The Shrine

Back in college I was playing Parasite Eve, and a friend who was a Biology Major was watching the game and said this game should not be allowed to be shown to children, and I asked him is it because of the gore or violence, and he's like 'no it's trying to pass wrong information about mitochondria as fact!' Well, the same should be applied to economics and MMORPG. People, including devs, should not be allowed to comment on the in game economics of a MMORPG unless they've extensive background. In particular, you have to know how the demand/supply looks like when you've nearly infinite supply. You also should be aware that comparison to real life is generally invalid because on one hand we have Diablo 3 with hyper-inflation that makes Zimbabwe look stable, and on the other hand a significant amount of MMORPG suffers from deflation which is something we hope to never observe in real life because it totally kills an economy. Yes, I realize this has nothing to do with gameplay, since you can play in a game with hyper inflation just as easily as one with deflation, but please do not equate anything in a MMORPG with real life because I'd be really scared if I ever see deflation happening in real life which happens all the time in MMOROPG.

The weird thing is that I'd think MMORPG economics is easy to grasp, because the supply/demand curves works almost exactly like the one for piracy, and you'd think people would have a lot of experience in that.

Don wrote:The weird thing is that I'd think MMORPG economics is easy to grasp, because the supply/demand curves works almost exactly like the one for piracy, and you'd think people would have a lot of experience in that.

Doesn't it work in reverse? The equivalent to piracy in an mmo would be...buying gold I guess?

Eric wrote:

Don wrote:The weird thing is that I'd think MMORPG economics is easy to grasp, because the supply/demand curves works almost exactly like the one for piracy, and you'd think people would have a lot of experience in that.

Doesn't it work in reverse? The equivalent to piracy in an mmo would be...buying gold I guess?

Piracy is basically infinite supply, which is pretty darn close to the availability of most tradeable product in a MMORPG. In a game like WoW there tends to be stronger inflationary pressures due to stuff like dailys, and Diablo 3 probably has hyper-inflation. But for a game that doesn't constantly inject a ton of currency into the economy, you'll actually observe the price of goods dropping rather quickly. iTunes selling MP3 for relatively dirt cheap prices is not unlike how a lot of stuff sells for the vendor cost in an AH. I think WoW for the most part managed to keep the demand side of things stable (probably doesn't hurt that they're the biggest MMORPG in the world), but games with smaller population often sees deflation due to ever decreasing demand.