MMOs suffer from a strange problem, at least in a real world economic sense. Everybody is printing money all the time. For years, every massive multiplayer game has struggled with this. And as any old school MMO player will tell you, the results were as devastating as they often were hilarious https://www.casinoslots.co.nz/jackpotcity-casino-review.
But of late, games have stolen a very real world economic solution. We've covered this a bit before, but basically every time you kill a monster in an MMO it drops money or a piece of loot that a vendor can conveniently convert to money for you. This money doesn't come from anywhere. There's not a limited supply of it at all. Rather, it's just magically created every time you win a fight. And with hundreds of thousands of players killing monsters 24 hours a day, 365 days a year that's a lot of money being constantly added to the economy. Imagine what this would do to a real world economy. Imagine if rather than your central bank having the exclusive right to print money and keeping careful tabs on how much money is out there, everybody was just printing money all the time. You would hit hyperinflation pretty fast The value of the currency would plummet and the loaf of bread that costs five dollars one day would cost 50 the next week. And then 5,000. And then people would just stop accepting money for bread altogether. Your currency would be effectively worthless. And that is exactly what happens in most MMOs. In Asheron's Call, the in-game currency became so inflated that shards were used as money. In Diablo 2, stones of Jordan rapidly replaced gold. And in Gaia Online, the currency became so worthless that the company started offering to donate two hundred and fifty dollars to charity every time the players threw away 15 trillion gold. Players just abandoned the designated currency and chose a different, more restricted currency because they could no longer trust the initial game currency to retain any value at all. And this has a devastating impact on these games. It makes the game less approachable for new players. It means that returning players come back to a now worthless bank account. It makes it harder for players to exchange goods, and in some poorly supported MMOs, it's even rendered the in-game auction house unusable. So of course, there were all sorts of ways we always used to try to design around this. We would put money sinks in the game. Things like auction house fees, vendor-only consumable items that were practically necessary to play. Guild dues, or even property tax for owning in-game real estate. Those sinks were designed to remove currency from the game. When you paid for any of those items or services, the money you paid with simply vanished, which theoretically would have a deflationary effect. But as we all know when it comes to MMO players there is practically no money sink you can build that's going to exceed how much people are willing to grind.
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