Game Guides Archive

Well....

I appreciate a good brain-yoga as much as the next guy, but you are seeing way too much into a 3000-5000 peoples economy. It can't be real at this size. And even if it could, i doubt it could be fun. You need to simulate a larger economy behind this pocket one, to make it "kind" of real.

As for fun... i had the most fun in game since i sold my house and stuff and went the vagrant way. FREEDOM at last! No maintenance, no harvester runs, no city hall poping right next to my long standing house and merchant with all taxes to the max... The thing is i have a better armor and weapons now, and more cash in the bank!!!

As the old saying goes, there are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics .....

If the dev team wastes more than 2 minutes of a monthly staff meeting on this nonsense, no wonder it takes so long to fix the bugs that really matter to the players. Using those numbers to determine how well the game is working is like scattering chicken bones to decide whether to have an appendectomy.

Barb-wire,

As much we all appreciate your simplistic and vague explanation of economic principles, vis-a-vis capitalism and socialism, you should generally not try to boil down large-scale economic systems into text-book propaganda style pseudo definitions.

Capitalistic systemsare notbased on hard-work and education, nor is economic success rewarded withwealth, which, when you think about it,isa pretty silly statement since economic successis a synonymFOR wealth. And they have nothing to do with personal responsibility. Similiarly, socialist systemshave nothing to do with equality, that is a philosophicalbasisfor communist-Marxist governments. Socialist economies, of which there are many examples around the world if youcare to look, are concerned with ensuringthat work is available for all first and foremost, and that all people have a social safety net so that if they cannot work, they are provided with the means to live until they can find work again, and that at retirement, they are providedwith the means to survive until they die, based upon the work they did while in the workforce. In fact, since the idea of providing universal work isa socialist one and not a capitalist one, I would expect (given the last paragraph of your statement) you to endorse socialist economies and reject capitalist ones, which have no such overriding economic principle.

Conflating socialist economic principles with Communist/Marxist ideals of equality is simply wrong, and claiming that the USSR failed "in a nutshell" because of it's socialist economy is just plain ignorant. Andyour anecdotal evidenceconcerning "begging"proves only that you take playing a game inwhich imaginary credits are exchanged for imaginary goods far far too seriously for your ownmental health.

I'm not prepared at this time to offer a full discussion of the basic economic principles governing the capitalist economic model or the socialist economic modelbut I would like to pointout that thetwo are linkedand in pretty much 100% of modern world economies there exist socialist and free-market elements.

SWG's economy is an interesting mix of the two, since of course, there is the possibility of finding "work" in the form of missions for everyone. It also tends to allow for the best products and rarest of items to command the highest prices, and for lesser objects to be sold for less. However, demand is not very high, as the vast majority of items in the game that are craftable have no pratical use. Retirement, excepting voluntary is not an issue and sincecharacters don't require food or living spaces in order to survive, the ideaof a social safety net is not applicable. In truth, discussions ofsocialist economies are useless in the context of SWG, but just as similiarly, soare discussions ofcapitalist ones. While it is true that certaincrafting professionscan make large quanities of money via "hard work" of finding theright components and makingsuperior weapons or armor, the vastmajority of money making opportunities in thegamerequire little hard-work. Mineral mining for example, takesa minimal amount of effort and a few hours of timeevery 7 days and can easily net 200-500% ofthe cost of mining, depending on what you are mining. Running missions, especially with a buffed/maxed combatcharacter, isn't exactly hard, nor could it be described as "work".

While it is arguable that SWG has capitalist elements, i.e. hard work"can" be rewarded with wealth (if you work hard to provide services thatare combat related), wealth is concentrated in the hards ofa few ultra-rich, with a broad distribution below them, etc. It also lacks such basicelements as mechanisms for facilitiating re-investment, incorporation, oreven free-market indicies that would help to set and stabilise prices. After all, theidea of redistributing wealth is not just a Socialist principle. Capitalist systems rely on the idea in order to provide the means for the economy to function. How else would it be possible for people to become wealthy via hard work ifalready wealthypeople were not willing to take some of the wealth they possess and use it to help others to gain wealth for themselves (and you)?

If the developersreally want to make the economy better, theyshould provide economic tools for us to use:

Market Indicies

Stock Market

Futures and Commodities Market

Contractual enforcement and Corporate entities

-warghul

Message Edited by WarGhul on 05-03-2004 10:38 AM

.... On a tangent....

A while back, my son and I were in a PA on Tarq. On evening, for fun, we stripped to our loincloths and began whispering "Alms for the Poor"...

when asked, we both explained that we were testing a new profession... Begger. and that we got XP for credits donated. I added "only 150K P more and I get a begger bowl"

almost everyone "got" the joke. Some /tipped us. (Made about 5K between the 2 of us. Someone gavemy son50K... which he /tipped right back)

Then, a curious thing happened... We began to get "followers"... when we logged out there was a line of acolytes... all in loincloths... sitting on the steps in front of the shuttleport... begging.

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The next day, Our PA leader told me that, in his opinion, begging was something that "tended to bring discredit" to the PA.

So, he kicked us out.

Sigh... SOME people have NO sense of humor.

I will /tip a person if he's begging "In character". If a person is just asking for $ because he does not want to run missions or the like, I /addignore him/her

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Arrya wrote:

Also, I would imagine that a good bit of the money in flowfrom missions is related to how old a character is. From myexperiences, the newer playerstend to run missions to gain money while the veterans use the economy to trade for credits. As the player base has matured, it doesn't suprise me to see the Money in-flow from missionsdrop dramatically - and at the same time, the veteran players are competing harder than ever to make the shrinking economy work for them.

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That isn't really the way it works on my server (Eclipse). It did work that way for a while, but the high-end missions do pay out fairly well and you will often see "solo groups" running out of Dantooine outposts with high-level characters taking 30k mokk missions. Figure if you take two at a time, and have a well-made combat character, you can make 60k in about 10-15 minutes. In an hour, 200k easy. Figure 7-8 people per group doing those... well that's upwards of two million credits paid out per group per hour. I also earned quite a few credits while grinding savage quenker missions for exp. at 7k a lair, I'd do 30-40 in a day and make 300k just for doing what I'd do anyway regardless of money. I'll admit I liked the anarchy online system better where you chose what kind of reward you wanted... xp or cash for missions. And those missions were instanced. Too bad the rest of the game sucked.

You are right though in so far as more time is spent doing things other than mission terminal missions at higher levels. That's 90% of the game for lower characters that cannot handle caves or theme park type places on their own. Most of the static content in the game is aimed at higher level chars, so we spend more time doing that than if we were newbs and our only option was terminal missions.

The stat I would most like to see is not there

m = money supply. How many credits are in cash and in bank accounts. If possible a breakdown of: cash; bank accounts; unremovable maint (harvs & houses); removable maint (pa halls vendors) would be awesome.

A graph of total money held in game over time. We could see the spikes of when the dupers hit, and to what extent they hit. Also, we could see the trend of running at a deficit and try and predict:

1, When will credits reach their true normal value, not inflated for duping.

2. When can we expect inflows to increase to offset the deficit.

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Exclarion wrote:
Is it just me? i cant seem to see anythign on that page for the economy ordeal..

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Here's a suggestion. Take the cap off the maximum bid allowed for auctions listed on the bazaar. I think we'd quickly learn what things are worth on each server.

You could control the number of auctions by setting limits on who could start an auction. Perhaps limit this tomerchants? Or merchants and smugglers?

You could also let GM's list rare stuff on the bazaar from time to time and delete the cash after the sale.

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Holocron wrote:

Just a couple of quickie comments. Glad to see so many folks enjoyed the article...

Expecting a game with largely player-driven pricing to adhere to the prices cited in the movie is unrealistic. There are VERY few numbers that the devs set directly in terms of values. If a given item is developing artificially inflated prices and is becoming the tulip bulb of SWG, that's largely thanks to player speculation in that market. For that matter, a centrally planned economy that could actually achieve hitting that number would be quite the opposite of a player-driven economy--it'd have to be very tightly centrally controlled...

Secondly, DFH, the power law distribution isn't about game balance. There isn't a single economy in the entire world that is "fair" in the way you propose. I'll say upfront that I am at a total loss as to how make sure that the game economy is "fair" in the way you suggest; I'd also note that fairness in the way you seem to asking for it would also mean that skill could not result in making more money than someone unskilled. And that seems antithetical to "fun game" in a lot of ways. It's certainly true that currently some professions tend to accumulate cash and others do not--it's a worthwhile exercise to build a graph showing where money enters (via which broad profession groups) and where it exits and accumulates.

This particular article focused on only a fairly small subset of the possible metrics, since it is largely about currency creation and destruction. Yes, there's tons more that can be done with commodities prices, per capita incomes, and so on. Some of you may have read the articles by Ted Castronova calculating the GDP of EverQuest--he'd love to get detailed stats on SWG, I'm sure.

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