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Easy Supply and Demand

Apr 3, 05:43 PM by Raesanos regarding Game Design

A realistic economy is a goal of many MUDs. Many of the benefits of a realistic economy can be created with very little work.

Here is a simple supply and demand system. Every time a player buys an item, increase its cost. Every time a player sells an item, decrease its cost.

Voila. Supply and demand. The system works well to make high-demand items expensive and extremely common items cheap. There are just a few tweaks that would keep things working.

Tweak the settings for how much the cost is effected by each purchase or sale. You can’t assign the “right” values deterministically. It depends on your playerbase’s size and behavior, and will change over time.

Consider having the prices normalize gradually over time. That way a surge of unusual activity will be offset sooner, and items that are bought but not sold (such as consumables) will not simply increase in price forever.

Consider a minimum and maximum price. EG, do not allow an item’s cost to change to 50% less or more than its original cost. This is a good approximation of other factors not considered in the system and helps catch flukes before they cause a problem.

To expand on the system a little, keep a multiplier for object types and materials, if you have them. Start at 1. Each time a player buys or sells an item, increase or decrease the multiplier (by a small fraction). Have the multiplier effect all objects of that type or material. Now, if silver longswords are in demand, the price of silver broadswords will increase as well.

To expand on the system even more, keep these set of values separate for each city, region, or whatever granularity is appropriate for your game. Then travelling to a region where an item is more rare will yield a better payoff.

Comment

1. The downfall of realistic MUD economies doesn’t really stem from the cost of storebought items, at least in my experience. In the vast majority of muds, the best of the best objects come from difficult mobs, hidden nooks in areas, or from player crafting systems of some kind. Good items are frequently bought and sold between players, rather than from coded stores. In the rare exceptions where the best items come from MUD shops, a player can usually make do with what is found or given, if prices exceed means.

   Where MUD economies become crazy is the plethora of limitless MUD money. If I can kill John the blacksmith every 15 minutes and loot 1000 MUD credits from him each time, or race through an area of baby dragons, killing them for 22 broze coins each, and every other player can do the same, MUD money can become subject to inflation pretty rapidly. If that’s the case, when I want to buy a decent item from a fellow player, I’d better have a sizeable war chest at hand.

   The largest factor, in my experience, that affects a MUD’s economy isn’t price (since in most cases, prices are primarily player-driven), but how difficult money is to acquire. If money is hard to come by, 100 farthing is a lot to pay for anything, for anybody. Conversely, if any player who works at it for awhile or who’s been playing for a long time has a bank account with ten million credits, spending a few million on a good item is nothing, even if the newer players to the MUD or the lower level players don’t have access to the good money sources yet, are lucky to have 10 credits to their name, and have to make do until they’ve leveled up enough to start acquiring bigger sums of money.

   — NW-PR · Apr 7, 11:44 AM · #

2. The scope of this article is to create a cool effect of a realistic economy without figuring everything out, which as you point out, is very hard. This is not to say you should not try to balance out out your mob drops.

   — Raesanos · Apr 7, 12:41 PM · #

3. It’s a good concept overall. I guess it depends on the type of MUD involved. For most of what’s out there (mostly stock ROM MUDs, etc.), I tend to imagine inexpensive food, drink, and consumable potion-type items comprising the majority of player purchaes, with implementation of a system like this leading to people switching to sandwiches until the price of pizza normalizes. Unless MUD money is so plentiful or pizza costs so low that a 50% increase in the cost of pizza doesn’t make a dent.

   But in some more sophisticated MUDs, this would be pretty neat. For example, in MUDs where your weapons and armor and clothing wear out, need frequent replacement, and general equipment is tough to come by, a storebought replacement is a real convenience. And when a replacement steel sword costs 1500 monetary units instead of 1000, that might be a big deal, until the demand for steel armor goes down. Again, though, this depends on whether 500 monetary units is a lot of money for the example MUD. Of course, out of control money drops could also be countered with swords that cost millions instead of thousands, making a percentage increase in cost based on supply and demand matter that much more. Take that, inflation.

   — NW-PR · Apr 7, 01:55 PM · #

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