Newbies can't make money, acius, 2003-11-04 01:25:26

OK, with the new shopkeepers in, we've introduced a new problem -- there's no way for newcomers to get into the market, short of an existing player either giving them money or having them do a little bit of work for them for money. The old method of 'kill rabbits and sell the pelts' is no longer going to work, because we don't have an automated method for selling things anymore. So we need to come up with ways around the problem.

An obvious first step would be to allow player-run shops to buy things from players. Here's my initial proposal on how this could be done:

Simply allow players to flip a flag on the crates -- either "buy 100" or "sell 100", something like that. If the crates are in "sell" mode, then they behave as they currently do (the shopkeeper is trying to sell the contents for 100 coins each). If the crates are in "buy" mode, then the shopkeeper will buy any item matching the contents of that crate for 100 coins each.

So, if I wanted to get into leatherwork, and I want the newbies to help me out by supplying pelts, I'd grab a crate and mark it as "buy 30" (I'm willing to buy pelts for 30 each, in other words). I'd then fill that crate with all the pelt types I am willing to buy -- one each of rabbit, wolf, and bear, for the moment. Then, players would come and 'sell all pelts' to the shopkeeper, and it would throw in the new pelts on top of the old ones in the sales crate.

I don't like this solution a whole lot -- it feels a bit clunky. But I haven't thought of a better way to do it yet, and at least this way is pretty much impossible to exploit. The only other thing here is to add an on_offer event to the shopkeeper, so that the store owner can give it money (in case the store does more buying than selling).

two ideas, angel, 2003-11-08 23:01:15

The first is needlessly stupid, ...stocks! Take a small amout of coins (obtained at chararter creation?) and invest in whatever.

The more logical one, mercenairy work, a newbie goes to a bar and finds, small jobs to do (like GTA vice) for small amouts, and your mercaniry "level" will encrease so that you can do more dangerous stuff.

i.e. a "level 1" merc will take some stuff and give it to someone else, while "level 5" stuff is fighting off invading orges or something. And "level 10+" does assassination missions and the like.
Oh, and maybe give them a choice, money or stat increases, or even free mecendice.

quests, malap, 2003-11-09 02:54:05

The first one is not a bad idea, we're just not there yet. I want to toss our generic 'coins' and just have players stamp their own currencies. The other developers who don't like this idea are all scared of being innovating and interesting, and their parents dress them. (More seriously, this has a few difficult consequences, most of which I like (but can be difficult for code to deal with.))

The second one generally gets called "quests". I have yet to see one* that is not either "kill this guy" or "give this to that guy" (aka the "FedEx quest").

* Excepting human-run ones; and we can't quite right human DMs. But I'd give a lot of wizpoints to someone who could, as would the last few decades of AI researchers. :)

Rupys, angel, 2003-11-09 11:13:48

"I want to toss our generic 'coins' and just have players stamp their own currencies."-Malap

Does that mean that each contry will have a different money system?
Gil, Coins, GP, Rupys, the Eurodollar, there are so may different type of game money. Or is it gonna be the same money only we can remane it?
Wouldn't that make buying stuff diffcult in some parts of the wolrd?

If so there have to be a currency exchange building at the border of every area, or maybr your money would just ajust itself?
But then wouldn't we have to worry about inflation or depressions?

good thoughts, malap, 2003-11-09 13:48:09

We'd be getting a lot closer to what things were like way back when. Yes, every country would have a different money system. It's possible that smaller areas -- counties or larger cities -- would have cause to issue their own currencies.

It absolutely would not just be a hundred different name for our generic coins. They'd have different names, different values, be issued and accepted different places.

This would indeed make buying things more difficult sometimes. It makes the world a lot larger. To keep it from getting too terribly crazy, we figure requiring founding a larger town is a good bar to entry.

Inflation or deflation are already in play -- for instance, money is basically worthless right now. The economic game would be a lot bigger and more interesting. Players could run currency exchanges and such.

Getting this working, acius, 2003-11-10 11:01:05

Yeah, my main objection to it is the usual 'but there's higher priority stuff to do!' No argument against the featurefulness.

The primary design consideration is handling how shopkeepers of player-run shops would decide which currencies they are willing to accept; I assume that you would set the currency as part of the price. It's a simple problem, but it gradually unfolds into a harder one.

More ideas, shadow, 2003-11-11 20:27:30

Currency - Instead of throwing out these generic coins all together, why not change them to a type of universal coin. In a way they already are. But when more countries and different currencies are introduced, constantly having to change back and forth between currencies may get tiresome. The universal coin or currency will allow players to travel to and from a wide-spread area.

Making Money - Doing quests sound nice. Setting up your own crate does too. But here's a simple way for newbies can make money. Have wizards go around a few days a week and scatter small quantities of coins around the world. The best places would be in caves, dungeons, and other hard to get to areas. Or the coinds, instead, could be spawned only in a few places. Newbies can go around and pick up these small piles of coins when they get tired of takeing orders from someone. This also works well as a way to explore more around the world.

I totally disagree, malap, 2003-11-11 21:11:48

If there's a global currency, there's no reason at all for local currencies. Bad. I see changing money, currency speculation, etc. as a far more interesting game than 'whack the foozle', so I don't see any reason to go around cutting the legs out from under it.

Having wizards scatter money around seems really silly to me, and heavier wizard manipulation of the economy than I think we should have.

Currency creation, acius, 2003-11-12 10:58:53

The following would all be necessary steps:

* Total abolishment of the 'value' field on all items (actually, we need to do this either way).
* The requirement for stamping money would be founding a city and the building of a mint. Building a mint would be rather difficult. One unit of metal will probably translate to 50-100 coins. Upon building a mint, you would have to choose a unique name for your currency.
* All prices would have to be set in terms of both count and currency. there are a couple ways we could do this:

- Store prices as a string, something like "2500 florins"
- Store price as a bitfield, and keep a global registry; 0x01000064 would be 100 coins, currency #1. Ask the currency daemon for a name.
- Store it as an array, ({ 1, 100 }) or ({ "florins", 100 }).

I tend toward the "2500 florins", since it's probably the simplest to work with in the long run.

The 'quantity' object needs to be careful not to combine objects with different currency designations. We might use the 'type' field for this?

Well, we need to build mints, then... And do a little bit of recoding on the shopkeeper.

Well, felix, 2003-11-12 22:53:45

You know, not every country would have to have it's own currency.. some areas could use the same thing.. a small group of countries could make a currency for that area.. The United Republic Peso, etc. or something, one of these could even rise to become almost universally accepted. I think town owners would start to figure out that it's a lot more easier and cheaper to just accept a nearby countries money and just leave it at that... if you only accept.. if you only accept your countries money and nobody lives in your country, you won't get much money. :P

Right, acius, 2003-11-12 23:45:02

This is absolutely correct. The main potential problem with a widespread currency is corrupt fiscal policy. See, if you have a universal currency, that means that somewhere you have small handful of players who can make *all the money they want*, and their money's good anywhere in the world! And as long as they keep their moneymaking to a small percentage of the total money out there, they'll get away with it ... after all, they are the legitimate printers of that money. Printing money is a big temptation for governments.

If this is used too much, however, you'll create inflation (this is, in fact, where most real life inflation comes from), which in the long run will destroy the value of your money. Players will quickly abandon your worthless coins and switch over to a city that's being more conservative in their currency printing rules. Perhaps eventually one country will have the self-control and long-term good sense to work at keeping their currency stable, and they'll eventually be accepted everywhere. But who'll it be? Or, will no one be trusted, and the world factionalize into many small currency groups? The economy would run less efficiently that way, to be sure, but at least each town would control its own financial destiny.

So now we are playing economic games :-). Of course, this was sort of the point.

Don't underestimate the power of greed, aeao, 2003-11-14 17:59:13

I would like to think If I had my own mint I wouldn't make money for myself but I doubt that to be true. I think putting users in charge of making money would be a bad idea for the time being. But if wizards or someone not bound by the monetary system for supplies they need were to be put in charge of making the money or at least watching over those who are in charge of it and might be trying to take a piece of the pie would almost eliminate the problem. But then again this is just my opinion. As for the problem of newbies not being able to get money, I'm not too worried about it right now. I think you should think about focusing on something for the money to be used for before trying to put more into newbies hands.

Oh, I don't underestimate greed, acius, 2003-11-15 01:18:24

It's not just that I worry people are going to print themselves money -- in fact, I'm more or less counting on it. The game won't be as interesting if they don't. That's what makes the whole thing so much fun ... it can make you quite rich in the short term, but in the long term, it's self-destructive. It's my secret hope that a few people will do it anyway, since it'll be an interesting lesson in economics.

I'd much rather the players do their level best to figure out a way to police themselves in this case. I kind of like making people think.

Crime does pay, aeao, 2003-11-15 14:22:00

So there would be no punishment for those people on the wizard level? It would be kinda aggravating if someone bought something from you with money that the next day was worthless. A person could make a new mint twice a week and make new money to buy things he could sell for stable currency.

crime, malap, 2003-11-15 15:46:50

There would be no punishments from wizards to players running their economic systems as a they liked.

If you as a player think that someone's currency is a joke or a scam, don't accept it and don't use it. If you run a city and the person responsible for your city's mint makes a ton of money for themself, you can punish them -- kick them out of their job, haev the town seize their house, etc. We're working on mechanisms for all this.

Issues of how player-run justice should be run should be posted in another thread, tho.

Oh, yeah, wizards, acius, 2003-11-15 16:09:33

Um, as a rule, wizards aren't allowed to play the game competitively, because they're too capable of cheating. Wizards do various things to test out their code, but should NOT be competitively building stores, printing money, etc. The right to do this is one of the things you lose when you become a wizard. Wizards do try and do stuff to *stabilize* the economy quite a lot, but that's not so much of a problem.

How we'd take care of a wizard deliberately destabilizing the economy would depend on the occasion.

Oh sorry, aeao, 2003-11-15 19:01:48

Thats not what I meant. I meant that the wizards would do nothing to punish them. Sorry for the confusion

one word, garvin, 2003-11-28 17:35:59

inflation

to expand: minting too much of one currency of money devalues the money itself. The wise minter/economist will abstain from minting more money than he is worth in his products.