[MUD-Dev] On balance and reality

[Vladimir Cole]

From: "William Leader" <leader at k2wrpg.org>

> When I came back to the problem, I came back with I different
> idea. I wanted to control inflation by controlling the money
> supply. I was trying to control the money supply with a reserve
> system which in hindsight I think was kind of dumb. I decided that
> since what I wanted to do was control the money supply I should just
> control the money supply. When prices when up, I just handed out
> less treasure, when they went down, the simulation gave out more
> treasure. The prices stablized. They wobbled, but were stable. It
> worked. It was at this point that I learned something about reality
> in MUDs.

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 (vs. PC to NPC trades, which I'd imagine are easy to
monitor). I undrestand the basic economic theory, but don't understand how
you practically measure prices.

Plus, how do your NPCs react to changing demand? If an NPC sells a bottle of
milk for 2 silver, how does he know whether he's set his price too high or
too low? In a real economy, merchants will raise the price of their goods
when they sense that demand is outstripping supply, but your NPCs are
probably stocked with unlimited supplies of milk.

If you really want to restrict money supply, why base your restrictions on
some sort of dependent variable like a synthetic CPI? Why not simply ask
your system how much cash your players have in their pockets and restrict
the supply accordingly? As a game designer, you can do what no government
can do: you can reach into the pockets of each player in your system and
count the change there. You can even track these values over time and
calculate the average growth in personal net worth from month to month to
keep your economy growing at a steady but not unsustainable rate.

- Vlad


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