The Broken Economy Is Your Fault

[SomeUnregPunk]

Why don't RPGs have decent in-game economies?

Have you ever played Mass Effect Shamus? I only just started, but the oppurtunities to gain money are very few. Those that are available offer only small awards. And the price of gear that actually bring notable improvements to your stats are very expensive.As such, Mass Effect accomplishes what you said at the end of the article. I eventually noted the difference between the game and other RPG's...then I stopped focusing so much on getting credits and delved more into the gameplay and story. (which is alot better in terms of realism...I mean, if your suppose to be in this deep world...you shouldn't be concerned with picking up credits off of dead baddies...)

Except if you cheated by killing things on the hardest difficulty, and on planets when you were supposed to use your tanks' cannons ...you would get lots more money and high level gear which you then sell to get that high level gear sold in the stores. That's not good.

That's like if i wanted more cash, I would give my six year old a bbgun and tell him to go kill that tiger b/c when he does and sells the carcass he would make loads more money than if I went after the tiger with a high calibre rifle.

 

[Nexus424]

You gotta love this kinda stuff that makes you think about just how deep you can get with games.

Excellent article.

 

[Tears of Blood]

That might actually be an awesome idea. The more of an item you sell, the less valuable it is.

I am not so sure, though, that Oblivion suffered from those problems. I picked up everything and sold it so I could buy my homes, repair hammers, lockpicks, unique weapons, and other assorted nonsense, and I only ever started accumulating massive amounts of wealth once I was near the end of the game. (Which, I think, is compltely reasonable.)

Fallout 3, however, is another story altogether. There wasn't much I needed to buy so I quickly become quite possibly the richest person in the Wasteland. (How I managed to carry all of those bottle caps, I'll never know.)

I guess it depends on how you play. If you're the type of person who spends tons of money on stuff in-game without necessarily maximizing your income, it may all seem quite fair.

 

[riskroWe]

The economies would work much better if the shopkeepers would just stop paying so much for stuff that is useless to the player (like jewellery), and if equipment deteriorated over time, not just over use, and also if players could only carry a realistic weight of stuff.

A lot of the excitement in an RPG is earlier on in the game when you're eyeing out all this unattainable expensive gear, then you go kill your first mountain troll and collect the bounty. Then you walk into the shop with a big grin on your face and buy better weapons and armour while selling your old crap. Then with the new weapons you can finally kill that evil wizard and collect an even bigger bounty, and you never lose sight of your goals while you capitalistically make your way up in society.

I want more of that.

 

[Dusty Donuts]

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.

OF COURSE! Only we have to call it the Waffle Index, in a childish bout of teenage immaturity and internet love for breakfast foods.
Personally, I reckon a great sucker for money would be to create a need for nutrition, and your attributes get lowered as it goes down. Even though root_of_all_evil covered that, it should be more expensive or cheaper depending on where you are, and have seasons etc. etc.

 

[123BIG]

Obviously the best way to counter this is rather simple: A money sink.

I agree. A real economy may sound fun but it brings a lot of issues. Not every player is an economist and many players just wouldnt understand why are the prices for upgrades and treasure constantly change, and how are they supposed to go about them, which is unintuitive, overcomplicated and frustrating. Not to mention that such an economy would require huge amount of time and resources on the development side for a very small effect.

All you should want from the ingame economy is to keep player from being able to buy everything he may want. Thus he gets to make a choice whether he should buy a new sword, upgrade his armor, or bribe a quest related NPC to progress the quest. Choice is always fun, it allows the player to make his own decisions and face the consequences of those decisions, enables different playstyles and does a lot of other things. Or at least he should always be able to usefully spend the money. And as long as the player can use more money to improve his character he will try to earn more money by exploring the world, searching for treasure, doing side quests. The player gets to enjoy the monetary reward for overcoming a challenge (since he can sell it and buy upgrades) and to see more content of the game.

Money sinks are simple and universally used way of fixing this. Basically if the player character can make money (in a form of loot) out of thin air, he must sink the money into thin air. A lot of RPG's do this. In Gothic (and Risen) you have to spend money on training and improving your character and the training costs grow exponentially with the level. WoW has a variety of money sinks like training, repair, consumables and other things, in order to decerease the inflation. Stalker used expensive upgrades.

The only problem here is balancing. Sometimes the developers just dont have the guts to make the game hard and that includes the economy. For exampe vanilla Fallout 3 had consumables (chems and meds) and ammo in wich you could theoretically sink your earnings but in practice the game was so easy you hardly ever needed them, and you found enough of them in loot to kill everything you came across with bare fists. And even if you did buy them you could afford everything because the prices were poorly balanced. So looting and searching for treasure became pointless and the only reward you got was experience, making exploration and combat less rewarding and less fun. But with mods that make the game harder and barter more expensive it all comes to live. You go out of your way to earn money in order to improve your character and make the game easier, you get to decide how you should spend your money, and the game works.

 

[Tales of Golden Sun]

The weirdest thing is that even slimes have money.

 

[Syntax Error]

Wouldn't that mean that the chance that your opponent has a longsword would be drastically reduced due to the swords getting melt down? I mean, where would they get new swords from?

Actually, a good model would be for more people to be using the longswords, since you've driven the price down so far that bandits can get a huge bundle for cheap.

I think an economy in a game would be a great idea myself. Even if it weren't too complicated, it would be a good step up from where we are now, and would add a nice layer of complexity if introduced into an already solid RPG.

And how did those bandits obtain them? They bought it from the shopkeeper you sold em to in the first place, that's how! This would actually make a great game. You start out as a small businessman and work your way up until you have the world in the palm of your hands.

 

[Uncompetative]

Easily fixed.

1: Realistic carrying capacity, no more carryin 47 swords.
It makes things like gems a better option. although most enemies will wear armour and carry weapons they wont all be carrying tonnes of currency, gems etc, things that you can actually carry away. You will probably carry away the best weapon and armour you find then leave the rest. We have just cut the players income. If we are going to be a real dick, we can make the player take armor back to the smithy and pay to have the size alterered before it can be used. Losing money and again limiting what can be carried/sold.

It would be easy to introduce a system similar to modern FPS's. You could have slots, 2 large weapons (sword/bow/shield), one small weapon (knife/cosh), a suit of armour, 1 back pack that can carry a large item (spare armour etc), 4 potions and a purse with a max carry. It can carry 50 coins, whether silver or gold or 50 gems. A Best value button would save manually throwing silver to take more gold.

Our FPS space marines no longer carry 99 grenades, 5 pistols, 4 rifles, 6 heavy weapons, a grapple gun and a chainsaw. Can't our RPG knights move on too?

2: Wear and tear on equipment.
Either weapons etc. need replacing every now and again or you need to by components to maintain them. This syphons off more money.

3: Cost of living.
Pay for food, lodgings, clothes, stables etc. This cost should grow as the player becomes a celebrity and as his party grows. This will again eat into earning. Throw in taxation if you want to be dirty.

4: The most simple answer: No more infinately spawning enemies.
This puts a cap on earnings.

Problem solved without taking an economist on for your company.

I like this solution.

4. could be done with Battlefield-style tickets, so that reinforcements would dry up in a short period of time (like a single-session battle) if one side repeatedly killed the enemy without losing too many of their own men. I had thought that this would be adapted to single-player, with you having to select from already existing NPCs to be "the next you" when you respawned (until there weren't any left - the depleted NPC population quietly receiving reinforcements of new characters with randomly generated stats). However, if we're talking about MMOs you wouldn't hijack another character as they would be a real person's avatar under their control, so your respawn would depend upon the availability of tickets assigned to your side for that session and you would pick from a rogue's gallery of randomly created instances of some familiar character classes (probably, all slightly worse than your old character stat-wise as a penalty for getting yourself killed, but not right back to noob level as that would make you want to quit the game entirely... and a world at war, receiving reinforcements of very weak unskilled noobs is not entirely realistic; they just wouldn't be veterans, but farmers and tradesmen). Of course, tickets would reset between sessions of a discontinuous game as game-time appeared to leap forward and character's aged in peacetime, rebuilt burnt homes and raised children to adulthood for the next cycle of conflict. Making the game continuous would just compel the player to never leave. I feel these games need to be more pick-up-and-play, like the way the arcade game Gauntlet let the number of players vary dynamically mid-game as your friends turned up to put coins into the machine for health and joined in the fight alongside you. It shouldn't matter if you are away from the multiplayer game world for weeks, you will have to play as an equivalent character though as your old one will have been hijacked by someone else whilst you were away, got themselves killed, or just died of old age. This may not seem very RPG, but I feel that the multiplayer aspect doesn't harmonise with the continuous roles that these games take their players away from, i.e. life. A true, develop-and-cherish-your-character, RPG may only be possible if done in single-player as then one gamer's necessary discontinuity does not create a problem for another.

 

[lwm3398]

Wouldn't that mean that the chance that your opponent has a longsword would be drastically reduced due to the swords getting melt down? I mean, where would they get new swords from?

Runescape has a smithing skill, it's just that it and most other things in Runescape are rubbish. It's such a grindfest, and any get-rich-quick schemes on it will still take fourteen years. The inventory space you have, the un-stack-ability of items, the going to the place, selling the shit, going to the bank, collecting, sell, bank, it's just grinding.

 

[badgersprite]

Very, very good points there, and it's something I've wondered to myself while playing my beloved RPGs. I found it hilarious that Fable II's answer to this problem was to have a 'vibrant economy' that essentially consisted of randomly induced sales and shortages every couple of in-game days. oO

 

[heyheysg]

I've only played WoW a couple of times, but the economy works pretty well right?

1) Increasing rarer and stronger materials cost more and are harder to farm for
2) There exists a player economy for the items people really care about at all levels. Sure you can easily afford whatever the vendors sell, but it's like buying necessities which are cheap.

 

[bjj hero]

Spoiler: You've read this already

Easily fixed.

1: Realistic carrying capacity, no more carryin 47 swords.
It makes things like gems a better option. although most enemies will wear armour and carry weapons they wont all be carrying tonnes of currency, gems etc, things that you can actually carry away. You will probably carry away the best weapon and armour you find then leave the rest. We have just cut the players income. If we are going to be a real dick, we can make the player take armor back to the smithy and pay to have the size alterered before it can be used. Losing money and again limiting what can be carried/sold.

It would be easy to introduce a system similar to modern FPS's. You could have slots, 2 large weapons (sword/bow/shield), one small weapon (knife/cosh), a suit of armour, 1 back pack that can carry a large item (spare armour etc), 4 potions and a purse with a max carry. It can carry 50 coins, whether silver or gold or 50 gems. A Best value button would save manually throwing silver to take more gold.

Our FPS space marines no longer carry 99 grenades, 5 pistols, 4 rifles, 6 heavy weapons, a grapple gun and a chainsaw. Can't our RPG knights move on too?

2: Wear and tear on equipment.
Either weapons etc. need replacing every now and again or you need to by components to maintain them. This syphons off more money.

3: Cost of living.
Pay for food, lodgings, clothes, stables etc. This cost should grow as the player becomes a celebrity and as his party grows. This will again eat into earning. Throw in taxation if you want to be dirty.

4: The most simple answer: No more infinately spawning enemies.
This puts a cap on earnings.

Problem solved without taking an economist on for your company.

1. Carrying capacity doesn't usually work out, in order to make money you have to be able to carry huge amounts of junk for selling, maybe a litteral horse and cart? Gems would be a better money maker, but then again the best gems would only be bought by jewelers in the big cities.
2. Realistically, armour and swords can't be repaired with a hammer and a nearby rock, you need a proper forge to repair the rends in your armour and bent swords, these are usually found in towns.
3. Food and clothes can be salvaged from the dead bandits you hack up, helpful tip #144; Aim for the head.
4. They arn't infinite but giant rats and goblins have insane reproductive cycles. Always seem to be plenty of bandits laying in wait, the poor and downtroden will always look for a way to make a quick coin and in fantasy settings there seems to be no end to their numbers.

With Oblivion, at level 1 raiding a bandit cave would net you maybe 200g, then you go to an inn and get charged 20g for 1 night and 6g for an apple. The economy is broken because storekeepers are greedy.

With carrying capacity I'd like to see a horse and cart. They had it in dragon quest. It would make far more sense. Of cause this would add extra upkeep costs. Also a lot of the gear would be notched and broken so that would limit looting. you are right that not everyone would be able tovalue gems. That doesn't mean others wouldn't give you a price for them. You just wouldn't get the full value.

I obviously didn't put my point across well enough with the maintaining weapons and armour. I was more thinking carrying oil to maintain your blades, maybe spare links for chainmail. Not fixing brokenblades. This would need doing in towns.

Clothes can be salvaged but most of it would be dirty and of little use. Think how much of it would be useful after you have just hacked someone to death, leaving them eviscerated.

I take your point about the rats and goblins. Rats dont carry anything of value and goblins may keep filling their ranks but would eventually all be armed with sticks and rags if you keep killing them. I don't see why you cannot clear a forrest of bandits. Word would get out that it was a short lived career if they were being hunted down by a legendary hero with 100 scalps already. They may come back if you left the area for a while but you could drive them away.

I fouund the store keepers pointless in oblivion. You can make or loot everything you need and they don't carry enough money to buy the junk you find. A poor system that I ignored. I would go weeks without seeing a store. Money had no real value.

 

[Booze Zombie]

Yeah, the economies in these games are quite odd. I mean, I'm playing Mass Effect with enough money to buy a planet and I'm still getting crap off of people?
God damn.

That said, I think Borderlands is going to do it right, from what I've seen.

Every gun and piece of equipment has a company behind it, which dictates what possible stats and special attributes it can have.

Logically, that means that the people you've killed have already payed someone for these weapons and that the economy is fine.
When you sell your stuff, you use a vending machine which also sells you ammo and special equipment.

It seems pretty solid.

 

[TJM8]

Love the article, said what every RPG gamer has been thinking for the past 10 years haha

 

[Susan Arendt]

This is definitely one of my favorites from you, Shamus.

 

[CrysisMcGee]

Most excellent. Personally, I thought the economies in the games you mentioned were balanced enough to get by, and that's all you can really ask. In Fallout, money isn't highly important since there's nothing stopping you from killing anybody you meet, andtaking all their stuff.

It's one of my favorite things about Fallout.

Also, in Morrowind the cap on shopkeepers money was very annoying. Even if you had 100k, there are plenty of ways to spend it in Morrowind.

 

[veloper]

The solution is very simple:

*maintenance*

Better gear would cost significantly more gold over time for each tier or upgrade level. Maybe it could be magic swords run on magic batteries or something.

At some point the player would simply nolonger be able to afford the higher maintenance of an extra upgrade and there would be many upgrades in the game. At that point, all the loot money that comes in is lost as maintenance.
Charisma and barter skills could also become useful again in RPGs that have them. More social PCs would consistantly run around in better gear.

 

[Halbert]

I always thought of it this way: You loot bandits of their swords. You sell swords in town. New bandits come to town and buy said swords. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I'd be more worried about the constant supply of bandits. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't some Matrix-style bandit farm out there, slowly releasing bandits into the environment to maintain equilibrium after you "cull the herd."