Making/Money: Conservation of Mass - Part 2

Welcome back for Part 2 in our series on closed-resource economies in MMOs. Last week we discussed how starting out in this *completely hypothetical* system might work, what some of the basic rules of operation might be, and what it would take to keep money available to players. Today, we continue on our chosen path to talk about how loot and gear could be distributed so that raiding, quests, and all the other content we enjoy would still be available even through endgame.

First, a quick recap of the groundwork we already laid out.

Rule #1: Server character limits. Yes, this would create the need for more servers in the game. But it would also enable the developers to determine a starting point for the goods, resources and money available at server start.

Rule #2: Items and money must leave the game in order to come back in as loot or gathered materials. That means that they must be consumed in some way, either by being dropped and deleted, or by being given to an NPC. Consumed items could return as they had left the game, as the resources used in their creation, or as another item entirely.

Rule #3: More gold sinks. In order to keep the loot flowing, there would need to be additional, enticing or mandatory ways for the gold to leave the game. An example might be to have service-oriented NPCs, such as the Work Orders in Lord of the Rings Online or the Saw Mill in RuneScape. Mounts or housing are always popular ways to get money back from players to NPCs as well.

Still with me so far? Excellent. On we go!

In looking at how loot can continually be available in our system, the character server limit becomes critical. A full server would be expected to "age" as players continue leveling up their characters. In so doing, the number of low level creatures needed on the server would decline and the number of higher level creatures needed to meet the demand of the player base would increase.

For example, let's say there are 10,000 characters allowed on the server. When the server starts, all characters would need maybe 1,000 creatures to slay to get from level 1 to level 10. This should not cause a problem because, once looted, the corpses would vanish and more creatures would spawn as per usual. Also, the rate at which each player moved through the content would be slightly different though. So there would not need to simultaneously be 10 million low level creatures wandering around waiting to be killed. There might be only a few thousand in the world. Plenty of XP to go around. There would also be higher-level monsters in the system holding loot that players would get to eventually.

As the distribution of character levels shifted, the number and levels of the monsters in the world would change. The reason for this is to limit the amount of loot needing to spawn at a given time. After all, if the world must constantly had to have the few thousand low-level creatures running around each with a little bit of loot, then a couple of larger creatures might be bereft of goodies. With fewer small monsters around and characters continually leveling up and "outgrowing" their old armor and so forth, the resulting resources would be available for the generation of higher level items.

Speaking of outgrowing items, a great way to force people into dropping their old gear and finding new stuffs would be to implement something along the lines of what City of Heroes does with enhancements. They essentially have a level range for which an enhancement is useable. Their range is 3 levels below the item level to 3 levels above it. Once the useable level cap is reached, the enhancement remains in the slot but no longer grants a bonus. By having not only a level minimum for use, but also a maximum, there would be additional incentive to either sell the items to NPCs or delete them.

Selling back to NPCs could also work a little differently that what we are accustomed to. After all, if there is a limited amount of gold in the game then the NPCs cannot be guaranteed to have enough gold at a given time to purchase items from players. Mind you, the resale value of any item to a NPC is generally pretty low, so unless there was a large rush to sell, there would probably be sufficient funds for most transactions.

For the NPC system to work as an item sink, they would have to start with a pretty good amount of money. The NPC funds would also likely be linked to avoid problems of a given merchant running out of gold. Think of them as a single entity, like a guild with access to the guild bank at any time from any location. In order for the NPC guild to have money to dish out, they would also need a source of income. There would have to be necessary items available only from NPCs for players to purchase in order for deposits to be made (a.k.a. gold sinks).

Another potential issue to address with NPCs is the ability to repurchase items that you have sold to them. This becomes tricky because if selling to the NPC immediately allowed items to regenerate then there would be expansion of mass - clearly not allowable. If repurchases from NPCs were allowed at all, there would have to be a timer on how long it could be done before the item decayed in the NPC's inventory and therefore generated a new item somewhere else. It could be the until-you-log-out rule, like World of Warcraft has, or it could be something like one hour so that within a gaming session items would still decay. My vote is for the latter so that refreshes of resources are done on an ongoing basis, not just after peak playing hours are over and everyone exits.

This brings us to another interesting point - what happens when the item leaves the game? As we stated in Rule #3, just because you drop your Fel Iron Plate Pants does not mean that someone else gets to pick them up off a creature. Instead, there would be a conversion table of sorts. For instance, given that it requires 8 Fel Iron bars to create the pants. They could convert to 16 Fel Iron ore to be mined (it takes two ore to make a bar). Or maybe they would be reincarnated as 2 Fel Iron Plate Belts instead, with an equivalent metal content of 8 bars. Each type of item would have an equivalency such as this so that resources could be converted into items and vice versa.

Magic items become a little trickier because it requires more lore to conceive of how the magic is imbued in the item. In other words, are some substances inherently magical or is magic somehow put on them? In WoW, the Enchanter can actually cause an otherwise non-magical item to be magical using material components. This type of magical system would simplify the process of determining what magic items can then be generated from a similar conversion table to that for basic, non-magical items.

But what say the lore specifies that magic is merely an energy? Well, according to the law of Conservation of Energy, that must be preserved also. It can change forms, just as the resources can, and therefore reenter the system without the restriction of any magical components from whence it came. That means all those pesky "of the Whale" items could come back as something useful. /me dodges out of the way of thrown tomatoes... This might also mean that a finite amount of magical energy would be present and therefore the using of magic could be limited to what was available, paving the way for a rune-based casting system where the magic energy is stored or similar... but that's a whole other can of worms.

Bringing this back to the original discussion of low-level creatures and server caps... Once the distribution of character levels advances sufficiently, fewer of the intro monsters will spawn and more of the higher level monsters will appear. The equivalent of the loot that the lowbies would have is then available for higher level loot. The conversion tables backing this system could then generated different items so you're not seeing Copper Maces dropping at level 50, for instance. The copper from these might instead be used for trinkets or other types of goods that would remain helpful at higher levels.

To make things clear on this topic, I am not saying that the only way higher level monsters would spawn is through the aging of the server and subsequent ceasing of lowbie critters spawning. There would already be bosses and tough monsters out there from the start of the server. Getting rid of some of the low-level creatures would just allow more of the tougher monsters to appear and have loot available when killed.

We'll leave it there for now. Next week, we continue on this series to how crafting can fit in with resources constraints. In the meantime, let us know what you think of this so far? What loopholes are still out there remaining to be closed (other than the hoarding of materials - which I promise will be addressed in the next installment)? On a more macro note, how high should resource caps be set on a given server in your ideal version of this economy? Would it be worthwhile to set the limits arbitrarily high, therefore making it essentially limitless? Or would you, as a player, want to "feel" the constraints of the system a little?

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.