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MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits

Extra Credits · 1.5M views · 2016-11-23 · 8:44

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Overview

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

On Hacker News

Cited in game-economy threads as a clear explanation of why vendor-sellable loot causes hyperinflation and how designers counter it.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2020

Topics

Game designMicroeconomics & behavioral economicsGaming culture & analysis
Search by tags
mmoinflationvirtual currencygold sinks

What people said

sdrinf · 2016-11 · Recommendation

Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways to avoid it: [VIDEO] | When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item for double the price. Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it. The game looks really promising, and I'd love to grind a few hours in it as it stands, but I'm not sure if dropping a bitcoin dependency into it won't sink it prematurely.

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geek_at · 2020-12 · Reference

until you have an established player base and are using 95% or your time for balancing and the economy ( [VIDEO] )

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stcredzero · 2016-12 · Reference

Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. [VIDEO] My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.

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Sources

Video by Extra Credits, played through YouTube.

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