The Broken Economy Is Your Fault

[LTK_70]

And here I was thinking Shamus was going to provide an interesting alternative, or at least a partial solution, to balancing an in-game economy. But, alas.

Come on, anyone can deduce the facts in this article in ten minutes' worth of loading screen time. The problem I already knew about, so how about the solution?

So let's look at the solutions that have already been tried. STALKER is a good example of a trading system that has many attempts at fixing, but it's still unbalanced. You have a limited carrying capacity, so you can't bring back every pistol you pick off a bandit. The equipment degrades, and the loot you get from enemies is often already half broken - why else did you win from them? - making them worth less. The amount of money people pay you depends on their attitude towards you: A nobody gets paid less than the messiah. You can buy stashes from people, where you may or may not get your money's value. And still, you eventually make enough money to buy everyone in your faction a plane ticket to Hawaii. But they make a good effort.

There's often the problem of overfunding. At one point in a game you have enough money to make a number of investments that, combined, guarantee profit in the end. But how to fix this? Maybe if we added more high-risk investments that make you lose money, but that could easily be avoided. How about an income tax? Nah, no one in their right mind taxes the saviour of humanity.

...Meh, seems like I've got nothing either. I guess it's a lot like the real world: Having a lot of money only makes it easier to get even more money, and apparently, in-game economies are true to that.

 

[JohnSmith]

Good article, maybe the way to address the problem is to have your enemies be part of the same economic system that you are in that when they are generated they have "bought" their gear out of the same system that you will be selling back into. This would however mean that your enemies would have to be shaped by some previous interactions with the game world you are playing with rather than arbitrarily created but if you want a real economy then things have to leave it. Also for some pieces of kit maybe in fantasy RPGs you would end up only able to sell to the local lord to pad his guards armoury for a drastically lowered price of course.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Supply. And Demand.

We don't actually need to track these things actively in a given game. But we could add in some pretty stable numbers to simulate what happens with them due to player interference with the world (without even getting as complex as what The_root_of_all_evil was getting at above dealing with localities and manipulating enemy strength by going all over the place).

In the case of an iron longsword, (and borrowing from Rathy above, since I like where he was going), assume that the market for iron longswords is at equilibrium when the player begins their game, and decide about how much you think its reasonable for it to cost (from a design perspective of "I don't want the player to be able to afford this weapon until..."). Now, as the player loots iron longswords (produced from thin air by the game) and sells them into the marketplace, realize that supply is going up, and demand is either holding steady (infinite new baddies), or going down (there are fewer people in the world with a use for iron longswords), and bring the base price of an iron longsword down a certain percentage. Each time the player sells an iron longsword, they get less for it. Do this for everything. You could even write a formula that you set certain values for every in-game item up front, and then all you have to do is count how many of those items have been sold so far, and let it spit out what the current market-price should be. Removing the aspect of infinite iron longswords driving out iron mining (as this is reductio ad absurdum, since there's no need to model iron mining to start with in most RPGs), is easily accomplished by removing the ability to turn iron longswords into raw material.

Now for the fun flipside: a given enemy, of a certain level, has X dollars to buy armor/weapons/etc. If the player devalues iron longswords sufficiently, even extremely low-level enemies will have iron longswords instead of wooden clubs because the enemy generation will identify the weapon with the best stats which has a price within the enemy's budget. It would even provide a little bit more feedback to the player that what they're doing is having an effect on the world. Assuming that you allow the system to work in reverse, a player could hoard/destroy a sufficient number of iron longswords that they would make it too expensive for your standard iron longsword enemies to afford them!

(My system in no way would ever be meant to apply to MMOs. Those should just be allowed to have real economies.)

 

[Forktongue]

Reminds me of the original Final Fantasy where you are tasked with killing the pirates who have taken over the town. I spent hours grinding (before grinding was even a term) for gold because you absolutely HAD to upgrade your gear to stand a chance and everything was incredibly expensive.

I've always wanted to see the npc merchants validate their choices. Something like a side-quest where the hero has been tasked with dealing with a werewolf problem. The weapons merchant in town has silver weapons, but won't even give you a discount on the extremely high prices. This, of course, is because the merchant turns out to be the werewolf you've been sent to kill.

Maybe it's just best to leave problems like this alone. At least until we come up with a valid reason for the hero entering every home they see to look for items of use....

 

[Zamn]

Pretty defeatist article really. There are plenty of ways to make an RPG economy function properly, several of them have been hit on by other commeters already.

Crude methods like money sinks can be effective, but the best solution is to build a realistic economy into the game. The reason RPG economies behave bizarrely is because they are bizzare. In every single player RPG I know of there is only one economic entity in the entire game, the player character. None of the shopkeepers or blacksmiths or clothiers or anyone else has any function except to service the player character.

Increases in processing power should make it possible, if it already isn't, to have a simulated economy running in the background, for example miners produce and refine ore and sell it to blacksmiths who produce weapons and armour for town guards. Of course, this requires the world outside the economy to function in the background too. If the town guards are going to buy from the blacksmith they need a reason to. They need to replace equipment peroidically whenever it breaks in combat or to buy new equipment to outfit new recruits to replace guards retiring or killed fighting the local kobolds or whatever.

Essentially, the weirdness of the economies in RPGs is a natural consequence of how their game worlds are built, which is as cardboard cut-out lookalikes of actual virtual worlds. Most of the time they look to the player like functioning environments but sometimes things like this poke through the thin facade. If you want to make economies realistic you need to make the worlds themselves realistic and functioning indenpendantly of the actions of the player character.

Incidentally, if someone did build a single player RPG like that it would steal a big part of the appeal of MMOs, which is the feeling that you are in virtual world and not just a pale facsimile of one.

 

[TheFacelessOne]

Perhaps game economies need to bend and flex in association with in-game events, just like in reality. For example, Fallout 3 is notorious for generating massive amounts of income (I'm replaying it right now at Level 18 and I have over ten thousand caps without trying). So why not have the economy collapse or rapid inflation occur during the later stages of the game, when the Enclave show up? By dramatically increasing prices on things like guns and ammunition, it makes it more difficult for the player to simply out-market the NPCs. Maybe even develop a black market as well, one that sells discounted goods but in a much more dangerous way (harder locations to find, maybe smugglers will try to just kill you and steal your equipment).

Possibly, but that'll take one hell of a scripter.

Great first post.

Welcome to the Escapist, you've been selected from a many series of canidates, a great honor. Please enjoy your stay here, in this utopia, safe from the wastelands of the internet.
I feel inclined to direct you tos some of the rules.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.112832
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.147439
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.116827
Please don't feed Doug, the troll outside, and ignore the body under the stairs!

OT: Great article, with a great point, Shamus.

 

[Zefar]

From personal experience by playing a lot of RPGs I haven't once had enough money to buy all the stuff in the games.

Yes this goes for Oblivion, Kotor and Diablo 2. In fact in Oblivion and Kotor you have a money problem. Well I had at least and I'm not trying to waste money either. But I had to chose what to buy. I couldn't just buy everything I wanted.

Oblivion was the same too.

Diablo 2 is a lot different than both of those but with maxed out money you might not actually be able to buy all the gears in the shop on Hell and Nightmare. Because it just isn't enough.

The same goes for Final Fantasy games. Most of the time you need to spend it more wisely. Until you find a way to get money quick. Something which most FF games have.


But really, the money system works in RPGs and most of the time they done a good job at balancing it. Sure when you get powerful enough and can farm money it'll get out of control. But if there wasn't a way to do that you'd end up grinding some monsters far more than you'd like. Which would be a bad thing.

But you can laugh at some MMORPGs on what they class as legal tender.
Ragnarok Online being the one I love the most.

Wet lump of sand - Just some basic sand that is wet, 500 zeny
Huge leaf - Leaves are legal tender actually grass is legal tender too and this one goes for 400 zeny. This should ring a bell for Hitch Hikers Guide to Galaxy fan.
Jeweled Crown - 10 zeny.....Yea apparently Gravity just doesn't wanna price some gears.


The respawning enemies could just use this excuse. Their army is up in 500 000 and all are well geared up. But they only send a small group at time.

USA armies is geared up without a problem. If someone where to go around and kill every last one of those soldiers and loot their weapons. They'd get a lot of them.

 

[Uncompetative]

The answer is pretty simple if you think about it.

There is no way to patch this economic perversion to have it make sense.

It doesn't have to make sense, just have the NPC's have wants and needs as well. Especially the monsters.

Coz Monsters have to get their stuff somewhere.

Let's take a simple value which we'll call the Dow Jones Index. Now, as players sell to NPC's, the DJI goes up, which affects how much the NPC's can afford, which lets them trade with the Monsters as well, which boosts the Monsters stats.

Then we add in a value, I'll call the Entropy value, which degrades weapons that aren't kept up to date. So the players, who are using the handy patchups supplied by the vendors are losing money to stay level, and the items stored with the NPC's degrade slower.

Then we add in the Merchandise value. For just a small fee, you can have the armour resprayed in any colour, or any design.

So Looting+Scavenging-Entropy-Merchandise gives the Dow Jones Index, which heads up and down for different continents, pushing traders and players from one area to another, making up their own commodity market.

In the deep swamps, Entropy is high, so there's a push to get any old rubbish in to turn into repair kits, so the DJI flies up making the monsters rock hard.

In the deserts, Entropy is low, and there's very few drops as it is, so the DJI stays low and the newbies frolic.

In the town areas, Entropy is medium, but Fashion is everything. People bring in any old crap to the towns purely to afford the merchandise, which is kept high to bring in trade. This keeps the DJI high, which means the Guards are rock hard.

Now, if people want to lower the strength of the swamps, they have to take their looting from the swamps into the city (or best of all the desert), lowering the strength there.

I'd need a proper economist to look through this, but if you've got traders melting down perfectly good swords to make sword repair kits for much better swords, then you're stopping the pyramid effect.

Well, I read through that 3 times and I failed to understand it. All entirely my fault. It doesn't help that I haven't played many RPGs. I found that my Oblivion character, Delia, was too vulnerable to explore the landscape (I'd basically bought the game to have somewhere pretty to go for a walk...) so I went into the Imperial City and found an weapon shop and successfully shop-lifted an entire suit of armour; although, I had to be pretty damned quick about the getaway.

Are you describing a way to procedurally generate a fluctuating world of weakly inter-dependent continents with their own currencies? If so, it reminds me of the space trading game Elite - which pre-calculated all the values of tradable items in eight Galaxies, weighting them so that you had to 'jump' into dangerous systems rife with pirates to get at affordable contraband that you could sell at a huge markup at a safer system (I think that is how it all worked... it has been a while since I played the game). I suppose Eve Online is doing real Economics now - it even has its own stock market, you can profit without risking your character's life in space, a kind of business sim. Some kind of Civilisation RPG would be of interest, after all, how does an economy find a value for a revolutionary new product and how does its impact on culture and the world of commerce affect the values of all the products it renders obsolete? Yet, to what extent is this all overkill for a game? Should we be aiming to simulate/emulate life? Life is only rarely fun, generally we are denied the opportunities to do the things that would be fun (due to personal endangerment/having-only-one-life and lack of funds - e.g. to go sky-diving, or white-water rafting), so a completely real game would have us working in a fake job that we authentically hated and only got paid enough for to eat and sleep under a roof that didn't leak too much.

When I read the article I thought of the use of 'tickets' in Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company, etc. wherein two teams attempt to secure all territories on the game's map that are, helpfully, marked by flags. Whenever you or a member of your team dies your side loses a ticket, you wait to re-enter the game and you can only rejoin if there are some remaining tickets left to spend on reinforcements. Imagine if everyone on your side and all of the enemy were bots (autonomous NPCs controlled by the game's AI, but due to this being an RPG, their skills would vary depending upon their rank which was based on their stats which depended upon their performance and what their AI made them concentrate on developing; essentially, they are not all clones), except yourself. Also that the map was so huge you rarely met anyone and that the majority of 'the enemy' lived in a separate continent. Being witnessed killing a member of your side would be a crime, NPCs would have a memory and relationships and would notice that you had gone into the woods with the Blacksmith looking for mushrooms and come back alone carrying his favourite crossbow. Also, your Persuasion stat could be negatively influenced by a dip in your Trustworthy stat, eventually making it impossible to repeatedly murder friendlies for their kit - because there was something 'not right' about you...

My point is that your character needs to die, but not an unlimited number of times. When you do you you get to take control of one of the other friendly NPCs on your side and a ticket is used to add a new randomly generated NPC to repopulate the game world. If this wasn't done things would get very quiet very quickly. The illusion of a major war could be contrived this way, which may only last 20 minutes of game time, but would involve far more men than were ever in battle at any one moment. The game would not start off with lots and slowly eliminate them to one survivor.

Of course, you could take the Molyneux approach and have your NPCs marry, get pregnant, have babies, raise children and send them off to war as well, only on a much slower time scale (although using accelerated time and the fact that you are, hopefully, not playing 24/7). So, I suppose all I am saying is it may help to look at the economy of people, their value to society: constructing it, or defending it.

 

[Strategia]

Never in history has there been a gunfighter or a swordfighter that regularly and single-handedly killed batches of foes with impunity.

Actually [http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-pussy.html].....

(Sorry for the otherwise one-word-and-a-quote post, but that article is too awesome not to share. And everything else I could've said on-topic has already been said.)

 

[Playbahnosh]

Nah, no one in their right mind taxes the saviour of humanity.

And yet they do! Every single game which has a built-in economy does tax the player, and in 99.9% of the cases, the player is the savior of humanity (or whatever race they belong to).

When I was a kid, even then I did not understand the concept. In those games, where I was the hero, the ONLY person who could save the world from certain doom, they still SOLD me stuff. "Hey, I'm humanity's only hope, and you still want me to BUY the gear to be able to save YOU? Seriously, what the HELL?!" It sounded totally unreasonable and stupid, even to a child, and made the in-game NPCs look like greedy, selfish idiots who don't care about THEIR OWN LIFE, since if the hero doesn't get the gear needed to defeat the evil, they all gonna die. It just didn't make any sense. "You are going to make me pay for the only sword able to cut down that monster? - Sure, pony up, or we all die here, your choice, Hero" Like they lost all sense of self preservation. I mean, when certain doom looms over the horizon, and the only thing, that can save the world is in your hands, would you be such an ass, as to demand payment from the only person who can save your ass, thereby ending all live as we know it? I doubt it.

Then I realized, it's the copy of the modern world economy, only polarized. I mean, what did modern economy do for us? It makes people kill others, literally and metaphorically. Most of you have enough food at home to stuff yourselves for months. Some people in Africa and Asia doesn't even have food to barely stay alive for a day, yet you won't give them even a morsel unless they pry it from your cold dead hands. Why? Because economy thought you that way. In this story, you are the greedy merchant in the RPG. Sure, there is more to this story, but at least it makes some twisted sense now...

 

[dochmbi]

I thought about this and it seemed to make sense at first. But then I realized that even if you played a hundred hours and sold all your loot, it wouldn't cause such a huge impact on the economy, because if the world has a high enough population and thus high enough gross domestic product, it wouldn't be a big impact.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Well, I read through that 3 times and I failed to understand it.

Basically, it's better to sell at a place where you can get a good price, and the good price makes good guards.
Lots of kills will give you an easier area, few kills will give you a harder one.

The Elite analogy works well. Agricultural farms to Industrial which replaces the machines.

(without even getting as complex as what The_root_of_all_evil was getting at above dealing with localities and manipulating enemy strength by going all over the place).

I like complex. That stops the script kiddies manipulating it for their own ends

 

[Poopie McGhee]

Good article...

 

[XSA37]

I agree. I am so tired of making enough money off loot in Fallout 3 that, by level 3, I am able to easily wipe out the town's caps while still having so much loot that I am nearly weighed-down.

 

[Fearzone]

An in-game economy essentially equates with unlockable items.

You unlock the level 60 super-sword of valiancy from the arch-wizard blacksmith when you acquire 1000 gold resources, assuming you haven't spent them in some other way, like healing potions. Sure, the less healing potions you use, the sooner you get your sword.

So how many systems of unlockables--experience, reputation, honor, etc.--do you want? One or two is fine with me, and if the in-game economy deflates by the wayside, as long as the rest of the game is good I wouldn't even worry about it.

A way to make a game economy interesting is to sell luxury items. Maybe you can straddle in to Jack Magee's Firesprite Meadhouse and get a lap dance from a stacked peasant girl for 10 gold, to the springy tunes of lutes and wooden flutes. It can vibrate your controller when she rubs against you, not unlike GTA4. If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, earning money starts to have value beyond being one further bar you need to fill in order to fully level your character. Or maybe something like letting a person change or reshape their appearance for a fee. We see that in Champions Online and a new set of clothes for Club Caprice starts to add up at high levels.

In the opposite direction, an economy could be punishing like causing player to loose stat bonuses unless you buy food and lodging, and have to choose between oats for your horse or invisibility potions. That would make the economy interesting, but I don't think a game designer would chance it.

Bottom line, I think these games want you make you feel like, as a big adventurer, you've hit the jackpot in Las Vegas. They don't want you to be poor. Gold isn't the sort of place where they want to offer a challenge. But a good MMO is a different story.

 

[TheFacelessOne]

Perhaps game economies need to bend and flex in association with in-game events, just like in reality. For example, Fallout 3 is notorious for generating massive amounts of income (I'm replaying it right now at Level 18 and I have over ten thousand caps without trying). So why not have the economy collapse or rapid inflation occur during the later stages of the game, when the Enclave show up? By dramatically increasing prices on things like guns and ammunition, it makes it more difficult for the player to simply out-market the NPCs. Maybe even develop a black market as well, one that sells discounted goods but in a much more dangerous way (harder locations to find, maybe smugglers will try to just kill you and steal your equipment).

Possibly, but that'll take one hell of a scripter.

Great first post.

Welcome to the Escapist, you've been selected from a many series of canidates, a great honor. Please enjoy your stay here, in this utopia, safe from the wastelands of the internet.
I feel inclined to direct you tos some of the rules.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.112832
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.147439
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.116827
Please don't feed Doug, the troll outside, and ignore the body under the stairs!

OT: Great article, with a great point, Shamus.

I'm actually an older poster from last year called Wouldukindly, my account got hacked last year and despite my repeated messages to the admins, no one ever got around to unbanning it(nor answer any of my messages). Nice opening though.

Ah. Well, still, welcome back!

lol nerds

Wait..seriously? Seriously, you just SERIOUSLY called us or whomever nerds on a GAMING WEBSITE. Were you expecting us or whomever to be more like jocks, or something else? Honestly, how can you expect anything else but nerds to roam around a GAMING WEBGSITE.

 

[TheFacelessOne]

Edit: -Excuse the double post-