Nothing new here, just going over the basics for the clarity's sake.
So, why economy? There's lots of games with no ingame economy, ppl come there to have fun, shoot stuff n this works just fine.
If the goal is to make loot desirable and meaningful you have to create a basic economic system.
If the ultimate goal is to create a complex and truthful virtual model of the reality, the more so.
For anything to be desirable it has to have a certain ingame value. If supply surpasses the demand the item value drops to zero. If all you can possibly loot from a mob or mine from the ground is worthless you have failed to create a working economic system and have to rely on other motivators (eg skills) to keep the ppl interested and game going.
Game economy is just another word for a set of balancing mechanisms. Game world's population is always relatively small compared to the real one. Games are relatively small closed systems therefore their economy is never "free" but carefully regulated. Those regulations are not visible for the untrained eye, creating an impression of free market and player-driven economic trends but ultimately it's only a artificially created illusion.
Basics of balancing.
Our goal was to provide (additional) motivation for the players to collect loot (and consume the resources while doing it). To achieve this we have to have some items/resources that have high value. "High" here is relative, it's somewhat higher than the total value of resources spent while trying to get those desirable items/resources. The only reason for this is the (relative) rarity of those items/resources (demand higher than supply).
In the big picture you now have certain resources you want to keep in high demand, regardless of the decisions and actions of any single player at any given moment and the trends of what your whole playerbase tends to do in the game in general.
It is improtant to understand that those actions are highly random, dependent on factors you can't possibly predict or control. Consequently, you can't rely on static loot tables to keep resources at desired level of supply. Static loot tables inevitably lead to oversupply and deficite.
A working balancing mechanism relies on the feedback from the game (could be done manually or could be a script that at certain intervals runs a database query and modifies a certain variable). (Over)simplified example: if the total reserve of a certain resource exceeds a treshold stops dropping from the mobs / can't be found in a mining claim.
(In reality it's better not to monitor the total result but the average price paid in trades, and the balancing action works better if it's a gradual decrease not an instant cut-off... for the reasons that are going beyond the topic at hand)Now we have a situation where certain resource(s) were dropping from a certain mob, but now have stopped dropping to avoid oversupply. The mob should still provide some loot with the total (average) value close to the value of the resources spent to kill that mob (or: find that mining claim).
Apparently we have to have a "filler loot", something that "fills the gap" and has no controlled maximum amount (and therefore relatively worthless).
What to do with filler loot? We create a
loot sink for it.
Suppose one of our filler loots is animal blood.
1. We can make it refinable. Either with some other filler loot, or by itself (like wood refining works currently, allowing endless re-refine). To motivate players to do that we provide something relatively cheap and useless for it. Some secondary skill that increases HP in huge amounts, or we make it drop a pnote now and then, etc.
2. We can include it in the crafting recipes. Making HK's would require huge amount of animal blood (or big amount of something refined from a huge amount of animal blood). Or even include it to the really massive crafting recipes like making of ammo or refining stones. Could be an additional measure used with those described in #1.
As a result, we will have mechanisms that keep the whole system recycled and balanced
regardless of any players actions. In fact it's so powerful that if u would release this system to the aftereffects of the totally unbalanced economic system like we have it in AW, it would effortlessly eat it all up and not even cough.
If you don't have such an economic system, what good would the manual wipe of certain resources do to you? It will only postpone the next wipe...
I mean, you either have it or you don't. In our case, regretfully, it seems you don't. Maybe it's a good time to start .... think ing about creating one, sometimes in the future... ?
________________________________
[size=78%]Disclaimer: I'm not talking about RCE here. It's the simple working game economy based on ingame currency. If that currency is convertible to real world currency is a whole another question.[/size]
