Money Makes the (Virtual)

World Go ‘Round

By Shayalyn

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You log in to your MMOG of choice
and you head to your favorite trading locale, perhaps a pawnbroker or
bazaar where players trade items for in-game currency. You’re looking
for the Lightforged Bastard Sword of Leetness; the item you’ve been
saving your hard earned kaching to buy. You’ve seen it for sale time
and again at a price that was just out of your reach, but finally you
have the cash--the item is as good as yours!



There you are, browsing the wares of your fellow players. You find the
coveted sword easily enough, but these players must be smoking
something! They’ve priced the sword well out of your range, and you
simply can’t afford it. You figure it’s just an off night, and vow to
check again at another time, but each successive trip to the game’s
player-to-player trading arena yields the same results--that sword
you’ve worked long and hard for is no longer affordable. What happened?



MUDflation, that’s what. MUDflation is a morphing of the acronym MUD
(for multi-user dungeon, the text-based games that preceded MMOGs) and
inflation. The fact that the gaming world has found a term to apply
specifically to in-game economies that are in a state of disarray
speaks volumes; MMOG economies are notoriously unstable.



How do carefully designed MMOG economies go to hell in a hand basket?
It’s really pretty simple--too much money floods the game’s market
without actually leaving the game, creating a “rich get richer/poor get
poorer” dichotomy. When a game launches, its economy is generally
stable, but as players progress and new players join the game, more and
more money enters the economy as coin loot is dropped and item loot is
traded. Eventually, the game’s monetary unit (usually platinum or gold)
decreases in value, causing item prices to rise. When that happens, new
or “young” players find it more and more difficult to afford the low-
to mid-level items they require to advance (like that Lightforged
Bastard Sword of Leetness), while higher level players grow fat from
the profits on the elite items they’re both high enough level to
attain, and able to sell for much more than what they should be worth.



Another contributor to MUDflation is the secondary market. You’ve all
seen the advertisements: Buy <Insert Name of Your Favorite MMOG
Here> Gold! (You won’t see any such ads on Ten Ton Hammer’s network
sites, by the way. href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=104">Here’s
the scoop on our official stance.) Secondary market sellers such as
IGE and MySuperSales make a killing trading real world cash for virtual
currency. The currency is usually collected by “farmers;” player
characters who exploit the game mechanic and/or use macros to run
“bots” that collect vast amounts of cash (or loot to trade for cash) in
short amounts of time.



These are some of the problems plaguing game economies, but what are
the potential solutions? It’s certain Turbine is giving this question
plenty of consideration as they develop Lord of the Rings Online:
Shadows of Angmar (LOTRO). While one could argue that there is no such
thing as a perfect economy, in-game or in the real world, what will it
take to at least create a stable economic environment?



The solution most MMOG developers try (with varying degrees of success)
is the “money sink,” a way to permanently remove money from the virtual
economy in order to help game currency hold its value. Games with
player housing often require rent or upkeep fees. Sometimes guilds are
required to pay maintenance, as well. Some games include elite
items--prestige goodies that have no intrinsic value other than to say
“I have arrived!”--which are sold by NPC vendors as a means to
permanently remove money from both the game and some of its richest
players.  Other games require equipment repairs as a money sink,
and the more valuable the equipment, the more costly the repair.
(Turbine’s recently launched Dungeons & Dragons Online is one such
game.) I’ve seen the idea of scalable taxes bantered about on forums
(the more you have, the more you pay), although I don’t know of a game
that makes its players pay taxes...yet. I mean, c’mon! We play games to
escape real world bummers like taxes, right?



Another way games have traditionally tried to stabilize their economies
is the “no-drop” item; goods which bind to a player and cannot be sold
or traded. No-drops are often parts of larger quests that result in an
elite no-drop item. (EverQuest’s epic weapons would be an example of
this system at work.)



What will happen with LOTRO? That’s anybody’s guess. It’s difficult to
speculate because so little is known about the game in its pre-beta
stages. A look at the href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=126">strategies
applied by Turbine for DDO might give us some clues as to how
things will play out in LOTRO. However, it’s wise to remember that
these are different games, with different goals and development teams.
Whatever happens, it’s almost certain that the economy of Middle-earth
will not be perfect. After all, what economy, real-world or otherwise,
is?

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