New World as a Player Driven Economy game and methods chosen by Amazon to fight inflation

[Ende]

Hi everyone,

I'm a gamer that likes games with player driven economy (PDE)

As an example of games with a successful PDE implementation we could talk about EVE online or Albion Online.

I have been checking a lot of videos about New World and how they want to have a game base on PDE where crafting and gathering is important and be part of the economy of the world they have created.

Thinking about this, I have concern about the current build of the game base on this regards and how inflation can ruin the game.

The problem with most PDE games is how you control inflation.

We understand that players generate money when they kill a mob, when they open a chest, when do gathering, etc. Basically, all players have their own printing money machine.

in the other hand, all games create a way to destroy money. In case of New World we can talk about, Taxes for war declaration, build a house, crafting taxes, weekly taxes for your house, repairing fees, etc.

Find the equilibrium between production money and destroying money in a PDE game is key for the success of the game.

If this equilibrium is broken it means that we have inflation, means that player could have too much gold and then iron ore will be costing 1000 gold and a simple iron sword 10000 gold. why? because a player have millions of gold and is easier to buy and item than spend time gathering the materials.

Note: This is not a case for day 1, or year 1 of NW but think in the long term. when you are level cap with best gear on slot you weekly gold consumption is low (consumables, house taxes and not much more and you generate way more gold than you consume and multiply that for months)

Most PDE games solve this introduction a premium currency, or other methods.

Albion Online introduce the back market to destroy items and balance the drop tables.
Albion online have a silver (mob currency) exchange to gold (premium currency)
Albion online have a full loot system where one or more items are destroy when killed in red or black zone.
WoW have gold to WoW tokens exchange
Eve Online have Plex credits
Lost Ark have gold to blue crystals exchange

Disclaimer: I don't want to talk if this solution or good or not, or if Amazon should implement them, I just mention then as methods chosen by game developers to fight inflation in video games, removing money from circulation to control inflation. I can agree that implementing wrongly one of this exchange methods you can ruin the players game experience.

So my question for amazon are:

What methods are you implementing to fight inflation in a PDE game as is New World?

Is there any plan to introduce a premium currency exchange to control the amount of gold in circulation to control the market price and avoid inflation?

What methods will you implement to control bots farming?

Because the other problem in PDE games are bots. Bots don't stop generating money and they don't consume money (maybe some consumables to even generate more money). At some point some bot farming company/web/person with 100 bots could buy all the iron ore in the market and put his new price at 1000 Gold also breaking the economy system. and then selling that gold in third party webs back to the users who can't follow the cost of the inflation and you enter in a spiral till your game is doom.

Summarizing:

I think that Devs are full focus in the release of the game and inflation in video games is something will not happen in first few months after release, but in the mid/long term is something devs will need to look into and have a clear idea of the path the want to follow.

If you read till here, thank you for your time and see you in the world of Aeternum.

BR

[jackman]

the IMF should start regulating game economies, that way we wont get 2300% inflation rates like some parts of the real world.

[River]

The current system in New World is not going to produce a particularly strong Player Driven Economy. As mentioned by others, that MIGHT be ok if it is part of their plan for the launch time, and they have systems in mind to implement and adjust later, but there are still quite a few problems with New World's core system, if a player driven economy is what you really want. Crafting also has issues, though a crafting driven economy isn't necessarily the same as a player driven economy. They're generally connected though.

- Both EVE and Albion have item destruction. New World does not. This puts a big dent in the potential for an active market in terms of gear.

- New World currently has very few ways for gold to leave the world. This is something that can be adjusted a month down the road possibly, but as it is now, gold will quite quickly flood the world. Some of the methods you mentioned actually aren't drains. Taxes, for example, don't leave the world as they do in other games, they go to the governor of the territory, like money spent on auction house goods. Based on the closed beta, the faucet/drain ratio is nowhere near balanced. New World drains include...
* Repair
* Market Listing fee (not tax)
* Buying a house (currently, 3x max, unless you move)
* Buying faction items
* Various aspects of controlling a territory. I don't know the details, but I assume there are large drains involved here.

That's really not much, compared to the massive amount of faucets.

- Crafting focuses on resources, not crafting skill. Maxing out a crafting skill is easier than in most MMOs, and everybody is capable of maxing all of them. This means (after the first few weeks) there's very little value in actually being a max crafter, because tons of people will be max crafters. The value is almost entirely in the resources themselves, as well as RNG (not dependent on skill) of perk combinations. This is fine for an active economy, but it does cut out a part that a lot of people look for.

- Crafting weapons and armor pre-60 is mostly pointless. Bags, jewelry, tools, and consumables are fine (though jewelry pre-40 is mostly pointless as well) but of limited value given leveling speed. Gear itself is much easier to obtain and generally more effective from PvE or faction merchants.

- Amazon has added a lot of artificial caps to things, likely as an attempt to control various aspects of the economy. I find this method questionable in terms of effectiveness, and likely counterproductive most of the time.

* Players are limited to 100 total buy/sell orders, which makes large scale market play impossible, especially considering each town has its own independent market, and the cap is global. Selling stackable things is doable, but when you get into gear, for example jewelry, reaching that limit happens quickly.
* Players are limited to a certain amount of total gold. I don't remember what it is. 500k? Whatever it is, I'm not sure I see how that can possibly promote a healthy player driven economy.
* Players are limited to refining 10? legendary crafting components a day. This makes room for more players to get involved in high end crafting, which is good since there's going to be so many, and it prevents the market from being flooded with legendary gear that never needs to be re-purchased due to no item loss. But, like the other caps, it severely hampers somebody's ability to be heavily market/crafting focused, so it would be much better to find other solutions to these problems.

--------------

I very very much enjoyed playing the closed beta. I expect I'll very much enjoy playing after release. But as traditionally economic focused player, New World disappoints in this realm.

[Voronja]

Regarding the bots can buyout the Trade Post and set the prices.

Players will be able to do that also further down the line. I don’t know how much gold coin a player can generate and what is needed to cover overheads. But a company owner can earn millions of gold coin per week from hoicked up taxes over multiple settlements and could then destabilise the trading economy in game in the distant future. That future is probably when the player base is getting low, the game is starting to go onto end of life and the devs have given up of creating further expansion or they have done all they can do with it. It’s like the end of the world prediction where the sun will implode and take everything out with it. It’s inevitable and there is not much we can do to stop it. Prevention’s can be made but the outcome will still be the same.

I’m more concerned the casual players will receive the back lash of not enough resources to go around as most jobs are 9-5 M-F so they will be logging on at roughly the same time and will be fighting for the same resources as each other. And just like wealth and resources in the real world wealth nothing is distributed evenly across the board. Some will have plenty and some will have enough. Some will have to find alternative means of obtaining resources and that could mean doing more activities that produce gold to buy the resources or items they require. But long term the result will still be the same. Those with the gold coin can manipulate the market to block others from progressing or obtaining what they need.

Solution? No idea. I’m not into economics of a grand scale as I just have to manage my own. And I’m not always successful in that. The devs are not trained in world economics and if they are they they would be working in that field. The players behaviour will dictate if it’s a success or not. And as I said before. Not everything is shared equally and not everyone wants things to be shared equally.

[BÆRD]

Without permanent item durability loss NW economy is going to stay broken. "Fear of loss" was clearly the motivation here, same as with the rejection of the initial full loot pvp design.

[Ozius]

Avoiding an saturation in mats is easy to resolve.

You just have NPC who will buy anything at a set price.

If there is no demand for a particular material, the price will be very low, if lower than what the NPC offers, people will sell to the NPC removing mats from the world.

If there is a high demand for certain mats, the price will go up and people will go out of their way to obtain to sell and make profits, which in turn starts lowering the price again as supply increases.

This may take a while to settle down as people work out the supply and demand.

Introducing things to spend gold on to lower the amount of currency in the game is also very easy and can be done anytime. The obvious would be currency converter to then buy cosmetics, or just tweak tax, rent, etc.

[EvilHare]

Has repair cost changed for higher tier gear than it has in Alpha or CB? Cause then, repairing higher tier gear used up a lot of repair parts and a bit of gold. It got pretty bad during some later parts of alpha testing.

If this has not changed too much, this can be a sink to keep your higher tier goodies tip-top. salvaging a lot at high levels may be how they control the market and currency.

[River]

Originally posted by EvilHare:

Has repair cost changed for higher tier gear than it has in Alpha or CB? Cause then, repairing higher tier gear used up a lot of repair parts and a bit of gold. It got pretty bad during some later parts of alpha testing.

If this has not changed too much, this can be a sink to keep your higher tier goodies tip-top. salvaging a lot at high levels may be how they control the market and currency.

My experience at level 60 in the closed beta was the the gold cost for repairs was negligible to the point that I wasn't even aware I was paying gold for repairs until somebody listed it in a conversation like this.

The only significant sink in the system currently is whatever is involved in owning a territory. The sinks that normal players deal with are all extremely minor.

[EvilHare]

Originally posted by River:

Originally posted by EvilHare:

Has repair cost changed for higher tier gear than it has in Alpha or CB? Cause then, repairing higher tier gear used up a lot of repair parts and a bit of gold. It got pretty bad during some later parts of alpha testing.

If this has not changed too much, this can be a sink to keep your higher tier goodies tip-top. salvaging a lot at high levels may be how they control the market and currency.

My experience at level 60 in the closed beta was the the gold cost for repairs was negligible to the point that I wasn't even aware I was paying gold for repairs until somebody listed it in a conversation like this.

The only significant sink in the system currently is whatever is involved in owning a territory. The sinks that normal players deal with are all extremely minor.

And repair parts?

[River]

Originally posted by EvilHare:

Originally posted by River:

My experience at level 60 in the closed beta was the the gold cost for repairs was negligible to the point that I wasn't even aware I was paying gold for repairs until somebody listed it in a conversation like this.

The only significant sink in the system currently is whatever is involved in owning a territory. The sinks that normal players deal with are all extremely minor.

And repair parts?

Ahh, I'm a bad test sample for repair parts. I did a lot of crafting, which means I did a lot of salvaging. I was permanently capped out on repair parts. I have no idea how it goes for non-crafters.

[Kief]

Originally posted by River:

Originally posted by EvilHare:

And repair parts?

Ahh, I'm a bad test sample for repair parts. I did a lot of crafting, which means I did a lot of salvaging. I was permanently capped out on repair parts. I have no idea how it goes for non-crafters.

Same

[EvilHare]

Originally posted by River:

Originally posted by EvilHare:

And repair parts?

Ahh, I'm a bad test sample for repair parts. I did a lot of crafting, which means I did a lot of salvaging. I was permanently capped out on repair parts. I have no idea how it goes for non-crafters.

Knowing how many repair parts it costs for legendary gear to be fixed is important. It may be a sink that works when we do have a lot of high level players. Especially when we do have players who think that doing trade skills are useless to them.

As for gold, mobs rarely drop gold. The only real way to make gold will be from market, trade, faction or settlement mission boards.

I do not know how much PvP rewards when it comes to gold and other currencies. And I do not mean open world PvP.

[Palad1n]

OP is over thinking and over complicating their thought processes for this type of game. It is not built around a player economy, or any real form of trade.

EVE online was, but not New World.

You can't make an MMO into something it is not. Long term for New World? Honestly the player base will most likely dry up after the first 30-60 days as there is very limited end game, let alone real progression.

The current PvP "meta" revolves around a very limited number of participants (50 vs 50) to determine outcomes of who owns towns, keeps, etc.

Older games such as DAOC, had a far more robust economy and PvP system that worked in a 3 faction system quite nicely. That game you would see hundreds of players participating in ongoing keep sieges, many times simultaneous wars on multiple fronts!

New World is a really nice, graphical MMO with basic PvE elements, basic story telling, basic crafting and economy systems, and basic PvP system which the player has full control over.

Yes, there is a lot of potential for the game, but that is completely up to the decision makers who often times have little to no real experience making these type of games. It comes down to, how many units they can sell with X features and Y in-game store transactions.

We live in a time where programmers and coders have little input or control over the outcome of the game, as corporate bean counters are more interested in generating the most quarterly profits for their share holders and selling enough units to get their bonuses.

[Ende]

Palad1n, you gave me the idea of a concept. And looks like it already exist !

What about if the solution of economy in video games is introduce a crypto currency.

I was reading and there are many cases like that. (160 crypto currency marked as for Gaming market)

One of the example is a crypto called "The Sandbox" SAND value 0.95$

Description:

"According to the official whitepaper, the Sandbox platform’s main mission is to introduce blockchain technology in mainstream gaming successfully. The platform focuses on facilitating a creative “play-to-earn” model, which allows users to be both creators and gamers simultaneously. The Sandbox employs the powers of blockchain technology by introducing the SAND utility token, which facilitates transactions on the platform."

or Rune value 403$

"Rune is a dark fantasy role playing game (RPG). Play and earn runes. Use runes to craft gear (NFTs) that can be used to make your character more powerful. Earn crypto in this addicting game by raiding farms, crafting, lending, trading unique gear, and battling other players, guilds, and AI for victory."

Maybe amazon gaming tokens. Will be interesting see gaming evolve in the next years

[Ozius]

Originally posted by Ende:

Palad1n, you gave me the idea of a concept. And looks like it already exist !

What about if the solution of economy in video games is introduce a crypto currency.

I was reading and there are many cases like that. (160 crypto currency marked as for Gaming market)

One of the example is a crypto called "The Sandbox" SAND value 0.95$

Description:

"According to the official whitepaper, the Sandbox platform’s main mission is to introduce blockchain technology in mainstream gaming successfully. The platform focuses on facilitating a creative “play-to-earn” model, which allows users to be both creators and gamers simultaneously. The Sandbox employs the powers of blockchain technology by introducing the SAND utility token, which facilitates transactions on the platform."

or Rune value 403$

"Rune is a dark fantasy role playing game (RPG). Play and earn runes. Use runes to craft gear (NFTs) that can be used to make your character more powerful. Earn crypto in this addicting game by raiding farms, crafting, lending, trading unique gear, and battling other players, guilds, and AI for victory."

Maybe amazon gaming tokens. Will be interesting see gaming evolve in the next years

That would only encourage hackers and bots, killing the game. No game should ever have monetary incentives.