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The Fairness of Virtual Currency

Posted by Zonk on from the change-your-gil-for-your-gold dept.

CNet.com is running an article looking into the fairness of the virtual currency exchange. From the article: "...according to two of the leading experts in the economies of these virtual worlds, getting a fair price in the exchange of real dollars for fantasy coins can be a crapshoot. Turns out it's hard to find reliable data about the dollar/virtual currency exchange rates in a pretend world where there's no Alan Greenspan setting interest rates and scolding everyone about irrational exuberance."

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Artificial? by wlan0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wait. Aren't all currencies artificial by now? I mean, not all countries have enough gold to substain the amount of "money" they have.

    1. Re:Artificial? by droleary · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In fact, that paper almost seems to be arguing that MMORPG economies, as they currently stand, are almost unavaoidably always inflationary.

      That's pretty much true. With timed spawns and random drops, there is no real economy. I mean, there have only been so many bills printed by the US Mint but in most games it's like every wandering monster can print money. The false economies of games are directly related to the false ecologies. There is no real population of rats (or whatever) that make up the lower level grind such that you can kill them all and the rat problem goes away. They fabricate rats from the same nothing that they fabricate currency, and so inflation is bound to spiral out of control.

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

      I don't know the particulars of that game enough to say. One way to balance inflation (without going down to a rat-level ecology) is to have sinks that take money out of the game just as quickly. What constant expenses are there in CoH that a player can't do without? Healing is often a good sink, as are items that wear out and break. If that's part of CoH, it would go a long way to explain a balanced economy.

  2. NO by vga_init · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I've posted on this subject before (and rather passionately). The past article was about property rights in a virtual world (ie MMORPGs and the like). It's just ludicrous. Now it's about currency value...

    I love games. I love to play these games; my girlfriend and I play a MMORPG together and think it's great. It is great to collect virtual money and spend it in entertaining ways, notwithstanding getting awesome items and equipment.

    That being said, the currency is worthless. Just plain worthless. Virtual assets don't exist; they're intangible. They're in a proprietary gameworld and if they belong to anyone they belong to the company that is providing the game. Also, trying to assign real value to items in-game by exchanging them for things outside the game like money is strictly prohibited in the license agreement of most games.

    Come on, people! The state should never be involved in this sort of thing.