[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[Paul Schwanz]

Freeman, Jeff wrote:

> 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.

It seems to me that this is all the result of the notion that you
must guarantee success to your players and that financial gain is
often key to a players conception in this regard.  To quote from The
Laws of
Online World Design:

  /Players have higher expectations of the virtual world/

  The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real
  world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in
  profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be
  protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek
  redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved
  quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to
  be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and
  you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the
  expectations.

If all players are guaranteed financial success in the game's
design, can there ever be *any* way to avoid inflation.  All players
expect to increase their own wealth and all players expect no
inflation.  Do developers really do a good job of managing these
expectations?  Or do their designs often try to cater to the
player's feelings of entitlement?  I've yet to see the marketing
campaign that explains how loss, toil, labor, and even failure are
necessary components of a healthy, functioning world.  :)

--Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz
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