Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#mmo#virtualeconomy#inflation

MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits

Extra Credits

309K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 9 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

1.4M views9 years ago1 recommendation

Game developmentSoftware designGame design

An explanation of how virtual economies in MMOs suffer from hyperinflation and how game designers use economic tools to stabilize them.

When players can generate their own money in infinite supply by killing monsters for in-game gold, MMO economies quickly get overrun by inflation. In the past we've talked about how designers can create gold sinks to solve this problem. Today we'll talk about other ways game designers approach it: by adapting the same tools used by economists in the real world. Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday! bit.ly/SubToEC (---More below) _________ Get your Extra Credits gear at the store! bit.ly/ExtraStore Play games with us on Extra Play! bit.ly/WatchEXP Watch more episodes from this season of Extra Credits! bit.ly/2xvDUdv Contribute community subtitles to Extra Credits: youtube.com/timedtext_cs_p... Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: bit.ly/ECCurator _________ Would you like James to speak at your school or organization? For info, contact us at: contact@extra-credits.net _________ ♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM bit.ly/1eIHTDS ♪ Outro Music: “March of Robbers in Treno City” by Bluelighter ff9.ocremix.org/

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent introduction to the challenges of designing and balancing virtual economies in multiplayer games.

sdrinfon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Hammercoin – A Bitcoin-fueled game”

Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways to avoid it: link to this video | When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item for double the price. Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it. The game looks really promising, and I'd…
View on Hacker News

stcredzeroon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports”

Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. link to this video My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.
View on Hacker News

stcredzeroon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports”

Anchoring the in-game currency is one of the main strategies for preventing in-game currency inflation: link to this video Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?
View on Hacker News

geek_aton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack”

until you have an established player base and are using 95% or your time for balancing and the economy ( link to this video )
View on Hacker News