Well, first off, this statement is equal to an affront in a place like this:
[quote=“zeno_t, post:1, topic:39742, full:true”]
Since most of MMO players are playing the game because they have boring lives.[/quote]
Next, I don’t necessarily agree with the amount of money having to be small in order to keep the economy healthy nor to make the money feel valuable for the players.
Let’s talk about the appeal of numbers for a bit.
Players actually want to see high numbers once they’ve reached a certain point in a game. Especially when we talk about damage numbers, it adds to the feeling of satisfaction when people see their attacks deal a lot of damage. Other factors like the sound-effects etc. add to this feeling as well, but the numbers have their part in it as well, which is often overlooked.
The numbers of the different currencies are much less important for this kind of satisfactory feeling because the value of the virtual goods in a game always depend on the counterweights and the possible flow of the goods.
It does not matter much for the player whether he holds 100k, 1m or 10m of a currency for him to feel wealthy, as the prices of the wares that he needs in the game and the dependancy on those wares can easily outweigh the amount of money they have. It also does not matter because the money may be flowing elsewhere, for example money not mainly being used for exchange between players (money stays in the market) but being consumed through purchases from NPC’s (money leaves the market).
It does make for an optical difference whether you look at 100k or 100m but it has nothing to do with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from being wealthy. It may, however give off a vibe that your money is worthless because of the sheer amount indicating inflation. What happens in your mind when you have that feeling is not the origin of you being more symphathetical towards lower numbers but the almost automatic fear of inflation that comes with these high numbers.
But that’s just optics and feelings and how the players are emotionally affected by these numbers. Which is very important, mind you, because a game’s success heavily relies on stimulating the players emotions. But it has nothing to do with the in-game economy of the game.
A lot of online games I have seen so far, especially indie games, give out ways to obtain money through grinding activities (as loot from killing mobs or other repetitive actions) but miss out on giving any form of counterweight to these easily obtainable amounts of money in form of items for example.
In that scenario players will hoard huge sums of money and not have anything to spend it on. Anything that is purchasable within the game will become worthless similar to the money in a short period of time.
We will call this: Bad Situation A.
Next step, they add counterweights. It is important that the in-game currency is either consumed or flows into another market in some way in order for the currency to keep value and make the players continue to seek more of it. Many games do so by adding NPC shops with all sorts of different items. What a lot of games fail to do is add the right kinds of items into these shops. You can then buy a lot of one-time purchases like weapons, cosmetic clothes, armor, consumables that you only need once or a few times etc. The players will reach the sum of all these one-time, must-have purchases (only counting the items that the player absolutely needs) at some point and once this point is reached, the players will either
a) start to spend their money on items that are not one-time purchases (if there are any)
b) start to hoard money again if they don’t deem the items left for purchase necessary, leading us back to Bad Situation A.
When you substract the inevitable costs of these one-time purchases from the currency that you will gain inevitably(i.e. from story quests) then we call this Money Point A.
So now you add a lot of interesting items or services that consume money and are helpful to the player. For example, you could add transportation services that consume money, RNG-based equip upgrades that consume money (or any other RNG/Casino/Gambling-system that are banned in countries like China or the Netherlands), potions etc. etc. etc.
This will inevitably lead to the in-game currency being consumed and taken out of the market, which then has to be farmed again in order to get back into the market.
The only reason you are able to sell a very rare item for 10 million of the in-game currency, 10 times as rare as an item worth 1 million, is because the market has at the very least more than a sum of 10 million in it. If these 10 million do not exist within the market, then they can also not be spent. Despite your items immense rarity, you would not be able to sell it for a fair amount if nobody has 10 million at hand. And that is not even considering whether the person with the 10 million even needs your item.
When money becomes a scarce resource or when huge price leaps between items happen and it becomes hard to make up prices for items because of this, then we have arrived at: Bad Situation B.
So the trick seems rather simple at first, you sum up Money Point A (the money which the player inevitably will have to spend), substract from it the money that the player will inevitably earn (story quests, milestones etc.) and balance these 2 numbers out for roughly equal proportions (plus/minus some currency that the players can/want to spend on things other than must-have purchases from Money Point A). And then you calculate in the currency gains from repeatable actions (grinding/farming, repeatable quests etc.) and substract from it all the currency costs for anything that consumes the money (not including money that flows into another market, or stays in the market via player-player trade), let’s call this Money Point B.
There are many ways in which you can balance out these numbers of static gains/costs(Money Point A) and the dynamic gains/costs(Money Point B) and you could even further intertwine the gains and costs from these with other systems you implement (like auction houses for example) to balance the numbers out. This balanced market situation, we will call Balanced Market A.
That’s that. But now let’s say our players are able to trade all items and our in-game currency between each other. It’ll create a market where our currency will flow between the players instead of being consumed (or be only partly consumed through a fee). This has immense consequences for our Balanced Market A. Players will no longer sell items to NPCs that they used to sell to them before (like an upgraded equip part or a rare item that they don’t need) and instead sell them for more money to other players now. This money is then no longer substracted from Money Point A nor B because it no longer gets consumed. The prices for the items are set by the players and hence the amounts of consumed money from fees and the money distribution between players become highly abstract. You can no longer say how much money a single player may have at a given point in the game because he might have made better or worse financial decisions during the transactions. But the biggest problem being that a lot of the items which count to Money Point A will now switch hands between the players for much cheaper prices. Suddenly your calculations from Balanced Market A are wrong, the currency does not flow in abudance into the market but the amount of money that leaves the market is drastically less than before and players now have to make decisions of whether to spend their money on player-traded items or NPC sold items, leading us back to money inflation and again back to Bad Situation A.
Now you may say that this problem becomes easily solvable by figuring out your demand and supply of the items that can be sold via player-trade beforehand already. And to an extend, it can and is advised to be done.
But this isn’t all. There are many more things you can take into account if you want to know about making a healthy game economy. For example, what happens if someone (like the devs) makes adjustments to an established market in a given situation? Or what happens when there is not 1, but 2, 3 or even more different currencies?
The creation of different currencies creates a money flow between different markets. Let’s take, for example, a free to play game with a cash shop. If the cash shop does not use insane amounts of in-game currency (which is advised) and instead uses a different currency, let’s call it cash currency, then we always have at least 2 different currencies in a F2P game.
So, cash currency. Quite a big factor in F2P games that can break your in-game economy with just the tiniest of loophole present.
If you separate the currencies from each other so that you can not exchange one for the other then it does not affect your in-game economy much. In most cases, the different currencies are not entirely separated from each other, however. If you sell in-game currency for cash currency then inflation and with it Bad Situation A will be the obvious result.
If you sell items that can be sold to other players or to NPCs for huge amounts of in-game currency (mainly when the items are only obtainable via cash shop), then the game balance will suffer from it through disproportionate distribution of currency between the players and bigger inflation, as players will have more reason to trade with players for these items rather than to spend their currency on things that will consume the money, leading to more money staying in the market (mostly in the hands of the cashers).
If you sell items for cash currency that can be found in the in-game world, then there will be an inflation of valuable items, leading to lower prices on the player market and either less player-trade or more player-trade (depending on the demand of those items).
This gets only more complex the more different currencies you add as long as these currencies grant you anything that may be traded between players or may be exchanged for one of the other currencies.
The situation of the desired Balanced Market B, which is the optimal market situation for your game, only comes within reach if you manage to keep all of these basic factors (and more) in mind, and hence prevent your game’s economy from ruining the game experience for all players.
And it’s a hard goal to reach, because you do not just want a balanced in-game market, you also want a profitable cash shop and at the same time keep the players both satisfied and wanting for more.
All of these 3 elements are strongly affected by the in-game economy. And these elements may conflict with each other so that you will have to sacrifice one for the other.
As a general rule, you want a game that’s fun for the players and profitable.
And that’s why many games suffer from a bad economy, because for devs it’s easier to neglect it in favor of the other 2 elements. What a lot of devs don’t seem to realize, however, is that a stable in-game economy rarely comes in conflict with a fun player experience. And you can easily implement cash items that take some of the player experience and trade it in for more profit. That way everyone wins. Your in-game economy isn’t lacking, you keep building up a bigger and bigger player community and in turn you are able to implement more and more features that net you more and more profit while taking little to none of the player experience from the players.
TL;DR/To conclude:
So, 10 coins within 1 hour or 10.000 coins within 1 hour?
It’s a discussion that - by itself - has little to do with economics.
Once we see IMC handing out silver in huge amounts after the OBT, like they did in the Indonesian events, we will be able to see how that affects anything.
I agree with you that large sums are dangerous to play with because it’s harder to re-balance an in-game economy that is based on currency with so many digits. That’s because it’s much harder to take out money that’s already inside of the economy than it is to add more (except if you plan on wiping your games countless times). A working in-game economy does not guarantee fun, but it’s better to have than not to.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYY!!! WOOOOOOOOOOW!!!
