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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

MUDflation, Legal Action To Hinder MMO Trading? 43

Posted by simoniker from the new-word-fairy-looking-unwell dept.
Thanks to Wired News for its article discussing the pitfalls which may face virtual item and currency trading in MMORPGs. The piece discusses previously covered sites such as the Gaming Open Market, whose founder ruminates on possible issues with TOS violations: "We're getting to the point where we're getting a reasonable amount of attention. I'm sort of afraid that the game companies are going to step in and terminate my accounts because we're violating the terms of service." Another commentator also worries about long-term dangers of virtual item/currency trading, "...because games like Ultima Online and EverQuest have flaws that allow cheaters to duplicate currency, and that ultimately leads to what Hunter calls 'MUDflation,' short for inflation in a multiple-user dimension."
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MUDflation, Legal Action To Hinder MMO Trading? More

MUDflation, Legal Action To Hinder MMO Trading?

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  • Copying Currency? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @03:24PM (#8069161) Homepage Journal
    Just like the real world, its called forgery. Surely someone needs to invent some rules how to check if a player obtained virtual currency legitimately.
    • Unless the government does it, then it is called Seignorage and causes inflation.

    • Re:Copying Currency? (Score:5, Informative)

      by JoeD ( 12073 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @03:46PM (#8069406) Homepage
      It's not so much that people are duplicating currency all over the place as it is that currency tends to enter the world much much faster than it leaves it.

      For example, in Everquest, this is how money enters the world: You kill a monster. That monster drops a junk item and a little bit of cash. You then take the junk item to an NPC merchant and sell that for more cash.

      Money leaves the world when you buy things from NPC merchants. Food and water are so cheap that they might as well be free. The only things that really cost money are trade skill items and spell reagents.

      The problem is that people kill stuff far far more than they buy things, so money enters the world at a faster rate than it leaves. Eventually, you wind up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of platinum pieces.

      What really needs to happen is to somehow balance the game so that cash coming in is balanced by cash going out. If there's too much money in the world, monsters drop less cash, merchants raise prices to suck some out, and lower the prices they give for stuff. If there's too little, do the reverse.

      • Re:Copying Currency? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @03:53PM (#8069500) Homepage Journal
        Well, cant it be done like it is in the real world?

        It used to be the case that at any one time the amount of currency equalled that of the value of the gold reserves. I suppose times have changed since then but the system might just as well work. Throw in a stock market algorithm ala Elite (or perhaps more sophisticated one) and maybe people will get a bit more interested in the trade aspects of the game.

        • Re:Copying Currency? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @04:11PM (#8069700)
          The gold standard isn't a very good idea in the real world. It'd be a piss poor idea in the game world. Allow me to explain:

          Let's suppose that there was a fixed amount of money, which is what the gold standard does. Well, it has to be distributed somewhere to begin with, so let's say it's in a vault, and everytime someone kills a monster, the money's taken out of that vault and given to the player.

          That's fine, until the vault runs out. After that point, killing a monster gets you no gold. Well, where else are you going to get gold? You could sell items to storekeepers, but eventually they'd run out of money, too. So, you'd have to get it from other players.

          But, the supply of gold is fixed. The supply of items is not; more are still created all the time. What's that mean? It means that the value of gold goes up, and the value of items go down (deflation). The longer you hold onto your gold, the more it'll buy.

          And don't forget, of course, that this gold would be piling up in the hands of the experienced players and guilds, who could've gotten the money when it was "free". New players who never had that chance would be left out.

        • Not like the real world (Score:4, Insightful)

          by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @04:19PM (#8069796) Homepage
          The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding). For doing what someone with money wants you to do, you recieve a certain reward. The amount of money in circulation is gradually tipped upwards as the population increases, productivity goes up, and old money is accidentally destroyed.

          In a standard videogame, closed monetary arrangements are impossible. The players give money to the merchants, who then pay the players to kill monsters? What is the value of an item when nobody wants it? How is the loop closed if items are being generated? At that point you just have massive deflation. Likewise, as players enter or leave the world you have inflation / deflation.

          Ok, so you have a closed-loop financial system, a closed-loop item generation and consumption system (that will encourage hording, of course), both of which are keyed to the number of subscribers. Yet special items must still be won, quests must be rewarded. The leveling treadmill will be in effect, but there must be the special blue blade of Nozerath for the adventuring players...

          I agree that there needs to be various controls in place, and that developers need to better understand basic economics, but a model of the real world this is not.

          • Re:Not like the real world (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @05:23PM (#8070542) Homepage Journal
            The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding).

            Dead wrong.

            The real world has a fixed number of dollar bills and equivalents. The amount of money fluctuates rapidly.

            Take a stock certificate. If one share of the stock sells for $25 right now, you would probably accept one share of that stock in payment for something that costs $20. The gap between the worth of the share and the price of the item will cover any broker's fees for selling, and the risk that the stock will go down before you can sell.

            How about loans? If I loan you $100,000, with the agreement that, over the life of the loan, the total you'll pay back is $200,000, I could sell that loan to someone else for $200,000. After all, that loan is a promise they'll be paid $200,000 eventually, but until the loan is paid off, that's additional money in circulation that the government didn't print. A credit card is just a variation on a loan, but it also increases the effective amount of money in circulation.

            How about playing with time delays in the banking system? Say I write you a check for $100, but I don't have the money in my account to cover it. If, by the time you get around to cashing it, I've been paid, nothing will go wrong, but until then, that's an additional $100 in circulation!
            • consider the situation where a bright geek gets an idea for a new and wonderful gadget. He picks up $50 in parts from Radio Shack and assembles them in a few hours into an item that people will gladly pay $200 for.

              Where did that extra $150 come from? His labor (ala Marx)? No, his creativity.

              The above scenario is brought to you by - Capitalism - "making money out of nothing one idea at a time"
              • consider the situation where a bright geek gets an idea for a new and wonderful gadget. He picks up $50 in parts from Radio Shack and assembles them in a few hours into an item that people will gladly pay $200 for.

                Where did that extra $150 come from? His labor (ala Marx)? No, his creativity.

                In that situation, he isn't creating money, he's just encouraging people to move it around in his direction. Now, if he then did an IPO of his new company, that would be creating money.

      • Re:Copying Currency? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @05:35PM (#8070679)
        IMAGD & IMAGP (I am a game designer & programmer)

        I'm so tired of people bitching about a "broken" game economy, when they don't have a clue what a game designer is all about.

        They speak of game balance, as if the game is a zero sum function, when it is not, no matter how hard you try. All MMORPGs, are *designed*, either directly, or indirectly, so that player's wealth gradually increase. How? Because players put their TIME into the game, and the game allows for players to convert their time into game wealth. This is a reason MMORPG tend to follow the instant gratification, and the materialism of "No Risk, No Reward"

        So nerf the reward? If there is no reward, what is the incentive to play? It no longer becomes a game in the tradional sense, because what is the goal then? You can't have a game without a goal! True, you can make a game out of ANY situation, but MMORPGs players don't just want a gloried chat sessions -- they want to experience things together with others.

        ANY game will have 1 or more of these core principles:

        - Creation / Nurture
        - Destruction
        - Cooperation
        - Competition
        - Communication
        - Exploratin
        - Navigation
        - Pattern Recognition
        - Problem Solving / Strategy
        - Organization
        - Acquisition
        - Trade
        - Simulation / Complexity

        What does EQ (mainly) focus on?
        - Acquisition
        - Cooperation
        - Communication
        - Strategy
        - Destruction

        By mistakingly thinking "money" is the problem, you're missed the whole point of the "goal" of the game: Acquisition

        As I said, you can remove the goal of Acquisition, but you need another goal to take it's place.

        Peace
      • The problem with this is the new players and non-hardcore players. This is an obvious problem, new players won't/can't kill as much as the older players, so you'll might reach level 10 but still be using a rusty sword and have less than 100 gold in your pocket.

        Same thing with non-hardcore players, (lets say you've played for a LONG time) you could have a level 50 hero with 30000 gold and you look at some badass item for 10000 gold but you decide to wait because its late. You log off for the week and come b


      • Actually Everquest is one game that kinda got things right. Yes there is inflation, but there also is a high rate obsolescence (which most people ignore).
        This infact drives prices for a specific item DOWN over time. For example an "Executioner's Axe" sold 4 years ago for 5000 gold to a player, today the same item sells for 500 gold. Why? Because there are better items out there.
        What does this do? It gives new players purchasing power and helps them get into the game faster. While old time player
      • A while back I played Asheron's Call and they did find a few ways to rebalance things. I don't remember all of the details since it has been a while, but they did have various economy problems. Some were just slight design mistakes, like being able to buy something at a beginner's town cheap and sell it at a profit in a far away town which became quite serious when money was made weightless (a friend filled almost his entire inventory with money in a short time). Changing prices fixed this. At one point

    • Actually, I doubt that copying currency is the major problem with these games. The problem is that the economy is fundamentally broken (one of the few things that Shadowbane apparently got right). Allow me to elaborate...

      In online worlds, there are basically two categories of assets; currency and items. On a very broad scale, both currency and items enter the game at a fixed rate. Once an item has entered the economy, it will generally remain in the economy until such a time as its value drops below t

      • Bad username good post.

        Why don't MMOG have more money sinks?

        I am thinking ever time you need to raise a level, you have to pay to be "trained".

        You own a house or castle there is normal upkeep costs, etc...??

        btw I never paly MMOG's but finding the economics of them quite interesting.

        • Exactly. Shadowbane was designed with *lots* of money sinks:

          Training skills

          Upkeep on city assets

          Salary for NPC crafters

          Repair on items (use leads to mild repairs, death leads to major repairs)

          If it hadn't been for all the duped gold from the first six months, the economy would pretty amazing.

          Of course, that leads to the opposite problem, where the players feel like they have to spend too much time farming for gold. You really can't win for losing, sometimes.

      • I Agree with you on that 100%. If people are playing, but they don't have to pay for anything than the gold situation gets out of hand. The one thing I can't understand is why monsters have to give you gold in the first place?

        logically, where does it say that monsters just happen to go around carrying the very thing that is spent in towns? It would seem to me, that MMORPGs would use something based off of reality. Say you have a creature called, "the Giant mammoth of Tarverac", and its strong, but if you

        • Say you have a creature called, "the Giant mammoth of Tarverac", and its strong, but if you kill it you can forage it for its tusks (very valuable), skin, good for shields or armor, and its meat for food. From which you turn around and sell it. However, the monster itself doesn't leave gold, unless it just happens to eat gold for food. Does this make sense?

          Who do you sell the stuff to? If the stuff is consumed at a reasonable rate (food, arrows, spell reagents), you might be able to sell to the player ma
          • My assumption is that weapons and armor wear out unless they have magical properties. Even then, magical items should have a shelf-life if they are not kept. However, your average creature isn't going to leave weapons and armor. You have to sell those to people with the skills to make them into useable items. So trading posts or what not. At the same time, certain creatures have body parts that are components to make magical items. However, not all the components are known to make a powerful item, that requ
      • There's a simple solution that worked fine in a MUD called Arctic: rent. In this MUD, you had to pay (in game currency) while you were away. You got back to the "reception", signed it in, and when you came back in you paid a certain amount of money which depended on what? On what items you have on you (and how long you were away for).

        Crappy items cost a couple of steel coins a day. Decent stuff cost a few tens of steel coins. And then there were great and uber items, which could cost in the thousands of c
        • rent has been around in MUDs for a long time; however thier are few problems which is why most designers dropped it. However it also has the benifit of keep high level items out of hte reach of low level characters since they could not keep up the rent.
          Main problems are
          1) Made it a requirment that you log on just to kill, no just chatting around with friends or not earning money.
          2) Made it impossible for casual players to get any of the good stuff, because they could not kill enough to keep items.
  • Back in the days I remember playing diablo online and someone at a very very high level just started tossing cash at my direction to trade for some weapon he lost battling someone.

    The only reason why I figured out he cheated was because the amount of money offered just couldn't fit into my slots.

    So watchout, there are as many cheaters online as there are offline.
    • The only reason why I figured out he cheated was because the amount of money offered just couldn't fit into my slots.

      In Diablo II the size of your purse goes with your level, so as you advance you can carry more gold. I don't remember if this was true for the original, but that fellow may not have been cheating.

  • Multiple-User "Dimension"? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I used them, they called them "Multiple User Dungeons"

  • GOM is a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jafuser ( 112236 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @04:16PM (#8069758)
    So far, Second Life [gamingopenmarket.com] seems to be their most popular market. I've played with it a little bit; it's kind of fun, and taught me a little about how the bigger commodities markets work.

    I think Second Life is doing especially well on OGM because the company that runs the game (Linden Labs) has not only allowed it to be used, but has encouraged SL residents to use it.

    One of the things that really turned me on to SL was how open-minded the company is that runs it. It's too bad the other bigger MMO companies are afraid to let their users own the fruits of their "labors", including their currency.

  • No legal threats (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @04:22PM (#8069838) Homepage
    I'd like to point out the fact that nowhere in the article are legal threats mentioned. Just because an assistant director of legal studies makes an economic argument, doesn't mean that the invisible hand is now under the court's jurisdiction.

  • A good reason (Score:2, Informative)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 )
    There is a good reason that these companies frown upon trading of virtual goods. First and foremost, they can become both directly and indirectly liable for these goods... they technically are the manufacturer, and retailer of these goods, so in many countries, they would be bound to consumer protection laws. If they eliminate these virtual goods from actually being identified as transferable propertly, then there will be a lot less to worry about.

  • The term "MUDFlation" (Score:2, Informative)

    by jbensley ( 106834 )
    You know, I don't remember ever hearing the term 'MUDflation' being used as "inflation in a MUD environment", or for that matter having anything to do with the economics of a particular game.

    I was always under the impression that "MUDflation" was the propensity for the items / players / mobs to get more powerful over time in order to keep people interested. "MUDflation" was the reason the level limit in EQ was raised from 50 to 60, and then to 65, and the weapons got significantly more powerful over time a
    • However what is happening in MMORPGS is NOT inflation, it is simple supply and demand and greed.
      Under inflation the price to produce items increase, no MMORPG has this. Even in SWG where everything is player made all the things like raw materials,travel, cost to run housing and factories all are constant.
      Now if any game started to raise or lower thoses costs based on the total amounts of in game money they you would start to see inflation.
  • I'd hate to have to figure out how to report virtual income on my tax return.
  • I don't know how much of the /. userbase plays the MUD Medievia (www.shamelessplugs.com) but just about every time they implement a major change (which isn't hard on a mud that has an average online base of (a frickan huge) 400 or so users at any given off-hour) that somehow involves money, be it a new zone opening (NEW EQ!!!) or a change to a fundamental portion of the game, people get richer and things cost more.
    There is no huge international online market for goods other than the Auction Channel, and eve
    • I think you put up a very valid point, if these MMORPG's try to simulate a real world, then be prepared for them to be just like it, fair or not (usually not fair).

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