[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Active and Inactive Currency

[Peter Keeler]

Caliban Darklock wrote:

> Your example of having the money in a bank pooled to supply the
> faucets is a start, but it doesn't actually model a system that works.
> Effectively, your bank is taking the money people deposit and either
> giving it away to monsters or abandoning it in out-of-the way places.
> This is not exactly a good business model. The bank should be doing
> something that increases its supply of money, so it can pay interest
> and salaries and the imaginary rent on the massive building where it
> does business.

Agreed. The pool idea is a gross oversimplification, but it's a 
necessary step in the right direction because it allows just the 
beginning of being able to track where the money in your game goes.

Modeling the real world exactly might be the ideal way to go, with banks 
offering loans and charging interest on them. The banks are viable 
businesses, the monsters actually get their loot by killing passersby, 
and everything works realistically.

My problem is that loans probably aren't fun enough to put in a game. 
There's also the anonymity problem - you can't hold a player accountable 
to pay back a loan. He'll take your money, give it to an alt and disappear.

The pool idea does gloss over some of the details. Especially the 
difficult questions such as "how do peasants get their money?" and "how 
does the bank stay in business if they give interest and don't lend 
money?" It makes the assumption that somehow the money you deposited 
made its way into the hands of a monster somewhere, which I don't think 
is really that much of a stretch.

If I were going to implement the system, I would allocate a size for the 
pool based on a bunch of statistics about the game (number of players, 
average cash per player, number of living NPCs, etc.) and grow or shrink 
the pool as it changed. Faucets hand out money proportional to how much 
of the total remains in the pool... so if it's running low, NPCs will 
spawn with very little. If it's closer to being full, they'll have more.

   Pete