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The game econemy


Fitorion

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Thing is, one of the main functions of a government is minting and printing currency.  I can see that in the beginning of the game we're going to need currency issued by the defacto government, the Arkship AI godmind.  However, as planets become independent, have their own military and economies, write and enforce their own laws, they're going to want to manage their own monetary systems as well.  Well managed economies will have stable currencies and exchange rates, while poorly managed economies will experience inflation, attempt to enforce price controls, etc.  

 

I think it depends on how many players we ultimately have.  If we top off around 20-30,000, we probably won't have enough players to have independent planetary economies, and all banking and currency will have to be managed by game mechanics.  If we have 100,000 players, we'll probably have two or three large political units with enough interested players to manage a government bureaucracy, arrange for deficit spending to build large battlefleets, have elections (or not) and manage customs and immigration issues.  In that case, there may be enough critical mass for money to be minted by these organizations and the arkship currency can be retired. 

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I tend to agree with Dinkledash. Currency is a man-made thing. It should not be imposed by the devs. Doing so will result in a wholly artificial economy subject to all the things that destroy artificial economies in other games - imbalance, inflation, etc.

 

If you look at the history of currency on our planet - humans have used all sorts of things from shiny rocks, to rocks with holes in them, to livestock, to other humans (slaves), to bits of metal, to bits of paper and now, actual electronic bits.

 

I think that players - in their markets - should be allowed to create their own system of credits and debits - just like the moneychangers of old. Actual "currency" is, after all, just a "chit" that represents a credit somewhere, kind of like a casino chip. The actual value of these "chits" depends on the faith the community as a whole has in the organization that backs that currency. So the Republic of Zimbabwe, for example, might have trouble convincing the community as a whole to adopt its currency, while the United States of America has no trouble having others use its currency - even when both nations apply very similar monetary and fiscal policies...

 

So what I would like to see (because it is what closely models the real world) is that players/organizations should be given the TOOLS to fashion a unit of currency that fulfills the basic requirements of money: it has to be portable, it has to be difficult or impossible to forge, it has to be difficult to destroy yet fairly easy to store, etc. Then let all the different organizations try to create their own currency. Some will be more successful than others. Some will go bankrupt, leaving players with millions of units of a currency no one wants anymore. And some will become hugely successful and become the de facto currency standard throughout the game.

 

If this is NOT done, then the devs will be assigning arbitrary values to things and these values will simply be exploited. It's much easier to create the conditions for real trade and real allocation of value through market forces, and then let the thing run itself.

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The reason you can't remove them from the game is due to how will you expand or accept new players in the future if they have no way of making money. How will a new person get the credits they need to buy something from the market? How will the existing players trade if no new money is brought into the game? How will the economy handle the loss of credits if someone decides to quit the game?

 

In eve you have the missions and rats to generate income you do not have that in this game. You will need to expand the player base if you just give new players X amount of credits when starting. This also becomes an issue as if you give X amount to players when they start the game 6 months after release that X credits is worth a whole lot more because everyone who has been in game has been dealing with a limited amount of funds to do things and has built up a massive amount of base level things like bases or mines and have resources to build things. This isn't a bad thing but it means your better off waiting to use your money for when you can buy things cheaper if credits are hard to get.

 

With the most recent AMA they said they will have NPC placing buy and sell orders. I think this is a good thing in the long run as yes it creates a base price for materials but also think that this will get credits flowing into the game systems and we will be able to have millions of credits to buy and sell ships or blueprints. The market sinks of listing or fees will keep inflation in check. Also who is to say the NPC won't adjust the prices dynamically as in it will buy 1k copper at 10 credits each then the next order it will only buy 1k copper at 9 credits and if it doesn't get filled in 12 hours it will go up to 10 credits again? 

Renting land around the Arkship = a perfect way to have a cycle of mullas to add back to the market bots operated and fuelled by the Arkship's money for the new players.

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@Dunbal You cant let players create currency for many reasons. If an org issued currency crashes what about all those players holding said currency? You are going to say; tough luck? No that doesnt work.

 

What about going into a foreign market? Pass through an exchange office? Hoping you dont get ripped of? It would be awful having to convert currency over and over.

 

In practical terms how would it even work?

How could the game know wich org qaulifies to issue its own currency? And how would your inventory hold all of those currencies? Everytime a new currency emerges it adds another "slot"? Sorry that just isnt practical.

 

Beyond that its a crazy idea to give players direct control over minting currency. Just look at real life to see how well that works out.

 

JC said that currently they are not looking into allowing players to create currency. And thats a good thing.

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They just posted a few days ago an answer to the currency and economy question:

Q. How is currency "created" and controlled? In the real world we have note printing and minting institutions and the amount of money in the system is carefully controlled (to avoid hyper inflation, hopefully). How is money going to work in DU? How is it created and what limits the amount of currency in the game?

 

A. The in-game markets will host some bots that will create buy/sell orders in order to act as money sinks and money faucets. This is one of the mechanisms, but we will also add some taxes on various activities, which will act as a way to take money out of the equation. We are still thinking about other ways to regulate the mass of money, but the general principle is that the amount of money should be proportionate to the economic activity in the game. This is a quite well know issue, and we will draw inspiration from other games that already dealt with it.

 

 

BTW, they never really said NPC as in actual NPC characters we interact with. more like bots or programs that auto add things to the ingame markets.

 

and also the same source on player made currency:

 

Q. Will players/organizations be able to set up an alternative method for wallet tracking, i.e. if an organization wanted to somehow manufacture and issue their own currency, could the wallet be modified to track it?

 

A. Having several currencies in game is not something we will favor. The reason is that it would make the development of the in-game economy more complicated, where in fact we need a system that is as fluid as possible to favor exchanges between players, and player specialization. Nothing prevents you from creating your own currency and role-playing it, but the price of items on the markets will still be displayed in the universal in-game currency.

 

 

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@Dunbal You cant let players create currency for many reasons. If an org issued currency crashes what about all those players holding said currency? You are going to say; tough luck? No that doesnt work.

 

What about going into a foreign market? Pass through an exchange office? Hoping you dont get ripped of? It would be awful having to convert currency over and over.

 

In practical terms how would it even work?

How could the game know wich org qaulifies to issue its own currency? And how would your inventory hold all of those currencies? Everytime a new currency emerges it adds another "slot"? Sorry that just isnt practical.

 

Beyond that its a crazy idea to give players direct control over minting currency. Just look at real life to see how well that works out.

 

JC said that currently they are not looking into allowing players to create currency. And thats a good thing.

If the purpose is to create a civilization with emergent politics and economics, the training wheels will have to come off sometime.  

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@Pang_Dread

NPC stands for Non-Player Character. So, they really did say NPC at one point in time.

They have since clarified that they intend to have bots mixed in with the orders rather than physical characters. 

 

 

 

http://www.dualthegame.com/faq

Will there be NPCs?  

There will be animal NPCs to hunt, breed or fight, and probably also space creatures or ships attacking players in the long term game (but these will not be in the alpha). There will also be trading NPCs acting on the in-game markets to help bootstrap the economy, but not to give quests like in “themepark” MMORPGs as we want to favorize social interactions between players.

 

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1692359

Will there be market NPCs?  

Yes, to help boost the economy we will introduce market NPCs, or “bots” (we prefer this term because they won’t have a physical presence in the world). Bots will appear as buy or sell orders in the list of player-made orders. The difficulty is to make sure that they stabilize but not disturb the natural market dynamics driven by players, which involves a bit of AI to get it right. Bots will amplify player activities, not replace them. If you set up a market in the middle of nowhere, isolated, don’t expect thousands of bots to come and sell you everything you need! Note: this may be different in alpha, as we will use bots on market to provide you with assets that you cannot yet craft. 

In the long run, our hope is that bots will become less necessary, or even completely disappear, as humans take over the whole economy. 

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I dont think you need player created currency for either of those.

 

I'll take the opposite view: any dev created currency automatically results in "farming" or "grinding" behavior as players will find the least balanced way of obtaining said currency and milk it forever. This has happened in every single multiplayer game to date be it gold farmers or ISK farmers.

 

It's up to the devs to create the game they think people want to play but the lessons are there: encourage players to seek after currency for the currency itself, or encourage players to solve the problem of value through trade. The first results in permanent inflation because of grinding players. The second will result in an economy in constant flux as players seek to control EACH OTHER as opposed to "the source of currency".

 

Besides, the devs have already provided a very real currency to the game: the DAC.

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Dunbal I dont think that applies to DU.

There arent any npc's you can farm to get credits.

 

And lets assume players can mint currency.

Dont you think that will make things worse? Because if thats the case players will only go for finding the currency resource, why bother mining anything else?

 

If there is a resource you can use to mint currency you will enforce farming not discourage it.

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I'll take the opposite view: any dev created currency automatically results in "farming" or "grinding" behavior as players will find the least balanced way of obtaining said currency and milk it forever. This has happened in every single multiplayer game to date be it gold farmers or ISK farmers.

 

It's up to the devs to create the game they think people want to play but the lessons are there: encourage players to seek after currency for the currency itself, or encourage players to solve the problem of value through trade. The first results in permanent inflation because of grinding players. The second will result in an economy in constant flux as players seek to control EACH OTHER as opposed to "the source of currency".

 

Besides, the devs have already provided a very real currency to the game: the DAC.

Not any kind of economy expert or even close but in how many of those games was the economy player based? If its just grind stuff, sell to NPC then yeah it create what you described. But in these types of games its the players that set the prices, so go ahead grind a metric ton of uberanium but how much you get depends on many factors not on how much NPC x buys it for.

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Good luck trading with player run currencies. You get scammed in exchange, get scammed in price, get fucked because you have like 200 different currencies in your inventory and finally you get scammed because big players on the market will just ever continue to drop new currency with referral programs and whatnot

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Good luck trading with player run currencies. You get scammed in exchange, get scammed in price, get fucked because you have like 200 different currencies in your inventory and finally you get scammed because big players on the market will just ever continue to drop new currency with referral programs and whatnot

Yeah I think people are trying to equate this to IRL as in we the players/guilds are all different countries under the same world and can have all out own currency's . Where in reality based on the games setup we are all just different states under the same nation hence will use all the same currency.

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Good luck trading with player run currencies. You get scammed in exchange, get scammed in price, get fucked because you have like 200 different currencies in your inventory and finally you get scammed because big players on the market will just ever continue to drop new currency with referral programs and whatnot

 

Yep, until one player comes along who doesn't scam people and screw people, and tadaa, everybody's favorite money-changer is born.

 

You don't _need_ currency. Anyone who has played, say, Ark:Survival Evolved knows that currencies will emerge. Before certain things happened to make it quite common, Chitin used to be the currency there. It was an item relatively difficult to obtain from critters and many servers had exchange rates set between chitin and other items. Once chitin became freely available due to dev modifications, other items have been used as a means of exchange - including gunpowder.

 

Artificial currencies encourage grinding and farming for currency. Leaving the means of exchange to the player encourages scamming, murder, and all other sorts of EMERGENT GAMEPLAY. I know which I prefer.

 

In EVE there is a guy called Chribba. He has earned the trust of all players because he's honest. If you want to buy a supercapital from someone else, you go through Chribba (or one of his designates). The seller deposits the supercapital with Chribba, and you deposit your cash with Chribba. That's the only way you are sure you won't get scammed. There's no reason other players can't rise to that level of trust in DU.

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Good luck to you sir, proposing this to NQ. I know their answer

 

Nah it's no biggie. Parallel economies always develop anyway. Find me a player in EVE Online who will refuse to be paid in technetium...

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I have to agree with the devs, having a singular currency woven into the code of the game is the better option. People need to trust the currency, and having it in the game code and controlled by the devs makes it more trustworthy. People trust the code of the game and the developers more than their fellow players. Player run governments will not be as trustworthy nor as competent as real world governments. We can't have players fearing for their wallets every time there is drama among the leadership. We can't have people finding they can't make a deal because they happen to have the wrong currency. We can't have currency made from gold because a gold rush will cause inflation, and a use for gold will cause deflation. People will be obsessed with mining gold too.

 

Again, we need a single currency hard-coded into the game, managed by the developers BECAUSE of the trust factor.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is currency based on gold or some other raw material confirmed?

 

I guess in a mining-focused game, that would make sense; but it seems very retro for a sci fi game - more of a steampunk thing.

 

Modern money is a share of production btw. It's a much more real basis for money than some random shiny metal.

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I have always lilked the idea of depositing real money to be converted into game currency. With the option to withdrawl the game currecy back into real money in the players bank account. Every one knows this is not an original idea. A certain game has been doing it for years, so it is possible. I dont know what the downfalls of this system could be. I just like the idea of possible being able to make a real world profit in the game. Is this a possibility?

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I have always lilked the idea of depositing real money to be converted into game currency. With the option to withdrawl the game currecy back into real money in the players bank account. Every one knows this is not an original idea. A certain game has been doing it for years, so it is possible. I dont know what the downfalls of this system could be. I just like the idea of possible being able to make a real world profit in the game. Is this a possibility?

 

The legalities make it more difficult than it should be.  The simple act of depositing money and withdrawing it later make the company in the eyes of many legal systems into a Bank... and subject to all the regulations that entails.

 

The game currency essentially becomes no different from real money.

 

Then if there are any gambling mechanics inside the game... The whole game becomes a gambling game in the eyes of many legal systems... and would either be illegal or subject to yet more regulations and taxes...

 

 

Just giving some insight into why games don't do it very often.

 

 

Landmark made a system where by you could get payed real money for selling your in game creations.  The game itself isn't great... but this idea is.  They made it so that the shop for voxel designs was real money and if anyone sold a design that included as part of it some of your voxels then you'd get a percent of the proceeds.  Like if you made a castle tower... and sold it... then the people who bought it used it as part of their castle walls... and then sold their castle.  You'd get a cut based on the percent of voxels in it which came from you.

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I have always lilked the idea of depositing real money to be converted into game currency. With the option to withdrawl the game currecy back into real money in the players bank account. Every one knows this is not an original idea. A certain game has been doing it for years, so it is possible. I dont know what the downfalls of this system could be. I just like the idea of possible being able to make a real world profit in the game. Is this a possibility?

The big problem with this model is that such a game is horrendously expensive to play. 

 

I assume the game you refer to is Entropia Univierse. It's a great game, but all PvE is designed like a casino - Whatever you put into an activity, you will get less back on average. EU's payout is about 50%, which would be illegal in any casino in the US. The only way to get ahead in EU is to get money from other players. (Or invest in the game, in which you become part of the house and, in a casino, the house always wins; I have a significant investment in the game, btw, but I don't play it anymore).

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