[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[Freeman]

From: Rayzam

> One measure of manufacturing faucets is the amount of inactive
> money.  Inactive money can be gained from multiple faucets, in
> fact from all of them. But the proportion of inactive money is
> related to the manufacturing in the player-driven economy.

> So I view that example as a case of inflation. There's a problem
> in that economy. Thus, removing inactive money from economy
> equations would mask or ignore the problem. Inactive money isn't a
> drain, it's a sign of an open faucet.

What about a scenario in which many/most players have very little
inactive money, but a relatively few players have giant reserves of
inactive cash that they will never spend?

Analyzing money-in/money-out ratios or even the bottom-line amount
of inactive cash might lead you to believe the faucet is too open.
But if you close it, then those players (most of them) who were just
barely getting by are going to feel squeezed by the sudden lack of
money available to them.

And I suspect that the money hoarders would continue to hoard cash
in this situation: In order to stop them hoarding you'd have to turn
the faucet almost completely off (having terrible consequences for
the bulk of the players).

Also, if players perceive hard times where money's suddenly more
scarce, won't this encourage them to hoard even more money.  If
money's easy to get, I don't bother to save any, because I can
always get more when I need it.  But if money is hard to get, then I
cling to every dime and never purchase anything that I don't
absolutely need (and then never for more than I absolutely have to
pay for it).

So, it still goes back to ignoring the inactive money - counting it
as being 'in the system' when it's mostly not - and then making
decisions based on bad analysis ("There's too much money, let's open
the drains and close the faucets" when, for the majority of the
players, this isn't really the case.

Furthermore, as time goes by, you will always have more and more
money 'going inactive' as players cancel accounts or just quit
playing. If you still count that money as being 'in the system' then
you'll think you have a lot more money than is really available.  If
you count it as inactive (because it *might* come back some day),
but take inactive money as a sign of open faucets, then you're
always going to be reducing the amount of currency in the game as it
ages (then getting into a really nasty negative feedback loop if
this scarcity causes hoarding).

I almost opened this reply with "If everyone had some chunk of
inactive money, I'd agree", but if cash being too scarce causes
hoarding, as I suspect it would, then you might, upon seeing that
everyone has some inactive cash (probably there'd be quite a bit of
it, bottom line), conclude that there was too much money in the
system and tighten the screws on the player even more.
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