Economies are fragile entities in MMOs and should be considered early on in the development process. Visionary Realms has made economy one of the Tenets of Pantheon: Game economies should delay and minimize item value deflation. We’ll take a look at what deflation is and why it’s important to stave off this enemy of the realm.
Deflation, in an economic sense, is a reduction of the general level of prices in an economy. I do not think that this is what Visionary Realms is targeting. An item’s value isn’t just the price for which you can sell it. Some of the value is dictated by the difficulty in obtaining it. So even if you cannot sell an item, its value can be deflated by more of this rare item being out there than is proper.
Generally in an MMO, the bigger, long-term issue is inflation. Inflation is a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money. MMOs are closed systems. Within this system, wealth is created by looting mobs or selling items to in-game non player characters. These virtual mints have no limit to how much they can generate. The mobs respawn and thus the wealth they generate is limitless. Games therefore need ways to remove funds from games to limit individual player wealth. These are referred to as “money sinks”. Even with the sinks, wealth in MMOs only grows. Eventually things that used to cost 5 gold now cost 10, then 20 and up. This trend is nearly unavoidable. Money sinks can delay it, but eventually inflation will occur. This is the way.
I think the deflation that the developers are discussing here refers to items losing value due to unforeseen events. These can include -but aren’t limited to- exploits such as duplicated items flooding the market, temporary rare item hype where things that were rare become common for some reason, an increased drop rate in ultra rare items, an item being “nerfed” (having its effectiveness reduced in some way), or a poorly-implemented change to the game by the developers. Each of these things can severely impact the economy by driving the value or price of specific items way down. There is no way to prevent these things from happening 100% of the time, but the developers need to be monitoring the economy to make sure there isn’t an unplanned change that will impact the player experience. These are complex games, and sometimes there are unforeseen links between a change and its effect on the economy.
If one of the aforementioned events should happen, quick, decisive action is needed to minimize the impact. A live hotfix, if possible, is the best solution as it will not bring the servers down, but sometimes bringing the game down to get it right is the best choice. We are better off being without Pantheon for a short time to protect the integrity of the economy.
Keeping an eye on all aspects of the game’s economy is important so it’s easy to understand why the developers made it a part of Pantheon’s foundation.
Special thanks to @ABrown35 and @kidleeasf for their input and help understanding a bit more about game economies.
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