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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that in order to make the experience fun for new players, the faucets have to be relatively open and the sinks not too punitive. I'm not sure how you can successfully balance a truly working virtual economy with making it fun for any but the most hardcore trader types, especially once real money comes officially into the equation.

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There's one good way: binding.

You allow players to add an after market effect to an item to greatly increase its value. However, doing so makes it bound to your account, and you can't sell it on the auction house anymore.

This can serve as both a tremendous sink of resources that players can work towards and a removal of valuable items from the market. (Because when the player eventually upgrades the item, the original item cannot be resold.)

Eve Online is the MMO that has got this closest to right. The economy has been running for 10 years now and inflation, whilst existing, has not been rampant.

Interestingly, there is not a RMAH, but there is a system to exchange ISK (gold) for subscription time that someone else bought. In other words the conversion of cash to ISK is facillitated - but not ISK to cash.

> successfully balance

You could try to balance faucets with omnipresent unavoidable sinks aka. taxes. But how fun would it be to pay taxes in a game? "You loot 100 gold. Minus 30% gold drop tax. 10% dungeon upkeep tax and 15% financial transaction tax." :)

So the thing is: As soon as you try to model a "real" economy (possibly with real money exchanges) you can't have artificial faucets and sinks. Even Eve Online - which has the most advanced game economy - struggles with inflation as there are too many faucets. For such an economy to work you need to have a steady amount of money circulating the economy. And the only source (and destination) for money for players has to be other players.

But then you get a lot of other problems. Like what if a player hoards all the gold? Or if players just deactivate their accounts with significant gold sums on them? How do new players get their first gold? etc.

At least one problem with gold in games is that the management of large sums of gold is unrealistic. If you really had a huge portion of gold available in the game the storage and transportation of said gold would be both costly and risky. These concepts work mostly for fantasy themed MMOs though, not as much in something like Eve Online.

Heh, yeah ... I remember Ultima Online where gold had weight and you had to carry it in your back pack. If you wanted to move large sums you had to get a pack horse. :)

But most MMOs nowadays treat gold as something ethereal that you even can't lose when you get killed.

I don't even understand why there are in-game economies. It's not as if the goods are scarce, so just distribute them as dropped items from random encounters and such.

To the players, the goods are scarce, so as long as they have some way of exchanging items, they'll create an in-game economy whether the developer planned for it or not. To us who are used to markets, it's only natural to trade items we have in excess for items we lack.

And to us who are used to video games, it's kind of dumb to pay money to some other player for an item when I could go out, find the right dungeon or whatever, and earn a fresh one myself. That, or just deliberately cheat/hack the game to fix the reward of my next random drop.

And to us who are used to video games, it's kind of dumb to pay money to some other player for an item when I could go out, find the right dungeon or whatever, and earn a fresh one myself.

Just to point out that we're talking about game money here, not legal tender.

But in any case, I don't see why would it be dumb, as long as you value the time more than the money. After all, the same situation occurs often in real life, and nobody is considered dumb to pay for fish that he could've fished himself or tomatoes that he could have grown himself. Why would it be different in games?

(Personally, I just don't play games with grinding or farming activities, so there's nothing to earn or buy)

Right, well that's the thing right there: if I value game-time less than game-money, I should not be playing that game. I play the game because I enjoy the time spent playing it, not to accumulate achievement badges.

Hence, farming for game money to trade for an item rather than just winning the item myself means the game is ill-designed for me.

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