Read Part 1...
So, this is going to be based in some thoughts I had many years ago, but I'm going to try to incorporate some more recent reading in my thoughts as I go.
Star Wars Galaxies was probably the first time I really thought about it, but what strikes me as the biggest problem with MMO economies is that they're completely open. Money (and in some, equipment/materials) flows into the system infinitely. Theoretically it also flows out of the system in the form of money sinks, crafting, breakage/loss, but in practice, the influx is always much, much faster than the outflux. The reason for this is players. Players will find ways to maximize gain and minimize loss. They'll hoard money and equipment, and learn to not lose equipment that isn't easily replaced (such as valuable weapons/armor/etc). The result is inflation on a massive scale. Certain base-level items will always be available for cheap in most MMOs, because the game ensures that NPC merchants will sell stuff that new players can afford. But once you start wanting to get past the basics, you usually need to start dealing with the player-based economy, whether it be through auction houses, 1-on-1 trading, player merchants, or whatever, because you can't buy the top of the line equipment from NPCs; It has to be quested for or crafted by players.
For instance, in Ultima Online, you could purchase a house for a relatively small sum. But if you wanted to actually put it somewhere, you were generally out of luck, unless you happened to find a decaying house and camp the spot until it fell down, or using player griefing to keep others from refreshing their house. Eventually, if you wanted a house, you'd have to but a pre-placed one from someone else, which meant that the demand was massive, the supply was completely fixed, and as the amount of money that was static in the system increased, the prices soared to exorbitant levels. I'm not going to lie; When Age of Shadows came out, promising empty land for housing, I spent $100 of real world money to buy 5M gold and bought several housing deeds, which I distributed to my trusted lieutenants. It was worthwhile for me to spend real money to get extremely difficult to acquire in-game assets. Though I stopped playing the game a year or so after that, I don't regret the purchase, despite the TOS violation.
So how do you fix this? My thoughts were to have a semi-closed economy. Resources like gold and materials would flow into and out of the player system, but there'd be a finite amount of those resources. Once a resource in the "pool" got low, it would flow into the system more slowly, until eventually it was depleted, or it was refreshed. Money is the easiest resource to demonstrate this.
So, if an NPC pays you to escort him safely to a town, that money enters the system from the pool. If you stick that money in a vault somewhere, it becomes static, and doesn't exit the system. If you pay for a service from an NPC, then the money exits the system, goes back into the pool, and can be put back into the system from another point of access, like maybe a dragon's treasure trove. If players start to hoard large amounts of gold, then NPCs will begin to have less to offer. Eventually, the money may become mostly static, until something changes, such as a raid on a rich player's holdings, or perhaps that player, hearing of such a raid, hires a force of NPC guardsmen to protect their vault.
One thing that I've considered is that as the player-base grows, then necessarily money will grow thinner, even without deliberate abuse. That's why I'm thinking of a semi-closed system. As the player base grows, the pool will grow to accommodate. There may also be a sort of trickle effect, perhaps to reflect the mining of precious metals and the minting of coin.
There are obviously ways this could be abused, which I'm still considering. I'd probably need to consult with people who've made a "career" of exploiting game mechanics to really cover my bases, as I've usually been one to play within the rules as much as possible.
So, how does all of this relate to a living ecology? Well, the ecology is a big source of the materials needed to build and play within the world. If you chop down a tree, you get wood which you can use to build houses, furniture, carts, weapons, and various other pieces of equipment. But you also have a tree stump, and one less tree. The normal system employed by MMOs is to have resource points which can never be depleted, or only temporarily. Trees which can be chopped for wood, and an hour later are refreshed so can be chopped for more wood. Mining nodes which yield 2-5 units of ore, every hour or so. This contributes to the same inflation problem you see with money. The system's normal way of dealing with this is to make the equipment you can make fairly low in value, until you've invested a massive amount of time building a few dozen swords, or what have you.
My thoughts on this are to make the endeavors take longer, but produce more. You take 10 minutes to chop down a tree, it's gone. But you get a whole tree's worth of wood. You spend an hour mining, you're going to get a lot of ore that you can then smelt... If you make a sword, you're not going to bang one out every 5 seconds, but when you've made one, you've also made some significant strides forward in your knowledge, and the sword won't sell for less than the cost of a meal. So there will still be the crafting grind, but in the end it'll take a similar amount of time, but a lot less individual items, and the associated equipment.
And the tree you chopped down? Plant a sapling, and it'll grow back in a comparably accelerated time (it's not going to take several real days of work to create a sword, but it will probably take several real hours) If you don't replant, then somewhere in a deep forest far away, another tree may begin to grow, but that will take significantly longer.
Extending this past wood and ore, things like climate, weather, seasons will have an effect on the recovery and growth of animals and plants. If you kill a lot of wolves, the rabbit and deer populations may grow, and conversely reduce the local plantlife. If you kill lots of deer and rabbits, the wolf populations may move away, die off, or start attacking human settlements. If you cut down a lot of trees, the wildlife in that area will become more scarce. If you never re-use the metal from old swords to make plowshares, you'll have to delve deeper and deeper into the earth to find more ore.
In the end, what I'm looking for is a world where player decisions matter. Players being selfish will eventually create a world bereft of natural resources. Players being good stewards of their lands, and learning to reduce, reuse and recycle will find themselves with more natural resources. Eventually, you may find some players at odds with others over how to treat the land. Eco-terrorists living in the deep woods, declaring themselves as defenders of the wilds, preying on the industrialists who send in their logging teams and their mining operations. In a more balanced place, industrialists will reuse materials, replant the forests amd promote animal husbandry.
I know that UO and SWG both tried something similar, and ran into issues. There was some suggestion that some of the issues were related to hardware limitations, but I doubt that was all of it. What I'm proposing is a bloody complicated system, with lots of small interactions that could eventually snowball into larger, unexpected problems.
So now that I've rambled at length, I'm turning the floor over to you. What problems do you see with the sort of system I've proposed? What solutions do you think might work? How would you address the problems I'm trying to address here?
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