Review: In-Game Economics

Summaries from The F-Words Of MMOs: Faucets:

• Inflation: Increase in price, or Increase in money supply.
• Faucets and Drains: Inflow and Outflow of currency/items.
• Game have no fixed amount of good or services: re-spawning and drop from monster.
• Fixed price for buying (ceiling price) and selling (floor price) with NPC (unlimited supply). Fake economy?
• Time = Money.
• Promote specialization and dependency. If you mine more ore, you actually gets more efficient and yeild more than collecting herbs. A herbalist who sucks at mining ore would rather buy from you; and you would buy herbs from him.
• Rather than NPC selling potions are fix price, perhaps it should follow the market price (become really expensive when there are more buyers than makers). Perhaps limited supply as well?
• Because of all the competition to unload junk on the open market, prices deflate very near to the floor price.
• When time is limited, it's worth a lot more.
• Is Gold farming and buying good? If gold "receiving" is okay but gold "selling" is bad, what's the solution? MMO makers should just sell their money (reduce time to gain money).
• Treat equipment like equipment (not means of progression): something to be used and replaced (item degradation, item loss). Make them affordable and common.
• Every items in game is crafted, rely on resource gathering by different specialization (Miner, Herbalist, Crafter).

Checklist to making a successful MMORPG in-game economy

• Make sure there are resources that are needed that everyone can gather
• Encourage specialization of labor by making systems that reward players for specializing in one thing, and encourage interdependency by having different specializations require output from other specializations...
• Possible to change specialization (everyone can work on everything).
• Build systems that make it easy for players to transact without actually having to interact (Market, Auction House)
• Get rid of permanent gear. Get rid of gear-based progression! To make the economy more dynamic, to produce more items (and gather resources).

An MMORPG designer has to make the choice between which would be more fun for their game: the aforementioned trio of perma-bind-lootrain or a strong in-game economy.

Resources could be valuable, but how to make resource collection fun? It should be as fun as killing monster, not running around and waiting. Ability to capture monster which produce certain resources?

Max level characters shouldn't even be able to loot lower level weapons, to avoid equipment farming to lower levels?