Game Economics - What ya think?

[Merrie]

Here is an interesting question for folks. I've played alot of online games and many older tabletop games. During a design phase (been slow because Im taking courses online for 3D modeling.) I was trying to lay down if I wanted economics or not.

Economics can open a can of worms in regards to farmers and resource camping (where a player waits for a node to respawn then grabs it.)

I would love to have some crafting and such in my social game but I don't want to fight with the above style of players. Not that it will be open to the world mind you, but Im sure Ill draw a couple bad apples.

What do folks think, is there some creative ways to have an economy and help to discourage the bad apples dropping in my basket?

Thanks!

[acocq]

Not sure what kind of economy you have in mind ... but the ones I've seen/played often restrict the benefit of a production unit to the "owner" of that unit ... so if player A takes possession of / builts a production unit, then only player A will have access to the produced goods of that unit ... player B would have to "acquire" the production unit (i.e. beg/borrow/steal  ) in order to benefit from it ...

Is this what you are thinking of ?

Cheers,
Andreas

[Merrie]

For example you gather wood to make bows, and the bows can be sold on the auction for the coin of the game.

[acocq]

Ahh ... I see ... I was thinking of complex production facilities ... but even so ... you could design the game so that even the "woods" belong to a player and unless another player "captures" the forest, only the owning player can gather up the wood ...

But, of course, it would allow more "freedom of play", if a player can collect "natural resources" and nobody "owns" the forest ...  maybe spawning the goodies at irregular intervals would counteract the "squatting for resource" problem you mentioned ?  Or maybe you would allow re-spawning only if no player is within a certain radius of the spawning point ?

Cheers,
Andreas

[Kor]

Play perfect world to see what hes talking about haha, Basically in PWi You roam around gather different materials to craft items (e.g. Armor, Weapons, charms etc...) no one owns the forest (unless a faction has the territory the forest is in)...

Did I hit the nail on the head? or....not?

[gekido]

implementing a crafting type of system is definitely possible, but obviously requires a lot of planning and 'back end' design.

this is something that the optionsfile system is perfectly suited for:

- each raw 'resource' in the game has an options file specifying things like weight, value etc

- each 'product' (craftable item) has an options file that dictates what pre-requisites the object has in order to be craft, as well as perhaps details such as how long it will take to craft the item etc.

in Fallen Earth (the mmo that i've recently become horribly addicted to) there are also tiers of crafting - so to make a gun or vehicle, you must first craft the individual parts of the object prior to crafting the final 'end result', which is basically the same as above.

in addition, in order to craft objects, you must have a specific skill level and the required 'knowledge' to craft the item (recipe in FE terms), which can be bought / acquired - but in order to raise your skill level you have to craft lower-level items, etc.

all in all, definitely do-able but would involve a LOT of paper-design work to keep track of everything.  of course, if you want it to be online-based, you would do most of the crafting logic on the server etc but that adds a whole other set of management / design issues ;}