[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Active and Inactive currency

[John Buehler]

Jeff Freeman writes:
> From: John Buehler

>> Well, how about vanity purchases?  Or just purely fun stuff?
>> That will cause players to spend their cash.

>> But, you immediately say, players will incorporate the cost of
>> those things into their prices.  I disagree with that becuase
>> these are truly discretionary purchases.

> I agree with you.

>> All this is true, except for the implication that there isn't a
>> way to solve the pooling problem.  It is discretionary
>> expenditures that make the difference.  Players need to have
>> things that they can buy, organizations that they can give to,
>> support and so on, that will inspire them to spend their ready
>> cash.  If they are too flamboyant with their spending,
>> competition will kill them because they can't just arbitrarily
>> raise their prices.

> I agree with this in principle, but I've never seen anyone do it.

> Then too, there are some players who are like dragons: They prefer
> the hoard of gold over anything the gold can possibly buy.

I think the hoarding thing probably is something that a certain
chunk of the population has a natural tendency to do, whether in
real life or in a game experience.  I suspect that such people hoard
because they are not risk-takers (check out the spending habits of
anyone who lived through The Great Depression).  If that's true,
then it would suggest that getting into any aspect of a game that
permits pooling should involve taking risks.  So running a business
should be risky so that when they're successful the business owners
are of a mind to use their excess cash instead of sitting on it.  If
we want to make killing things a means of introducing value (cash
and prizes) into the economy, then killing has to be far more risky.
Perhaps only dragons have cash and prizes, and dragon hunts take
many people, beat up equipment and happen infrequently.

And I certainly agree that tuning a game to support all this stuff
is a difficult thing.  But I figure that it's the next logical step
for game economies.  I'd be working on a simulation to test out all
this stuff, but I'm busy writing a book :)

JB
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev