Making/Money: Conservation of Mass - Part 1

This is the first in a series of articles theorizing on what a virtual economic system that had a finite number of resources might be like. I would like to impress upon you that everything expressed here is hypothetical. As far as I am aware at this time, there are no games currently being made with a system like this. Also, this is only one potential way that it could be done.

There have been several discussions amongst friends and fellow bloggers lately of what the economy of game with no ability to spontaneously create items might be like. Specifically, what if all of the resources, loot, and money in the game was there at the start and no more could be generated during gameplay than had been removed? In short, what if the law of Conservation of Mass was obeyed in a MMORPG?

Let's be clear about this - we're not talking about each character starting out with a set amount of gear or money that they would then have to use throughout their lifespan. This would be a server-wide amount of stuff. All players would have access to it provided that it was available. Once an item was "destroyed", either by dropping it or by selling it to an NPC, another item could become available.

Fundamental to the way I am laying out this concept of a system is that just because an item leaves the world as an axe, for instance, doesn't mean it has to re-enter as one. It could come back in the form of steel ingots, iron ore and coal, or maybe even as a different weapon entirely. With that in mind, onward we go!

The first question would be - how does it begin? Most of us are accustomed to being handed something useful to fight with while in an intro quest or looting the first enemies we defeat in order to obtain money or a salable item. Without helpful quest-givers with endless supplies of Bent Staffs, we would not necessarily be able to receive these seeming necessities.

In order to counter the lack of starting items, I posit that there would need to be a relatively limited server capacity. Technically, server capacities are already limited. This is evident when World of Warcraft offers free character transfers or when City of Heroes shows a red status indicating that the server is nearing its maximum load. However, those are temporary states of being that usually reflect the power of the server equipment rather than the in-game dynamics. Facilitating a system with no new items would require a maximum number of characters, not just a maximum number of simultaneous connections to a particular server. By limiting the number of characters that could exist on a server, the developers could start the game with sufficient intro items to accommodate them all.

Generally, after receiving your starting items, you are given a task to go beat up some baddies or gather something for a quest giver. These types of quests probably wouldn't need much tweaking. After all, the corpses already disappear before others reappear (They're all zombie critters!), so there's no need to go crazy trying to figure out what happens if they were all dead when you logged in. And gathering quests usually require you to fork over your gathered items to the NPC, thereby allowing them to re-spawn for other starting players to gather.

Ding! Time to level up. We, as gamers, are accustomed to the amount of loot from each kill increasing as our character level and/or enemy's level increases. Therefore, in the beginning levels, we expect to hold little of the in-game currency. At higher levels, we expect to be wealthy adventurers. But if every type of resource is limited, including money, how could every endgame character have the money needed to purchase gear or mounts?

This is where the limit placed on the number of characters per server becomes critical. In order to allow players reasonable access to items they will need as they near endgame, the system would have to start out with quite a bit of money floating around. Players would gain access to this through higher-level content, as usual, but there would have to be significant, perpetual money sinks.

Perhaps additional service-oriented NPCs (think of the saw mill in Runescape) might be used to pull funds back out of players' hands in order to recirculate it. Repairs, mounts, and all the other typical gold sinks we see might be relatively more expensive so that money flows more readily. Of course, that also means that either quests or crafts would have to require the use of such services. If not, there would be no reason to purchase goods and services from NPCs and money would likely tend to stay in the hands of those who have it - potentially leaving other players with insufficient funds for their adventuring.

We'll stop there for now. But tune in next time when we'll ponder how loot and gear could work in a system where the conservation of mass applies.

What do you think so far about the possibilities presented here? Would you be interested in playing a game where resources were limited on a per-server basis? What are your thoughts on other ways players could start out in such a system? Do you think that the limitation of the amount of money in the economy would create a caste system of the haves and the have-nots?

Alexis Kassan is a numbers nerd. She spends her days with statistical programs and her nights with spreadsheets and textbooks. She's also a MMORPG addict, having gotten sucked into Ultima Online at a formative age. In her time away from work, books and games, she can usually be found drowning in pools of sprinkles. If you have a question about in-game economics or how crafting fits in with them, hit her up at alexis DOT kassan at weblogsinc DOT com.