How do economies work in MMORGs?

[Little Raven]

I'm curious how various MMORGs (with which I have virtually no experience) handle a living 'economy.' It seems like inflationary pressures would be very high. I do remember how the economy (such as it was) in Diablo worked, and how quickly everyone managed to acquire even the rarest equipment.

I hear very positive things about the WoW Auction House, so I gather game developers have made some strides in this department. Have any MMORGs managed to develop and sustain a workable economy of sorts?

[Peacedog]

It seems like inflationary pressures would be very high. I do remember how the economy (such as it was) in Diablo worked, and how quickly everyone managed to acquire even the rarest equipment.

Well, available resources are infinite. Monsters don't stop respawning, and thus the booty they can give doesn't ever dry up. Thus, good booty doesn't drop often. Even decent booty may not drop often. The influx into the economy is slowed, but slowed is a relatvie term.

You need to give the players *something* to do with all that booty. So you give them things to pay for. Lots and lots and lots of things to pay for. Take W&W: people have to pay for their class abilities (and upgrades) as well as tradeskills (and upgrades). And mounts. And recipes for tradeskills. And that makes no mention of things you want to buy in the Auction House (be it materials for crafting or just a fancy new item). This all assumes you are using NPC vendors (bear with me here).

The Auction House in WoW is just a facilitator to trade (though afaik it works like ebay - they skim some profit thus acting as another modest weight on cash flow). It isn't an economic engine in the output sense. Money exhanged via the AH goes to other players. Or stays "in play" if you will (minus any fee). Money used on all of the things I listed above goes to in game vendors, or goes "out of play" and you never see it again.

The Diablo economy was borked all to hell until patch 1.10, because Blizzard couldn't really stop duping (and I don't know if it was eliminatedf in 1.10 but there were quite a few account deletions I think). Even if you went onto Battle.net, Blizzard's "closed" server (character data resided on that server, not your machine), any trading in public channels probably involved a duped item (unless you knew the person involved enough to gauge their integrity). Many, many high end items and runes were duped. It got so ridiculous that the Stone of Jordan, a very nice and rare unique ring, was being traded for pennies on the dollar (so to speak - in d2 currency it was going for chipped gems, and not that many).

[Fretmute]

Note: This reply is WoW specific, but applies to most games, I'd imagine.

Inflation is an issue. When a server starts, the amount of gold in the world is essentially zero . . . it all has to come from selling items to vendors. Unless the game has some pretty serious sinks built into it, the amount of money in the world climbs upward forever. WoW doesn't really have such sinks, and as a result, you have items selling now for 50 gold when they cost 20 gold a few months ago.

The sinks that are in place are really just 1 time speed bumps; sure, an epic mount costs 1000 gold, but you only have to buy it once. From that point forwawrd, all of your money is your own. Gear repair costs take a little out, but those are static prices that reflect the intial economy of the server.

This isn't a completely debilitating problem, as you stand to benefit just as much from the higher prices, provided that you can find an item to sell. But until that happens, you're in trouble, as the sell to the vendor economy pricing scheme will leave you far behind.

Correcting this is a tricky issue, since doing so will likely cause those with the most money (and your most rabid fan base, as they play the most to accumulate said cash) to be somewhat angry.