[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[Douglas Goodall]

John Buehler wrote:

> 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.

This is kind of how I see it. The most basic axioms of economics
don't apply to virtual economies.

  1. In-game resources are not scarce.

  2. In-game resources do not have alternate uses.

  3. No private property (thus, no reason to protect or preserve
  it--the Tragedy of the Commons, etc).

  4. Players are even less rational than real-life consumers and
  producers.

This makes virtual economies hard to predict or analyze. The only
scarce resource with alternate uses is *time* (or patience...). But
this is a choice of playing the game or doing something else, not a
choice between two in-game resources.

The first three are design issues. You could make an economy where
goods are scarce, where each good is necessary for many different
things (not just a dozen "different" swords), and where players can
own "natural" resources. I suspect players would hate this and
refuse to play the game, but it is possible. Though you'd have to be
very careful to ensure that allowing property does not guarantee
monopolization. I.e. everyone has to pay Guild X a use fee to hunt
on their land, which includes all the high-level spawning points.

Irrational behavior has no solution.
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