Extra Credits
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2020
8:44 · 1.5M views · Nov 23, 2016
An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.
Cited in game-economy threads as a clear explanation of why vendor-sellable loot causes hyperinflation and how designers counter it.
4 comments from Hacker News
Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways to avoid it: this video | When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item for double the price. Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it. The game looks really promising, and I'd love to grind a few hours in it as it stands, but I'm not sure if dropping a bitcoin dependency into it won't sink it prematurely.
Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. this video My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.
Anchoring the in-game currency is one of the main strategies for preventing in-game currency inflation: this video Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?
until you have an established player base and are using 95% or your time for balancing and the economy ( this video )