On Sun, 2010-06-27 at 07:48 +0000, Anton wrote:
> Money - is the measurement of your success in the game. This
> means that players should not receive same amount money each
> day. Players should be focused to earn more money in the
> game to purchase more inventory/goods. Therefore you should
> offer player a way to earn more money then his competitors.

Cf my previous answer on progression - leveling is already part of the
hack/scan points leveling. This doesn't mean there can't be any
progression with money too, but the money is also a monetization mean,
so we should be careful about it. If we give more money to higher
levels, it then depreciates the value of the money earned (or bought) by
lower level players. Cf how Godfather points are handled in Mafia Wars -
you don't get more when you progress.

> In our games player hack sites. I think that sites should be
> sources of money. If I have 1 low-level site hacked it will
> generate me small amount of money, but the more sites I hack
> and the higher level of sites I hack - the more money they
> could generate for me.

If we do this, we should earn *very* little money through websites -
otherwise we'll depreciate the currency.

The general issue with this way of generating money is that it's very
hard to balance - players accumulate money and websites over time, and
you usually get a lot of inflation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_sink 

We should be careful about the stability of the economy. I think it
would interesting to setup something like the Second Life economy (cf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life )

By emitting a "virtual currency" (though it would only be possible to
buy it, not to sell it), we would have to closely control the amount of
money that is generated and always implement linked resources flows, and
be able to apply all the "real world" economy tools (inflation, currency
exchange rates, etc.).

For example, we could have a kind of "state budget" - ie every money
given to the players would have to come from a budget, like when a real
state provides help to poor people or small companies. This budget could
come from taxes (on revenues, on sales between players...), and we could
inject new money into the economy through currency conversion, or even
loans...

Would be good to discuss this with an economist - anyone knows one who
could be interested by the concept? I think David has some knowledge of
the subject, too?

> > **There should be no rare item. Everything should be
> > accessible if you are patient enough.
> Hm, this brings us idea that some items cannot be purchased
> in store and can only be received somehow during the game.
> For example when you hack site you receive not only site
> itself that generates money for you, but you get also some
> "artifacts" that site had. 

Yup, the concept is nice. Two things to be careful about here, though:
griefers, and items decay. If we have items that last forever, every new
generated item lowers the value of the other items of the same type.

We'll need to think on how we integrate the items into the economy. The
Eve Online market economy could provide some good insights here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy 

Xavier.

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