing limit and more complex strategies
(multiple stacking buffs and +skill items) would be limited to the
high-end game.)

This can also be reduced slightly with item decay. Players can't
pass on old equipment if it's been ruined with use or time. But
whether you want to reduce "hand me downs" is a matter of some
debate. It does give players with friends or a large guild an
advantage... But not allowing it could harm the community in that
you've removed one possibility for kindness. Some players need help
to advance or have no way of acquiring better gear on their
own. Other players (such as myself) enjoy helping others more than
personal advancement.

> The second inflation is the straightforward monetary
> inflation. Most games realise that players hate to lose their hard
> earned equipment.  Instead they leave all items in the game
> indefinitely.  They are, in other words, running with the money
> press running full out. The predictable result is a rampant
> inflation.  In a real economy you would see prices go through the
> roof, and starting players starve to death but in a game there is
> a fixed price for which vendors will sell and buy for, and the
> game economy will get increasingly skewed. The end result is
> either tradeskills getting useless, or players needing an ever
> increasing amount of game money to obtain worthwile items. They
> likely will have to turn to game item and money sellers like IGE
> to obtain the hundreds of thousands, then millions, then billions
> of gold pieces to buy ordinary pieces of equipment.  There is of
> course a limit on this, namely the influx of 'free' items through
> looting, and this brings us directly to the third form of
> inflation.

Item decay and strict money sinks are the only solutions I can see
here. That, and making sure that there aren't any easy *sources* of
in-game income like dupe bugs or diamond seal farming or mission
blizting, etc. If there's a better solution, let me know. Players
hate money sinks (and hate the consequences of not having money
sinks, too, but those are not so obvious or ripe for forum
complaints).

> As the second form of inflation puts a downward pressure on the
> value of items this causes an equal inflation in the real dollar
> value of things.  Both the companies selling things and the
> players providing them must sell ever more items for less money,
> or they must begin to control the production. Players whose income
> depends on their ability to come up with a rare piece of armour,
> or hundred thousand gold pieces, will need to bring in more and
> more resources just to earn the same income. Or they will start
> pushing out the competition This means that the less dedicated
> (desperate) players will get forced off the content that is
> profitable for the professional players.  Game mechanics generally
> make that easy to do, and hard to prevent.  While there is no
> indication that this is happening systematically there is the risk
> that the professionals will start to control the market, both the
> influx of valuable items and the real world value of the game
> money that is needed.  And if you can control both then you can
> first make the player pay for the money, and then give the money
> right back to you for the rare item the production of which you
> also control.  If, as the article claimed, 100000 players a year
> are spending $100 on average then the 10 million income a year
> will tempt any company and player to fix the market so the profit
> is not going to diminish. This will lead to situations where
> players who do not pay for equipment are locked out of it, and are
> forced away from the content where they could find those items for
> free.

This is a result of what I call monopolization. The ability for a
guild or high-level player (or IGE type group) to monopolize a
resource and prevent other players from enjoying it. If a raid-class
mob spawns only in one place and has a predictable spawn timer, it
will almost always be monopolized. A lower level player that does
not belong to an uberguild has no chance of acquiring the items
(except, perhaps, through powerful friends or ebay).

There are several solutions to this, and I'd personally suggest a
combination of them. First, I'd spread loot around. Instead of
giving a boss mob a .001% chance of dropping an item, I'd give the
boss a 20-50% chance and nearby minions (or all mobs of the same
type/mesh as the boss) a 1-5% chance. Second, I'd spread the mobs
out more, making sure there were at least three camps which always
had minions and the boss would spawn at another camp the instant it
was killed (or a way of instancing the zone so that if more than a
certain number of players tried to enter, the excess would get a new
zone all to themselves, etc). Finally, I'd make sure that raid-class
gear was desirable, but not necessary. Many players will struggle
for, and feel rewarded by, minuscule or situational advantages. But
if you make raid-class loot dominant (even weakly dominant) over all
other items/strategies, it will be in excessively high demand as
every player feels they *need* the item to compete.

Only instancing (or "content on demand" as I believe it's called
these days) would completely prevent monopolization, but it could be
hard to add to an existing game. It also might not be what players
really want. Shadowlands, for instance, added a bunch of static,
non-instanced content to AO (which was about the only game that had
an early form of content-on-demand with their mission system). The
forums are full of complaints about camping, but AO allegedly has
more subscribers now than ever before. EQ is even worse in terms of
camping, but is more popular than AO (though, admittedly, perhaps
not for that reason).

So do players want camping? They seem to prefer sitting on their
<ahem> in a full group and fighting deep red mobs, even when a group
of 2-3 players moving from camp to camp and quickly killing
even-level mobs can gain XP faster. Perhaps they want to waste many
hours camping for items, as well as XP. If so, the developers should
provide this. I can only speak for myself, and I avoid camping, even
when it costs me equipment or XP or teams.

Most of the MUDs I played were too small or short-lived to have
problems with inflation. UO, EQ, and AO do not have good
economies. UO has a good excuse, being first. AO is an especially
good example of all the points you brought up.

DAoC, on the other hand, only had mild inflation while I was
playing. I believe there are several things that contributed to
this. First, items decayed. The decay rate allowed equipment to be
passed on only once or twice. Second, there were several largely
unavoidable money sinks: tradeskills, item repair, and the death tax
to name a few (presumably housing as well, but I left before that
was implemented). Third, player attributes and skills were (at least
in the earlier days of DAoC) more important than equipment. Weapons
were fairly well balanced so that I didn't feel I *needed* a rare
sword to be viable. The best spellcrafted equipment gave you no more
than a 2-3% statistical advantage over common equipment (unless my
memory is way off here). Fourth, other than diamond seal-farming,
there weren't any easy ways of generating income. And finally,
raid-class mobs were fairly generous and on relatively short spawn
timers. They usually dropped several items (and *always* put quest
items directly in player's inventories) instead of having a .001%
chance of dropping one rare/quest item and an 18 hour spawn
timer. In my limited experience, casual players had a better chance
of getting raid-class equipment in DAoC than in other
games. Particularly, as I can't recall any of it not being
sellable/tradeable to other players.

Whether this was a result of intentional design or chance, I do not
know. Would the same techniques work in another game or could they
be used to "fix" current games? I don't know. Also, I haven't played
DAoC since SI was released, so my memories are suspect...
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