dynamic economy

[Argh]

Hi Guys!

I used my two free lessons today to think about some thinks regarding The Mana World. One of the outcomings was the idea of a dynamic market (like in space-trading games like X - Beyond the Frontier), so that if a bunch of players sell masses of a special product in a city the prices for this special prodcut (or if it is a resource, the products basing on that) will descent bit by bit.

To create a realistic economy situation in the Mana World (so, that a city at the coast sells more and cheap fish and water in a desert cities is rare and expansive) I've got the following idea, which might not be really realistic, but is much simpler to implement that to let npc chipping wood and go fishing (this could be implemented later ).
It's like that:
What is needed first is to set resource spots on the world map (i.e. "wood" in a the forests, "fish" in the sea, etc.). Then you could calculate the distance of the particular city to those resource spots in the near. On the basis if this distances you could then calculate how much of the appropriate resources and goods basing on those would be on the market - for example would a city near a large wood sell much very cheap things made from wood.
I think this idea is good to create a realistic game world and it furthermore saves time and effort otherwise used to think about and edit all the markets manually.

[Kyokai]

Sounds pretty interesting. Let's have multiple currencies for the regions too, like in Secret of Evermore, because that was cool.

[Talaroc]

Agreed with both ideas. Those sorts of things could help to correct a big problem with a lot of RPGs: no distinct cultures, even when you travel halfway around the world.

[Bjørn]

I agree with having realistic prices and I also think different currencies are an interesting idea, but I'm not sure about the proposed way of reaching the first. Instead of artificially making prices realistic, I think we could try to make them realistic by modifying price based on the amount of resources of a certain kind players take to or away from the market.

So near a beach town where there's lots of crabs, people will return with crab parts to the city a lot so their crab parts won't be worth much and won't costs much here either. If you want to sell your crab for more money, you'd need to take it land inwards. The more people do this, the cheaper crab will get at the places were people take their crab, etc.

You could even have players that don't fight crab at all, but just transport it to other cities to make money. Of course you can only transport so much and the price will have normalized between the cities.

I think some kind of logaritmic scaling will still need to keep the prices within reason cause the system may otherwise be vulnerable to go out of hand, but I think it is possible to do it dynamically like this.

[Argh]

but I'm not sure about the proposed way of reaching the first. Instead of artificially making prices realistic, I think we could try to make them realistic by modifying price based on the amount of resources of a certain kind players take to or away from the market.

I wanted to express to mix the two: The available resources around the market would define the basic prices, which the player influences then by trading. But after a certain time, the city has recovered its resources, so the market situation puts itself right again, if not much is traded.

[Kyokai]

Do we have a coordinator for world desing? Someone needs to apply for that so they can start getting all these great ideas categorized and figure out how to implement them.

[Bjørn]

That would be Rotonen, he's into the ideas though, not the implementation.

[Rotonen]

My opinion: a dynamical economy. An idea of mine: the economy system could be finite, not infinite as in most games: the money wouldn't spawn from nothingness, there should be a constant number of money and the value of money would evolve then (if the economy would get out of hand the gamedevs, us, could spawn more money into the world to speed up the inflation rate on purpose).

[Kyokai]

So I need to create a dynamic economy system too now? I'll put it on my to do list then. Don't expect it to be done for a while though, I've already got alot on my hands.

[Bjørn]

I think nobody said you had to implement it. Also while this dynamic economy idea is interesting, it's thinking months ahead of the current state of the game.

[Kyokai]

Right. We need to get core systems up first.

I didn't mean to sound like I was exasperated by it. I'm excited by the idea, but, as you said, Bjorn, it's a bit ahead of us at the moment.

I just want to let everyone know we will get to it eventually. So there, now you know.

[Rotonen]

Dynamic economy is a nice idea, but it always has a great risk of devalvation and/or inflation. So a semi controlled system?

[Kyokai]

We'll need a semi-controlled model, so none of the kingdoms can go broke. I think maybe the price limits can be 25%-300%, based on how that kingdom is doing politically in respect to other kingdoms. Currencies can also change value, which creates a sort of stock-market type simulation.