[MUD-Dev] On balance and reality

[William Leader]

From: "Vladimir Cole" <vc at vladcole.net>

> Will, how do you measure when prices go up? The CPI is a basket of
> goods that the consumer can be expected to buy. Do you go out and
> attempt to purchase a basket of standard goods every month? Or
> every two months? Or do you have an automated means of monitoring
> player-character to player-character trades?

...

> Plus, how do your NPCs react to changing demand?

...

>Why not simply ask your system how much cash your players > have in
their pockets and restrict the supply accordingly?

I assume you mean Consumer Price Index, and I have been doing
something similar. So what I've been doing is collecting the price
paid for each item, In both directions PC sales and Purchases. PC to
PC trades are hard to track so I have been ignoring them (I figure
it helps inject a little chaos.) If you are familiar with
Everquest's Bazzar, that information is just as easy to capture as
NPC data. Each sale is an insert statement into a table. Nice low
overhead to collect the information. An external program takes all
that data for a time period and calculates as follows.

Each Object is Generated an Average. This value is stored in a table
that is later used by NPC merchants. This way the merchants price
changes over time to what the market says it should be. So if
players are always selling object X for 5 gold pieces to each other,
and NPC only pay 1gp. then over time NPC prices will rise to match
PC to PC prices. Neat huh?

Ok, now that each object has a market price, These Prices are
averaged, and this average is compared to the previous time
period. When the average goes up, treasure rewards are reduced. (To
combat inflation, reduce the money supply) When the average goes
down hand out more treasure. I really haven't hit a magic amount to
change the treasures payouts by. I suspect it will be different for
different system, and may even be different across shards.  Thats
not really any worse than what the federal reserve does now, they
just guestimate too.

I suppose the reason I don't just dig into player accounts and count
their funds is that I never thought to do so. Now that you bring it
up, I can think of couple of reasons why you wouldn't. Mainly it
comes down to this.  Say the prices are too high, The players can't
afford what they want so they start saving. All this saving means
that more player have more money in their accounts. If they have to
much money you want to raise prices to siphon it off right? Well
no. They are saving because prices are too high, and raising prices
will only make it worse. If you lower prices based on this, then
they won't spend as much and money will still accumulate. On the
other hand, say prices are too low. Players easily buy what they
want so their cash reserves stay lower. Again no matter what do you
do, Niether raising or lowering prices makes sense for the same
reasons as before. What it really comes down to is I am trying to
control inflation. Inflation is based on prices not on savings. To
make a good decision, I need to base that on choice on prices, not
on savings. So yes capturing price data is more work, but it is the
data I have to have to acomplish the task.

On a side note while I find this endlessly interesting, I wonder
what effect it will have on socialization to have merchants always
have sane prices.  Will PC to PC trade be reduced if players can
always buy and sell to NPCs and still get a good deal? I suppose
that could easily be fixed by having NPCs always have their prices
be a percentage off so that players can get a better deal from other
players....

-Will
k2wrpg.org
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