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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.
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.