ukmuiik

Question

I'm currently working on a very small scale mmo game planned to support approximately 100 players per server, but we're having trouble with our economical model.

For various reasons we have decided to go with a fixed-currency-amount system; meaning that there are only a certain number of "gold" that can ever exist in the game at the same time. In this early play testing version (9 players) that amount is 9000 gold but we are planing to have around 1 million gold per server (100 players).

To briefly explain how this system works:

At a certain point in time this is how the gold amounts may look in the game.
| Max Gold | Bank | Shopkeeper | Player A | Player B |
| 100 | 90 | 0 | 5 | 5 |

 1. Player A sells 2 gold worth of loot to the Shopkeeper. 
 The Shopkeeper has 0 gold and so he "borrows" 2 gold from the bank (only NPCs can).
 2. Player A sells 3 gold worth of loot to Player B. 
 Player B pays from their wallet.
 3. Player A buys a sword for 5 gold from the Shopkeeper. 
 Player A pays from their wallet.
| Max Gold | Bank | Shopkeeper | Player A | Player B |
| 100 | 88 | 5 | 5 | 2 |

Repeat the above loot-and-sell step a few times and you may end up here:
| Max Gold | Bank | Shopkeeper | Player A | Player B |
| 100 | 0 | 27 | 59 | 14 |

Player A tries to sell a 30-gold item to the shopkeeper, but cannot because
the Shopkeeper only has 27 gold and cannot borrow from the (now empty) bank.
Player A have to lower their selling price, trade wares in return, or wait until
the Shopkeeper gains money in other ways.

This system is working fine - for the most part. Recently one of our testers did something that completely broke our system; they sold, traded, and haggled their way into owning about 60% of the total currency amount available in the game then refused to use it (becoming the RPG equivalent of Scrooge McDuck). This caused a big problem because suddenly approximately 5500 gold out of our 9000 total was unusable.

Of course in the release of the game one player owning 60% of all money is unlikely, but 60 players each owning 1% of all money can cause the same effect. We have considered deleting old characters and returning their money to the "bank" but decided against it since if a player comes back and his character is deleted I would imagine they would be quite sad (especially if it was super rich!).

So on to the actual question; how can we avoid this happening and how can we limit the damages caused by this?

If anything is unclear or you need more information about how the system works (or anything else) please leave a comment and I will gladly provide more information! — 2 days ago
As gold moves around the system, players will naturally update their perception of the value of a single coin. Do your NPCs do this as well? Or will they always sell an apple for 1 gold, even if the world is full of apples and some jerk is hording 8999 pieces of the world's gold? — 2 days ago
One other caution: if the currency you've provided proves to be too inflexible for players' needs, they'll pick another one. Say they get tired of the logistics of handling gold with its limited supply and inconsistent availability from vendors. If apples are easy to come by, they might decide to start using apples as the medium of exchange instead. Stranger things have happened in game economies. ;) — yesterday
@CortAmmon I think you misunderstood the question. The Scrooge McDuck actor described in the question hoards money instead of spending it, which effectively removes it from circulation. The result is a deflation, not an inflation. — yesterday

score 46 · Answer 1 · 2018-08-05 17:07:35Z

Fees & Taxes

One common way to deal with this in real economies is to add a periodic fee that redistributes hoarded wealth back into the community. A few forms this can take:

Wear on gear items that requires they be repaired periodically, so even a player who's hit a steady state and buys no new items still needs to pay NPCs (or other players) for repairs / repair materials

Luxury/property taxes or ownership fees for items like real estate, stabling & food for mounts, etc.

Banking fees or wealth taxes charged when carrying a large balance.

(These last two can continue to ding a miser's in-game gold account at a slow trickle even while they're offline, so a player who abandons the character can't keep the wealth tied up indefinitely)

Theft

Allow players some means to steal from each other. Cap the amount that can be stolen to a fixed percentage of current wealth in any given timeframe, so a player cannot be completely ruined by a group of players ganging up on them.

A percentage based cap makes it more profitable to go after misers since they have more loose money to steal. Now your player characters have a financial incentive to help you with your miser problem by sniffing out who has excess cash (make sure they have some gameplay means to do this) and targeting them.

If you can steal from a player's sleeping character / camp / land even while they're offline, then again this gives money a route out of dormant character accounts.

You can also offer players means to defend against stealing, giving rich player characters something valuable to spend their money on: security. This could include paying NPCs / other players as guards or to install & maintain security devices, or storing their money in a bank, which charges fees (see above).

Logistics

Make it impractical to store that much wealth at once.

Make a limited size purse for spending money held at any one time (giving players cause to invest in buying/crafting/maintaining upgraded capacity)

Add a weight to each gold piece so you sacrifice mobility or carrying capacity to hoard lots on you at a time.

Have stacks of coins in your inventory take up inventory slots. The more coin you carry, the less room you have for gear.

This can create additional gameplay around acquiring & trading higher-density stores of value, like gemstones or valuable items, so player characters can "compress" their wealth (and in doing so, release coinage back into the market)

It can also create demand for long-term storage in a bank or investments like real estate. (Where the above rules can erode it)

Other Options

You could also consider allowing your currency supply to expand gradually over time, which can introduce a little inflation. Inflation at a controlled rate can be a good thing: it means it's more valuable to spend money now than to hold onto it and spend it later, disincentivising hoarding (especially in the absence of interest) and ensuring that there's always at least some more coin entering the system.

If you keep the currency supply absolutely fixed, then the inverse can happen: your currency area (the set of things you can buy with gold) grows as players join and quest for/craft desirable items and updates release new goodies. If the currency supply available to spend on all these valuables stays fixed, then the currency deflates, gaining value per gold piece over time, making it more sensible to save this valuable & appreciating commodity than to spend it, worsening your miser problem.

For some more ideas of how to make money tougher to hoard or have other interesting game mechanical characteristics, check out Vili Lehdonvirta's GDC talk on currency design.

Remember that players can still hoard currency and then quit playing the game, thus not being subject to any fees, transaction taxes, or weight penalties. — 2 days ago
Whether wear on items is a good idea can be a discussion of its own. — yesterday
@AlexandreVaillancourt Yeah, we used that as the textbook in a game economies class I taught. It wasn't my favourite though. I think it tried to be an economics text with a gloss of game-relevance and a lot of the explanations feel shoe-horned as a result ("let's examine the market activity of crafting apples for halflings" ...who "crafts" apples?). I think a straight-up Econ 101 text paired with some of Lehdonvirta's talks might do just as well. — yesterday

score 17 · Answer 2 · 2018-08-04 09:58:22Z

There is a critical flaw in your system. You assume players will play forever. In the real world, this is the case. "Players" keep "playing" the game until they die, and then their remaining wealth gets redistributed to their heirs.

Not so in an MMO.

Players play until they get bored. Then they find a new game and forget about yours. Then their wealth stays on their unplayed character, which effectively removes it from the system. This is the natural lifecycle of an MMO character. Nobody needs to intentionally play "Scrooge McDuck" for this to happen.

This constant drain of rich players quitting the game is why MMOs usually do not use closed money systems.

But there is a solution: negative interest. In regular intervals, remove a small percentage from all ingame accounts and move them to the bank. This gradually diminishes any dead wealth in the game. It also motivates people to spend their wealth, which will lead to a more active ingame economy.

It might seem like players could escape this system by investing their cash into items and hoard these instead. This, however, is an illusion. While cash is constant, items are constantly being created in your game. More items in the game means the items which exist constantly lose value. So no matter if you hoard items or cash, the value of your hoard will decrease over the long term.

Josh Petrieâ™¦ 89.5k16202312 · Answer 3 · 2018-08-03 22:05:11Z

You're going to need some kind of forced, "hard" sink to return the money to circulation. Without it, as painful as it might be to implement one, you will only be postponing the inevitable.

Character death can act as a hard sink, returning a portion of the character's wealth to the pool available to NPCs. Gameplay incentives revolving around upkeep can push players towards spending their money.

For example, perhaps characters need to pay a monthly (real time) fee to their house guards while the player is logged out to maintain their security. Otherwise there is a chance the character will be "killed by an assassin" or whatever while offline.

Obviously, as you note, this can be frustrating so the death should not be permanent and you should probably have a pressure relief valve for characters that end up completely penniless so they can bootstrap themselves back when they return to play after a year. It's better than deleting the character wholesale, though.

You may also want to consider modelling the economy around, rather than an absolute fixed amount, a relative amount (based on the number of players). If you have 9000 gold and your game is a hit and you have 9001 players...

The amount of gold is essentially scaled to the number of players -- roughly 10,000 gold per player, in the original question (1M gold per server, each server supporting 100 players). — 2 days ago
@Charles: Literally scaling the available gold supply in proportion to the number of players could have problems too, though, especially if the game is free to play. As soon as the players figure that out, I'd expect somebody to test what happens if they register a million dummy accounts. In practice, it might be safer to scale the gold supply e.g. in proportion to the total exp / levels / whatever accumulated by the players. — yesterday
(Or you could just give each player account a fixed pool of "unmined gold" that they can somehow acquire, at a steadily diminishing rate, through playing -- although this could also encourage the creation of dummy mining accounts, as established players realize that their personal gold supply is running low and that it's a lot easier to mine for gold with a new account. Which probably makes this a bad idea, but I still wanted to mention it since it's also kind of an obvious idea, but not obviously bad at a glance.) — yesterday

score 2 · Answer 4 · 2018-08-04 09:00:12Z

Background

In the real world, there are (almost) no Scrooge McDucks. Instead rich people invest most of their surplus money, i.e., they lend it to other people.

Suggestion

Let x be the amount of gold available per player (1000 or 10000 in your examples).
Every piece of gold that a player has aboveÃ‚Â x is available for lending to shopkeepers, i.e., your Scrooges become banksÃ‚Â¹.
This way, somebody entering the game, hoarding a lot of gold, and quitting is a neutral action that should not affect your economy.

What if Scrooge stops hoarding?

Ã¢Â€Â¦, i.e., he buys something or even decides to suddenly spend all his gold?
Say, Scrooge decides to spend yÃ‚Â gold pieces.
In that case, your have to accept that the banks (including rich-player banks) have a temporary negative balance Ã¢ÂˆÂ’y.
If the banks were at 0 before and nothing else happens, this would mean that your shopkeepers would have to earn back y+zÃ‚Â gold before they can buy anything for zÃ‚Â gold.
That may sound bad, but then consider whom Scrooge can give our money to:

He can buy something from a shopkeeper.
This means that the balance is immediately settled.

He can buy something from a regular player. Then the balance problem gets settled as soon as the player buys something from a shopkeeper with their gold (which they tend to do, because this is what regular players do in their game if I understand you correctly).
While this may be the worst of the three cases, the effect is also limited by the time consumed by the required playerÃ¢Â€Â“player interaction.

He can buy something from another gold hoarder, say Flintheart Glomgold. In that case, the balance is again settled immediately, since Flintheart now has more money available to lend.
(This also partially covers the case that Scrooge gives a lot of money to another previously poor player.)

Superscrooge and a World of Scrooges

One problem with the proposed system is that the gold lent back to the system by Scrooge can again be amassed by Scrooge himself (becoming Superscrooge) or other players (eventually leading to a World of Scrooges, where every player hoards money).

A Superscrooge could own a multiple of your original maximum gold.
This in turn could pose a problem as Scrooge could suddenly release insane amounts of gold into the system (or something he buys with his money, if shopkeepers have unlimited supply).

On a World of Scrooges, money would become irrelevant for the players and whatever motivation you had to fix the amount of gold would very likely be broken.
To avoid this, you have to ensure that amassing gold is not an interesting option for most players.
Another option would be to introduce negative interest for hoarded gold that scales with the total amount of hoarded gold on the world.

Sidenote

If Scrooges are a problem, so may be quitting Donalds (i.e., poor players), as they cause more money per player to exist in the system than intended.

^{Ã‚Â¹Ã¢Â€Â¯While you can do this silently under the hood (such that nobody notices), you could also make it a bit more explicit in the game mechanics by introducing an in-game bank where players must store money above a certain amount, e.g., because it exceeds their carrying capacity.
However, players may consider this tedious, it opens new pathways to break the game (e.g., people using mules), and you do not have the nice property that a quitting Scrooge has exactly zero effect.}

quitting players would case the same problem unless they have some mechanism to circulate that money back to other players. having only 100 players (total, not concurrent(!)) sounds a bit like a recipe for dead servers though. — yesterday
@LassiKinnunen: I am not exactly sure what you mean. If a player quits, their hoarded money will be circulated back via being lent to shopkeepers in my suggested system. Their base amount (x) will not be circulated back, but then it was only created for them in the first place. The asker does not specify explicitly how this is done, but it could very well be that for every player joining the game, the bank gets x gold. — yesterday

Jessica Ward 213 · Answer 5 · 2018-08-04 10:42:07Z

Look at the Circular flow of income model used in real-world Economics.

One of the best ways to redistribute money is to look at supply and demand. Do the players with most of the wealth have an incentive to spend their money? If not, they won't.

Another way to redistribute wealth is to use Fiscal policy (taxation). By charging a small amount of tax at a certain time interval, or on each purchase, you can control where the gold ends up.

AMADANON Inc. 1011 · Answer 6 · 2018-08-04 12:03:55Z

First of all, an observation - you show "the bank" as independent from "the shopkeeper" - since there is free exchange between those, I'm not sure why you would do that? Just a thought.

If it were me, I'd rethink your decision to have a hard currency limit.

If you don't want one person to collect a large proportion of the money, your options are: to disincentivize them somehow, to make it harder the more they get, or to rob from the rich & give to the poor.

Examples of disincentivizing have already been mentioned: theft, tax, expenses and so forth. IRL inflation is another option, though if your money is worth less goods, then your goods are going to be worth more money.

Another option is to have a fixed currency-to-gold coin exchange rate. For example, if you have a million of your fixed currency, you can steal 10% off everybody, and increase the ratio by 10%. Someone might have had 10 gold coins before, which might have been 10 currency (if the ratio was 1:1); you stole one currency from them, and at the same time changed the ratio so those 9 remaining currency are still worth 10 gold coins. A player need not have any idea of the underlying currency, so would never know.

Another option is to create an item - e.g. "a giant gold coin", worth, for example, 100 gold coins. At any point, if a player has more than 100 gold coins, you could steal 100 gold coins from them and give them one of these; if they look at their stash, it could count it as if it was 100 individual gold coins; if they are about to spend money, you can swap it back.

Or you could have "giant gold coins" items, and make them optional - players could buy & sell the same as other items. I think "Scrooges" would tend to collect these instead of regular gold pieces. And/or push or force it on them if each time they trade with a shop keeper - at the end of a transaction "Oh, I see you have 300 gold pieces - would you like me to swap that for 3 giant gold coins? They are guaranteed redeemable at all shops, for 100 gp each".

Inherently, if you keep adding items trade-able for money, with a limited money supply, you're going to run out of money, even if you don't end up with a Scrooge.

I would expect that, as the amount money "in the bank" decreases, the prices in the shop would rise to compensate, and the amount offered to buy from players would go down. It might even be that, when Scrooge turns up to sell something, the NPC shopkeeper offers them less; if they want to buy, the shopkeeper demands more. They can afford it! If players can see how much money other players have, they might even join in. This might lead to "puppet" players, controlled by Scrooge to be poor, buy cheap & sell to Scrooge.

One option for making sure money to buy items is available, is to count the value of items as part of the money supply. If that 5-gold-piece sword counts as 5 gold pieces in someone's inventory, then "selling the sword" to a shopkeeper is a net transaction of 0 - the value of the items owned by the player does not change, so there is always enough money. This does mean that there is a limited number of items+gold in your universe, you cannot spawn items your universe can't afford to pay out, unless you devalue other items in your universe.

nondescript 1 · Answer 7 · 2018-08-04 18:23:49Z

With regards to the hoarders and people who have stopped playing:
They must be storing their gold somewhere, and if that somewhere is the bank then you don't have a problem: The bank is holding onto their gold and can lend it out to the shop to reintroduce it to the economy, until the player withdraws the gold from the bank again.
On the other hand, if they are not storing their gold in a bank, then that's dangerous. There's a reason why people prefer not to bury shoe boxes full of cash in their backyards (create disincentives to carry the gold on their person).

Your main problem is that you have a shop that's not breaking even: it's losing money over time (and realistically, it should be profiting as shops do). You can solve the shop problem in many ways, but the simplest would be to make the shop adjust its prices to be unfair or very generous depending on how much gold the shop has in supply. This makes sense because if gold has become scarce then the shop owner should value gold more comparatively to items.

Austin Hemmelgarn 1513 · Answer 8 · 2018-08-04 18:43:00Z

First off, it's important that you understand how wealth should end up distributed on average. If you've got 100 players on a server, then on average over a long period of time, everyone should have approximately 1% of the player owned wealth with a minimum owned by NPC's, ideally with a very low variance. In a short-term situation though, small to medium imbalances are good, they're what drives the economy.

So, don't make the amount of gold truly fixed on an instantaneous scale. In other words, long-term, it ends up being a roughly fixed amount of gold, but short term, it varies. One way of doing this is to do all of the following:

Give players options for earning gold that don't require them to give up some other form of net worth. Good options for this include random drops from hostile NPCs they defeat, rewards for completing tasks for NPCs, and other similar stuff. This also solves the issue of a player running out of money, because it gives them a way to earn it without already having any. In an ideal situation, this should be a reasonably inefficient way to make money, otherwise people will just do this instead of trading and crafting.

Have player crafting 'create' value. In other words, if the player spent time crafting something, they should see a net return on that investment when selling the result to an NPC. This should also generally be less efficient than trading to other players if you want to encourage player trading. This 'extra' value created should be paid for not from the NPC's pockets, but by adding gold to the game.

Have NPCs purchase things at a price based on the trading price of those items among players. More specifically, I would implement this as follows:
- Provide a 'base' price for the item. This should be based solely on the materials, skills, and time required to produce the item if it's crafted, or on it's rarity and how useful it is if it's not crafted.
- If there is no pricing data at all for the item, or there have been no recent player-to-player sales, NPCs purchase it at the 'base' price.
- If recent player to player sales of the item have been too infrequent to get good data, NPCs will purchase the item at the 'base' price.
- If there have been recent player-to-player sales of the item with high enough frequency and a reasonably consistent price, NPCs will purchase it for a small percentage less than the average price paid by players.
- If there have been recent player-to-player sales of the item with high frequency, but inconsistent pricing (for example, the price varies wildly, or some people are buying and selling at far above or below the average price), NPCs will calculate a weighted average of the average price paid by players and the 'base' price, weighing more in favor of the 'base' price the higher the variance in the prices paid by players is. This helps to stabilize pricing with player trades, and disincentivizes players from trying to make a fortune selling off some highly sought after item at insane prices unless they can actually corner the market.

Give players three practical options to trade with other players:
- They can advertise in a (dedicated) chat channel. When they get a PM with an offer, they coordinate where they will meet up, go there, and perform the trade directly. This is high-cost in terms of time spent and having to pay attention to chat, but it's also free of fees and taxes.
- They can list their items for sale on an in-game auction house. They pay a small fee, list the items for a fixed period of time (higher fees for longer listings), and then just sit back and wait until someone decides to buy the item. Items remain visible while the player is logged out, and can be sold without them needing to acknowledge the sale in real time. This is the most convenient method for general trade, but requires you to pay a fee, and possibly a tax (see the next major point).
- They can coordinate with other people outside of the game. To do this, they still have to figure out a time and place to meet up in-game (or agree to have third player who they both trust broker the sale for them), so it's still more limited in terms of convenience than the auction house. However, it's still direct trade that avoids the fees and taxes.

Tax trade. This gives you a way to remove gold from circulation. I would implement this two ways:
- Put a small flat tax on the sale of items by NPC's. Make this invisible to players so that they don't avoid purchasing from NPC's to keep gold in circulation. The exact value should be a function of how much gold is flowing into player hands through the mechanisms of my first two points and what percentage of all goods sold by players are sold to NPC's instead of other players (higher percentage equals lower tax, so that you are on average removing a constant amount of gold from circulation this way).
- Put a tax on player-to-player sales. This should be completely visible to players, but should only apply to game-mediated sales (that is, those done through the auction house). In most cases, this should be a small percentage of the sale cost, optionally with an increase to a higher percentage for very high value items.

If you allow transfers between servers (and you ideally should, so that people can play on the same server as their friends), add the following two points to the above list:

The auction house should span multiple servers (items listed on one server can be purchased on one of multiple others). It should not span the entire set of servers (spanning all of them gives you one economy, which makes it harder for players to get away from the economic influence of other players). Cross-server trading should have the same tax as regular trading, and should only account for the transfer of gold out of the originating server.

Server transfers should not be free in-game (independent of what they cost IRL). This helps limit the transfer of wealth between servers. Ideally, I would implement it as an amount of time you have to wait for the transfer to finish, which is based on how much wealth you're transferring, and the option of paying gold (which goes into circulation of the server the player is transferring off of) to expedite the transfer by some fixed amount per unit of gold paid.

With this approach, you have four levers to control the amount of gold in the game:

How much is earned by players through things like quests and drops.

How much is earned by players through crafting and selling to NPCs.

How much is removed from circulation by taxes on items sold by NPCs.

How much players spend on the auction fees and the auction taxes. This will tend to impact hoarders the most.

Using those four levers, you can tweak things to keep the total amount of gold roughly even on average, while still allowing for enough variance that hoarding is not as much of an issue. It also gives a much closer approximation of the real-world economy than just allowing a fixed amount of gold in circulation.

You may also consider having a system whereby players can purchase from NPC's on credit with a fixed limit, but only if they have less than some total amount of wealth. Combining this with the above system will limit how much impact hoarders have on the game, because being out of gold doesn't mean you can't do anything.

Platedslicer 1 · Answer 9 · 2018-08-04 20:03:47Z

In the vein of Josh Petrie's comment on your original post, hoarding need not be an insurmountable problem in the first place. It's a matter of the value of gold relative to other goods. With sufficient decimal precision, you can have 1 ouce of gold in the entire game and the economy would still be able to function if prices are flexible. Of course, that would require NPCs to be able to handle changing relative prices, which might or might not be reasonably doable in your case. But by your example of a player trying to sell a "30 gold item" to the shopkeeper who only has 27 gold, so that the player has to take the 27 gold or leave it, I'd say you're already on to something.

Also, money is basically a commodity that rose to be generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Real gold, for example, has aesthetic and social status appeal, as well as industrial applications. So if you can treat gold as a normal item rather than a separate value, other convenient commodities would likely emerge as "money" by way of barter. It might lead to other complications - for example, if you need to bribe someone in a quest, instead of checking how much money a player has in their purse and transfering it to the NPC, you would have to use a barter interface.

There's also the matter of how exactly Scrooge McDuck gets to keep all that money for himself in a hard world full of dishonest people. In the real world, storing gold safely costs a not insignificant amount of money. So a storage fee that gets cycled back into the general economy is an interesting idea. Especially since, as gold becomes more and more valuable relative to other items due to the hoarder's own activity, the risk of theft is bound to increase, and the storage fees along with it.

For added realism, you could make theft itself - by other players or a computer-generated event - a real possibility. The less you pay in storage fees, the wimpier the vault's guards, and the higher the chances that a chunk of your gold will go missing.

You could impose a "maximum gold in your purse" limit - or just a storage limit if gold is treated as a normal item - to force wealthy players to pay a storage fee while not penalizing paupers. This would have the additional advantage of slowly bleeding gold from a long-absent player's bank account and back into circulation. If you're gone a long time, maybe everyone thought you were dead and the bank lent out all your cash (like Cianfanelli's in The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine)!

Hard "gold sinks", like repairs or basic materials that can only be obtained from NPCs at FIXED prices, are a BAD idea with a fixed amount of currency. It works in games that have no hard cap on the amount of cash in circulation, and instead try to balance the rates of money creation and destruction per player. They do not, in principle, prevent gold from being concentrated in a few hands, so you could end up with people who cannot for the life of them get enough cash to pay repair bills. It's probably a good idea to implement some sort of "rock bottom" failsafe so that characters have a chance to progress even if they're left completely destitute - unless you're OK with players having to rely on charity.

Joe W 1011 · Answer 10 · 2018-08-05 13:26:28Z

You are missing a major flaw in your system which is the players themselves. One developing a game, especially a multiplayer one, there is one major rule that should never be forgotten. Players will take advantage of any flaw in the system in order to gain advantage for themselves or to disadvantage others. I think this is highly important so it bears repeating.

Players will take advantage of any flaw in the system in order to gain advantage for themselves or to disadvantage others.

Why this is important to repeat is that if it has been shown to happen in testing you can guarantee that it will happen after the game is launched to the same degree if not more on at least one server.

Now lets break this down into why this causes a problem for them game, specifically in attracting new players. As you have a fixed amount of gold that can be in the game at any given point then chances are it was in existence in one of three ways at the start of the game.

Out in the world waiting to be discovered.

On merchant and bank npcs

On the players starting characters.

Now over time all of this money is going to be removed from those sources and gather in the hands of the players which is where you are going to start running into problems.

If you look at your example where a merchant could not buy loot because they do not have sufficient (or any) gold you will start causing a major problem for players. The issue comes up in the fact that merchants will both sell and buy from the players (and from what I am understanding is the price can be changed). So a rich player who has the ability to farm more valuable loot can easily suck all the money from merchants leaving them useless to anyone else.

Rich player finds a merchant with items they want

Purchases what they need

Unloads all the loot they don't need leaving the merchant with no money

If the merchant was not broke before the transaction they now have more money then they started with

Rinse and repeat in order to control a large chunk of the money

With a system like this I would see very little incentive for a player to join any sever that is not just starting off as they can quickly become at a large disadvantage to anyone who has a head start on collecting the money.

score 46 · Answer 11 · 2018-08-05 17:07:35Z

Fees & Taxes

One common way to deal with this in real economies is to add a periodic fee that redistributes hoarded wealth back into the community. A few forms this can take:

Wear on gear items that requires they be repaired periodically, so even a player who's hit a steady state and buys no new items still needs to pay NPCs (or other players) for repairs / repair materials

Luxury/property taxes or ownership fees for items like real estate, stabling & food for mounts, etc.

Banking fees or wealth taxes charged when carrying a large balance.

(These last two can continue to ding a miser's in-game gold account at a slow trickle even while they're offline, so a player who abandons the character can't keep the wealth tied up indefinitely)

Theft

Allow players some means to steal from each other. Cap the amount that can be stolen to a fixed percentage of current wealth in any given timeframe, so a player cannot be completely ruined by a group of players ganging up on them.

A percentage based cap makes it more profitable to go after misers since they have more loose money to steal. Now your player characters have a financial incentive to help you with your miser problem by sniffing out who has excess cash (make sure they have some gameplay means to do this) and targeting them.

If you can steal from a player's sleeping character / camp / land even while they're offline, then again this gives money a route out of dormant character accounts.

You can also offer players means to defend against stealing, giving rich player characters something valuable to spend their money on: security. This could include paying NPCs / other players as guards or to install & maintain security devices, or storing their money in a bank, which charges fees (see above).

Logistics

Make it impractical to store that much wealth at once.

Make a limited size purse for spending money held at any one time (giving players cause to invest in buying/crafting/maintaining upgraded capacity)

Add a weight to each gold piece so you sacrifice mobility or carrying capacity to hoard lots on you at a time.

Have stacks of coins in your inventory take up inventory slots. The more coin you carry, the less room you have for gear.

This can create additional gameplay around acquiring & trading higher-density stores of value, like gemstones or valuable items, so player characters can "compress" their wealth (and in doing so, release coinage back into the market)

It can also create demand for long-term storage in a bank or investments like real estate. (Where the above rules can erode it)

Other Options

You could also consider allowing your currency supply to expand gradually over time, which can introduce a little inflation. Inflation at a controlled rate can be a good thing: it means it's more valuable to spend money now than to hold onto it and spend it later, disincentivising hoarding (especially in the absence of interest) and ensuring that there's always at least some more coin entering the system.

If you keep the currency supply absolutely fixed, then the inverse can happen: your currency area (the set of things you can buy with gold) grows as players join and quest for/craft desirable items and updates release new goodies. If the currency supply available to spend on all these valuables stays fixed, then the currency deflates, gaining value per gold piece over time, making it more sensible to save this valuable & appreciating commodity than to spend it, worsening your miser problem.

For some more ideas of how to make money tougher to hoard or have other interesting game mechanical characteristics, check out Vili Lehdonvirta's GDC talk on currency design.

Remember that players can still hoard currency and then quit playing the game, thus not being subject to any fees, transaction taxes, or weight penalties. — 2 days ago
Whether wear on items is a good idea can be a discussion of its own. — yesterday
@AlexandreVaillancourt Yeah, we used that as the textbook in a game economies class I taught. It wasn't my favourite though. I think it tried to be an economics text with a gloss of game-relevance and a lot of the explanations feel shoe-horned as a result ("let's examine the market activity of crafting apples for halflings" ...who "crafts" apples?). I think a straight-up Econ 101 text paired with some of Lehdonvirta's talks might do just as well. — yesterday

score 17 · Answer 12 · 2018-08-04 09:58:22Z

There is a critical flaw in your system. You assume players will play forever. In the real world, this is the case. "Players" keep "playing" the game until they die, and then their remaining wealth gets redistributed to their heirs.

Not so in an MMO.

Players play until they get bored. Then they find a new game and forget about yours. Then their wealth stays on their unplayed character, which effectively removes it from the system. This is the natural lifecycle of an MMO character. Nobody needs to intentionally play "Scrooge McDuck" for this to happen.

This constant drain of rich players quitting the game is why MMOs usually do not use closed money systems.

But there is a solution: negative interest. In regular intervals, remove a small percentage from all ingame accounts and move them to the bank. This gradually diminishes any dead wealth in the game. It also motivates people to spend their wealth, which will lead to a more active ingame economy.

It might seem like players could escape this system by investing their cash into items and hoard these instead. This, however, is an illusion. While cash is constant, items are constantly being created in your game. More items in the game means the items which exist constantly lose value. So no matter if you hoard items or cash, the value of your hoard will decrease over the long term.

Josh Petrieâ™¦ 89.5k16202312 · Answer 13 · 2018-08-03 22:05:11Z

You're going to need some kind of forced, "hard" sink to return the money to circulation. Without it, as painful as it might be to implement one, you will only be postponing the inevitable.

Character death can act as a hard sink, returning a portion of the character's wealth to the pool available to NPCs. Gameplay incentives revolving around upkeep can push players towards spending their money.

For example, perhaps characters need to pay a monthly (real time) fee to their house guards while the player is logged out to maintain their security. Otherwise there is a chance the character will be "killed by an assassin" or whatever while offline.

Obviously, as you note, this can be frustrating so the death should not be permanent and you should probably have a pressure relief valve for characters that end up completely penniless so they can bootstrap themselves back when they return to play after a year. It's better than deleting the character wholesale, though.

You may also want to consider modelling the economy around, rather than an absolute fixed amount, a relative amount (based on the number of players). If you have 9000 gold and your game is a hit and you have 9001 players...

The amount of gold is essentially scaled to the number of players -- roughly 10,000 gold per player, in the original question (1M gold per server, each server supporting 100 players). — 2 days ago
@Charles: Literally scaling the available gold supply in proportion to the number of players could have problems too, though, especially if the game is free to play. As soon as the players figure that out, I'd expect somebody to test what happens if they register a million dummy accounts. In practice, it might be safer to scale the gold supply e.g. in proportion to the total exp / levels / whatever accumulated by the players. — yesterday
(Or you could just give each player account a fixed pool of "unmined gold" that they can somehow acquire, at a steadily diminishing rate, through playing -- although this could also encourage the creation of dummy mining accounts, as established players realize that their personal gold supply is running low and that it's a lot easier to mine for gold with a new account. Which probably makes this a bad idea, but I still wanted to mention it since it's also kind of an obvious idea, but not obviously bad at a glance.) — yesterday

score 2 · Answer 14 · 2018-08-04 09:00:12Z

Background

In the real world, there are (almost) no Scrooge McDucks. Instead rich people invest most of their surplus money, i.e., they lend it to other people.

Suggestion

Let x be the amount of gold available per player (1000 or 10000 in your examples).
Every piece of gold that a player has aboveÃ‚Â x is available for lending to shopkeepers, i.e., your Scrooges become banksÃ‚Â¹.
This way, somebody entering the game, hoarding a lot of gold, and quitting is a neutral action that should not affect your economy.

What if Scrooge stops hoarding?

Ã¢Â€Â¦, i.e., he buys something or even decides to suddenly spend all his gold?
Say, Scrooge decides to spend yÃ‚Â gold pieces.
In that case, your have to accept that the banks (including rich-player banks) have a temporary negative balance Ã¢ÂˆÂ’y.
If the banks were at 0 before and nothing else happens, this would mean that your shopkeepers would have to earn back y+zÃ‚Â gold before they can buy anything for zÃ‚Â gold.
That may sound bad, but then consider whom Scrooge can give our money to:

He can buy something from a shopkeeper.
This means that the balance is immediately settled.

He can buy something from a regular player. Then the balance problem gets settled as soon as the player buys something from a shopkeeper with their gold (which they tend to do, because this is what regular players do in their game if I understand you correctly).
While this may be the worst of the three cases, the effect is also limited by the time consumed by the required playerÃ¢Â€Â“player interaction.

He can buy something from another gold hoarder, say Flintheart Glomgold. In that case, the balance is again settled immediately, since Flintheart now has more money available to lend.
(This also partially covers the case that Scrooge gives a lot of money to another previously poor player.)

Superscrooge and a World of Scrooges

One problem with the proposed system is that the gold lent back to the system by Scrooge can again be amassed by Scrooge himself (becoming Superscrooge) or other players (eventually leading to a World of Scrooges, where every player hoards money).

A Superscrooge could own a multiple of your original maximum gold.
This in turn could pose a problem as Scrooge could suddenly release insane amounts of gold into the system (or something he buys with his money, if shopkeepers have unlimited supply).

On a World of Scrooges, money would become irrelevant for the players and whatever motivation you had to fix the amount of gold would very likely be broken.
To avoid this, you have to ensure that amassing gold is not an interesting option for most players.
Another option would be to introduce negative interest for hoarded gold that scales with the total amount of hoarded gold on the world.

Sidenote

If Scrooges are a problem, so may be quitting Donalds (i.e., poor players), as they cause more money per player to exist in the system than intended.

^{Ã‚Â¹Ã¢Â€Â¯While you can do this silently under the hood (such that nobody notices), you could also make it a bit more explicit in the game mechanics by introducing an in-game bank where players must store money above a certain amount, e.g., because it exceeds their carrying capacity.
However, players may consider this tedious, it opens new pathways to break the game (e.g., people using mules), and you do not have the nice property that a quitting Scrooge has exactly zero effect.}

quitting players would case the same problem unless they have some mechanism to circulate that money back to other players. having only 100 players (total, not concurrent(!)) sounds a bit like a recipe for dead servers though. — yesterday
@LassiKinnunen: I am not exactly sure what you mean. If a player quits, their hoarded money will be circulated back via being lent to shopkeepers in my suggested system. Their base amount (x) will not be circulated back, but then it was only created for them in the first place. The asker does not specify explicitly how this is done, but it could very well be that for every player joining the game, the bank gets x gold. — yesterday

Jessica Ward 213 · Answer 15 · 2018-08-04 10:42:07Z

Look at the Circular flow of income model used in real-world Economics.

One of the best ways to redistribute money is to look at supply and demand. Do the players with most of the wealth have an incentive to spend their money? If not, they won't.

Another way to redistribute wealth is to use Fiscal policy (taxation). By charging a small amount of tax at a certain time interval, or on each purchase, you can control where the gold ends up.

AMADANON Inc. 1011 · Answer 16 · 2018-08-04 12:03:55Z