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Finite Currency


Oblivionburn

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My apologies if this is already a thing, but I would like to propose there being a finite limit to the amount of currency in circulation and not an unlimited amount that can be created from player sold items/vehicles/etc.

 

The reason: what breaks most mmo economies is the ability for players to amass wealth without limit, which ultimately causes the currency to be essentially worthless. You can look on the market of nearly any current mmo and see items priced in the millions+ because the majority of players have more currency than they could ever possibly spend. Most mmo's have attempted to compensate for this inevitability by having 'money sinks' or regularly introducing new currencies to keep the market from flooding and prices skyrocketing to absurd levels. However, money sinks and new currencies always fail since they underestimate the speed at which players can amass currency (especially when working together in large numbers). I would like to see a mmo do the right thing and learn from the mistakes of the thousands of mmo's that have failed at this in the past, and the solution is simple: cap the currency.

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I believe there was a post that currency amount is going to be regulated. Initially there would be npc buy orders for resources and stuff. Their amount should control money flow to player pockets. There are no other money sources anounced

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the only faucet for generating quanta out of nothing that was talked about up until now is mining and selling that ore to market bots. There's no missions/quests/other faucets we know of as of today.

 

If that single faucet is enough for the economy will be seen

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  • 2 months later...

Imagine a game where money is finite. You join 5 years later and all the money is issued. Sure things are cheap, but good luck gettinf that 5quanta needed.

 

As the existing money is spread thin between more new players, it is harder to aquire. This makes the old wealthy and new poor.

 

I have never gotten sufficient answers on how they will handle source and sinks, but early talks years ago indicated they were looking at how Eve managed their economy. Which Id say is an MMO that CCP handled it very well.

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25 minutes ago, WilburKit said:

This is a great idea and adds a layer of realism to a already amazing game. However it would require thinking and planning to work well.

How is finite currency realism?  It couldnt be further from real.

 

Ignoring fiat currency, whatever was used to trade was rare, you you could still find more of it. IE, gold and silver.

 

If truely finite it will become to rare to use for everyday trading. And as I pointed out above, it leads to hoarding. 

 

Dont get me wrong, as someone in on the ground floor ill take it. But I also have plans to abuse the hell out of it if they do make that decision. 

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Eve has some interesting data about it's economy: https://www.eveonline.com/article/pxf0wt/monthly-economic-report-august-2019

 

I don't think there is such a simple solution, but as long as it can be made somewhat stable it should be fine. I would think fewer faucets would be easier to control.

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33 minutes ago, Haunty said:

Eve has some interesting data about it's economy: https://www.eveonline.com/article/pxf0wt/monthly-economic-report-august-2019

 

I don't think there is such a simple solution, but as long as it can be made somewhat stable it should be fine. I would think fewer faucets would be easier to control.

Easier to control. But the question will be is it as seemless or obvious. 

 

Faucets and sinks need to be balanced though. 

 

The only faucets i know of atm is bootstrap market bots that are said to be temporary. Whats the long term faucets.

 

And I currently know of no sinks. Theres pvp for destruction of elements driving demans, but its not a currency sink. Maybe a market tax like eve?

 

I've tried getting more details in the past but it seems it wasnt worked out or they just werent ready to tell us.  

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The idea in DU is that new money will only be created by selling ore to NQ's buy orders on the market. Once NQ feels there's "enough" money in circulation, the buy orders will be temporarily withdrawn, until the point is reached where they are needed again.

 

Having a single faucet that can be shut down at will, removes the need for "money sinks". The faucet is also independent of game play, no need to remove or suspend missions or loot tables, etc.

 

Instead of things like paying rents or taxes to NPC's to drain excess money from the system, those payments in DU are made to actual players, which moves the money around in the game. As long as the dependency between players is high, money should keep circulating. You can only hoard money if you don't need to buy anything from anyone else, whilst they will have to need something from YOU.

 

You can't take money from other players by force, because quanta is not lootable (it's in a digital wallet). So the only way to "forcefully liberate" the funds in someone's wallet is via asset destruction. However, that doesn't mean the person doing the destruction gets the funds, the money will go to those involved in replacing the assets. It's a complex web, but the money moves...

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On 9/25/2019 at 6:22 PM, WilburKit said:

This is a great idea and adds a layer of realism to a already amazing game. However it would require thinking and planning to work well.

If you want to add realism just look at the EU banking agency, they press new money daily to keep the economy rolling, add negative interest rates to keep economy rolling, you get free cash when you loan with them to keep economy rolling. 

 

So probably the best way to keep the game rolling is a free monthly cash deposit by the Arc ship to all players, to keep the economy rolling.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think the fear should not be the infinite money, but the lack of money. I really do hope that the studio really looks into another faucet besides just relying on ore buy/sell orders. Sounds like hell if I have to dig for rocks just to make some cash. That is going to kill game pr:   Noob: How do you make money? Vet: Go out into the wild and dig for rocks and sell it to npc's. After doing that 150 times you can finally afford a speeder.

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On 10/22/2019 at 8:42 PM, plmkoi said:

I think the fear should not be the infinite money, but the lack of money. I really do hope that the studio really looks into another faucet besides just relying on ore buy/sell orders. Sounds like hell if I have to dig for rocks just to make some cash. That is going to kill game pr:   Noob: How do you make money? Vet: Go out into the wild and dig for rocks and sell it to npc's. After doing that 150 times you can finally afford a speeder.

Well regardless of faucets a player could earn money in other ways, like designing a ship and selling it. The faucets are the ways the economy as a whole would earn isk. 

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On 10/23/2019 at 4:42 AM, plmkoi said:

I think the fear should not be the infinite money, but the lack of money. I really do hope that the studio really looks into another faucet besides just relying on ore buy/sell orders. Sounds like hell if I have to dig for rocks just to make some cash. That is going to kill game pr:   Noob: How do you make money? Vet: Go out into the wild and dig for rocks and sell it to npc's. After doing that 150 times you can finally afford a speeder.

noob can make simple speeder by himself just after digging few nodes. this way at least he will lern few things about geme world. Not just mindlesly bying stuff from market. 

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Hehe, you guys sound like plumbers talking about faucets and sinks.

 

I think that a finite currency could be interesting, but wouldn't there have to be separate currencies for ingame item purchases and real life purchases like DACs?


Having both kinds of purchases being tied together to one kind of currency would stress it a lot, the devs might struggle feeding money back into the economy. People would be trading DACs, eventually someone could just abuse it by spending tons of real life money on DACs and end up draining the finite currency. Lots of MMOs have separate currencies and having one for normal ingame purchases and a premium one for things that are purchased with real money has worked very well.

 

What I'm saying is, long term players could maybe have a premium currency that can be harder to obtain and that they will spend more often, this could fix the issue of the finite currency running out too quickly. They could convert the ingame currency into the premium currency and then maybe get custom textures and DACs ingame that can also be purchased with real money, so it adds more value to them. This premium currency could be infinite while the ingame one is finite, and because the microtransactions wouldn't effect a veteran player's progress in the game it wouldn't make it pay to win either.


An infinite currency is okay with me, but trade would be more fun with a finite currency in my opinion.

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On 10/23/2019 at 11:36 PM, DevisDevine said:

Well regardless of faucets a player could earn money in other ways, like designing a ship and selling it. The faucets are the ways the economy as a whole would earn isk. 

Yes, to get any type of money, but what I am referring to is faucets, that means creation of currency. Faucets are non player controlled ways for the game to inject cash into the game and you have sinks that removes the money from the game to avoid devaluing the money. If the only method of generating cash is through the sale of ore to npc's, I expect people to just hoard the cash. People afraid of "infinite currency" have obviously never played any mmo outside of a theme park.

 

I believe the developers are going to have to put more thought into how they are going to inject cash into the game. If you want to get a better idea on how a sand box economy works, this guy does a okay job explaining it.

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9 hours ago, plmkoi said:

 

I believe the developers are going to have to put more thought into how they are going to inject cash into the game. If you want to get a better idea on how a sand box economy works, this guy does a okay job explaining it.

The only valid example is EvE. And even EvE now is goingh through hard times in balansing sinks and faucets. 

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7 hours ago, Lavayar said:

The only valid example is EvE. And even EvE now is goingh through hard times in balansing sinks and faucets. 

Eve always erred on the side of too many faucets, and that problem got notably worse with the move to F2P.  Turns out that bots don't really use sinks.

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On 10/27/2019 at 5:25 PM, plmkoi said:

Yes, to get any type of money, but what I am referring to is faucets, that means creation of currency. Faucets are non player controlled ways for the game to inject cash into the game and you have sinks that removes the money from the game to avoid devaluing the money. If the only method of generating cash is through the sale of ore to npc's, I expect people to just hoard the cash. People afraid of "infinite currency" have obviously never played any mmo outside of a theme park.

 

I believe the developers are going to have to put more thought into how they are going to inject cash into the game. If you want to get a better idea on how a sand box economy works, this guy does a okay job explaining it.

Trust me I know what they are and how sand box economies work. I spent years in eve and my first year on this forum trying to get a better idea of their planned economy and the abuse of temoprary facuets and sinks.   Unfortunatly they devs havent gone i to it further. 

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Here's a totally stupid and completely insane idea that most if not all may laugh at. why not use a finite/infinite/faucet&sink system :)... Why not create something like a "wealth" talent. if we can place points into different talents why not create a talent with its various levels dealing with the amount of wealth we can hoard. you may think well what happens if i max out the amount i can hoard and i want to sell something, well this will encourage you to either place points into your "wealth" talent or go out and buy and spend the currency, contributing to other player controlled industries. yeah people may pour points into this talent but in doing so ignore other important talents. this way a finite/infinite amount of currency can be implemented while at the same time using a faucet and sink system depending on the amount of players in the universe. yeah i know stupid. :)

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/27/2019 at 5:43 AM, Virtesi said:

Hehe, you guys sound like plumbers talking about faucets and sinks.

 

I think that a finite currency could be interesting, but wouldn't there have to be separate currencies for ingame item purchases and real life purchases like DACs?


Having both kinds of purchases being tied together to one kind of currency would stress it a lot, the devs might struggle feeding money back into the economy. People would be trading DACs, eventually someone could just abuse it by spending tons of real life money on DACs and end up draining the finite currency. Lots of MMOs have separate currencies and having one for normal ingame purchases and a premium one for things that are purchased with real money has worked very well.

 

What I'm saying is, long term players could maybe have a premium currency that can be harder to obtain and that they will spend more often, this could fix the issue of the finite currency running out too quickly. They could convert the ingame currency into the premium currency and then maybe get custom textures and DACs ingame that can also be purchased with real money, so it adds more value to them. This premium currency could be infinite while the ingame one is finite, and because the microtransactions wouldn't effect a veteran player's progress in the game it wouldn't make it pay to win either.


An infinite currency is okay with me, but trade would be more fun with a finite currency in my opinion.

Well the thing is that infinite currency isn't really an issue and people are literally taking concepts from theme park mmo's and applying it to a "Eve like" sand box game. Scarcity in currency is going to happen, as many people don't spend every single penny they get as soon as they get it. There was a post a long time ago that CCP put out, it basically showed that there are trillions of isk in the game, but a lot of the currency is in player wallets. It is not affecting the economy in any way and that the heavy spenders tends to not be the people with hundreds of billions of isk in their wallet, but the people with tens of billions.

On 10/28/2019 at 3:31 AM, Lavayar said:

The only valid example is EvE. And even EvE now is goingh through hard times in balansing sinks and faucets. 

This has to do with the fact they kept a lot of the sink artificially low and on top of that they decided to stagnate/kill their game with the introduction of citadels. 

On 10/29/2019 at 11:56 PM, DevisDevine said:

Trust me I know what they are and how sand box economies work. I spent years in eve and my first year on this forum trying to get a better idea of their planned economy and the abuse of temoprary facuets and sinks.   Unfortunatly they devs havent gone i to it further. 

Well here is why I doubt you do, "a player could earn money in other ways, like designing a ship and selling it. ". This isn't creating money, but a transfer of wealth from one player to another. In mmo's currency isn't just magically appear in the wallet, they received it from another source and that source is through the npc's or the game itself not a player. As for abuse of the faucets/sinks in Eve that only came if you botted. 

 

The only manipulation a individual can do is mess with the premium currency which wasn't plex, but gtc's. I usually joined the groups of people that would push the prices high to 1.5 times 99% of the time in comparison to plex. Sometimes double and that was because it was easily abused from the lack of transparency aka no graphs to show you someone is trying to manipulate the market. Only heavy sellers would know when someone is artificially raising the prices because the prices go up pretty fast within a week and then tank once the person made their premium. 

On 11/1/2019 at 6:11 AM, BillyAngel said:

Here's a totally stupid and completely insane idea that most if not all may laugh at. why not use a finite/infinite/faucet&sink system :)... Why not create something like a "wealth" talent. if we can place points into different talents why not create a talent with its various levels dealing with the amount of wealth we can hoard. you may think well what happens if i max out the amount i can hoard and i want to sell something, well this will encourage you to either place points into your "wealth" talent or go out and buy and spend the currency, contributing to other player controlled industries. yeah people may pour points into this talent but in doing so ignore other important talents. this way a finite/infinite amount of currency can be implemented while at the same time using a faucet and sink system depending on the amount of players in the universe. yeah i know stupid. :)

I don't think it is necessary as currently the developers are basically are saying mine all your stuff and sell it to npc's. Now I disagree with adding missions, unless they have some system that makes in immensely difficult for botters to abuse that system. But the current only faucet is sell stuff to npc's at set prices is terrible in my opinion as what is the incentive for me to mine other then a forced op's by your outfit?

 

I suspect that the early days players that make currency is going to get a lot of free months of the premium currency since it is going to be at a premium, unless they start allowing players to create isk.

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On 11/25/2019 at 12:33 PM, plmkoi said:

 

Well here is why I doubt you do, "a player could earn money in other ways, like designing a ship and selling it. ". This isn't creating money, but a transfer of wealth from one player to another. In mmo's currency isn't just magically appear in the wallet, they received it from another source and that source is through the npc's or the game itself not a player. As for abuse of the faucets/sinks in Eve that only came if you botted. 

 

If you try and criticize me please dont quote me out of context.  As I specifically said regardless of faucets and sinks in the instance you are quoting from. 

As a player, I dont need the isk I make to directly come from a faucet, I can still earn isk from doing things for other player that have it.

This was a direct response to someone stating that if ore buyers are the only faucets the mining would be the only way to make isk. 

 

As for you method of making isk in Eve, I knew a guy who single handed did what you are talking about rose the price of plex from about 250 to 350 mil just to pay for a new station. Ofcouse typically he made his isk by spending thousands a month on the GTC to replace motherships he stupidly lost. 

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On 10/2/2019 at 4:49 AM, rothbardian said:

Determining the supply of money, like all other goods, is best left to the free market. Aside from the general moral and economic advantages of freedom over coercion, no dictated quantity of money will do the work better.

I have to agree with this person.

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On 10/3/2019 at 4:26 AM, NanoDot said:

The idea in DU is that new money will only be created by selling ore to NQ's buy orders on the market. Once NQ feels there's "enough" money in circulation, the buy orders will be temporarily withdrawn, until the point is reached where they are needed again.

And who will hold Quantas, tell me! Fiat money in real-life has no intrinsic value, the reason you can exchange them for more than paper is people's faith in the monetary system. There is no NPC in this game that sells any item for quantas to spend your quantas on, so tell me, what is the intrinsic value of quanta? Does it yield anything? It is again your faith on the quanta!

 

Look at DACs, they are intrinsically valuable because atleast you can use them as monthly subs to this game!

Look at raw resources, they are intrinsically valuable because you can process them to crafted resources, and crafted resources are intrinsically valuable because you can use them to build which is what this game is mainly about.

All of these yield something! Who will exchange them for quantas which yield nothing? You wanna know why Warren Buffett believes gold is worthless? As an Investor, he looks at intrinsic value, he is not foolish! Does gold yield anything aside from it's malleability which is useful in some industries?

 

Think about what I'm saying. It's the same ignorance in real-life that you people will replicate again in this game!

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