[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[John Buehler]

Jeff Freeman writes:
> From: Rayzam

> 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.

1. Competition and anti-trust laws.

2. Don't make cookies a mandatory consumable.

Consider the oil industry.  Oil is the lifeblood of western
civilization.  Without it, we're toast.  There are only a few
companies that are cranking out petroleum products in volume.  If
they acted in collusion, they could extort arbitrary amounts of
money from us.  Except that we have laws against that sort of thing,
so theoretically they are in competition.

So it must be with the cookie-makers.  Competition drives down the
prices, especially when they do not have a captive market.

Something that I want to stress is competition comes in many ways.
It's not just two companies making cookies head to head.  Cookies
provide something to people.  It might be the energy boost. It might
be social status.  It might be taste.  Whatever it is, it might be
something that can be provided by other goods and services.  So
competing with cookie-makers for taste might be the bread makers.
Competing with cookie-makers for energy boosts might be the
chocolate-makers.  Competing with the cookie-makers for status might
be the coffee shops.  And so on.

Game economies don't really permit much in the way of capitalist
forces, except in rather simplistic ways.  They have great
difficulty in balancing because the designers typically craft a
specific economy that is supposed to work in a specific way.  It's
somewhat analogous to the case of being able to sit in a chair, but
not pick it up to hit somebody with it.  The designer chose to make
chairs be things you sit on, and nothing more.

JB
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