But since death penalties alone usually aren't enough to prevent the hyperinflation incurred by player farming, what else do games do? Well, first off, they use the buy and sell prices of vendors. Note how most NPC vendors in these games only give you a very small percentage of an item's value when you try to sell it to them. Where does that value difference go https://gaming-side.com/?
Nowhere. It falls out of the economy, effectively reducing the amount of currency in circulation. Unfortunately, this technique isn't a cure-all for the problem either. Because our NPC merchants aren't all that discriminating about what they'll buy. In real life, a shopkeep would tell you, "No. Stop trying to sell me rusty knives." "You've sold me thirty of them now. I don't want any more. Get out of here." But nope, our NPCs are happy to pick up those tattered rat pelts all day long! Rag, weeds, a handful of rocks... Doesn't matter if they're worthless at the auction house; that NPC will buy as many as you can bring them. This means that items which otherwise would have zero economic value now have some economic value due to our NPC vendors. Which, in the end, often results in the sell function actually adding more currency to the economy than it removes. This is doubly true when you introduce the concept of soulbound items. Sure, it creates scarcity for those specific items... But it also means the only place you can eventually offload them is with a vendor. Which just floods more and more money into the economy. If it were a regular item, it could at least get circulated among the playerbase forever... ...as players kept selling it to each other, which is a currency neutral activity. But okay, what other options do we have? Well, there's also consumables. Potions, ammo, food and drink. All of these serve as ways to remove currency from the economy. And games which make these systems crucial parts of play tend to do so... ...so that the designers can have a big lever to pull to stop runaway inflation when they need to. Is inflation growing too fast? Well, create an expensive high-end consumable that all your players are gonna wanna burn through... ...and you can level out that problem real quick. Auction house fees are another common system. Besides simply deterring players from putting up junk auctions all the time... ...these fees serve to remove a small percentage of the cost of an item from the economy every time it circulates through the playerbase. There's also services. Have you ever wondered why you have to pay for fast travel, or why that griffin ride costs you money? It's because it's another economic sink. This can be anything from transportation, to fees for sending letters, to money paid to open up new bank slots. All of these services take money from the player without returning a tangible good, thus effectively deleting that money from circulation. I could go on all day about this stuff, but let's talk about some of the more inventive solutions that could be used. First off, let's talk about this idea of tying currency to a consumable necessity. Let's say, for example, that you put a high-end potion into your game for ten thousand gold that every raid player is gonna want every time they go raiding. Now let's say that it's only purchasable from vendors. And not only does this remove ten thousand gold from your economy every time a player swings one of these things... ...but it also sets a baseline for the value of money. Your currency may inflate, but by essentially backing it with another good - by saying that at any point, you can trade in ten thousand gold for this potion... Your currency will never become worthless. Or you could tie it to real-world currency. If players can trade your in-game currency for something with real-world value... It'll inflate, but it'll always retain value. In Eve Online, Plex serve this function. Plex are game codes that can be used to pay the monthly subscription fee for the game, but they're also tradable on the in-game market. And this means that the in-game currency will always have value, because it's tied directly to something with a real-world dollar value. There are also taxation systems in games, which help to keep things regulated. You wanna keep your guild for another month? Well, you better pay x amount of gold. You wanna keep that farmland you bought? I guess you better pay the NPC lord a few hundred guilders before the week is out. It's an effective option, although it's really hard to manage without making it feel burdensome to the player. Lastly, there's the idea of permanent purchasable upgrades for a character. We do already use this to a limited degree. Have you ever wondered why this trainer who wants to guide you through life or prepare you to save the world... ...isn't gonna teach you that new kick until you fork over four platinum? It's to get that money out of the game. The problem is that this often stops at the level cap, when you run out of stuff to learn. Which is unfortunate, because that's the place where it would actually be most effective. There is an alternative, though: premium endgame trainers. Have you already maxed out your level? Well, here's a special trainer who will increase any stat you want by one point, for 40,000 experience points and 10,000 gold. The great thing about this is that it can be an exponential system, which causes the high-end players to just drain money out of the economy. Which is good, because those players are usually the biggest generators of inflationary influxes of cash. This stuff is all just the tip of the iceberg, but we are way out of time. If you guys found this interesting, let us know. We may come back to it. There is no shortage of special weirdness that comes with trying to craft an economy for an MMO. See you next week!
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AuthorThis blog to help people in finding a good job. He is a guest writer, Casinoslots analytic. He likes poker, roulette, esports, real money casinos https://www.casinoslots.co.nz/online-casino-list Online Gambling Reviews
March 2019
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