[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[Freeman]

From: Rayzam

> 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 ;)

Hrm... But what about money-flow?

Simplifying this a bit, lets say in cookies-online you have people
who kill doodlebugs for cash, and the occassional chocolate chip.
They sell the chips to cookie-makers.  You have a dough-harvesting
profession which harvests dough from trees and sells that to the
cookie-makers.  Both the harvesters and the adventurers buy cookies
from the cookie-makers.

In this scenario, cookie-makers are always going to accumulate cash.
Even though they pay money to adventurerers for chocolate chips and
pay money to the dough-harvesters for the dough.  And even though
the money faucet in this case is aimed at the adventurers, not the
cookie-makers.

Unless they're working for free or losing money on each cookie sale,
the price they pay for dough and chips is going to establish the
base price for cookies.  They'll sell cookies for that amount of
money, plus a little more.

So eventually you have cookie-makers with lots of inactive cash. It
doesn't matter if the adventurers and harvesters start charging more
for their resources: That's just going to raise the price they pay
for cookies so the money is going to return to the cookie-makers
pretty quickly, accumulate and go inactive.

If you tighten the money faucet or the dough faucet (or open 'em
both wide-up), the cookie makers will still accumulate cash, either
more quickly or more slowly.

It seems to me that the problem there isn't the faucet at all.  But
how do you address it?  All crafters will take any cost or drain
that you throw at them and use that to establish a base price,
charging everyone else that plus a little more, and therefore
accumulate cash.

But I'm still not entirely sure that it even matters.  I made the
assumption that lots of inactive cash is bad, but I suppose it might
not be at all.

> 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.

With the money flow-issue, it really could be faucet that you can't
close without negatively impacting other players, but I can see
where the rate of inactive cash growth is better marker.

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

Agreed.  When I say 'open' and 'close' I really mean 'increase the
flow' and 'decrease the flow' rather than 'turn on' and 'turn off'.
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