Game Design/Logic: Limited Money

[Sim]

All mc Codes, and GL games and Mob, gangster, mafia games I've seen, every user who plays will reach millions in no time. The logic of getting rich in these games are to simple.

 

Ratings are usually based on who has the most money and usually whoever puts more hours in, has the most money. I'm debating on keeping my game like that, or figure out a way to limit the amount of money the majority of users can keep. By that I mean, payouts would be more real like, not $400 from doing something that would never pay above $10.

That be the 1st rule.

I am also thinking about only putting so much money into circulation. Based on user count. Keep the money mostly being rotated between members.  So all crimes being committed would pick a random member that the effect would take place on. Ex:. 'Go Mugging', %40 chance of success. 

If successful, it would take the 'reward' from a member. (Who it takes it from would be later).

One could also add some sort of tax, 'Player Housing', ' Invisible Protection tax' , 'Good luck tax' and take a % of money from everyone. The % would be based on income brackets. Maybe once a week or month. 

 

While writing this, I thought of another idea. 'Random Disaster Events'. An Event is held like earthquake and if owned houses can destroy or damage them costing users to repay to fix, replaythem. Can also damage, destroy cars, items, anything.

'Random Thief Day'-another disaster event. Randomly picks people and they get mugged taking % of money.

 

Why all this? I am thinking of a way to not have the person with the most money usually most time played not be the strongest player. I really want more strategy behind keeping there money since getting there money is based mostly on luck.

 

Maybe it should stay the same in a sense. People love seeing all those 0's. $1,000,000,000. But is it much different then $100,000 if you still ranked #1?

 

#ThoughtOfTheDay

[Dave]

This is the fun challenge of building a stable economy, players need to feel rewarded but you’re right you don’t wanna flood the game with money. I believe TORN hired an economist to help with this.

[Aaron_]

The economy plays a massive part in all games and it's probably what I'm most worried about on my upcoming game - as I have no idea how I'm going to make sure it's right!

I don't think the actual value (£1, £1,000 or £1,000,000,000) matters, I think it's more just about fitting the theme and ensuring that it remains playable. For example, if your game is focused around the standard gang theme, you probably shouldn't have an over-inflated economy, or if it's a space age theme then you might want things to be in the millions/trillions. 

I think the key is ensuring that the value of the things in the game match the money in your economy, so you don't want an over inflated economy with cheap items which make the game easy to play and get to the top, but you also don't want items to be overly expensive so that they are unachievable and players become bored because they feel like they can't progress.

It's just about striking the right balance - which is probably the hardest and most important part to get right of any game.... in my opinion.

[Sim]

I also think one of the main problems is in real time games which are similar, players are usually not doing the same task over and over, they are progressing to harder challenges. Players also don't usually have to deal with consequences of death to much in browser games. They don't loose everything from past save points. 

[KyleMassacre]

I wish I was an economist because one of my goals is to write an inflation plugin/module for any “outgoing” currency from the game bank. I figure people could sell or trade for any price they see fit but at least anything coming from a “crime” or equivalent would be updated based on how much money is floating around in the game. And it would also help or may even be required but, have an actual game bank

[Aaron_]

16 hours ago, KyleMassacre said:

I wish I was an economist because one of my goals is to write an inflation plugin/module for any “outgoing” currency from the game bank. I figure people could sell or trade for any price they see fit but at least anything coming from a “crime” or equivalent would be updated based on how much money is floating around in the game. And it would also help or may even be required but, have an actual game bank

Actually sounds like a really good idea, so I'm presuming that a crime would pay out X% of the total amount of money that is currently in circulation, meaning that your wealth is always in direct proportion to the wealth of the rest of the game?

How would buying items work? (non user transactions)

 

[KyleMassacre]

29 minutes ago, Aaron_ said:

Actually sounds like a really good idea, so I'm presuming that a crime would pay out X% of the total amount of money that is currently in circulation, meaning that your wealth is always in direct proportion to the wealth of the rest of the game?

How would buying items work? (non user transactions)

 

It would be the same. The more money in the game, the more anything costs that the game would provide or the less the game would pay out.

[Sim]

18 hours ago, KyleMassacre said:

I wish I was an economist because one of my goals is to write an inflation plugin/module for any “outgoing” currency from the game bank. I figure people could sell or trade for any price they see fit but at least anything coming from a “crime” or equivalent would be updated based on how much money is floating around in the game. And it would also help or may even be required but, have an actual game bank

That's the starting point I had in mind, a game can only have so much money in circulation. 

 

I also believe the majority of actions(ex: committing a crime) would use a formula against a person instead of giving money from 'the game currently'. It would keep the money going between players. One could always create a buff or debuff if character levels/skills are not the same just for that action. 

Since I don't have an actual game up and running, I'm going to actually try to work on some kind of economical fix.

[KyleMassacre]

10 hours ago, Sim said:

I also believe the majority of actions(ex: committing a crime) would use a formula against a person instead of giving money from 'the game currently'. It would keep the money going between players. One could always create a buff or debuff if character levels/skills are not the same just for that action.

I would figure that inflation should handle the amount of currency being paid out for actions such as crimes especially since most of the payouts are a static number or some sort of min/max and that money should come from the game bank. 
 

Another thing too is that instead of people accruing interest in banks they should pay a tax on that much like real life. Anything the game pays out should be adjusted in one way or another unlike something like stocks. Stocks would be something that should ultimately come from “taxed” money until they receive a payout then whatever they “gain” should be taxed and put back into the game bank

[Sim]

On another note it would also be hard to create a stable economy for any game besides your own if they are adding new features all the time.

[KyleMassacre]

And since it is just a game, it would be unfair to punish the 90% of people with 1% of the games money by jacking up prices because the rich people want to hoard all the money in game so I’m sure it’s doable to create some algorithm to adjust inflation on a per player basis. And maybe only a price adjustment should be made if there is more money in players pockets than in the game bank.

 

Maybe I’ll spin up an instance of MCC or something that is easy to tinker around with some inflation and see what I come up with.