Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act One: Currency Control)

NOTE: I have made a couple edits here based on a note from a good friend about an unintended tone I took at one point in the piece. My apologies. :)

Mudflation, the natural progression in a persistent world from rarity and low buying power to rarity with high buying power is considered by many to be an uncurable disease and a sign of a normal MMO economy. Money supplies are most commonly cited as the irritant for the mudflated economy in most games, but the reality is the lack of connection between money supply and goods and services in an MMO economy.

The fixes have always been fairly straightforward – they are some of the basic principles of economics. Here I will discuss a threefold plan for curbing mudflation: limiting the influx of currency (or currency-like objects), modeling more required purchases, and eliminating superfluous currency and goods.

The reason few, if any, of these have been truly explored in the MMO space is the “pain” of requiring a player to engage in a living economy outweighs the fun-factor of playing in the gamespace. Additional to this is the prevailing notion among the game design community that modeling and guiding the economy is “too hard” for the payoff it would give to the playerbase.

I’d like to posit that a lot of the ills of a mature MMO economy can be fairly easily corrected, and the “pain” of playing in a living gamespace is offset by the creativity of a dedicated design staff who leverages these behaviors – behaviors that players do naturally anyway as they try to succeed in the rapidly inflating economy.

A good place to look is the real world - a place that has seen ample instances of poor economic planning and behavior. Start with observing conquering empires. Players in a persistent world are much like Mongol raiders or Roman soldiers - they produce nothing, take greatly out of proportion to their needs, and amass wealth with few outlets. Even the endgame of a player in an MMO matches that of a conquering empire - with no outlet for wealth, having achieved the pinnacle of power, there exists nothing for the player to do but leave the scene.

How does this relate to an MMO? Part of the answer is in providing luxuries and services that befit that of a senior member of the game space. For instance, some money sinks that fall into this category include:
-> Purchased Titles
-> Clothing and Finery (such as glows, etc.)
-> Houses, Homes, Bases, and Guildhalls
-> User Services

The challenge with these is they indeed serve as a drain on the economy, but they are created and presented in such a way that the player pays for them at the beginning, and rarely needs to maintain them. In such cases where maintenance is required, the maintenance is considered onerous to the player and does not take into account leaving the game for extended periods of time. These luxuries thus become part of the pain, and not part of the solution.

So what is the solution? Well, what I suggest in this series isn't a magic bullet, but I certainly think we can look to these "Mongol Warrior Syndrome" solutions for inspiration.

Limiting the influx of currency

The belief has always been that you have to keep adding an infinite amount of money into the virtual economy, for as long as the players demand it. This is certainly how things have always been done, and the result is inflation and the beginnings of the players creating their own grey markets of alternative currencies.

The potential exists, however, to somewhat cleanly leverage the players' alternative currency and put an interesting lock on some aspects of inflation with the institution of currency limits.

By limiting the amount of currency in the system, you create a scarcity of buying power, which encourages player barter and trade. You can also choose to infuse currency in any content update if you miscalculate the initial run of currency.

By doing this, and requiring players to engage in "government" services using only currency, you can flex your players' buying power in many interesting ways.

For instance, suppose you had a currency limit of 10 frobnars per player on the server, to a limit of 100 players (if you want more "realistic" numbers, simply add some zeroes!). This means your 100 players will be paying and playing in a currency pool of 1000 frobnars. Soon, the frobnar becomes quite a bit more valuable, and all but requires your players to explore alternative currencies for barter and trade.

If the design of the game includes automated bartering systems with certain classes of NPCs, then it appears that the NPCs are part of the grey market of the alternative economy, and you can drain off useless items and goods while retaining good currency health.

An example of an automated bartering system is this: Suppose players can gather boar bacon in the course of their murderous adventures. When the economy is young, these boar bacons will be salable for currency - perhaps straight to the governing body of the game. The time quickly comes, however, where all the currency is "out" in the world, and the government no longer wishes to pay rare coins for bacon.

The player, however, knows that bacon is in and of itself a commodity with value, and takes it to the ingame armorsmith the next time he needs his armor repaired. Instead of just handing over 5 frobnars (which reinjects them into the economy elsewhere!), the player can choose to hand over a stack of bacon instead.

Now, multiply this by all "loot" items in your world, and you can see something interesting arise - players no longer have to "run the triangle:"

- Go out into the world. Murder stuff. Take their loots.
- Go back to town. Walk up to the store and convert their loots into gold.
- Buy potions and repairs and the like with gold.

Now, it becomes a simpler economy on the surface:

- Go out into the world. Hunt and gather. Take the loots.
- Go back to town and trade loots for potions and repairs. Save the gold for starting guilds and the like.

The value of loot in "frobnar equivalents" is a simple scalar that can (and should!) be adjusted by metrics gathered each patch cycle. By scheduling out loots into categories, players can be taught to gather in ways that leverage their barterable goods quickly and cleanly.

In Act Two, we will discuss adding many more things for you to WANT to buy as a means of slowing and limiting Mudflation.