[MUD-Dev] Crafting/Creation systems

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Ron Gabbard" <rgabbard at swbell.net>

> Thus, to have an inflation-proof, balanced economy you need: 1a. A
> closed market with a fixed money supply, or 1b. An open economy
> with no hard-coded prices or wages and a system by which prices
> can adjust to inflation.  2. A system by which the supply of goods
> is able to equal the demand for those goods.

> If a game designer can create a system where the available supply
> of raw materials equals the player-driven demand for raw materials
> without the players providing the supply and where the price for
> those raw materials can adjust to inflation and are market-driven,
> more power to them.

In DAoC, there's an interesting dynamic that has set in now that
players have realized that even without special magical bonuses, a
good player-crafted weapon is significantly superior to a loot drop
weapon.  In DAoC, quality of output is random in a range from 94-100
(the best non "Dragon-grade" loot is 93%), with equal chances of
94-99 and one chance in 71 of a 100% quality item (aka
"masterpiece").  Players being the way they are, and the system
working the way it does, a 97% weapon is considered barely
acceptable, a 98% workable, a 99% preferrable, and you really want a
100% masterpiece.

But the only way to guarantee the quality is to keep trying to make
the item until it comes out at the quality you want.  It comes out
low you have to salvage it (with some loss of raw material) and
start over.  If you insist on 97%+, it's going to cost, on average,
50% more.  98% doubles the effective cost, 99% quadruples it, and if
you insist on 100% it's going to increase the cost by a factor of 40
(plus whatever premium the crafter demands for spending so much time
creating and salvaging weapons to make your perfect specimen).

Keep in mind, the combat performance difference between a 98% and
99% item is not very large, in fact it would take some careful
analysis of combat logs to see it.  But because it is present,
players will demand it, *if* they can come up with the funds.  If
the player has more, he spends more.

This isn't applying to armor yet, because the other bonuses gained
from loot-drops (bonuses to stats, resists, etc.) are outweighing
the gain they would see in reduced melee damage.  However,
instilling equivalent magical bonuses into player-crafted items is
only a few weeks off, and I fully expect that once it does
player-crafted items will become the equipment of choice (and that
players won't be able to afford full sets of it, but that's a
different discussion).  The main thing is that players will spend
themselves broke chasing tiny marginal gains in performance,
regardless of whether the economy is open or closed, or if raw
material prices are fixed or floating.

>From a purist viewpoint, DAoC's economy is inflationary, in the
sense that players can get arbitrarily large amounts of money, and
equipment can get arbitrarily stronger (spellcrafting and alchemy
will have "soft failure" regions where attempts to improve an item
can fail to take, consuming their raw material but exceeding normal
caps when successful).  But in practice the things that normally
create inflationary pressures have been converted into safety valves
to *prevent* inflation from becoming significant.

> Cynical?  Yeah... sorry.  It's just that UO has been out for what,
> 5+ years?  MMPs released since then are actually going backwards
> with regards to designing integrated systems that will efficiently
> support thousands of concurrent players... particularly in the
> area of crafting and economics.  What's up with that?

I ain't done yet.  The economy I designed included Spellcrafting,
and has had a big hole where that belonged.  Even so, the underlying
economy in DAoC has proven fundamentally sound, and I'm proud of how
*little* I've had to worry about it since launch.

--Dave


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev