Interference in Economies

How much should you interfere with how an economy “should” work to facilitate its smooth operation?

Let’s start with something relatively mundane. Players don’t like being ripped off; if they want to trade, should there be a secure trading system whereby goods can be exchanged with no danger that anyone will take the money and run? It’s not very immersive, but players are accustomed to the idea and will accept it without thinking (in the same way that they accept slow scene dissolves in movies as a signal for the passage of time). The easier it is to trade, the more likely players are to engage in trade.

Trading, though, is tangible: Coins and objects are things the virtual world can track. Services are intangible: If I want to pay you to guard something, how can the virtual world track whether or not you did it? Similarly, although it’s possible to contrive a trade screen whereby I cast a heal spell if you give me money, it’s not so easy to do it for more complex arrangements (such as casting heals on you “whenever you need them,” in exchange for “a share of an expedition’s profits”).

There will always be unsecure trading, because designers can’t hope to model everything that players may want to trade. Given that they can’t model everything, the question that then arises is whether they should model anything at all?

The answer must be yes, because it’s the only way for low-AI NPCs to trade. Given that it’s therefore there already, allowing it for instant inter-player trade isn’t really going to hurt any. For transactions that take time, though, it’s trickier. If I pay an NPC to train me to use a crossbow, I know that the NPC is not going to disappear with my cash; with a PC, I don’t know that. This can be shoehorned into a transaction system, but the more complex transactions become, the harder it gets. There comes a point where to continue would be ridiculous, even if it’s short of what NPCs can do. Automated transactions are okay if they don’t stretch convention too far, but beyond that they hurt immersion.

If a smooth-running economy were the only aim here, this model could be further extended. For example, players could be allowed to trade with one another without being in physical proximity. Goods could be teleported immediately from point of sale to point of purchase, with the two not necessarily coinciding. This would greatly facilitate the exchange of goods, leading to greater satisfaction for all. In a Science Fiction virtual world, it may even make sense within the fiction.

Whether it would be any fun is another matter, though. One of the things about an imperfect economy is that it takes time for production and demand to fall into step. During that time, profits can be made. If response is immediate, this smoothes out the creases that make commerce interesting.

In some virtual worlds, the mobiles you fight are tuned to your combat abilities. In other words, no matter what you attack, it will adapt to be commensurate with your abilities to defeat it. The design thinking is that you’ll have a more exciting time if you’re pushed close to defeat but still manage to win. It’s flawed, though, because nearly-losing-but-then-winning is only exciting if there exists the possibility that you could actually lose. Because mobiles are bent to fit your abilities, there’s actually no real danger of this. Combat is ultimately dispiriting.

A similar thing applies to over-smoothed economies. If as soon as players think of something clever to do, checks and balances come into play that dampen the effect, in time people are going to wonder what the point of it all is. There has to be enough opportunity to make a success of something before the bandwagon arrives, otherwise it’s just not worth trying.

Interference in the low-level workings of an economy can thus be counterproductive: The easier you make it for people to trade goods and services, the less interesting it becomes. On the other hand, if you don’t interfere then the economy might not work at all. You have to achieve a balance.

There are other ways to interfere that could help.

National governments use interest rates to control their economies. Low interest rates cause people to spend; high interest rates cause people to save. If you have a virtual world where players are spending or saving too much, it shouldn’t be too hard to create a mechanism that corrects the problem (for example, by making NPCs change their prices, or by taxing PC bank accounts).

Regrettably, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. The problem is not the implementation, but players’ perception of it. Unlike with a secure transactions system (which is a transparent process), they don’t see the workings of the economy’s carburetor, just the effects. It’s very difficult for them to trust what’s going on. Even if you completely automate the checking and balancing, there’ll still be a deep suspicion that actually it’s the live team that makes all the decisions, with some “nerf knob” they can turn to make prices rise or fall.

It’s an issue of trust. If you must have a nerf knob, you might want to give control of it to a committee of players rather than automate it. They may screw up, but at least they’ll get the blame, not you!