Goblin Squad Member
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I don't understand one thing: Why is coin being created/destroyed?Just imagine if there were a constant amount of coin in the game during the first seven months, when we intend to go from 4500 players to 16500 players—the economy would be a mess in no time! Even if our goal were just to keep the economy completely flat, we'd still have to be making constant adjustments as players come and go, and as coin gets locked up in the accounts of players who don't play for a while, or just don't spend for a while.
But we don't want a flat economy—we want an increasing economy. See the blog paragraph that begins "In general, more coin will enter the game than leave it" for the explanation.
Vic, I just read this and it kind of set my alarms off, and so I went back and re-read that paragraph. It read ambiguously to me--in some places money & production are conflated (yikes) and then taken apart (ok).
- Money isn't wealth, and has no value. Money is a unit account, like *feet* or *liters*. If you had "Twenty ounces of gold," it's the gold that has value--ounces is just a way to count or measure. Money is a kind of accounting technology that lets me trade my production (research) for your production (badasstic video games).
- Money isn't the economy and doesn't drive it. It has an effect on it, in that it can "make that which is uneven, even" and is "the oil which renders the motion of the wheels [of trade] more
smooth and easy." It can also be a serious wedge between producers, in that "changing the unit account cannot change the terms of trade"--changes in the unit of account cause a windfall loss or gain. - Increasing the money supply doesn't cause inflation, nor does decreasing it cause deflation. Monetary error is an increase or decrease relative to the size of the pool to be denominated.
This stuff matters because the model for what money is will drive monetary policy. If you grow the money supply because you think it will grow the economy--if you have the relationship backwards--you risk monetary error, likely inflation in this case. So stuff like this is worrisome:
"This will allow characters to accumulate wealth, and it ensures that there's ample capital available for loans and gifts. But when the value of M increases in an economic system, it often drives inflation." If that paragraph means "we will increase the money supply because that drives production," then there's a problem. But then later in the paragraph you've got:
"We can adjust our economic system with precision, changing the amount of coin that enters via faucets, and controlling the amount that exits via drains. There's no perfect stable point; M will have to be constantly adjusted over time in response to player activity."
Which sounds a lot better, i.e. "We will match the size of the money supply to the size of the economy."
Could you good folks unpack that paragraph a bit?
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Goblin Squad Member
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We don't want old, rich characters to have all the wealth, and new poor characters to have none.
If there was a fixed amount of money in the game, shortly, we'd have that concentration of wealth. Therefore it is a requirement of the game design that the total amount of Coin in the system is always increasing, so that young, poor characters can earn it from the system, as opposed to having to earn it from the old, wealthy characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks for responding Ryan.
That concerns me a bit--money isn't wealth, and we don't earn money. That linguistic abstraction stands in for production and the exchange of production, using money as an accounting aid.
So we could have players producing (mining, crafting, protecting, singing, etc.) and exchanging that production--creating and accruing wealth--with no money. Or they could denominate their new production with a fixed pool of money, and deal with the difficulty of price changes due to monetary error (most assuredly deflation in your example).
Increasing the money supply to match population might not work out badly--you could use population as a crude proxy for the pool of production, we could assume there is some sort of level of production implicit in each new person added to the game.
So does this mean you do not plan to look at the price of something/s to act as a signal for monetary error?
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Goblin Squad Member
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What will likely occur is that certain easily harvested materials will become de facto commodities and the price of those commodities will allow us to gauge the level of inflation in the system. It will take a while for the market to get big enough for that to occur and in the beginning I expect there will be wide price swings - especially as people experiment with cornering markets (something that should become less possible the larger the player population becomes).
In EVE, for example, there are about a dozen base minerals which fill this role and the economics team watches their prices carefully. There are also similar proxies for intermediate production components and even finished goods but that's because EVE's economic system is just so huge.
What will happen over the long term is that the big, high end stuff will likely carry with it big sinks so that as a character or a social organization progresses through its lifecycle they find that every increase in power or area under their control brings with it substantial costs as well - in other words, they'll never get to the point of not caring about income. That's so far in the future though that I'm not going to worry about it. :)
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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Some additional economic concepts I have been thinking about:
I have been thinking about farms, and how they could be utilized in Pathfinder Online, while making them interesting, and keeping with the flow of the game. First, farmed plants could provide the necessary materials for certain potions, or alchemical ammunition. However, unless you are going to make self-healing impossible without a potion, their use will be limited, and a single large farm could supply all the (insert plant name here) the world would need. At least until you got a very large number of players. But food variety being important for commoner health and happiness, would provide incentives for farms, and demand for farmed goods. If the soil type, and temperature made growing conditions great for some plants, but terrible for others, then true variety of food would come from many sources, creating the player demand based economy you are looking for. This will also mean that great empires can not survive on the powerful might of a few characters. To build a great empire they will need a lot of common folk, meaning they will need a lot of a diverse food supply, fueling additional economic factors.
Warehouses and shops are two types of buildings that must be able to be built. If a player process a particular good, then wants to transport that good to a far away city for use in that city by their crafters, then they will need to have access to a warehouse. Either they can build one, or perhaps they can lease space from someone who does have one (adding another aspect to the economy). They will also need to have a store where to sell their wares. The store could be covered by an auction house.
Blacklisting should be a merchant’s option as well as a bounty for those who attack them or their wares. By adding the ability to prevent the sale of their goods to the attackers, and the attacking party, the merchant has an additional tool they can use to discourage the attacks. I also think there should be the ability to blacklist the larger groups. A guild that makes it’s living from attacking merchants, then those merchants band together with other merchants and blacklist the entire guild or city-state. This could be used to help the merchants fight back, and make it difficult for the guild to get the variety of goods necessary to supply a large network.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This piqued my interest in the gamasutra article, "What went wrong with SWTOR":
B. Trade and Economic Interactions: Being part of a player driven economy can give opportunities for player interactions that involve not just dozens of players, but even thousands. If your economy is designed well, assets in the economy will maintain their value, or equity, over time and allow a player to build wealth and prestige. This can make for a game with a very long life span, as EVE Online has demonstrated.
Starting on the first day of the retail launch of SWTOR, I held an "economic deathwatch" on the LinkedIn Game Developer group forum. I tracked the real world exchange rate from SWTOR credits to real dollars. By giving almost daily exchange rates I was able to demonstrate that the value of game credits fell by 97 percent in the first 30 days. This destroyed all equity in the economy and amputated all of the associated content. Given the complexity of the craft system in SWTOR, I would say this eliminated most of the social interactions in the game before they even had a chance to get started.
The mechanism of attack against the economy was an instance reset exploit. I described this class of virtual economic attack and its countermeasures in my 2009 proprietary paper, Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models. A vulnerability was discovered during the SW beta test and a macro was developed to take advantage of it. It is in the interest of the creators of such macros to keep them secret, because competition can quickly drive down the value of credits created this way. In this case the macro did end up in the public space, implying that the motivation for whoever did so was to rapidly destroy the commercial viability of a major Western game product. This was disastrous for both EA and the gold farmers preying on SWTOR. I did notify EA immediately about this macro, but by then the damage was done.
Kinda creepy what happens in the murky waters of mmorpgs?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Kinda creepy what happens in the murky waters of mmorpgs?
Human Nature isn't really any different in an MMO than it is in the faculty of a university, or in a platoon of Marines, or in a training program for NASA astronauts. The fabled "anonymity" that makes internet forums so despicable isn't really all that different than a coworker who sees something he wants in the community refrigerator and takes it because he knows nobody's around and he won't get caught.
Some additional economic concepts I have been thinking about:
I have been thinking about farms, and how they could be utilized in Pathfinder Online, while making them interesting, and keeping with the flow of the game. First, farmed plants could provide the necessary materials for certain potions, or alchemical ammunition. However, unless you are going to make self-healing impossible without a potion, their use will be limited, and a single large farm could supply all the (insert plant name here) the world would need. At least until you got a very large number of players. But food variety being important for commoner health and happiness, would provide incentives for farms, and demand for farmed goods. If the soil type, and temperature made growing conditions great for some plants, but terrible for others, then true variety of food would come from many sources, creating the player demand based economy you are looking for. This will also mean that great empires can not survive on the powerful might of a few characters. To build a great empire they will need a lot of common folk, meaning they will need a lot of a diverse food supply, fueling additional economic factors.
Warehouses and shops are two types of buildings that must be able to be built. If a player process a particular good, then wants to transport that good to a far away city for use in that city by their crafters, then they will need to have access to a warehouse. Either they can build one, or perhaps they can lease space from someone who does have one (adding another aspect to the economy). They will also need to have a store where to sell their wares. The store could be covered by an auction house.
Blacklisting should be a merchant’s option as well as a bounty for those who attack them or their wares. By adding the ability to prevent the sale of their goods to the attackers, and the attacking party, the merchant has an additional tool they can use to discourage the attacks. I also think there should be the ability to blacklist...
That would make my idea for a non combatant halfling sheep farmer viable.
I say this as someone who used to farm crops in MEOL and made substantial ammounts off in game gold
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't understand one thing: Why is coin being created/destroyed? You emphasize a 'real' economy, so when buying/selling from NPC merchants, why shouldn't the coin for that transaction be debited from somewhere (as opposed to being created on the spot) or be deposited to somewhere (as opposed to being destroyed)? How does the NPC part of the economy function if it never develops any coin value?All the coin in the game enters via a faucet. Faucets are things like rewards from NPCs for completing various tasks, or payments made by NPCs when they buy things from player characters. New coin may also be found as loot when a monster is defeated, or it may be discovered as treasure while exploring.
Coin exits the game as well, via a drain. Drains include actions like paying an NPC vendor for something or paying a tax or a fee to an NPC or to some system service. Coin might be consumed by player characters in other interactions with the game world in ways yet to be determined.
I am very late to this party, but I grew up on the original D&D Tabletop games and have watched this develop over the last few months and am encouraged. I have been a banker and stockbroker in my RL professional life and know a little (*holds thumb and index finger very close togther*) about economics. Here is my two cents.
The money supply in any game (mostly theme parks, but also sandboxes like EVE which I am playing now) is "created" when player characters perform a deed and get paid for it (quests or missions, kills and NPC, same thing).
This coin must come from somewhere. I encourage Pathfinder's economy to keep a "realistic" flow of coin in mind when turning on the faucets. Corporations in RL have shares of stock held in reserve "treasury" to generate additional cash when needed, and a king will have a treasurer as well with a supply of coin stored away in a vault for use when the king needs to either increase the current money supply available to the public or to make an emergency purchase. (He might use it for other purposes as well, such as subsidizing a specific city's construction near an enemy empire to provide a well supplied and fortified outpost where attacks could be carried out.)
In any case, normally only the king can authorize the minting of coin, so most gold ore is carefully mined and brought to the royal mint for processing and production of gold coin for the treasury (other coin types typically are copper, silver, platinum and occasionally palladium depending on the game). Using physical coin might add the extra level of realism and it production, storage and trading would add many layers to the economy, not to mention the skill tables.
So, (1) consider making the mining of ore, transportation of ore for processing and finally production and storage of coin a government function to help carefully control the economy (sure you can see it all through programs, but these controls would create an in-game operation needed to turn on the faucet), and (2) consider physical coinage carried by players and lootable by looters. It would also create a need for banks and would give players a place to store coinage (and maybe even a place for bad guys to rob).
Thanks...
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Goblin Squad Member
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...This coin must come from somewhere. I encourage Pathfinder's economy to keep a "realistic" flow of coin in mind when turning on the faucets. Corporations in RL have shares of stock held in reserve "treasury" to generate additional cash when needed, and a king will have a treasurer as well with a supply of coin stored away in a vault for use when the king needs to either increase the current money supply available to the public or...
Very well made point, Hardin.
It would be very interesting were the findings of the finished economic model made available for study. Keynes and Friedman would probably have loved to see the outcome if it is not intentionally skewed, or if skewed then to know what was the adjustment and what were its effects?
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CEO, Goblinworks
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In an MMO where currency is virtual and people come and go continuously (leaving some value abandoned, or re-injecting it without warning) classic "central banker" style manipulation of the currency supply is virtually impossible. Fiddling with an interest rate or buying and selling assets on anything but a massive scale won't have much effect.
What we have that the central bankers of the world don't have is total visibility about the money supply and the flow of transactions, and the balance of accounts. We can use that information to adjust the faucets and sinks in the game to maintain certain in-game attributes we consider desirable.
For example, there needs to be enough wealth created by new characters to allow them to buy supplies, replenish lost goods and equipment, and engage in profit-making activities. If there is too little wealth being created by the things new characters do they'll be starved of Coin and at the mercy of wealthy characters to sponsor them.
We also need to have sinks that can remove huge sums of Coin from the economy to keep the older, richer characters from accumulating so much excess wealth to trigger "MUD-flation"; the spiral of rapidly inflating costs for higher-level gear. Wealth in MMOs tends to become concentrated in large social organizations so that is where we'll focus significant Coin sinks. Operating a large Settlement and/or Kingdom is going to be expensive.
It's a critical part of the plan to operate the game, constantly twisting the knobs at our disposal to juggle these balance points. I doubt it can ever be fully automated.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In an MMO where currency is virtual and people come and go continuously (leaving some value abandoned, or re-injecting it without warning) classic "central banker" style manipulation of the currency supply is virtually impossible. Fiddling with an interest rate or buying and selling assets on anything but a massive scale won't have much effect.
What we have that the central bankers of the world don't have is total visibility about the money supply and the flow of transactions, and the balance of accounts. We can use that information to adjust the faucets and sinks in the game to maintain certain in-game attributes we consider desirable.
For example, there needs to be enough wealth created by new characters to allow them to buy supplies, replenish lost goods and equipment, and engage in profit-making activities. If there is too little wealth being created by the things new characters do they'll be starved of Coin and at the mercy of wealthy characters to sponsor them.
We also need to have sinks that can remove huge sums of Coin from the economy to keep the older, richer characters from accumulating so much excess wealth to trigger "MUD-flation"; the spiral of rapidly inflating costs for higher-level gear. Wealth in MMOs tends to become concentrated in large social organizations so that is where we'll focus significant Coin sinks. Operating a large Settlement and/or Kingdom is going to be expensive.
It's a critical part of the plan to operate the game, constantly twisting the knobs at our disposal to juggle these balance points. I doubt it can ever be fully automated.
Don't get me wrong. I am not at all opposed to the "Economy Specialist" with GW to monitor the flow of coin...that is as is should be, and the more tools he/she has to do so the better.
My points were on a "realistic" flow of ore-mint-coin (even if we never see the actual coin in our pouches, it would give the government a role in the land, as it always has, even in fantasy worlds) and maintinaing a sense of realism (again, yes, we all know we are in a fantasy world) where each spawned NPC or wandering monster is not born into the world with a bulging pouch of freshly minted coin.
I think where this really comes into play is with the same invisible population of "workers" that will be doing the labor of harvesting raw materials at a resource camp, or doing the laundry in town, or serving drinks in the tavern. These are the people that will be earning the coppers, spending the coppers on food at the market, and getting ganked on the road by ne'er-do-wells. These are the people that will be moving coin around the kingdom and through the wilderness. These monetary exchanges, though completely invisible to other players, is the mechanic that can be used to distribute newly minted wealth to the rest of the population. It might take a few more monetary transaction for the new coin to make in into players hands, but the lowest level consumer is the real driver of any economy.
Plus, it would be cool to see a royal mining expedition digging out ore and moving it to the royal forge under heavy escort. What a haul that will be if a bunch of baddies could get that wagon train!
(Edited to add an afterthought-The royal wagon train heading to the mine to fetch the ore and carrying it back to the mint would also be a good way to get some underpowered players out to the wilderness... ...tagging along nearby, but not too close, to the royal guard so no bad guys could gank them.....until the wagon train left to return. Then the players could go with it, or try their luck in the wild.....might be an interesting opportunity for experimentation.)
Edited to add an afterthought-The royal wagon train heading to the mine to fetch the ore and carrying it back to the mint would also be a good way to get some underpowered players out to the wilderness... ...tagging along nearby, but not too close, to the royal guard so no bad guys could gank them.....until the wagon train left to return. Then the players could go with it, or try their luck in the wild.....might be an interesting opportunity for experimentation.)
This is similar to how things will work in and around our settlement. Between the small gathers and the larger settlement harvesters I'm fully expecting to see large caravans picking up material and transporting it back to the settlement. This would give the lower powered players a chance to venture far out into the wilderness, giving them experience and the chance to score some loot. I compare these settlement caravans to the Spanish Black Ships in feudal Japan, a truly huge load of material guarded as strongly as possible by members of the settlement.
In reading about the PFO Virtual Economy and the "Coin" concept, it stated that Coin would never exist as an In-Game object. With that said, will everything be strictly barter system (goods for goods) and how will PCs pay for training? I imagine that there would have to be some form of In-Game currency, or will that be created by Players too? Perhaps with a Mint building when a settlement gets large enough to support one.
I'm pretty sure what they meant was that coin won't exist in terms of you having to manage how much your carrying with you or how much is in your bank. If you need 25 gold to pay for training, or want to buy an item that costs 5 gold you won't have to go get that coin from the bank, the total coin you possess will just be there for you to spend.
Honestly I would rather manage my coin, only keeping small amounts on me so that if a bandit hits me with a SAD, they can only get what I'm carrying, but it's not a huge deal if its handled the way they intend.
I might be wrong in how I interpret this, so keep the salt handy ;)
I'm pretty sure what they meant was that coin won't exist in terms of you having to manage how much your carrying with you or how much is in your bank. If you need 25 gold to pay for training, or want to buy an item that costs 5 gold you won't have to go get that coin from the bank, the total coin you possess will just be there for you to spend.
Honestly I would rather manage my coin, only keeping small amounts on me so that if a bandit hits me with a SAD, they can only get what I'm carrying, but it's not a huge deal if its handled the way they intend.
I might be wrong in how I interpret this, so keep the salt handy ;)
If this is true, then there might be a reason to use your "Coin" to purchase small high-value items like gems or precious metals. You could keep these stored away somewhere safe and if bandits hit you with a SAD, you literally are not carrying that much "Coin" on you. This would encourage (gold under the mattress) hoarding though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan, does this:
Luckily, unlike real–world bankers, we have 100% visibility into how much coin exists, who has it, how it is being used, and what prices are charged for goods across the whole game world.
This system will work very much like PLEX works in EVE Online. PLEX has proved to be extremely successful at reducing the effects of gold farmers, and at making it easier for casual players to enjoy the game without requiring them to put in massive effort to raise in–game funds. We expect to see the same positive outcome in Pathfinder Online.
mean that you will have a handle on "gold spammers" and "gold farmers", and thus keep them out of PfO? If so, you get a +10 in my book! Nothing sucks more than someone spamming "go to www.goldscammer.com (made up url) for best plat prices!" a dozen or more times, or when you see a new player running around with half-a-million coins buying the best gear when you are playing by the rules and can only afford standard equipment. I only ask because you say the PLEX system has been extremely successful, but you don't say totally successful. With a smaller, hardcore base of players, I am hoping that GW can do an even better job than CCP.
Here's wishing you guys the best of luck keeping these type out of PfO!
Also, Ryan, can we get more info on:
Theme park adventure content: In–game modules that you can unlock for yourself and your friends
please? Will these be instanced only for those players who buy it, and will they be one shot deals, or will they, God and Goddess forbid, be multiple run, thus "farmable"? I am not a big fan of multiple use dungeons in a persistent sandbox game, so any clarification will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I noticed that, actually, and then dismissed it as a coincidence and my imagination. Glad to see I'm not nuts, and other people are thinking that as well...Notice the term they used. I bet 5 bucks the middleware they just bought a license to Blizzard's WoW game engine.
GW plans to use the Unity software as the middleware - as Ryan noted, nothing from Blizzard at all :)
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@Gloreindl - I wish I could say that we have "solved" the RMT/Gold Farmer problem, but it is unlikely. As long as there are people who want to pay the smallest amount of real money possible for in-game currency, there will be RMT and Gold Farming.
But in a game with PLEX, it is far less profitable so there are fewer Gold Farmers and that makes it easier to target and remove them. But it just means "less" not "none".
Without there being ton's of gear in the game hopefully gold farmers will be easier to spot because they have less places to farm for gold. I might be wrong, but it seems like it'll work out that way. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Gloreindl - I wish I could say that we have "solved" the RMT/Gold Farmer problem, but it is unlikely. As long as there are people who want to pay the smallest amount of real money possible for in-game currency, there will be RMT and Gold Farming.
But in a game with PLEX, it is far less profitable so there are fewer Gold Farmers and that makes it easier to target and remove them. But it just means "less" not "none".
Thank you Ryan! I have high hopes you can keep 99.9999% out, but you are correct, you can't keep them out with 100% certainty. My hope is that with a small, very dedicated hard-core group of gamers as you envision, this alone will make it less profitable for the gold farmers and spammers to invade PfO. With so much of the base being invested in keeping PfO fun for all, sales wouldn't likely amount to something worth the effort. That being said, I have heard as recently as last week someone offering ISK from a website in EVE :( None-the-less, I love your approach and think you are doing things better even than CCP.
On a side note, I know we haven't seen eye to eye all the time, but I want to thank you for taking the time to answer me. I respect the work you are doing, and I respect everyone at GW and Paizo for their commitment to making PfO a great experience. I don't really see PfO as a game, more of an experience, and figured you should know that :)
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CEO, Goblinworks
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RMT didn't really impact EVE in a big way until they were over 100,000 players. It was there from the beginning, of course, but the business wan't large enough to attract the hard-core RMT teams until the market of potential buyers was big enough. They have costs to set up and run the kind of tech they use to maximize gold farming and they don't bother with "small games". However, once you've proved to be a worthwhile market, they have a huge asymmetric advantage on their side: Some totally legit players act like Gold Farmers and there are more such players than actual Gold Farmers so you have to work really hard to separate the signal from the noise.
So long as there are enough people who decide to buy gold from RMT providers at a rate that generates enough income to make the business profitable there will be RMT providers to supply them. And as the population grows there will inevitably be people who, when faced with the choice of buying Gold at a market price of $1, or an RMT price of $0.99, will pick RMT because it's "cheaper", and the market price is a "rip off". They therefore discount the risk of credit card fraud, identity theft, and malware to 0, which is foolish, but neither I nor anyone else will ever manage to convince them otherwise.
It's a problem that comes with success. I look forward to having it.