[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[Rayzam]

<EdNote: The quoting and attribution were a bit weird.  I think I
fixed them correctly>

From: "Freeman, Jeff" <jfreeman at soe.sony.com>
> Rayzam wrote:

>> 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?

That is evidence pointing toward what faucet is open. If
nerf-herders are the ones building up inactive cash at the greatest
rate, then obviously the nerf-herding faucet is putting more value
into the economy than the costs or drains. Granted there's a
coefficient of this rate, possibly due to scruffiness ;)

> 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.

Right. So as you were pointing out, and a point I hadn't thought
about: use the rate of inactive cash growth as a marker of what
faucet is open.  Then work on closing that faucet. That won't affect
others depending on different faucets. Thus, those other players
won't be squeezed by a lack of credits/gold.

In general, I feel that faucets need to be adjusted slowly, instead
of open/closing them. But this is a separate issue.


> 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).

Well, someone into collecting a bank account would hop to the next
best faucet. They'll in essence track the rate of monetary gain for
providing player-created goods and services in a player-driven
economy. They're the stock traders of the player-driven world.

I think that the second-order point you're making is a notable
one. When we are examining the economies of our games, we can only
be reactive, not proactive or retributive. That means, we can see
where faucets are open too wide or too slow, and where drains are
too fast or too slow. We can then correct for it. We can't predict
these imbalances, or if we could, we wouldn't put them there. Once
we detect something to be modified, especially if it led to a
build-up of credits, we cannot go in and say sorry, you have 1
million credits, but we messed up, so we're taking back 900,000 of
them.  Oh, Bob over there only has 10,000 credits, so we're not
taking anything from him. Once someone's built up a hoard, it's
going to stay around.

Maybe that's a good point. Maybe it's not the amount of inactive
cash, but the rate of gain. If Billy manufactured goods and built up
a large hoard of credits due to a design issue, and that faucet is
then corrected, it's not the amount of cash he has that matters, but
the fact that the 20 million credits/month he was adding to his
reserves is now dropped to 50k/month. The fear still is that he can
dump that hoard into the economy causing lots of problems.

> 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).

Economic value can be self-correcting, as well as
self-inflating. When the East Germany economy bombed, bread was
going for an awfully high price.  If money is more scarce, the price
of goods will drop to what the market can afford. Bob may only get
10 credits a nerf he's herded, in a tighter economy, which means the
price he can pay for food and feed is less. If every nerf-herder is
in the same boat, the prices of those materials will drop [assuming
it's a sell or decay system].

But that's a digression, because I'm talking about a directed
tightening. Whatever was being manufactured that gives a person 100M
credits in reserve is the faucet that was open too much. That needs
to be tightened.  Those buying the manufactured goods were getting
their credits from a different faucet. So they won't be making less
credits/week. The profit margin the 100M credit person was making
will be shrunk.

> 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 he drains and close the faucets" when, for the majority of
> the players, this isn't really the case.

You're right. Opening drains and closing faucets indiscriminately is
bad. It needs to be directed. And you've had me change my original
intent: instead of measuring inactive cash, the important thing is
to measure the rate of gain/loss of cash reserves, and use that to
determine which faucet/drain needs modding.

rayzam
www.travellingbard.com
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