| The lack of money printing wouldn't prevent groups of people from coalescing into big blobs and gaining a competitive advantage. In fact, I'd assert it makes it even worse. Imagine a sufficiently large alliance in your idealized game that by hook and crook "surrounds" your central bank. All new money in the economy passes through them. Sure you can finely control inflation, but without helicopter money you have no knobs you can twist to control wealth inequality in such a situation. Even if you do use helicopter money tactics, you'll be in a constant arms race with the big alliances to try and distribute the money as far away from them as possible. Long term players having big piles of cash really causes a lot of price dysfunction in my mmo experience. Eventually all the goods and materials that aren't required for end game play approaches a price of zero, where everything else gets more and more and more expensive as money loses value for the people who have it in abundance. As for the arbitrage thing -- price in nullsec for capital goods was 10-20% higher than it was in empire. Having an operation that hauls replacement ships, mods etc out to nullsec, and nullsec resources back to empire was an easy way to make billions if you were set up to move enough volume. I could easily make more money moving goods in my carrier than using the carrier for combat. Eve's combat system is a piece of design brilliance in and of itself. Battleships struggle under most circumstances to destroy frigates. Each ship size tier is loosely isolated from the other tiers by tracking constraints. Drones blur this a bit, but even though that guy spent 100m on that battleship and you spent 250k on your rifter -- he's probably not going to instapop you. Chances are he can't hit you. Your mobility makes you generally more of a threat to him than he is to you if you're tracking and tackling and people are backing you up! In terms of other mmo's, FFXIV made some good decisions but suffers from inflationary currency problems because the lack of gil sinks. High level crafting uses tons of low level materials, so new crafters can still make a profit off turning iron into screws or whatever. They do it really broadly so there's a whole lot of goods and materials that still churn on their auction house for non 1,inf prices. I haven't played WoW in a while, but low level ores and used to be pointless to the endgame players, so the prices on them zoomed towards zero. I think eve is a pretty boring game, but I have never seen an mmo that did a synthetic economy better. If you manage it I'll be the first to carry your banner to future mmo economic discussions ;) |
I'd simply make access to the central bank universal. Done.
Long term players having big piles of cash really causes a lot of price dysfunction in my mmo experience. Eventually all the goods and materials that aren't required for end game play approaches a price of zero, where everything else gets more and more and more expensive as money loses value for the people who have it in abundance.
Well, for one thing, I don't have a defined endgame. The leaderboards will be based on how far out into space a player can "camp" -- with the environment becoming exponentially more powerful as you go out. Tech level N+1 items will be made out of tech level N items.
Also, I'm starting to think that I should limit the uses of money. There will be the equivalent of "cold pressed latinum" -- which will have very limited uses. Maybe have everything be based on a sophisticated barter-matching system, with money only being available to and used by players? (And in-detail simulated player-equivalent NPCs.)
As for the arbitrage thing -- price in nullsec for capital goods was 10-20% higher than it was in empire. Having an operation that hauls replacement ships, mods etc out to nullsec, and nullsec resources back to empire was an easy way to make billions if you were set up to move enough volume.
Okay, I thought that this was referring to something else. This is the reason why I knew my small alliance would fail! We didn't build the "infrastructure" to do this! Or rather, we didn't create the intra-organizational norms and information infrastructure that let us do this efficiently. We even had a freakin real station, which should have been an insurmountable advantage -- except for the whole server crashing thing every time we were clearly going to win a sovereignty battle.
even though that guy spent 100m on that battleship and you spent 250k on your rifter
I loved the Rifter! My alliance had a philosophy of flying cheap ships, having no mods, and not being afraid to die, so long as you destroyed more ISK than was destroyed out from under you. We had it all over our opponents in terms of battle tactics. We couldn't manage our own economy, though. (It was badly centrally managed.) We also couldn't maintain morale.
High level crafting uses tons of low level materials, so new crafters can still make a profit off turning iron into screws or whatever.
My scheme for a procedurally generated tech tree has this property.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w
If you manage it I'll be the first to carry your banner to future mmo economic discussions ;)
Thanks.