Oddbean new post about login | logout No mmo has ever created a successful ingame economy because the game prints money when you kill monsters and it eventually undergoes hyperinflation. They end up resorting to huge gold/item sinks and price controls to try to fix it. Sounds familiar … 🤔 maybe design “gold” systems with scarcity in mind. I haven’t found a game that does this right.
Wen bitcoin in mmo and ordinals items
bitcoin backed ingame currency has been something i have been thinking about for a good 13 years now. I’ve always wondered how I could make that work without making it pay to win.
That's called real life and using bitcoin as a currency.
I think a real thing that's not being considered is that real life economies include efforts/capital towards innovation. With mmo economies, the only grind is for existing goods because there's no ability to "invent" items. Thus, all inflation and all grind goes solely towards the purchase of the highest level items, which either have to generated at a rate matching demand, or inflate to infinity because their scarce. Sounds weird, but in game economy would have to introduce "invention" as a natural sink for capital to combat inflation whether it be from in game grinding or external pay-to-win players
it's not just the in-game currency. In an MMO a lot of the abuse comes from duping resources or items. If the in-game economy is secured by it's own ledger then duping resources to dump the market all of a sudden doesn't work cause the internal blockchain would reject any injected resources as they haven't been created in a mining process. 1 sat is just 1 sat so the currency is solid by design. It's everything else that gets exploited in game engines eventually resulting in a crashing eco-system. To go back to CSC MMO, the game had it's own scarcity engine which would ensure that ore, ships, module etc etc were actually created or mined in-game before ever making it to the market.
Maybe ecash would be great for this 🤔
Why not just sats? Bitcoin works fine with LN and removes a native shit token from the start. I think the challenge is really creating a tamperproof system to prevent the duping and other abuse that affects the economy of an MMO. The currency is just that, currency. If every unit of ore and every module created for a ship has to be verified by an internal ledger then you've already fixed one of the biggest economic issues in MMO's
Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Making everything sats would make the game pay-to-win, which puts off 98% of gamers.
Isn't it only pay-to-win if people can purchase things from the game's store which they cannot acquire through grinding in-game? if the developer was to only "seed" the game initially with mods and ships but then turn over the economy to the players through an uncapped tier based crafting system then everything in the game has to be created by the players. As in MK1, MK2, MK3 shields for your ship (for example). Perhaps dig into CSC. The concept of that MMO was great but unfortunately the company decided to let the game go.
making it sats implies there’s ways to get them in and out or transfer them between players. Once it’s on bitcoin then you can bring money from the real world to buy more resources in game.
I understand what you're saying. But those resources were mined by someone (not duped) and by buying them you'll have to pay them for their labour. If the economy is balanced well then resources would be scarce enough to have value on the market and if you want to "pay-to-win" me $1,000 for some ores so that you can fast track to a plasma shield MK3, your call 😉
Also, consider that things can be energy-backed without being bitcoin. nostr:nevent1qqsg2xrggnayk8xya7t4wmraqpvkptr0cw8g3nn038a7v8z8yu0kw0spramhxue69uhky6t5vdhkjmndv9uxjmtpd35hxarn9ehkumrfdejsyg8ga5me33hla0l6ppgp4su7yutx9073vrmg372vghtf9krk0hf5tgpsgqqqqqqs205rhz
Specifically, I mean that game items could be attained through POW. An example would be crafting. Other items could be committed to this crafting operation as ingredients (referenced as preimage tags). The POW (NIP-13) yields a new item that required other items and energy to produce. Since its a game, you can require events to be published to the game's dedicated relay. This allows the game clients to check for double spends on ingredients. I'm working on a game that uses a system like this. The event ID of the item must contain leading zeroes, and the digits after the zeroes must match a certain bit suffix to yield a particular item. The game functions as an interpretation mechanism for POW. Game items could also be purchased for sats. Crafting and buying are different things.
this is pretty interesting actually 🤔 PoW as a mechanism for adding a cost to production. you could see how much cumulative work went into a final item from the transitive input graph.
My concern would be out-of-game grinding. You have any way to deal with that?
You mean just running POW outside the game to get items? This is solved by requiring crafting ingredients. The crafting ingredients are only dropped by DVMs if you meet the right conditions.
Bro, every time you open your mouth, and I mean this in the best way: https://i.imgflip.com/1itoun.jpg?a473899
Is pow difficultly used to determine quality or rarity? I was imagining gpus grinding away to get higher quality drops. Maybe you don’t use pow for this for this reason.
The POW can be interpreted many different ways; rarity is possible. If someone has the prerequisite items and wants to direct a GPU farm at mining a great item, I'd say let them. But other mechanics are possible. Example: You craft ammo. You combine 2 items and then apply POW. The amount of ammo you get is equal to the POW (leading zeroes). This is asymmetrically beneficial, because each additional unit of ammo costs DOUBLE the previous unit, so it is better to find the most efficient sweet spot to maximize the resources you are sacrificing to create the ammo. (Each additional leading zero costs double the previous in POW terms). So you don't actually want the highest POW possible.
Damn this is really good. I want to try this.
Another idea that I had was to have the server give out a gametick bearer token, that is needed as an input when crafting items. The token is only valid up until a certain time, so you can only grind for so long.
A crafting window of sorts. 🤔 Could you randomize the window somehow in an equitible fashion or would a static value suffice?
lol I’ve also spent many hours thinking about this. I just want to play UO and earn sats. https://image.nostr.build/b668b0e559b1db36d351a019ec470e6752eaa5bfb60d71c44edfe3958b00dd99.jpg
There are always people and bots that will farm the gold and throw off the local economy.
Imagine if the government let people use the money printer but they had to keep pressing a button over and over to print each dollar. People would or course make a machine to press the button for them (bots). The issue is probably the money printer and less the bots. But how to reward players without printing stuff? Hard problem. Albion has a cool system called the black market where you sell stuff to mobs loot tables. Maybe thats a part of it.
Isn't it exactly what bitcoin fixes? Sats instead of in-game "gold"
If you tied it directly to bitcoin saylor or whales could completely break the game. Maybe bitcoin backed ecash or something
meh. Sounds like shitcoinery
Thats like saying every ingame currency is a shitcoin. Noone is investing money into this. Its just a smart accounting system to try to fix the inflation issue
I agree, and isn't bitcoin a smart accounting system that fixes the inflation issue? Everything else they could come up with, the developers of the game must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of in-game currencies is of breaches of that trust
Generally game devs do not benefit by debasing the ingame currency, since that would make the game worse. They spend lots of time trying to bandaid fix inflation issues caused by gold drop money printing systems.
Can’t use bitcoin L1 directly because it’s slow and not meant for toys like gaming. Currently playing with the idea of ecash tokens backed by bitcoin. Players could get these bearer tokens as drops and trade them between players. I think it would work well! Maybe at the end the player could even cash out and in to grow the economy at a controlled rate.
Wouldn’t that just go back to the bot issue? You’d have bots farming tokens? How are tokens distributed to the mobs? Who sets the drop rate and what funds that initially?
I can see how they could have a large influence on the game but don't think they'd necessarily be able to break it. They can't break reality with their bitcoin so why would the be able to do it with a game?
@jb55 EVE Online have built a very successful in-game economy. They even have economists on staff just for that purpose.
CryptoSpaceCommanders did a very good job in 2018 with their space MMO. So good that they completed the game before they went into a three year soft rug of the now difunctional game. It was one of the best proof-of-concepts every created for web3 gaming aka play-to-own your stuff.
You would enjoy REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. They build an in-game economy in an MMO based on physically modeling geologic gold production in the earth. The game-gold becomes a stronger currency than fiat, and people play the game as a way to earn money.
awesome, will read
Another super interesting economy is steam money, It has become apparent to me that valve has designed their item market in a very clever, very sneaky way. It's easy to get `real money` into `steambucks`, and almost impossible to get them out. People view `$1 steambuck = $1 real` but are in fact far far less valuable. Games can constantly print items and "airdrop" them free onto players at no cost. Items are rarely sold, and if they are sold, they're being sold in order to afford more expensive items in that same economy. Steambucks never leave. Games on steam release items in waves, discontinuing the supply process for past items. These supply-discontinued items feel rare to people, and on average get bid up with increases in player base. Everyone's item value in steambucks goes up. People go nuts over these 'rare' items, everyone knows the steam item market simply goes in one direction --- up. People start depositing large sums of money into steambucks. Not because they want to buy cool skins for their game, but because they want to invest in the rarity and scarcity of steam items. Steambuck portfolios. (reminiscent the nft craze isn't it). Ok now you've got a lot of steambucks, you might finally want to get them out. There's no "withdraw" button. You search for a 3rd party item for cash exchange. All the links are dead because either they were scams or valve smacked them with copyright or something. Finally you find someone barely trustworthy that recommends a marketplace. The marketplace offers you 40c on the dollar, and that's not including all your steam market fees to convert your items into the items they want. Grim.. so what can you spend your steambucks on? Games. Games that valve can print for free. And their steamdeck. t. my csgo cases i got 'airdropped' in 2016 went up a lot
Ultima Online tried it. The economy siezed up from hoarding resources. "Fixed" by changing NPC shopkeeps to accept rediculous goods via gold assigned to them out of thin air in time based alottments, as well as time based creation of more resources. Game system went from finite supply to perpetually inflationary
Yes. The typical 'fix' added in MMO's are money sinks, to cause players to lose money, thereby seemingly counteracting some of the apparent inflation. Taxes and fees are money sinks that won't fix inflation (expansion of the money supply).
It's not possible to make a game with good money. New players would have no way to attain gold when max supply is reached. New players by definition have no skill.
Yup. And some players would never log back in so that is lost
Yes precisely. I'm a game dev and a Bitcoiner. Ive thought about this issue for a very very long time. It's just not workable. A game economy must be controlled to ensure balance.
Couldn't you design a system that monitors the amount of active currency in recent circulation and only generates more to account for that? Then you just need low level stuff that high level characters don't have time to grind because they can get better value elsewhere. Gold would circulate to the noobs.
Yes. You're describing controlling the economy. Which is what I said.
it has to be circulating somehow
Inflation isn’t the monster like CT usually says. Humans are very ego-driven people. You need counter-balance it using some kind of time-dilution-power solution. If someone can get rich without doing anything, then nobody will want do anything. Like the laser-eyes culture. They want get rich but want #nostr plebs to build to them while they hodl forever while speaking non-sense on CT. That’s the biggest problem we already have on #bitcoin and we’re lucky we have a worst system (fiat) and we are currently winning but as soon as we win the peak motivation will be far-away.
No ones getting rich doing nothing. The lucky times of 1000x returns in short order are over. Interest and trading schemes on wall street are the do nothing get rich paths available today. Stat humble, work hard, stack sats. _defer_ your economic redemption for later.
When possible, gamers will tend to use the hardest item as money, SoJ in Diablo being the most famous example. For a game to do this right, it’d need a fixed amount of currency to serve as money, but also a way to distribute it as fairly as possible in the beginning. Offering faction wide goals that’d give everyone whom participates a fair share of the money would be one of several good options. Then let the free market handle the rest. Noobs would need to provide any kind of utility/services to the community to earn some money, or could be sponsored by friends pulling them into the game, like family works when you pull newborns into the world. Would be a great social experiment for sure.
https://www.entropiauniverse.com/ It pegs ingame currency to dollars. Not sure if you can count it as successful but it has been running for years and generates profit.
i always found it interesting on new WoW servers how the economy always resets and eventually as time goes on inflates to outrageous prices to where new characters are essentially locked out unless they luck into something random BoE drop worth a lot of gold.
"Hack" (ascii terminal game from BSD days) randomly distributes gold through the levels. Players and certain monsters take the gold when they find it (Leprechauns steal it right from a players pockets). When you kill a monster carrying gold, you can then take it. No new gold is generated.
It’s hard to describe how magical the stone of Jordan economy of Diablo 2 was. You just had to be there.
I made good bank playing Eulora because it's ingame economy was/is BTC-based. The coppers were pegged 1:1 to satoshis. Would prolly make a great model for other games if any were willing to implement such.
new world tried something like this, not sure on the full story but it had a massive deflationary crisis so they had to turn the money printers on.
interesting. any article available that explains more?
You’d have to spend a shitload of time mining ore or refining a resource, which is work and not play. It happens right, but those games (looking at you No Man’s Sky) IMHO become boring and tedious.
No mans sky and RuneScape are two of my favourite games. I guess I love the tedium 😅 I have almost 90 mining in ours.
I let someone convince me not to buy No Man's Sky. It was a mistake. Going to buy it now.
That person was 100% to tell you that in 2017. But it’s gotten better and better with each update. Not really my cup of tea, but it’s worth playing if you’re interested, and does not deserve the hate it got at launch.
Oh nice! Because that happened in 2017
To say that it overpromised and underdelivered on launch is an understatement, however it has exceeded all that and more with where it is today.
I wanted to love it, but the procedural generation of planets (flora/fauna/terrain) got so samey to me. Which is kinda weird because I dig Minecraft? Back to monetary policy and gaming: Perhaps attainable with shitcoin POW? Like CPU compute?
The problem is that NPC don’t spend the money you give them. After a while, the NPC will hoard all the wealth and players will be left with nothing. If there is a way for NPC to spend the money, you will have a circular economy.
what would npcs buy
I want to say they can buy things players collect. But usually in games items are sold at a huge discount, giving a huge advantage to the npcs. So this needs to be tight. NPC can’t sell things they didn’t pay for to begin with. But honestly at this point, the game is not fun 😅 there is no need to implement real economics in a game you the objective of it is to have fun.
They’ve never done it successfully “on purpose”, but there’s something to be said about creating a range of small, valuable and rare items and then letting the players converge around whatever works. Emergent (accidental?) “monetary” policy is best
