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That "gold silk" argument has been used for ages:
* "The In-game Economics of Ultima Online" - http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html

There are NO amount of gold sinks that can fix an infinite money supply. Your theorycrafting about "wealth" and "fun" is incomplete. Please read:

* Ludwig von Mises Institute "What Has Government Done to our Money?" http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf
* Ralph Koster's "Theory of Fun" http://www.theoryoffun.com/theoryoffun.pdf

> They sacrifice economical stability for fun.
Bingo.

If game designers focused on economic stability then _no_ one would play the game! You forgot the _basic_ premise of WHY people play MMOs in the first place: MMO games are all about the illusion of power. To slow down the "rate" of wealth acquisition would cause exactly one thing: drive players to OTHER games where the rate IS higher.

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Only an idiot gamer thinks "indy" games can't compete with commercial games.

ALL fines should be paid back out to the public, or simply destroyed increasing the value of our dollars.

I think this is very interesting. Closed-loop economies are difficult to balance properly, we know this from video games. How would an open-loop economy moderated by the government work? Taxes, fines etc. are the 'money sink'. The government simply destroys funds recovered in this way. New currency is issued at a rate which allows the purchasing power of a dollar to remain roughly constant with time. I haven't figured all the details out but the basic principle may be sound.

UO did that at the beginning. It doesn't work mainly because player's hoard. Plus of course player's will find a dupe bug at some point and screw the whole thing up (see UO again).

http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.htm l is the detailed description of what they tried to do and why it broke.

This is bad, lame, faux cooperative threads.

Local variables are not preserved.

A protothread runs within a single C function and cannot span over other functions. A protothread may call normal C functions, but cannot block inside a called function.

Unless memory is at an absolute premium, just use cooperative threading instead. If you try to use prototheads, you'll quickly discover how unlike "real" programming it is. Even just a 4K stack in your cooperative threads will get you way more than protothreads does.

In the real world, we associate hyperinflation with the almost total devastation of a country and its population. In UO this really did not happen because there was little that players wanted that was purchasable with gold. The one major exception was reagents which were also cloneable! The hyperinflation, while annoying, did not preclude players from having fun and, in the end, this is all that matters. This should perhaps introduce a bit of humility into the over-design of the economy - for all its complications, it is not required to make the game fun.

That's somewhat true in World of Warcraft too. Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon. This helps to some extent (eg. allows you to buy top-notch equipment and buy all possible skills and spells), but isn't such a strong and disruptive effect that Blizzard considered removing this mail-yourself-money feature.

Also, some data shows that inflation tends to always happen in MMORPG's, regardless of whether there's a dug bug. The papers above go a long way towards explaining the theoretical reasons for why that might be.

In the real world, we associate hyperinflation with the almost total devastation of a country and its population. In UO this really did not happen because there was little that players wanted that was purchasable with gold. The one major exception was reagents which were also cloneable! The hyperinflation, while annoying, did not preclude players from having fun and, in the end, this is all that matters. This should perhaps introduce a bit of humility into the over-design of the economy - for all its complications, it is not required to make the game fun.

That's somewhat true in World of Warcraft too. Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon. This helps to some extent (eg. allows you to buy top-notch equipment and buy all possible skills and spells), but isn't such a strong and disruptive effect that Blizzard considered removing this mail-yourself-money feature.

Also, some data shows that inflation tends to always happen in MMORPG's, regardless of whether there's a dug bug. The papers above go a long way towards explaining the theoretical reasons for why that might be.

For a manufacturing profession such as tailoring or smithing, players are motivated to improve skills because it will allow them to make better items for themselves on-demand in the future. Thus players, in the process of training, produce huge numbers of item regardless of whether there is a market for them. This, combined with the effects of macroing and the fact that some players create items for the shear fun of it, conspire to shift the supply curve to the right. This results overproduction and deflated prices of many basic goods.

Ultimately, it's a game, and people will make things for non-economic reasons. So if you're more profit-driven than fun-driven, avoid these items. It's still a problem though that the game encourages players to create these items, but then gives them decreasing rewards for producing those items.

And yeah, there are definitely inflationary pressures when someone who is level 60 creates an alt. Normal level 10 players have to grind for money at lvl 10 to get their EQ. But there are a few people who instead are able to grind for money at level 60 for their level 10 EQ. I haven't seen good economic analysis of this to confirm how severe of an influence it is, but it's very obviously inflationary, and an increasing influence as time goes on. (if it were possible to remove this feature from an MMORPG though, the more global problem of the "open loop" economy creating inflation would still exist)

For storage, yes, you can mail things between yourself, but there's a 2 hour delay, not convenient at all, because in some situations you need items more urgently. For items that have no vendor-buy price (eg. enchanting materials), you can post them items to the auction house for 9999gold, then cancel the auction, and let the item sit in your mailbox. That's slightly more convenient, but you have to make sure you retrieve the item before the mail expires.

(city of heros seems to buck the trend... is there anything fundamentally very different about its economy?)

This wasnt even close to the coolest thing at SIGGRAPH! Takeo Igarashi's work on predictive interfacing making easier 2d and 3d drawing tools was cooler. Digiplasty , a kind of 3d exquisite corpse as shown by Stewart and Makai was cooler. (For that matter the Studio, manned by Makai, Stewart, Scott and many others, where you could create 2d and 3d art and print 2d and 3d was AWESOME - you could work in there for hours, vs. the few seconds of playing with a silly virtual sword.) Scotts Dodecahedron was a wonderful example of taking something abstract and virtual and making it real and usable. Isa's overview of wearable tech and cyberfashion (she took out the notes, dammit!) was refreshing, if not so new to a frequent slashdotter. (She's a burner too!) Some of the mixed reality work being done at the University of Singapore was really neat. (This is an example of some of the most exciting stuff there. Several researchers showed some great work being done in augmented reality, and combining that with some of the reasonable priced wearable and wirelessable computing, we can see some real headway being made. One researcher even composites a virtual face back onto a fellow participant in the augemented reality environment, masking the HMD, even going so far as to track the eyes and simulate the gaze.) The results of last years meditation chamber research installation was an interesting and possibly VERY useful application of VR technology. W. Bradford Paley's work on applying alternative interfaces to explore other media was fascinating, where you can use this LARGE java tool named TextArc to examine graphically over 400 literary works. The Web3D Consortium's release of the final working draft of X3D (with tools) could end up being much more important than the newest video card from ATI. Dietmar Offenhuber's work on non-isotropic spaces at wegzeit was an interesting approach to mapping and representing real places. Zachary Simpson et al's delightfully simple shadow interactivity was many times more fun than the virtual swordfight. Fabric.ch's knowscape was also exciting, both for the viewers and the presenter, as he would find additions from his European counterparts each morning when he logged on to the shared 3d space. Kenneth Huff's beautiful art using maya was just one example of some wonderful digital work being done. Lastly, Michael J. Lyons soon-to-be-published research on the aesthetics of Tokyo's Kyoto Gardens was both informative and inspiring. And this is just a TINY PART of what happened there!

Really, SIGGRAPH was NOT just an exhibition floor with cheesey swag (although the little green LED lights were very nice) and some cool new toys. It was presentation after presentation by resesarchers, some barely able to speak engrish, but all excited about their work and open to collaboration. It was hours and hours of animation, some (Like Allain Escalle's "Le Conte du monde flottant") were so stunning as to make you forget where animation ended and life began. Disney's work on replacing one actors face with another, retaining ALL facial expression, was downright scary. And the Spiderman gag footage, his spidey-suit oddly replaced with a fully reflective silver surface, like most of the rest of SIGGRAPH'S less entertaining presentations, were surely an indication of things to come.
Take the time to go to SIGGRAPH2002 and look around. If you find something interesting, write the author. This is where the new VR and AR comes from - not ATI!