As of now I’m currently trying to plan out a player-run economy that allows players to buy and sell goods with ideally no direct interference coming from the developers unless there were rule violations. Naturally, you would need a currency to allow for these transactions to occur. The issue, however, is that in many player-run economies inflation is a major issue that has to be addressed constantly by developers since they’re the only ones who can control it. So I was considering to create a currency system that allowed player-run governments to print and control the money supply of their individual nation. Is there any issues that such a system could bring or would this be a genuinely interesting concept?
I think if you allow players to adjust their own money supply you are going to see some hyper-inflation
. Seriously, it’s an interesting idea, but I wonder if the typical Roblox player is able to manage this, or indeed, would enjoy managing this.
The main requirement for a balanced economy is having sufficient ways to remove cash from the system. Generally in games players either loot, earn or mine objects of value in exchange for their time: This creates the problem of spiralling wealth.
This is not how the real world works, where costs are everywhere due to labour, food, fuel, housing, health, breakages… But these are rarely fun to have in game.
You need to create methods of extracting cash from the system whilst keeping the game balanced (new versus old players) and enjoyable (don’t make the player feel they are impoverished). Fast travel fees, upgrades, aesthetics, access to traders, etc.
You can try adaptive pricing based on supply and demand, but this can have a very negative effect on new/casual players finding unachievable costs due to demand from long term grinders. Balancing such a system can be very tricky.
Yeah, I’ve considered the possibility of inflation and part of my idea would be to not have any npc vendors to prevent wealth spirals, allow player-run governments to destroy currency or at least take it out of circulation, and utilize resource sinks(like food spoilage) instead of money sinks.
The main reason why inflation generally happens in player economies like Roblox Islands is due to the existence of npc vendors that can exchange loot directly for newly created cash. This forces developers to constantly update prices to stem inflation. My plan would allow for an actual limit on currency to be enforced and revised when needed according to the needs of the nation. I also wanted to utilize resource sinks to encourage players to trade more often(at least in the early game) and make the switch to currency more natural.
Of course, inflation will still happen to some degree, but if things get out of control, players would have someone they can blame(i.e governments)in the server. This would turn inflation into an actual gameplay feature that could drive conflict between players and create some really interesting stories.