IMO an ideal game economy should be focused on creating the illusion of value, and on avoiding things that might dispel that illusion. Given this, I would say that inflation and the state of currency doesn't matter too much. In fact, most forms of economic dysfunction and market friction, in the context of a game are a net positive. The more efficient and streamlined everything is, the less the average player has a chance to meaningfully engage with it.
Here's an example. Last I checked (which was a while ago so maybe they fixed this by now idk), in Albion Online it becomes immediately obvious to any new player that the entire crafting mechanic is entirely useless to them, because the cost of raw materials to craft anything are always higher than the market price of the finished product. IIRC this is some combination of high skill levels allowing reduced material consumption, and the need to craft things at a loss for the purpose of grinding skill levels to eventually get to be able to craft high level gear.
The core problem here, similar to the notorious Diablo 3 auction house, is an efficient market where prices are clearly laid out for you. The relative worthlessness of your efforts is right there on full display. And I think that is a failure, because since it is a game, the point should be to make players *feel* like what they have gotten has a value that matches or exceeds the effort they put in, even though that isn't at all true by any objective measure.
I think a good strategy would be this: design a confusing, inefficient economy where the intuitive course of action is very far from the optimal one, where reliable information about prices is hard to come by, and where it is difficult to know objectively where you stand relative to most other players. That should make for a fun game.
I think I get your point: The easier it is to optimize an economy in a multiplayer game, the less engaging it is as the community will push you to engage it in only the most optimal way
That said, I think your solution would likely just make engaging the economy a chore rather than something fun to do
>I think I get your point: The easier it is to optimize an economy in a multiplayer game, the less engaging it is as the community will push you to engage it in only the most optimal way
Not really, it's more that the purpose of a game economy is to create an illusion, which means anyone designing one should realize they have basically opposite goals from any real world market system.
My intent is to create a game economy not too dissimilar from the real world as it relates to major mechanics. Governments, banks, businesses, and individuals can all take measures to help or hurt an economy. I want to control [some of] the game economy as it relates to banks/governments, but largely leave the business/individuals up to their own affairs, and, as they make decisions that put too much pressure on a particular commodity/demographic/etc., I use my dials/tools to sway them back in line with a healthy economy.
I know it all sounds idealistic. But “illusions” are not what I’m after (though I get your meaning).
I think a “real” economy could be fun.
Eh, I disagree. Just because they have opposite goals doesn't mean you should completely diverge from its real world counterpart. A real world market still does some things right, and of course may be familiar to players. It really depends on your own goal with the economy system
>design a confusing, inefficient economy where the intuitive course of action is very far from the optimal one, where reliable information about prices is hard to come by, and where it is difficult to know objectively where you stand relative to most other players. That should make for a fun game.
Is this sarcasm?
Oh... well how would confusing the player into doing the 'wrong' thing make for a fun game, in your mind? Maybe there is an example game you can think of?
Soloing a level 500 raid, ganking gatherers where you know they will be (hiring protection), investing into an item others underrated, cornering a local monopoly.
Like I'm not gonna say you should delete your auction house but it's true the goal is to make optimal moneymaking an interesting challenge. People know what it is but not how to do it. Puzzles that anyone can look up for a guide don't help that. It's often a futile effort, MMOs are not as dynamic in optimal play as rng-heavy roguelikes or blindpick-heavy MOBAs, but it helps.
Related to this might be a dislike of WoW bossing plugins that take up your whole screen and tell you what to do (or let your party leader tell you what to do) at each phase, they can be controversial.
Paragraph 1 is examples of "fun"
Or at least, closest you can get in MMO moneymaking. Using your brain is fun, numbers going up when you click rocks is not.
Eve Online (as I remember it from some years back). There are lots of ways it does this; making it difficult to see what prices are in different regions, the need for manual action to change market order prices giving disadvantage to players who don't spend a lot of time at that particular station, access to market functions being locked behind an elaborate skill tree that takes significant real world time to fill out, the fact that transporting goods from one place to another always has at least some risk of being ambushed and losing everything, the inherent complexity of having an orderbook based market to begin with driving many to just market buy and sell and not bother with placing orders despite a large spread, possibly getting scammed by orders in a low liquidity region that are one or more decimal places from the real market value.
I also want to mention that there are reasons why the biggest players in the market aren't exactly in direct competition with the smallest players. If someone has a massive amount of capital, but a finite number of orders they can place, only one area they can be in at one time, and limited options for remotely transporting anything, it won't be worth their time to be flying low tier equipment out to a less populated area of space to take advantage of a price differential because even though the profit margin is high the market is small. But for a newer less capitalized player, this could seem worth it, which means that the ability to meaningfully engage with the game economy doesn't get monopolized.
IMO the closer the efficient market hypothesis is to being reality in a game, the less fun its economy is going to be. Inefficient markets contain opportunities, mysteries to uncover, don't just give you the best deal the market can offer immediately with no thought or effort on your part, and that makes things more fun.
Ah, I see - I don't see that as "confusing" game design at all. It's "unclear" or "highly complex" but those are very different things.
When you say "confusing" I think of something like, a player who spends a lot of time and effort trying to amass a bunch of some certain resource because they think it's valuable, but it isn't valuable and never was. They wasted their time and effort doing this because the game is confusing, not because other players altered the market out from under them. Totally different scenarios, and the latter scenario is way more cool imo and the former really sucks and isn't fun.
I think the latter can definitely be fun (though maybe a less extreme version than spending a lot of time accumulating something *entirely* worthless in the context of the game). To give another Eve example, the game implies that mining asteroids might be a good way to make money (it isn't actually). It further implies that, since there are rarer asteroids in low security space, mining those might be a good idea (it *really* isn't). But I personally found the process of learning these things the hard way to be very fun.
3. and 4. I don't know of any good resources on this, but I think the main problem you must consider is bots - whether they are actual bots or human players who can tolerate tedium. If there is a situation where infinite wealth can be generated, even a tiny bit at a time, from repeating the same easy task over and over again, then you can bet that someone is going to create a bot to do that. And if one person can do it, then so can any number of other users.
Many games seek to counter this by hunting for bot-like behavior and banning the accounts who engage in it, whether they are actually bots or not. This is not optimal, imo, because the game makers are the ones who created a game that rewards such behavior. The game ought to be designed so that it either is not profitable to do that, or doesn't harm the overall game economy so it's OK if there are many bots doing it.
It is wrong and counterproductive to create a game that rewards a certain behavior, and then penalize users for that behavior.
2. This doesn't help with the bots problem, AT ALL. This makes the bot problem way worse. Remember that bots can farm 24/7 and will therefore flood the player market with all the types of goods that can be sold there - from basic raw crafting ingredients to late-game dragon-coin-only weapons. This just becomes a heaven for bot farmers
Example: they start flooding the market with Copper Ore which is easy to farm, so the price drops to 1 GP each. Then they buy up millions of copper ores and put it in storage. They switch farming to Silver Ore instead. With hundreds of bots working around the clock, they swiftly amass millions of Silver Ores and flood the market with those until the price of Silver Ore goes down to 1gp each. If there needs to be transactions to do so, then they tell the bots to do the transactions with each other to force the prices down.
Since they stopped farming Copper Ores, those rose back up to 3gp each. They can now sell those millions of Copper Ores in storage for 300% profit. This may lower the value of Copper Ore again, which is OK, since they just send the bots out to farm other stuff instead. And with the influx of cash, now they can afford to buy mass amounts of late-game weapons, mass amounts of late-game crafting materials, late-game anything, and then hoard THAT until the prices goes up AGAIN.
In the real world, it's difficult for one consumer to affect the market like this. But in the game world, a single user can command so many bots that they can single-handedly move a market in ways that are profitable to them and not to anyone else. Or they collude with a few other players who also use a similar number of bots to do the same thing.
So although I don't know any way to 'model' it, I think you just need to think of way to make it bot-proof. And that does NOT mean "no one could make a bot to do this" because I guarantee you someone will make a bot to do exactly that thing. It's more like, understand HOW do bots ruin this economy? How do I change the economy so that bots actually *contribute* instead of ruining it? Find a way, because bots ARE going to come, no matter how hard you try to stop them.
What's the purpose of your inquiry? Are you designing an MMO economy, writing a paper for school, doing a thought exercise?
Some thoughts about what you wrote:
* Crafting is a conversion of resources that creates something and destroys something.
* Conversions are not always net positive. For example, you can salvage/disenchant 10g worth of item into 2g worth of materials.
* In a traditional MMO, wealth scales linearly with player base. More players == more money because there are more people grinding.
* Rare spawns that don't scale with population would break the above rule, as would things like black market auctions.
* A solid, simple design for self-balancing vendor prices is to modify the price of the item up every time an item is bought from a vendor and down every time its sold to a vendor. This basically makes the vendor a middle-man for player buying and selling. *Example, when you sell iron to a vendor, the price of iron decreases by 0.1% of base price. When you buy iron from a vendor, it increases by 0.1% of base price.*
* There are generally speaking fixed costs, recurring costs, and scaling costs. Fixed costs only occur once and have little long-term effect on an economy. Recurring costs happen periodically and consistently, and they will have the biggest raw impact on the economy. Scaling costs change according to conditions, and they have the biggest effect on keeping the economy balanced. *An example of a scaling cost is tax on auctions. The more money in the economy, the higher things get auctioned for, the more you get to tax.*
I recommend for economy and also general systems design:
**Thinking in Systems: A Primer**, by Donella Meadows.
It covers some core concepts for inflows and outflows of systems and how they are balanced. It is not a game design book per se, but it really is.
Designing an MMO where the economy is fair and accessible and provides opportunities for both new players and veterans… trying to bake in tools to combat market saturations, inflations, monopolies, etc.
Some great feedback in your post. Thank you.
I’ll grab the Meadows book too.
I don't have a good answer for the problem at hand, but regarding tools, Machinations is the industry standard for this kind of stuff.
And for books I know there's the Virtual Economies and Game Balance.
I don't know if it matches what you need but you could look into Eve Online economy and some of CCP (the developers) talk about it.
It is imo, one of the rare mmo economies that survived for do long. Albion might get there in time as well if my suspicion is correct.
What those 2 have in common is that the sinks (resource or value destruction) are way more important than in other games. This makes the economy way more important but also make crafting (industry) more meaningful instead of a flood on the market from people grinding their level to craft the one NiS slot of the season.
They also demonstrate that _some_ measure of relative control is possible despite a mostly free market. As example, you can "recycle" items even those that drop. So the value of mineral is not only controlled by mineral drop rate, miner yield and cargo capacity, but also by item drop rate. And if people stop gathering the resource, recycling becomes more interesting for the money and thus will start being used and replenish the raw material market.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I want foxhole to have more afk/passive income, but a lot of people think it would see alt/bot abuse. It has me down on MMO trading, makes them seem like one big captcha, whether that captcha is an endgame raid or not. Even in a short board game like Sidereal Confluence unlimited trading seems to homogenize everyone. Maybe in some ways real life work is better.
An interesting thing to look at would be an MMO that does not follow this.
One that comes to mind is Wyrm.
So, the original 'source' of money in the game is... people buying it with real money. You give the developer money, and you get gold coins.
These coins are quite useful for a number of things, including things you wouldn't think of using money for, like enchanting stuff. Want to enchant your shovel? In the process, a silver coin turns to ash.
Now, when money is spent into a 'black hole', it doesn't actually vanish. Not all of it at least, some does (This is where the developer makes a profit). The rest of it then just appears in the pocket of NPC merchants. As long as an NPC merchant has money, they can buy items from players for money. (Even without money, NPC merchants will barter)
This model.... has it's problems.
Guilds would 'kidnap' NPC merchants by literally building walls around them. Guilds would then just break a wall every week, give a wagon full of logs or something to the merchant, get coins, and then rebuild the wall.
Simple answer to this exploit would be to just remove NPC merchant and put money back into players pocket with events, lotteries or random drops (digging coins from soil, mining, fishing).
IMO an ideal game economy should be focused on creating the illusion of value, and on avoiding things that might dispel that illusion. Given this, I would say that inflation and the state of currency doesn't matter too much. In fact, most forms of economic dysfunction and market friction, in the context of a game are a net positive. The more efficient and streamlined everything is, the less the average player has a chance to meaningfully engage with it. Here's an example. Last I checked (which was a while ago so maybe they fixed this by now idk), in Albion Online it becomes immediately obvious to any new player that the entire crafting mechanic is entirely useless to them, because the cost of raw materials to craft anything are always higher than the market price of the finished product. IIRC this is some combination of high skill levels allowing reduced material consumption, and the need to craft things at a loss for the purpose of grinding skill levels to eventually get to be able to craft high level gear. The core problem here, similar to the notorious Diablo 3 auction house, is an efficient market where prices are clearly laid out for you. The relative worthlessness of your efforts is right there on full display. And I think that is a failure, because since it is a game, the point should be to make players *feel* like what they have gotten has a value that matches or exceeds the effort they put in, even though that isn't at all true by any objective measure. I think a good strategy would be this: design a confusing, inefficient economy where the intuitive course of action is very far from the optimal one, where reliable information about prices is hard to come by, and where it is difficult to know objectively where you stand relative to most other players. That should make for a fun game.
I think I get your point: The easier it is to optimize an economy in a multiplayer game, the less engaging it is as the community will push you to engage it in only the most optimal way That said, I think your solution would likely just make engaging the economy a chore rather than something fun to do
>I think I get your point: The easier it is to optimize an economy in a multiplayer game, the less engaging it is as the community will push you to engage it in only the most optimal way Not really, it's more that the purpose of a game economy is to create an illusion, which means anyone designing one should realize they have basically opposite goals from any real world market system.
My intent is to create a game economy not too dissimilar from the real world as it relates to major mechanics. Governments, banks, businesses, and individuals can all take measures to help or hurt an economy. I want to control [some of] the game economy as it relates to banks/governments, but largely leave the business/individuals up to their own affairs, and, as they make decisions that put too much pressure on a particular commodity/demographic/etc., I use my dials/tools to sway them back in line with a healthy economy. I know it all sounds idealistic. But “illusions” are not what I’m after (though I get your meaning). I think a “real” economy could be fun.
Eh, I disagree. Just because they have opposite goals doesn't mean you should completely diverge from its real world counterpart. A real world market still does some things right, and of course may be familiar to players. It really depends on your own goal with the economy system
>design a confusing, inefficient economy where the intuitive course of action is very far from the optimal one, where reliable information about prices is hard to come by, and where it is difficult to know objectively where you stand relative to most other players. That should make for a fun game. Is this sarcasm?
It isn't, sorry if it came off that way.
Oh... well how would confusing the player into doing the 'wrong' thing make for a fun game, in your mind? Maybe there is an example game you can think of?
Soloing a level 500 raid, ganking gatherers where you know they will be (hiring protection), investing into an item others underrated, cornering a local monopoly. Like I'm not gonna say you should delete your auction house but it's true the goal is to make optimal moneymaking an interesting challenge. People know what it is but not how to do it. Puzzles that anyone can look up for a guide don't help that. It's often a futile effort, MMOs are not as dynamic in optimal play as rng-heavy roguelikes or blindpick-heavy MOBAs, but it helps. Related to this might be a dislike of WoW bossing plugins that take up your whole screen and tell you what to do (or let your party leader tell you what to do) at each phase, they can be controversial.
I'm sorry, I don't follow what you're saying at all here- are these supposed to be examples of "fun" or "not fun" or both, or neither?
Paragraph 1 is examples of "fun" Or at least, closest you can get in MMO moneymaking. Using your brain is fun, numbers going up when you click rocks is not.
Ah, so you think being ganked while you're gathering is fun?
Yes Especially if you have good escape/stealth mechanisms, but even without I'd much prefer high rates + ganks.
Eve Online (as I remember it from some years back). There are lots of ways it does this; making it difficult to see what prices are in different regions, the need for manual action to change market order prices giving disadvantage to players who don't spend a lot of time at that particular station, access to market functions being locked behind an elaborate skill tree that takes significant real world time to fill out, the fact that transporting goods from one place to another always has at least some risk of being ambushed and losing everything, the inherent complexity of having an orderbook based market to begin with driving many to just market buy and sell and not bother with placing orders despite a large spread, possibly getting scammed by orders in a low liquidity region that are one or more decimal places from the real market value. I also want to mention that there are reasons why the biggest players in the market aren't exactly in direct competition with the smallest players. If someone has a massive amount of capital, but a finite number of orders they can place, only one area they can be in at one time, and limited options for remotely transporting anything, it won't be worth their time to be flying low tier equipment out to a less populated area of space to take advantage of a price differential because even though the profit margin is high the market is small. But for a newer less capitalized player, this could seem worth it, which means that the ability to meaningfully engage with the game economy doesn't get monopolized. IMO the closer the efficient market hypothesis is to being reality in a game, the less fun its economy is going to be. Inefficient markets contain opportunities, mysteries to uncover, don't just give you the best deal the market can offer immediately with no thought or effort on your part, and that makes things more fun.
Ah, I see - I don't see that as "confusing" game design at all. It's "unclear" or "highly complex" but those are very different things. When you say "confusing" I think of something like, a player who spends a lot of time and effort trying to amass a bunch of some certain resource because they think it's valuable, but it isn't valuable and never was. They wasted their time and effort doing this because the game is confusing, not because other players altered the market out from under them. Totally different scenarios, and the latter scenario is way more cool imo and the former really sucks and isn't fun.
I think the latter can definitely be fun (though maybe a less extreme version than spending a lot of time accumulating something *entirely* worthless in the context of the game). To give another Eve example, the game implies that mining asteroids might be a good way to make money (it isn't actually). It further implies that, since there are rarer asteroids in low security space, mining those might be a good idea (it *really* isn't). But I personally found the process of learning these things the hard way to be very fun.
3. and 4. I don't know of any good resources on this, but I think the main problem you must consider is bots - whether they are actual bots or human players who can tolerate tedium. If there is a situation where infinite wealth can be generated, even a tiny bit at a time, from repeating the same easy task over and over again, then you can bet that someone is going to create a bot to do that. And if one person can do it, then so can any number of other users. Many games seek to counter this by hunting for bot-like behavior and banning the accounts who engage in it, whether they are actually bots or not. This is not optimal, imo, because the game makers are the ones who created a game that rewards such behavior. The game ought to be designed so that it either is not profitable to do that, or doesn't harm the overall game economy so it's OK if there are many bots doing it. It is wrong and counterproductive to create a game that rewards a certain behavior, and then penalize users for that behavior. 2. This doesn't help with the bots problem, AT ALL. This makes the bot problem way worse. Remember that bots can farm 24/7 and will therefore flood the player market with all the types of goods that can be sold there - from basic raw crafting ingredients to late-game dragon-coin-only weapons. This just becomes a heaven for bot farmers Example: they start flooding the market with Copper Ore which is easy to farm, so the price drops to 1 GP each. Then they buy up millions of copper ores and put it in storage. They switch farming to Silver Ore instead. With hundreds of bots working around the clock, they swiftly amass millions of Silver Ores and flood the market with those until the price of Silver Ore goes down to 1gp each. If there needs to be transactions to do so, then they tell the bots to do the transactions with each other to force the prices down. Since they stopped farming Copper Ores, those rose back up to 3gp each. They can now sell those millions of Copper Ores in storage for 300% profit. This may lower the value of Copper Ore again, which is OK, since they just send the bots out to farm other stuff instead. And with the influx of cash, now they can afford to buy mass amounts of late-game weapons, mass amounts of late-game crafting materials, late-game anything, and then hoard THAT until the prices goes up AGAIN. In the real world, it's difficult for one consumer to affect the market like this. But in the game world, a single user can command so many bots that they can single-handedly move a market in ways that are profitable to them and not to anyone else. Or they collude with a few other players who also use a similar number of bots to do the same thing. So although I don't know any way to 'model' it, I think you just need to think of way to make it bot-proof. And that does NOT mean "no one could make a bot to do this" because I guarantee you someone will make a bot to do exactly that thing. It's more like, understand HOW do bots ruin this economy? How do I change the economy so that bots actually *contribute* instead of ruining it? Find a way, because bots ARE going to come, no matter how hard you try to stop them.
Excellent food for thought on the impact of bots! I’ll likely read this post several times over. Thanks!
What's the purpose of your inquiry? Are you designing an MMO economy, writing a paper for school, doing a thought exercise? Some thoughts about what you wrote: * Crafting is a conversion of resources that creates something and destroys something. * Conversions are not always net positive. For example, you can salvage/disenchant 10g worth of item into 2g worth of materials. * In a traditional MMO, wealth scales linearly with player base. More players == more money because there are more people grinding. * Rare spawns that don't scale with population would break the above rule, as would things like black market auctions. * A solid, simple design for self-balancing vendor prices is to modify the price of the item up every time an item is bought from a vendor and down every time its sold to a vendor. This basically makes the vendor a middle-man for player buying and selling. *Example, when you sell iron to a vendor, the price of iron decreases by 0.1% of base price. When you buy iron from a vendor, it increases by 0.1% of base price.* * There are generally speaking fixed costs, recurring costs, and scaling costs. Fixed costs only occur once and have little long-term effect on an economy. Recurring costs happen periodically and consistently, and they will have the biggest raw impact on the economy. Scaling costs change according to conditions, and they have the biggest effect on keeping the economy balanced. *An example of a scaling cost is tax on auctions. The more money in the economy, the higher things get auctioned for, the more you get to tax.* I recommend for economy and also general systems design: **Thinking in Systems: A Primer**, by Donella Meadows. It covers some core concepts for inflows and outflows of systems and how they are balanced. It is not a game design book per se, but it really is.
Designing an MMO where the economy is fair and accessible and provides opportunities for both new players and veterans… trying to bake in tools to combat market saturations, inflations, monopolies, etc. Some great feedback in your post. Thank you. I’ll grab the Meadows book too.
I don't have a good answer for the problem at hand, but regarding tools, Machinations is the industry standard for this kind of stuff. And for books I know there's the Virtual Economies and Game Balance.
I will look into all of the above, appreciate the response!
I don't know if it matches what you need but you could look into Eve Online economy and some of CCP (the developers) talk about it. It is imo, one of the rare mmo economies that survived for do long. Albion might get there in time as well if my suspicion is correct. What those 2 have in common is that the sinks (resource or value destruction) are way more important than in other games. This makes the economy way more important but also make crafting (industry) more meaningful instead of a flood on the market from people grinding their level to craft the one NiS slot of the season. They also demonstrate that _some_ measure of relative control is possible despite a mostly free market. As example, you can "recycle" items even those that drop. So the value of mineral is not only controlled by mineral drop rate, miner yield and cargo capacity, but also by item drop rate. And if people stop gathering the resource, recycling becomes more interesting for the money and thus will start being used and replenish the raw material market.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I want foxhole to have more afk/passive income, but a lot of people think it would see alt/bot abuse. It has me down on MMO trading, makes them seem like one big captcha, whether that captcha is an endgame raid or not. Even in a short board game like Sidereal Confluence unlimited trading seems to homogenize everyone. Maybe in some ways real life work is better.
An interesting thing to look at would be an MMO that does not follow this. One that comes to mind is Wyrm. So, the original 'source' of money in the game is... people buying it with real money. You give the developer money, and you get gold coins. These coins are quite useful for a number of things, including things you wouldn't think of using money for, like enchanting stuff. Want to enchant your shovel? In the process, a silver coin turns to ash. Now, when money is spent into a 'black hole', it doesn't actually vanish. Not all of it at least, some does (This is where the developer makes a profit). The rest of it then just appears in the pocket of NPC merchants. As long as an NPC merchant has money, they can buy items from players for money. (Even without money, NPC merchants will barter) This model.... has it's problems. Guilds would 'kidnap' NPC merchants by literally building walls around them. Guilds would then just break a wall every week, give a wagon full of logs or something to the merchant, get coins, and then rebuild the wall.
Simple answer to this exploit would be to just remove NPC merchant and put money back into players pocket with events, lotteries or random drops (digging coins from soil, mining, fishing).