Timeline for How do you prevent inflation in a virtual economy?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
16 events
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| Dec 20, 2016 at 23:51 | comment | added | mrr | This isn't actually a good answer. The underlying cause of inflation is increasing prices. That can be driven by all sorts of factors. Most famously, large drops in the supply of oil caused massive inflation in the 1970s. | |
| Feb 1, 2013 at 16:29 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Jonas Byström | ||
| Jul 24, 2012 at 19:20 | comment | added | CosmicGiant | @BBz I totally agree! If i wanted to play something that behaves like a lottery or queue, id search for a an e-poker game or something similar! I think the key to a fair, stable in-game economy is obviously to have consumption (destruction) balanced to match production (creation). Not the opposite. Otherwise (matching cration to the rate of destruction) it's like telling your players: "Here is a gold-rich soil, but if you mine it right now, you wont get any gold." // "Sorry, tough this round-table's knight's quest should give 'amulet of justice', the world has too many of it right now." | |
| Jun 17, 2012 at 4:46 | comment | added | Atav32 | But would a closed economy make for a fun game? For example, if players could do a quest over and over again, but couldn't receive the rewards for the quest unless rewards were available, why would they do it? And if they could receive the reward every time, but weren't allowed to attempt the quest until rewards were available, wouldn't that create competition to attempt quests? Doesn't that sound similar to competition for a job? | |
| Sep 21, 2011 at 17:12 | comment | added | Benjamin Chambers | Keep in mind that to avoid inflation / deflation, the amount of currency needs to be fixed not to a specific amount, but to a specific ratio based on the population. That is, it is useless to set a fixed amount of circulating currency at 1M, but setting it to 1K / player would achieve the desired result. | |
| Apr 29, 2011 at 14:16 | comment | added | edA-qa mort-ora-y | @MrCranky, I agree, but I think the essence of the answer still remains: stop handing out so much stuff and try to have a balance. The trouble of course is that RPG's by nature tend to focus on endless level-up/improve, thus having a closed economic system would be a great diversion from a typical RPG. But hey, somebody should at least try! | |
| Jan 5, 2011 at 10:46 | comment | added | MrCranky | This answer I think misses the fundamental economic point involved here. Currency is no different to any other resource, it's just there to facilitate trading real items. There are no items of fixed value that can be used to measure other items' value against. If you artifically fix the number of coins in the system, but allow infinite amounts of, say, food to be generated, then it all breaks down. It all has to be a closed system to work in the long term; fixing parts of it won't work. The key design decisions come in how you choose to manage the distribution through sources/sinks. | |
| Sep 23, 2010 at 15:37 | comment | added | Nate | To continue with the WoW comparison, Quest Gold rewards could be averaged out with the gear repair bill as well as the cost of regants for special buffs etc. There is a way to make sure that the amount of money entering the system is roughly equal to the amount leaving the system. | |
| Sep 23, 2010 at 8:41 | comment | added | o0'. | @Cyclops: true, you would need to completely re-design. Is that a bad thing? No. For a already-completed game is a useless thing, but for future games could be the key point of success. | |
| Aug 24, 2010 at 0:58 | comment | added | Kzqai | While having a fixed maximum amount of currency in play at any time does indeed create an economy, I don't see why that amount would have to stay at any exact integer number. For example, instead of having 23423423 coins available at any point in time, you could have 500 coins available per active account, and create more if the currently available number of coins fell below that maximum. In that way, while resources would remain limited, they could still expand dynamically to suit play. | |
| Aug 4, 2010 at 13:59 | comment | added | Martin Nycander | This is the only correct answer in my opinion. Have a closed system of resources, you can't just magically create new things without taking away something else. Apply this principle to your game design: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy | |
| Jul 28, 2010 at 18:30 | comment | added | Jake McArthur | @Cyclops NPCs could, theoretically, only offer quests when players have lost money "to the environment." It would have drastic effects on various parts of the game, but I don't think your claim needs to be so black and white. | |
| Jul 23, 2010 at 17:33 | comment | added | Cyclops | "Currency can't inflate if there's a limited amount..." - is a good example of a true but useless statement. There is no reasonable way that a major MMO like Warcraft, could stop handing out gold for doing quests. "Stop minting money" just isn't an option, without a total game re-design. | |
| Jul 23, 2010 at 17:16 | comment | added | John Haugeland | You could do that, sure. | |
| Jul 23, 2010 at 15:32 | comment | added | Tetrad | That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Would that also entail doing things like taking money that is removed from the player base (through "money sinks") and using that to populate, say, drops from monsters? | |
| Jul 23, 2010 at 15:05 | history | answered | John Haugeland | CC BY-SA 2.5 |