As was inevitable, the VO Universe's trade routes have been dried up by dedicated pilots (I plead guilty to this as well). The VO economy is now in it's running state and no more in its initial state.

What does this mean to future developments of VO ?

Simple: we're hitting a hardcoded absolute limit in how much money can be gained by trading.

This is bad news. It means that, from now on, players cannot make millions in a few days like I and select others did. It means that trading resources is now in a diminishing returns situation: the quicker you want to make money, the smaller you make. And as the number of players grow, it's bound to get worse.

Explanation: Let's say all trade runs worth something have been dried. This is purely speculation, and I don't exactly know the mathematical formula that is applied to reduce prices of untraded goods in a station. So let's assume prices go up by 1 every minute, and that all untraded goods are at the same prices as they're bought elsewhere (=trade runs dried out).

There are 111 stations. They have approximately 3 untraded goods (this needs not be precise, we just want to estimate the order of magnitude). That's a "production" of 333 potential credits per minute, or 20000 per hour, or 500000 per day. For 100+ players !

See ?

Of course there still are traded goods, those that don't drop in prices and yield an approximate 100 gain per CU (my observed average). But you're hardly ever going to be rich on such a trade run :(

This is why the mining system will be very welcome, and why the prices of future features should be set with this consideration in mind. Imagine this universe with just 1000 players, they'd get at most, by trading, 100-1000 credits a day per player !

Seems my calculation is off. Let's correct it:

20 traded goods are not sold locally, in average. 111 stations, and prices go back up 1 per 6 minutes approximately:

111x20x10=22 200 credits per hour in the whole universe of VO, or 500 000 credits worth of potential trade net gain per day, to share between every player each day.

That's still WAY TOO LITTLE to sustain the economy, especially with over 200 players (1000 credits net gain per hour per person when trading). The prices re-adjustments should be done much much faster.

To the people who say "but I made a million this morning" I'd like to point out they helped bring the system to its depleted state. Of course not all trade runs are dried yet, we're talking about 2220 possible lucrative trades (with multiple routes), but eventually they'll all be dry.

First I want to thank you for this post. It's excellent, and I totally agree with it, although your assumption about what the "credits per minute value" is isn't exactly right, it's still an underlying problem. (The difference is that demand as a fraction of the price range goes up X percent per minute, so more expensive widgets can gain "credits per minute" faster).

[Edit: come to think of it, it's just a different way of looking at the same thing, so you're not wrong to say "credits per hour".]

The economy as it stands right now has one tunable parameter and we can tune it as a stopgap measure. You've already figured out what it is. It was implemented this way, originally, so we could easily adjust it to the userbase as this problem started to occur. It is also totally boring and predictable (predictability being its sole virtue).

But what we _really_ want to do is make a completely different economy actually based on production cycles and actual demand for actual items based on its necessity for production (ore/metals/etc) or sale (luxury goods) or life support (water & food). This is coming, and I am pushing hard for it.

I'm probably being dense here, but I don't understand Chao's math.

Based on his conclusions though, I'm guessing that the problem he outlines is that the economy is not actually automatically scaled to the number of players currently logged. In other words, the current economy doesn't set the rate at which prices change based on how many people are currently playing (much less scale the economy based on historical values such as the average number of widgets sold per player per hour). As a result, there is a finite ammount of profit available in the universe.

This is not at all what I hoped for, and is one of the reasons why I opposed introducing an dynamic economy. When it became clear that the devs were dedicated to facing the challenges involved, I wrote this post.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/2890#39358

Some of you will probably quibble with the small profit margins I was suggesting back then. At the time, we didn't have licenses to sink money into, and the low profit margins were intended to encourage exploration and some degree of caution. I had not envisioned a universe in which making a profit was necessarily important to your character development provided you could keep yourself supplied with a ship. The current universe is quite different and requires you to run money treadmills more regularly. If this continues, then a higher base profit margin than I suggested will be necessary.

I want to again reiterate that I think it essential that the economy scale with the player base dynamically. That's the most important number in the algorithm. Chao envisions a situation in which profit per day over the whole universe is fixed resulting in profit per player being at most p(n) = P/N. If he is correct, then this is radically different than the model I outlined. In it, profit _per player_ per day was fixed and so the profit in the whole universe was P(n) = p*N. a1k0n seems to be suggesting that under the current model tweeking the economy doesn't change the profit per player, but the profit per universe. That just seems totally wrong.

It is not scaled to the number of players.

I was never enamored with the current economy. To be fair, it was originally specified to scale with the current number of players (in fact it was specified to be very similar to what you proposed) and was never implemented that way. But nobody ever did even a simple simulation, so the numbers are the same now as they were a year ago: arbitrary.

So arbitrary, in fact, that we weren't sure how much it -should- scale with the number of players. We also had no way of knowing, from the station's perspective, how many users are online, though we could easily add it now.

Thanks for the information, a1kon ! This is exactly what was missing. And Celebrim, you're right in the other thread, your argument is a lot like mine.

The main problem of the current economy seems to be this "revenue per player" number. Obviously I cannot determine the average "player spending", nor can I say how much "capital" each player should be able to amass through playing.

There are two ways to regulate those numbers (revenue and capital): prices and a method to recycle money. Else you stumble onto two pitfalls: first, if you have a fixed quantity of value in the VO universe, then every player will grow poorer with time and growth of the userbase. Second, if this value grows with number of players, then some will own most and the others will have the crumbs (effectively locking them out of licenses and ships: a league of heavy traders/exploiters would arise). The answer is the same as in the real world: to make this value grow with the "work" of the players.

This means getting rid of the price drop, for example. The price drop system, as I explained, limits the value in the Universe of VO to an arbitrary number (fixed quantity: first pitfall), and making the prices regrow slowly is but an inadequate clutch :( But implementing a solution like Celebrim's where total value grows with player number is, IMO, not adequate enough (second pitfall).

My suggestion is then to abandon the price drop mechanism, or at least correct its shortcomings if you want to keep it as a deterrent for trade route abuse (my opinion is that the best trade routes should be across unmonitored space between two nations, ranging down to same-system trade routes, so as to encourage piracy as a regulation method).

I'll take my own experience as an example: I made millions by finding the best-profitable trade routes in terms of net gain per time spent playing. Litterally, I found the job with the best salary. But it still took me over DOZENS of hours, and that's why I think it's fair and should stay like this. Unfortunately the current price-drop system makes this "job" dead in the long term.

I hope this makes enough sense.

It makes sense, but I bristle at the idea that my solution is 'inadequate'. ;)

Then again, basically you are suggesting that we abandon the idea of a dynamic economy entirely, which was my original position to begin with.

I think you are a little big confused. I would imagine that there is not a 'price drop' system, but rather a 'price adjustment' system which can take the price up above its normal price or down below it depending on whether demand is being met. I think what you are experiencing is merely an economy which in which everything is no longer near its maximum price, and so everything looks like a price drop to you. Nonetheless, your point remains.

The biggest problem with a dynamic economy is that it is competitive. Some people may scoff at that statement. Afterall, isn't the whole point of playing a game to be competitive? Well, yes and no. Board games like Monopoly and Risk are poorly designed in that competition can elimenate opponents from play before the game is over. This is no fun for the people who get elimenated. Better designed board games like Settlers of Cataan and Puerto Rico allow all players to keep competing right until the end of the game (and with at least some hope of winning). A MMORPG finds itself facing the same sort of design issues. If the MMORPG doesn't encourage some ammount of competition between the players, it would be better off as a single player game. But on the other hand, if the competition becomes so fierce that certain players are elimenated from play that's not only unfun for the players but bad for the health of the game.

Dynamic economies are probablimatic because that's exactly what is at stake in a dynamic economy. If you can't earn an income of some sort in the game, then essentially you've been elimenated from play.

I personally think that you are gaining something with a dynamic economy, and a well designed one would be better than none at all. But as a cynic, it wasn't an area I would have tackled immediately because you are better without one than with one that doesn't work well.

On the other hand, I disagree with Chao's assertion that my model of growing the economy as the player base grows is inadequate. He is perfectly right that more experienced players will dominate the economy, but they also have bigger money sinks. A new player, nestled in the heart of a faction somewhere, just doesn't need nearly as much money as a veteren engaging other veterens in pitched battles on the frontier. Also, if the faction system is well designed, the veterens should have incintives for nuturing newbies (if only in the same way that nobles have incintives for nuturing serfs).

The best thing would be an actual economy, instead of this pretend dynamic economy, using real trade items, such as ship hulls, engines, electrical components, weapons. The trade goods we have now are useless junk and are merely stopgap token items to move around, and have as much intrinsic meaning as eating cardboard. It might be good to keep them, as a supplimental trade item, but if a dynamic economy's the goal, it needs to be reactive in a realistic manner to the player base.

Making some stations produce hulls(which would be hugely expensive, for the high end ones, and so large even a Centaur would have to carry only 1 or 2), some weapons systems, some targeting systems, computers, nav systems, etc... and others would actually sell ships.

Players could be the equalizing force here. Limiting supplies of used items, like ships and weapons, and then making it so actual shortages create the possibility for great profit, would make a HIGHLY dynamic and self governing system which would never have a permanent shortage of anything, since everyone would have a good reason to equalize the imbalances, with a personal benefit of great profit.

I propose making the number of ships and weapons limited in supply(not low end stuff like buses, free/light batteries/gov plasma), and making the number that people can actually buy dependent on what's traded. Maybe make it so each 'shipment' of 1 hull unit makes 5 ships available(in other words, maybe the ship hulls are 'broken up' into the struts, armor, etc. during shipping and are greatly smaller than the finished ship will be) to make sure that there isn't a constant ship crisis...

I'm not sure if I'm completely on the right path here, but the current system is, bluntly, really awful, and NEEDS replacing with something truly dynamic.

Edit: I don't expect this overnight, just as a long term goal. I know what sort of effort would be required to impliment somethisg like this...

part of taking steps to a more permanant solution would be to make the supply chains logical as well.

See post below for my thoughts on that.
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/6631

Once everything is travelling in such a way that items need to go to certain types of stations, those stations can then produce limited quantities of whatever it is that they sell based on how much materiel they recieve. A station thats not getting enough of what it demands wont have availible as much of what it produces, but it will have a correspondingly higher profit for the items it does recieve.

With player asteroid mining coming into the game (hopefully) on monday, the initial link in the chain can become player based. (how much ore are the players bringing into the refining stations)

With that as a variable amount, adjusting the prices for making a limited profit should be possible. (eg if you are going to a research station or manufacturing station from a refinery taking "REFINED GOODS" will always gaurentee a small profit.

This can be set up by making sure that the maximum buy price on any given product at a station that produces it has a top range that is slightly lower than the minuium sell range on that product at a station where it is in demand.

Obviously if the model i describe in the other thread were to be added the commercial and capitol stations would have a slightly different set of rules. Buying a product from them would only make you a profit if you sold it to a station that was demanding it towards the higher end of the price scale.

I reject the more that you can fix problems with balance and design simply by throwing more realistic detail at the problem.

Throwing more detail at a broken system in hopes to correct the problem just ends up creating a more complex system in which things are obviously wrong but because of the complexity it is less clear what needs to be done to fix it.

You can't just throw out terms like supply chain and trade good and hope that Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market will make everything better. Even if it would, it wouldn't necessarily make for a great game. In the real world, people spend most of thier lives moving stuff from points of production to consumers, trying to figure out how many resources to purchase to meet demand, and trying to find, coax, and stay in touch with potential buyers. The real economy requires billions of man hours to work right, and even then its subject to alot of seemingly random fluxuation that doesn't make people all that happy. Most people play games to get away from that sort of thing. If you go and make playing the game work, people will wonder why they are paying you to play the game and not the other way around.

I'm not suggesting that you throw more detail at a broken system, i'm suggesting that the broken system be replaced with a more detailed one. I'm not sure if you looked at the suggestion i referenced in my other post, but the changes, while subtle, are fairly significant compared to what we have now.

The idea that you can buy ore at a station labeled "orion heavy manufacturing" bothers me from a game immersion point of view. It doesnt make sense.

If each station has goods that it demands and uses to produce other items, then taking those goods from a station that produces them to a station that demands them will always provide a small profit.

It might not be more than a few percent at the minimum, but it will be a profit.
If the station hasnt recieved any of that item in a while, the profit margin will be higher.
If a station has recieved a lot of that item, the profit will be lower, but the goods it produces will also cost less, creating more profit on the next leg of the chain.

EDIT: as far as making for a great game, I think having some idea of what you need to take to a station based on what it is designed for makes for a more immersive game. The fact that in UIT space everything is pretty much availible anywhere detracts from the game IMO.

Spellcast: I suggest that instead of using these terms loosely, you plug your ideas into the economic model I suggested in my post from last year. Effectively what you are doing is taking terms the terms in my model and expanding on how they are generated in the hopes of obtaining better numbers for them.

I think if you start looking at this algorithmicly rather than in vague terms you'll release how little of a solution it really provides.

Thats because i'm not looking for an algorythmic solution celebrim. I'm looking for a sensible one.
Creating an algorythm to define an economy, dynamic or otherwise is exceptionally difficult.

I personally don't think that there is going to be a magical algorythm that creates a functional economy in the game. Instead i feel that there is going to need to be a series of "groups" of cargos balanced more or less manually against each other that, while taking a bit more work from the developers to set up, will provide a more entertaining trade system.

I broke the trade goods down into groups in my other post, I see the groups as being the basic building block of the economy. If each group of cargo has a set range of numbers associated with it, then the values of that cargo can be adjusted based on several factors, without ever making a link in the chain broken and unprofitable.

I see a setup kind of like the following. (i'm sorting this out of the way i see it working in my head on the fly, trying to make it clear and understandable in the process)

Each group of cargo has a value range with a minimum and a maximum.

Each specific cargo has a modifier that gives it a different minimum/maximum than the other cargos within its group, but constant in relation to them.

Each station type has a modifier specified for each group of cargo. This determines what the value range of that cargo group is at each station. it also determines how many of each group is needed to "fill" the stations demand.
if a station type demands that cargo group, the modifier will increase the base range, and it will take more cargo of that type of cargo to produce a demand change in the base range;
if it produces the cargo, the modifier will reduce the base range, and it will take less of that cargo to produce a demand change to that cargo range;
if it ignores the cargo, there wont be a modifier at all (the modifier will be x1), and the station demand will be the constant (100, 300, 500, this will have to be a more or less arbitrary number determined by playtesting).

the value of each cargo is set by how those numbers react to each other, and only to each other. This means that if the groups are balanced with each other, all the cargo within them can be balanced.

Example:

If the cargo group ORE has a value range of 1-20, all cargoes within the group ORE have that as the basic range.

IF xithricite ore has a modifier of (x5 +100) then the base price range for any Xithricite ORE is 105-200

IF a REFINERY type station has a modifier of (x1.2) for the cargo group ORE, then xithricite ore will always have a base price range of 121 - 240 at a refinery.

If a MINING type station by contrast has a modifier of (x0.6) for the group ORE, then the base price for xithricite ore at a mining station is 64-120.

Thus even if you purchase ore at the maximum price at a mining station, you will make a small profit (1 whole credit woot) selling it to a refining station even at minimum value.

For buying/selling add/subtract say, 2% from the base range, and allow for up to an additional 3% change based on standing with the faction the station belongs to. Give an additional 0.25% change for each level of trade (capped at 4%?) to allow some benefits for those trade points.

As long as the modifier for each station TYPE is balanced in relation to the various cargo GROUPS, there will be some profit availible at any step of the chain, certaintly not in the amounts we have seen in the past, but there wont be negative profits on a trade route that would logically make money just because someone sold 500 wigits at once and completely destroyed the trade route.

The economy is dynamic in the sense that each cargo fluctuates within its determined range, making some trade routes more profitable than others. If balanced carefully it could be set up so that buying any cargo at its maximum price would result in a profit of 0 if sold to a station that demanded it that has had the demand filled completely.

To make it a demand based economy, When a station recieves items that go into the production of a cargo it offers for sale, that will count as a "delivery" of that cargo to the station, adjusting the price of the cargo being sold accordingly.
Each time an item is purchased, the demand for the "base materiels" that go into it would increase.
By the same token (and to prevent an obvious exploit with that) selling an item to a station would also cause the demand for the items that are used to make it go down appropriately.

EG if a refining station sells steel, and steel needs 2 Ferric Ore and 1 Carbonic Ore to make, for every group of 2ferric/1carbonic, the server "sells" a steel to the station, causing the demand for steel to drop lower, reducing the price.
Buying a steel will cause the stations demand for Ferric and carbonic ore to increase (at a 2 to 1) ratio.

since the price works its way back up the price range at a constant rate over time, if a station hasn't recieved any deliveries in a while, the price a station sells an item for will slowly increase also.

There are some definitely problems with this model, breaking existing groups down into subgroups or adding a new group entirely for more detail being the most obvious one, as that means each station type has to have a new modifier added for the new group. If the economy became complex enough that could become time consuming.

Incidentally celebrim with as many times as we have argued on these boards i wouldnt think you of all people would accuse me of using any terms "loosly". :) As usual we are looking at the problem from different points of view.

ok, well, rip away celebrim, I feel that i've got a possible solution buried in there somewhere, but forcing it to become coherent after 12 hours at work is apparently beyond me at the moment.

The ideal system, and the most sensible one, would be one where buying stations had some price setting algo which took into account how badly the item in question was needed, how large it was(IE., how many could be transported at once), and how far one would need to travel to bring that item to the station, as well as what the item was selling for at the nearest stations.

If the station NEEDS the item NOW, and has none at all, it would pay a considerable premium to the first couple of people to bring it supplies, and the price would drop on its own after that as the station's inventory reached safe levels again. If you tied this system into a virtual 'stock ticker' that people could see, and made the price adjust in reaction to inventory changes every few minutes when the ticker started over, it would give people an idea of what sort of window they'd be looking at in which they could make the delivery and be assured a substantial profit.

Remember, the game will soon have a news system that will announce shortages of items, so traders won't have to hunt for stations in need; they can just work out how they can get the item in question to the station in question the fastest.

Wow, no one has understood what I'm trying to say :(

I'll be back in some hours with more complete explanation.

A MMOG economy differs fundamentally from a real-world economy. The latter has limited resources and uses scarcity-based mechanisms to regulate (fairly or not) the dispatching of resources to individuals. The former uses money to achieve three (possibly four) objectives, which are:

1) Let any player be able to buy whatever element of gameplay (s)he wants, eventually or given enough work on his/her part.

This is the prime reason the current price-drop system must go. With an arbitrary cap on how much money is added to the economy, VO will eventually have a ruling class of richsters, and working poors. Bringing artificial scarcity in a system which has virtually unlimited resource is NOT a good idea, we play games to evade reality, not to run into the same frustrations as in real life !

This is also why, sorry for those harsh words, none of your propositions of supply-chains and other scarcity-based mechanisms can address the real issue :(

Players should be able to make a fortune if they want to do so and spend time working on making money. However difficult/easy it is to make money has to be balanced with price-setting. Ultimately, players would set prices themselves, for best balance.

2) Accompagny the progression of players in the game.

As experience / levels grow, revenue / capital should grow for a player. This is most obvious and already implemented with many mechanisms (i.e. higher bounty for harder bots).

3) Put an accent on otherwise less interesting aspects of gameplay.

Want players to try mining / trading ? Make the better weapons / licences / ships cost more. already implemented.

4) (Optionally) incitate players to pause regularly to avoid continuous treadmilling.

OK, I got this one from World of Warcraft, kudos to Blizzard for thinking about this. If you want to keep some balance between new players and older players / time-loggers / treadmillers, you can give incentives to value pauses. For example by implementing a short-cycle diminishing returns mechanism (like a price drop system which would adjust prices back to their original value after a fixed period of time).

Other considerations:
- Competition between players. Someone asked once in the ingame chat whether the price-drops were specific to one player, or if they affected other players as well. I think this is insightful, and have not yet clearly made my mind about whether to seperate players' prices. Please debate.
- Diminishing returns over time or experience. This means instaurating a fuzzy cap on how far a player can go. That is, beyond 10/10/10/10 there's little to gain, and much more effort necessary to progress. Other MMOGs generally have a hardcoded cap to level (99, usually) or money (this one is less common). That incitates players to turn to other activities after reaching "the top", which is a good thing IMO, but may detract players from playing after a while (done everything there was to do), maybe giving unique opportunities to each player could incitate creation of new characters over and over by seasoned players.

"This is also why, sorry for those harsh words, none of your propositions of supply-chains and other scarcity-based mechanisms can address the real issue."

I don't agree fully with everything Chao says, but he is absolutely dead on target here. And even though I don't fully agree with what he wants to do, he certainly has 'got it' alot better than most people yelling about the economy. Realism alone won't make the economy better. In fact, it would probably make it work 'worse' because there are alot of differences between a game economy and the real world. I also wonder whether an actual working system that took into account the differences between a game and the real world, could not be effectively modeled by something much much simplier than what alot of people are demanding.