MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits

When players can generate their own money in infinite supply by killing monsters for in-game gold, MMO economies quickly get overrun by inflation. In the past we've talked about how designers can create gold sinks to solve this problem. Today we'll talk about other ways game designers approach it: by adapting the same tools used by economists in the real world. Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC (---More below) _________ Get your Extra Credits gear at the store! http://bit.ly/ExtraStore Play games with us on Extra Play! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Watch more episodes from this season of Extra Credits! http://bit.ly/2bB9ziR Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ___________ Would you like James to speak at your school or organization? For info, contact us at: soraya[at]extra-credits[dot]net ___________ ♪ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1eIHTDS ♪ Outro Music: “March of Robbers in Treno City” by Bluelighter http://ff9.ocremix.org/

Comments

1. Just make ingame money exactly like real money. It is limited by region, in diffrent regions you have to change your money, if a region gets out of money the buy-prices rise and if the money comes back they fell, reverse for selling. It isn't more difficult than an MMO itself.
2. wouldn't it be simpler if the game just had a hard cap of currency?
3. But if everyone is printing money all the time, what diffrence does 5k from 5 dollars make?
   since everyone probably like printed trillions by now
4. In real economies, money acts a medium of exchange that reflects real value, which is inherently created - if you make a painting that someone pays a million dollars for, then you created a million dollars worth of value that didn't exist before. (Of course, this is somewhat ideal. Contrast that to stealing a million dollar painting... no value was created, it was simply transferred. This is part of the reason why property rights enable a society to become wealthy!)
   
   I think the real issue is that players are being "overpaid" for their monster killing - you might could resolve the issue by rethinking the way in which players generate real value and are compensated for it... maybe just don't hand out money willy-nilly, or make the rewards non-exchangeable, or automatically deflate the rewards for certain quests as more people do them. (The latter option is basically what's happening if you did nothing, except that the inflationary effect is localized to the particular player action instead of the entire currency.)
5. Inflation is not AT ALL a natural or normal part of a growing economy. Inflation occurs when money is printed, pure and simple. What these games should do is print a fixed amount of currency per player, and then require (and make it SUPER EASY for) players to trade their drops for currency. The game could give the player pieces of that fixed amount of currency allocated to them throughout the game, but the primary way to get currency would be from other players through the item market. This would produce a stable non-volatile currency. I don't think the techniques you mentioned solve the problem at all.
6. How about only giving xp for mob grinding? Or, after a player has a certian amount of currency per day, mobs stop dropping more currency.
7. wouldn't this just make it so diamonds are no longer as valuable as the irl money they cost?
8. WTF DOES MMO MEAN!?
9. 6:31 is that on purpose or did you just forget to paint :o
10. I once played a game that allowed players to trade in-game currency for real-money currency with other players. It didn't stop the insane inflation; people just kept setting higher prices.
11. Have any games ever included a limited quantity of resources (mobs/mining/etc) to restrict the amount of resources available to the community playing the game?
12. What if the game doesn't include trades between players? Does hyperinflation still occur?
13. Zenimax...Can you tell me again why Elder Scrolls Online doesn't have a public auction house?
14. lol that 'magic bullet' was hilarious, when the staff fell over i just lost it lol
15. "is setting a maximum limit on how much a diamond can cost" he means how much in silver a diamond can cost, right?
16. Gaia Online
17. why is dan colorless at 6:30 ?
18. 6:30 "clearly" Well played... Well played...
19. Logged onto WoW the other day and checked out the auction house. A pair of lvl 13 non-crafted green boots were being sold for around 1200 gold... I remember in vanilla WoW it would take months to get enough gold to purchase your epic riding skill (400 gold for the skill, 100 gold for the mount).
20. When I returned to WoW , everybody was so rich, than I was able to buy only the items from npc-vendors. No chance on the Auccion house too.