MMO Design Noodling, part 2: Living Economy and Ecology

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?

MMO Design Noodling, part 1

Introduction: I've done a lot of thinking about this over the years. MMORPGs used to be, at one point, my primary source of entertainment.


My resumé:

1. Ultima Online
2. Star Wars Galaxies
3. City of Heroes
4. World of Warcraft
5. Saga of Ryzom
6. Dungeons and Dragons Online
7. EVE Online

Plus some demos, trials and Betas here and there.

This list is roughly chronological, which is somewhat telling. The MMOs that are most influential to my preferences are the first few, UO and SWG foremost. They definitely shaped what I consider an MMO, and what I want out of an MMO. We'll start there.

What I want: For me, an MMO is another world to live in and explore. I don't want the experience dictated to me, and I don't want to be constantly retreading ground where thousands of others have been before. I want it to be lived in, not a theme park where you're running from one ride to the next. Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies almost exemplified that ideal for me. EVE Online, were it not a ships-in-space game, would be an even better example.

Don't get me wrong. I don't actually dislike City of Heroes or even World of Warcraft. I've played both extensively and enjoyed them for what they were. But they're not what I really want out of an MMO, and they are excellent examples of what I don't want, which is theme park instances of infinitely retreaded content. Sometimes they're excellent content, but eventually it all starts to run together.

Let's get a bit more specific, though.

Dynamic Content: This is probably the hardest thing to do in a game, ever. But this is probably the biggest thing for me. I remember running around as a 20-ish Paladin in WoW, with my beer-keg-onna-stick. 5 levels later, I'm done with it, and I see another 20-ish Paladin with that same beer-keg-onna-stick... that's supposed to be a unique weapon, crafted just for me. I knew it wasn't unique when I got it, but the point remains. Before that, we "rescued" a town, just after someone else rescued it, and right before another group rescued it. It's fun only so long as you can ignore or pretend that you and your friends are the only heroes in the land.

Dynamic Content would create one-off unique experiences. They may end up being slightly generic a lot of the time, but at least you're not going to have the next group of heroes wandering into the area rescuing the same village you just did. There are a couple approaches to Dynamic Content which can actually work side-by-side, so it's not an either/or decision.

The first is content that is generated upon need based on a bunch of variables. An example might be a farmer with a bunch of variables defining resources he has. If he gets low on a particular resource, he may generate a request to get some of that resource. How the player chooses to get it is then up to them. That same farmer might have problems with bandits raiding his farm, so he'll generate a request to get rid of the bandits. Once the bandits are no longer a problem, maybe a bunch of wolves move into the area, so he may generate a request based on that.

The second approach is player-generated-content, and this one dovetails best into the various things I want in an MMO. I'm not talking about quest-creation tools like you found in City of Heroes or Saga of Ryzom, though those are pretty bad ass. The problem with those is that they're mechanically divorced from the rest of the game world. What I mean is that players should have some mechanically supported way to drive activity in the game, such as putting requests up on a message board. Such requests might be a smith wanting to buy ore, a miner wanting a mine cleared of threats, or a merchant needing goods moved from one place to another.

Living World: This obviously dovetails strongly into the above. I don't want a world where everything stays the same. This is a reason why, given the skills, the team and the budget, I would still never pick a licensed IP. I want the players to be able to shape the world to their collective will, and IP owners and fandom might get a little... cross about that.

I mean this on a pretty epic scale. Like, so epic that it might actually turn out to be completely impractical. The setting will have cities, but those cities will be capable of being conquered, burned to the ground, rebuilt, abandoned. Governments, countries, all will be capable of being taken over by players, and run as they see fit. The world on Day 1 will look very, very different from the world in one year.

I also mean it on a much smaller scale. You'll be able to build a house, set up a shop, and eventually build a tidy little mercantile operation, utilizing other players to help with tasks you can't or don't want to do. Maybe you'll build it in a prosperous city, where you'll have the protection of guards and laws, as well as regular traffic. Maybe you'll find a crossroads somewhere for your endeavor, which might in time lead to the birth of a village.

These are just the key concepts I want in an MMO, but there's a lot more, in terms of systems, gameplay and world design I want to talk about.

Next time, I'd like to dig more into the idea of a virtual world, economy and ecology, and how they all tie together.

What are your thoughts? Which MMORPGs have you played, which were your favorites, and why?