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MUDflation, Legal Action To Hinder MMO Trading?
Thanks to Wired News for its article discussing the pitfalls which may face virtual item and currency trading in MMORPGs. The piece discusses previously covered sites such as the Gaming Open Market, whose founder ruminates on possible issues with TOS violations: "We're getting to the point where we're getting a reasonable amount of attention. I'm sort of afraid that the game companies are going to step in and terminate my accounts because we're violating the terms of service." Another commentator also worries about long-term dangers of virtual item/currency trading, "...because games like Ultima Online and EverQuest have flaws that allow cheaters to duplicate currency, and that ultimately leads to what Hunter calls 'MUDflation,' short for inflation in a multiple-user dimension."
It's not so much that people are duplicating currency all over the place as it is that currency tends to enter the world much much faster than it leaves it.
For example, in Everquest, this is how money enters the world: You kill a monster. That monster drops a junk item and a little bit of cash. You then take the junk item to an NPC merchant and sell that for more cash.
Money leaves the world when you buy things from NPC merchants. Food and water are so cheap that they might as well be free. The only things that really cost money are trade skill items and spell reagents.
The problem is that people kill stuff far far more than they buy things, so money enters the world at a faster rate than it leaves. Eventually, you wind up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of platinum pieces.
What really needs to happen is to somehow balance the game so that cash coming in is balanced by cash going out. If there's too much money in the world, monsters drop less cash, merchants raise prices to suck some out, and lower the prices they give for stuff. If there's too little, do the reverse.
Well, cant it be done like it is in the real world?
It used to be the case that at any one time the amount of currency equalled that of the value of the gold reserves. I suppose times have changed since then but the system might just as well work. Throw in a stock market algorithm ala Elite (or perhaps more sophisticated one) and maybe people will get a bit more interested in the trade aspects of the game.
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The gold standard isn't a very good idea in the real world. It'd be a piss poor idea in the game world. Allow me to explain:
Let's suppose that there was a fixed amount of money, which is what the gold standard does. Well, it has to be distributed somewhere to begin with, so let's say it's in a vault, and everytime someone kills a monster, the money's taken out of that vault and given to the player.
That's fine, until the vault runs out. After that point, killing a monster gets you no gold. Well, where else are you going to get gold? You could sell items to storekeepers, but eventually they'd run out of money, too. So, you'd have to get it from other players.
But, the supply of gold is fixed. The supply of items is not; more are still created all the time. What's that mean? It means that the value of gold goes up, and the value of items go down (deflation). The longer you hold onto your gold, the more it'll buy.
And don't forget, of course, that this gold would be piling up in the hands of the experienced players and guilds, who could've gotten the money when it was "free". New players who never had that chance would be left out.
The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding).
Dead wrong.
The real world has a fixed number of dollar bills and equivalents. The amount of money fluctuates rapidly.
Take a stock certificate. If one share of the stock sells for $25 right now, you would probably accept one share of that stock in payment for something that costs $20. The gap between the worth of the share and the price of the item will cover any broker's fees for selling, and the risk that the stock will go down before you can sell.
How about loans? If I loan you $100,000, with the agreement that, over the life of the loan, the total you'll pay back is $200,000, I could sell that loan to someone else for $200,000. After all, that loan is a promise they'll be paid $200,000 eventually, but until the loan is paid off, that's additional money in circulation that the government didn't print. A credit card is just a variation on a loan, but it also increases the effective amount of money in circulation.
How about playing with time delays in the banking system? Say I write you a check for $100, but I don't have the money in my account to cover it. If, by the time you get around to cashing it, I've been paid, nothing will go wrong, but until then, that's an additional $100 in circulation!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.