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[GavJ]

I am considering making a multiplayer sandbox game. I am currently thinking about an economy, which I would like to exist exclusively among players if possible and be actually active and realistic. I would also like to avoid side effects of the economy causing too much hoarding or concentration of power that can collapse the game/society.

The chief enemies to this plan are, as far as I can tell from experience:
1) Accumulation of junk in the world. Fancy terms for this are "inflation" and "deflation" but both are bad and both are because of different kinds of stuff accumulating, it is all the same problem.
2) Isolationism, I want people to actively trade, and have to trade, to get by. Minecraft is a good example of this utterly failing -- 99% of what you need makes no sense to trade for ever.

I'm wondering if I can run some ideas by people to see if you've heard of these being used before and if so, whether they worked or not, or if you think they will if they haven't been done.

ACCUMULATION OF JUNK
Unlike a typical RPG where stuff is generated (monster spawns) and destroyed (armor breaking and disappearing) all the time, I would plan to have my game would use a closed world -- no magical creation or destruction of matter at all. However, the resources begin locked away in the earth, so as people mine them, it still effectively leads to more and more accessible junk accumulating in the world. More building materials, metals, fuels, etc. The problem with this is that new players entering with nothing would be at an increasingly severe and de-motivating and stagnating disadvantage.

Some solutions I have considered to address this. Basically, all of them are aimed at not attempting to stop accumulating junk, but just making it less biased:
1) Fairly high taxes, property/income/sales. Then some central government (which doesn't do much else besides this) hands out fair shares of available tax dollars to new players and/or to dead respawning players + new players (you might also be able to will your next self some money, but there would be a death tax as well). Thus, as the game world progresses, newbies get dynamically more to begin with depending on how rich the world is, so they're never too far behind for when they started. Then just don't worry about accumulation too much.
2) Doing complicated things in game requires the help of other people, so people with ambitious projects pretty much have to hire employees and pay them to do gameplay stuff.
3) Have each new player have a special resource that you can't make more of, and that you need to do certain things. Similar to #2 but this is more like a passively applied resource. More advanced things require more of it than one person has, so they have to lease this resource from other players to do ambitious projects. Think of something like "psionic energy" for example (although that has nothing to do with my game as yet, this is an abstract idea) -- can't manufacture it no matter how rich you are, can only pay people for theirs. The richer the rich players are, the more they can competitively afford to offer for leasing, so newbie hel scales with wealth of the planet.
4) Crazier idea -- player avatars have limited lifespans, and also have children, and when you die (from accident or old age), you spawn into a randomly available (NPC at first) child via some set of rules, and get perhaps an allowance or something, then eventually inherit whatever the parents had when they die. This distributes wealth periodically among players, but not among families in the game world. This sort of interestingly gives players an incentive to make their COMMUNITY better off on average, to maximize their chances of spawning next time into a richer family. Need some way to avoid children murdering their parents all the time... also creates issues if too many people join too quickly. Also is bizarre.

ISOLATIONISM / FORCING TRADE
It's not an economy at all if you can get everything you need yourself. But this is rampant in all sorts of games. Minecraft as mentioned, but also RPGs like WoW, people trade a bit, but not at all routinely.

Solutions:
1) Clumpy resources - not every material and mineral is within 25 yards of you at any given point... Some things may be miles away from other things. In fact, routinely so. It may not take very long for you to personally travel such distances, but it still matters for trade because:
2) Bulk materials are difficult to move. No carrying of 40,000 metric tons of rock as in minecraft, for example, in your backpack. You want to move a traincar full of granite, you need an actual train car. So you as a person can run around and meet other people and do things without feeling like you are isolated, but your RESOURCES WILL feel like they are isolated... economically.
3) Moving a lot of bulk materials requires infrastructure that requires an upfront investment. This is important. #1-2 alone don't encourage trading. Sure, it might take a lot of effort to move materials, but if it takes just as much effort for some other guy to move rock to your home as it would you, there's still no reason not to do it yourself. But if infrastructure, like roads and railroads, is required and expensive, then that changes things. Me building a railroad form my house to every mine for everything I need is prohibitive. But me building one railroad to the nearest town with a market to move everything I need and everything I have for sale is affordable. I.e. a hub and spoke system costs much less in infrastructure than a cobweb of roads, and this forces trade.
4) Similarly, it should take a decent amount of capital to set up mining, so it's more feasible to have one guy with a mine for X who sells X to everyone than 15 redundant mines for X for each individual. You just can't afford to mine everything yourself (unlike 5 seconds in minecraft to make a pick to mine anything), but even a fairly new player can afford to mine SOMETHING fairly early on.

RUNNING OUT OF MATERIALS
A possible risk of doing things in the above ways is eventually just plain running out of stuff for people to mine. Solutions:

1) It costs more to move things further distances, to a significant degree, even after the infrastructure is in place (due to fuel, etc.). Early in the game world, you pretty much have to build an ironworks somewhere near a supply of charcoal, flux, AND iron ore if possible. But later on, you have more materials to fund further exploration and far flung industries, so you naturally expand out over time from the absolute best sites to the areas in between, in a sort of self-regulating way.
2) There are different grades of ores and things available, just like in real life. At first you have easy nuggets just lying around on the ground, but only in small quantities. Then people have to start digging a bit but not far. When they do, the seams will be more plentiful than the nuggest were, but require more processing (lower % per ton rock, even though total amount is higher). Later, you need to dig really deep, with expensive, collapse-prone mines and complicated machinery, and poisonous gases and heat and you have to process much larger volumes of ore for the same amount of stuff (or maybe veins are still rich, but harder to find them down there more wasted shafts).
3) #2 is discouraging to new players who may not have the know-how to design complex mining operations. This is a problem.
4) Recycling is fine too. Matter is not destroyed, although old machinery full of oil and unknown random crap and wiring and mud may not be as cheap to re-purify as the ore was.

[FearfulJesuit]

Look up Civcraft, which is a Minecraft server that uses mods that provide a certain level of property protection.

Civcraft has some issues that makes it unlike the real-world economy- for example, land is nearly free, and labor is really expensive. This last is mainly a consequence of the small player base.

[Fniff]

Which the labor issue could be solved with NPC helpers. Granted, they will always be worse then players, but they could be considered unskilled labor.

[GavJ]

Yes I am already intending to have NPC helpers do busywork. Probably actually do so significantly BETTER than the player, such that you only want to do things yourself if it's the only remaining way to survive for some reason. Your normal job is to be clever and design things cleverly. Primarily featuring an extremely extensive system system of modular gadgetry. Think like levers and components in DF or redstone in minecraft or Gary's mod, but on crack in terms of how many there are and capabilities. With the primary gameplay mechanism being designing efficient and effective contraptions.

In terms of speed and efficiency:
A well made contraption > a mediocrely made contraption > NPC helper > a poorly made contraption > Player manual labor > a non-functional contraption

[Knit tie]

What if you implement both material creation and destruction, but not in a classical way? Eventually, stuff like armour, weapons and machinery will deteriorate beyond repair, and recycling it will yield only a small fraction of those raw materials that were used in production, forcing players to search for new, spawning, veins of resources?

[FearfulJesuit]

What if you implement both material creation and destruction, but not in a classical way? Eventually, stuff like armour, weapons and machinery will deteriorate beyond repair, and recycling it will yield only a small fraction of those raw materials that were used in production, forcing players to search for new, spawning, veins of resources?

That's how it works in Minecraft mods, generally speaking.

[Knit tie]

What if you implement both material creation and destruction, but not in a classical way? Eventually, stuff like armour, weapons and machinery will deteriorate beyond repair, and recycling it will yield only a small fraction of those raw materials that were used in production, forcing players to search for new, spawning, veins of resources?

That's how it works in Minecraft mods, generally speaking.

I am sorry, I am completely unfamiliar with Minecraft.

[GavJ]

There's not really any point to "spawning veins" nor can i think how that would really work. If you've already mined or explored an area, it would be pretty bizarre to have stuff suddenly appear there when you turn your back... and if you haven't mined an area, then there's no real difference between spawning versus just generating a world with more minerals in it in the first place.

Things eventually wearing down is okay, I guess.

Another option is making everything fuel-limited. I.e. your machines work a long time and they can be recycled pretty well, but it may cost too much to simply move them to a new site (building rails and toting tons of machinery miles away with expensive fuel usage that also needs to be mined), versus making new machines there. So you end up routinely letting stuff rust in place and abandoning it, effectively sinking those resources, but not unrealistically. Someday, the economy may make it profitable again to go back and salvage that stuff, for instance.



Note that the world doesn't have to last perfectly indefinitely. Just a long time, and to be fair-ish fun to players joining at different times. If you end up stripping the world into a toxic waste dump before you achieve [some long term goals, including perhaps achieving some high tech renewable energy] you might just "lose" that planet, and decide to start over. That might be fine. In that model, you might have 10-100 player local servers in that situation, that play for maybe a few months at a time.

[GavJ]

To provide a bit more background, the concept is Victorian space-faring industrialists.

Earth is at this point a bustling mass of almost completely industrialized super advanced (from a Victorian standpoint) sprawl. And they have managed to invent some sort of gigantic system for flinging people into space accurately. As well as very intricate, high-tech capsules to keep them alive.

You (and other players) are setting out to colonize a new planet, having invested your life savings into a capsule. Which doubles as a state of the art automaton when you arrive that can do all basic tasks pretty well, better than you... you worthless sack of meat.  However, it can't think or plan very well. And it's just one robot, can only do so much. So your job is to call the shots, and leverage your automaton to setting up arrays of automated factories and machines to achieve anything beyond its capabilities. Which can then be used to make better contraptions, and so on.

You and your meager population of astronauts don't have enough manual labor to do anything, and don't have the time to wait around and breed more people. So machines it is! All of which you need to learn how to design well, and inventively, with little external instruction or rules. Except whatever is necessary to stop people being dicks to one another in game.

You also can't build new automatons. They represent the intricate pinnacle of engineering of a whole planet-wide industrial complex. It's simply too far beyond you at any point in game.



Example of degree of modularity: The "train" system in terms of hardcoding might be little more than tracks and undercarriages like this:

You can build stuff on top of it, but you have to design your own drive and brakes and something to switch directions or control how much power goes to the wheels, using other very simple components like cams and cranks and boilers and fuel hoppers and cooling and custom designed compact gearboxes, and so on. Or load up an old blueprint you designed before. Or... in the short term, an automaton might be able to hook up with its R2D2/dalek-esque "do everything" nozzle and power it for you, at a slow pace and low tonnage pull, until you design something better... and while he fails to accomplish anything else in the meantime.

[Knit tie]

What if you really do make transportation of anything but personal items unreasonably expensive? For example, by making oil, or coal, or whatever else you may have powering the trains and trucks of your world so rare as to warrant a collective effort of many players to be able to afford transporting the bare minimum of devices needed for a new settlement/colony to a new location? This way, new players will be in a position that is not that different from that of more experienced players who have just moved to a new location, and resource scarcity will also necessiate trade as a bonus.

[Flying Dice]

There are issues when you combine nonrenewable resources with difficult transport, though. It massively frontloads potential profit so that the very first players have a nigh-insurmountable advantage because they were able to exploit the resources closest to the starting area, which then makes it easier for them to either up-stakes and move or set up a system of logistical support for whatever they're doing, while people who join later are stuck with no readily available resources and no way to easily reach unexploited clusters.

That's why virtually all MMOs have respawning resources. Now, expensive transportation is one way to drain resources from the economy, but it's one that a lot of players will flat-out hate for the same reason that people hate taxes. It's usually better to just carefully balance crafting requirements so that they drain enough resources to have the same impact without directly pissing off players; this is also why a lot of games have steadily escalating costs for crafting recipes as you level up.


Regarding permanently depleted resources in a Minecraft-esque game with a large enough playerbase for it to be a concern, there's one obvious solution. If, like Minecraft, the game is set in an arbitrarily large world, a system to offset the spawn from the current spawn and all other former spawnpoints by an arbitrary distance once a given number of characters have been created is probably the best bet. Set it up so that the new spawn is sufficiently far from all existing spawns to prevent it from being overrun by existing players, and if a fasttravel network exists, prevent the new spawn from being linked into it until

• period of time has passed after it has been 'filled' and a new spawn created, or [y] period of time since the last character was created.

That gives new players a chance to bootstrap themselves in virgin territory, to learn the basics of the game, and prevents most/all ganking/exploitation by existing players for a decent length of time. Better yet, if it's a system like Minecraft where the only transportation is on foot and player-built, it'll simulate actual colonization and expansion in a way which doesn't detract from in-group efforts at expansion and also provides a way for new players to form their own power structures rather than being roped into existing ones to get access to useful resources.

[GavJ]

I like the periodically shifting spawn point. That's a decent solution. It sounds more effective WITH (at least moderately) expensive transportation of goods. Old players don't know where the spawnpoint will be, and even the easy surface resources in the boondocks aren't worth transporting back to original spawn, even if they're explored the areas on foot before. And little motivation to set up a new base themselves that would just be randomly isolated from everybody else and they already have a better thing elsewhere.  But new players, if it was clearly communicated that "this is the new spawn, other newbies will be here to work with you and make a new base area" might be willing to set up there.

Also, it is very easy to justify with astronauts "planet is in a new orbital position compared to Earth" etc.

However, it may still seem more effective to just make friends and have somebody older let you work with them, which breaks down the whole idea if that happens a lot, because the other newbies won't have enough friends to make a sustainable area.

Now, expensive transportation is one way to drain resources from the economy, but it's one that a lot of players will flat-out hate for the same reason that people hate taxes.

Which is what reason?

If people could start with decent resources from taxes, then they could afford to break into the deeper resources even at the main spawn area as newbies. But if like you say everybody just hates them with a fiery passion, then that may not work. But I'd like to know why to consider possible less-hated variants of this.

[Flying Dice]

Nah, nah, I'm specifically talking about things that are direct resource sinks which exist solely to take stuff out of the economy permanently. Percentages on trades, fees for travel imposed by the game (rather than players), &c. Things where the game is set up to drain out currency or whatever base measure of value players have just because the dev needs a way to prevent inflation and is too lazy to come up with a solution that doesn't whack the players in the face like a percentage charge on all trades or a fee for fast travel that disappears rather than going to other players.

The shifting spawn was specifically intended to mesh with and resolve the main issue of expensive transportation of large quantities of goods, which is in and of itself a good idea. Basically, I'd probably peg it at something like the cost of transporting X quantity of raw materials across a given distance requires Y quantity of refined energy source, where Y is never more than 10-20% or whatever of the potential quantity of that refined energy source gained by refining a full load of the raw materials required to make the refined energy source.

So for example, if 1 unit of refined fuel is produced from 10 units of unrefined fuel, it should never cost more than 0.1-0.2 units of refined fuel to transport 10 units of unrefined fuel across whatever your base distance is. So if you're transporting 10,000 units of unrefined fuel across 1*base distance, it should cost the player somewhere between 100-200 units of refined fuel to do so, leaving the players with a net gain of 800-900 units of refined fuel, and allowing them to transport 5-7 loads of other cargo while still retaining enough to move another load of unrefined fuel. Make the fuel costs based on distance rather than the size of the load.


Obviously those numbers are all arbitrary, but you get the idea. The costs should be high enough that the efficient transport is only used for large loads of cargo, and requires an established industrial base to use regularly, but not so high as to preclude players using it at all because hand-carting smaller loads of cargo is still more efficient, even if you're actually hiring other players instead of doing it within your own group.

Something unreasonable would be setting the ratio closer to 60%+, so that players need to ship many loads of unrefined fuel and build up massive stockpiles before ever using it for the actual purpose of moving other cargo. By basing the fuel costs on distance rather than load, you make sure that it isn't used for petty convenience, and that after a certain point it's more efficient for production facilities to move further afield, stimulating natural expansion and growth.

--

e: As an addendum, you could consider adding an alternate less efficient but more cost-effective and sustainable method. Something like wind/watermills which slowly charge a capacitor on the transport vehicle, with a maximum charge so that longer runs would require stopovers at waystations. That'd take substantially more time to transport a load of goods a given distance, but would do so without requiring fuel, though it would require the large initial investment of building the charging stations. If you wanted an additional incentive to not just spam those, you could force players to calculate on their own how far a full charge would take a laden cargo transport, while "build path, dump cargo in, fuel, done," would be the costlier but easier way.

[GavJ]

Sure, or just coal is scarce. Maybe there was never much life there, or only marine plankton type stuff that doesn't really form easy to find coal layers, or life has only been around a couple hundred million years. Maybe you NEED to get some of your energy from hydro or wind (present even in a lifeless world).

Lots of different ways to do it. that's definitely one thing to do one way or another.

But to be clear, you don't think people would be too pissed off about some taxes if they knew they were all being funneled back to new players for reasonable (and pretty easily lore-justifiable) reasons, not destroyed? Cause that would really help supplement the situation. Or more generally, forms of direct intervention that do not destroy but help along distribution or cooperation?

I'd much rather have at least SOME sort of more objectively reliable bootstrapping, even if it doesn't go all the way toward getting to a non-frustrating place for newbies by itself.





By the way, I don't mean the game programmatically deducts from some account. I mean it persuades you. It shouldn't be hard to enforce rule of government -- they built your automatons back home. They can program certain non-overridable behaviors into them for the good of the British completely fictitious Earth empire...

Automaton: "Pay your damn taxes, the crown wants all of you to succeed."
You: "No"
Automaton: "Okay I'm just going to stop working then and instead start carrying your most valuable things and giving them to other players until it's paid off."
You: "I will hide them."
Automaton: "Okay, I will murder you then."
You: "Fine." or perhaps "I am going to run away into exile now" if you want. Which amounts to the same thing. Especially if the automaton can go further on a tank of gas than you on a full belly, and run faster. But hey, maybe you time it just right so it's low on fuel, you sly fox. Though not much good avoiding your taxes will be in the wilderness when you had to leave all your wealth behind anyway... Also maybe the game designer coded in that it will first go steal fuel then go after you... Maybe the game designer coded other automatons to fill it up on their way by, etc. All good fun, the hunt is.
Or maybe you unveil a large wall of cannons and maybe you succeed in blowing it up. Welcome to try.
And then have fun dodging bone saws and bullets from everybody else's automatons when you go to trade with them.

[alway]

You will never theorycraft up a solution that works. These sort of dynamic systems need feedback or things will go out of kilter one way or the other.

What you need are a couple things:
1. Data gathering with some basic analysis.
2. Some mechanism which allows you to flexibly change certain aspects of the system to adjust things, possibly even automatically.

On the first, you need to track sinks and faucets:
Where are materials leaving the economy[pre-defined], and in what quantity[dynamic]? Where are materials entering the economy[pre-defined], and in what quantity[dynamic]? How many materials are extracted and in storage, awaiting use[dynamic]?
That allows you to track supply glut or lack, and adjust gameplay accordingly (or at least keep an eye on things). This will give a broad overview of the entire economy and how it is functioning. Keep periodic data point, and now you have a full look at your economy, its volatility, how any changes or updates affect it, problems arising over time, and so on.

On the second, it often comes in the form of npc price fluctuations which can be automated for minor adjustment and stabilization on a small scale. In addition, large-scale intervention is used to adjust any new glaring holes made obvious by players discovering and exploiting them en masse, with the potential to throw off the economy. At one point, a game I played had some considerable inflation issues where players had too much gold; so they introduced a feature which was a big money-sink to soak up that excess gold and reduce inflation. It can be more or less subtly done, but can fairly easily be worked into a complex system if you have data acquired in the aforementioned manner telling you exactly what input/output needs to be modified to bring things back into line.