Unpaid rent rage

My last post in this thread on (macro) economic theory, but sometimes side-topics can be a Good Thing(tm).
Edit: TL;DR - check the link at the bottom.

Greed is the "invisible hand" that makes the system work. MMO economies are very interesting, and studied quite a bit, because they are the closest thing to a true "free market" that exists. There are no real "barriers to entry" and generally no one can hold a monopoly on a certain good (there are exceptions here and there). They are also very volatile: changes that would take months to show up in a "real world" economy can happen in days and sometimes even hours in an MMO.

In a free market, Price determines Supply and Demand, not the other way around. If something is selling for a 100 plat on the broker, more people will go out and farm said thing, increasing Supply. OTOH, at 100 plat the Demand for that product may be very low (even as low as zero). [Edit: obviously 100 plat is a random number - for some items 20 silver may be 'normal' (equilibrium - the Price where Supply equals Demand), and others 500 plat is a "quick sale" - Demand at that price is so high that it is almost immediately sold] If no one thinks the item is worth that much, it will sit there unsold until that seller or some other seller puts one up at a price low enough to create some Demand. Remember - nothing ever sells on the broker for more than it is worth: it may not be worth that much to you, but it was to whoever bought it.

For the volatility: I've been involved in 'price wars' that took an item that had been stable at say 50 plat (picking an easy number) and dropped all the way down to ten in a single day. If it drops low enough, one of the major sellers will generally buy it all up to relist at a higher price. Note that that can't work forever. Trying to corner a market in an MMO is nigh impossible because if Price is artificially high, Supply will grow to match it (more players farming). Eventually there's more items for sale than can be purchased by one player - and the new farmers are happy anyway since their goods are being bought very quickly. Yes, some items are limited by spawn rates, but those are the minority. Bind on Pickup was created to address this very issue, btw. Bind on Equip was created to solve a similar issue: an artificially high Supply of an item as none of them get destroyed and players outlevel them putting them back into the market.

The post above on the money supply was spot on. Every player is their own mint, able to create new currency at will by killing things and taking their stuff or receiving quest rewards (buying from or selling to another player doesn't create new money, though money can be removed by brokerage fees). If nothing is done to dispose of that money every veteran player will eventually become filthy rich, prices on everything will rise (like the eggs for a dollar in the Gold Rush "boom towns") and newer players will be effectively shut out unless they are very creative and persistent (example: learning to collect and sell 'shinies' and rare harvests to sell on the broker, but that's still a long process to get anywhere).

In the US the Fed takes actions to control the money supply on a DAILY basis by controlling the rates for short term loans banks lend to each other and borrow from the Fed. The short term paper market (one to three day loans) dwarfs the stock market. Devs in an MMO should be doing the same thing by adjusting drop rates from mobs and other subtle things invisible to the player. Maybe an orc that dropped 8-12 silver now drops 6-10 or 9-13: a small difference, but multiplied across the server things like that have a real impact.

Edit 2: Here is a humorous, but accurate take on this issue.

Always gotta love Order of the Stick!

Uwk

but in that case, the broker won't tell you that they are selling from their house. the house listing is only for houses that have the crates on the floor.

Sorry - haven't read every post. I have returned after a brief (about 3 month) absence. On returning I logged through my alt army clearing guild mail (nice of them not to prune me lol) and checking the broker. From my side every single one of my characters still listed as selling from their rooms despite all but those in rent free housing having run out of rent. At least I knew they were out, so topped them all up.
Point is, the broker window is not "telling" the vendor their rent is due, so many wouldn't realise.

I like the idea of being able to optionally choose to default pay rent, or from escrow. As my alts can generate multi plat sales per week even at level 15, 5 silver a week is not really relevant lol.

i was very surprised there was not an escrow on houses in eq2. in eq1 there is. you can put enough plat for several years if you want into the escrow of the house and it draws it out regularly. you won't know there if your rent is due, because you find out when you go to the house and try to remove something from storage. however, if you have to be away for 3 months, you'll come back to find the house and everything in it in an eviction crate in your hand or if you had more than one house, on the postal guy. I wish they were more like the ones in eq2 in that respect. don't know why they couldn't have given us the best of both games.

They may, for EQ3...just crossing fingers they don't give up on this game after that. :-/

Uwk
still not actually looking forward that much to that (though Landmark's pretty cool! could do without the "don't pay your rent this week [and don't even think about paying it up in advance at all], lose everything, including your land and everything on it" bit, though...)

if that's the way landmark is, then that's the way eqnext (it's NOT EQ3) is going.what i don't understand is this. they give us all access and encourage us to play all their games then they make it impossible to keep your property while playing all the games because there are time limitations imposed - log in every month or you lose your guild hall, log in every 3 months on each toon or you lose their houses, log in weekly or you lose everything - first two are eq1 and last is landmark. do they really think the only thing anyone does is play all their games with no time left for a real life? I do at times, but then there are times when other obligations take me away from the game. the way they are doing this stuff they are hindering us from really enjoying all of their games- not helping.

By calling it EQ3, I like to try to remind folks (maybe even the Powers That Be!) that a game called EQ2 still exists. Going from Everquest to Everquest Next smacks too much of wanting to be able to gloss over this game, which is my favorite of the lot. :-/

Uwk

Don't. Landmark is just a sad fading memory of what Everquest once was.

I remember Everquest. My friend (he was a music teacher) practicing his trumpet while his ranger was on auto run across Karnan.

I remember using my ranger to track corpeses...that got nerfed long ago even in EQ1

I remember SK tracking and dragging corpses. It used to be fun. Not so much now.

Edit2: Honestly a lot of what used to be "fun" was mostly because it was new and omg we have to do WHAT? Spending 15 minutes waiting for the spires to go off just wouldn't fly well now. Back then it had peeps chatting because we didn't know any better.

you can track corpses with necros and with sk's and also with the bone rod you can buy from a vendor. and the lower level zones are still fun. what turned me off to eq1 was when it got so hard to do anything without triple boxing and even then you kept dying. you can still relive the past though. not only on the progressive servers but i take my toons out to the older zones and enjoy them from time to time.

Does anyone get the feeling that SONY (not SOE, but SONY) had/has no real idea about what to do with an online game, but heard they were all the rage? ;->

Uwk

I alpha'd Landmark... Even went back and forth a bit with the lead dev. Landmark had the potential to be THE game of the decade. Give everybody a private instance with infinite resources, give them the dev kit the Next team has, everything that happens in an instance stays in the instance (so instance states have to be saved and nothing affects your outside Landmark character). You'd have seen tons of instances with content that sucked, but there would have been enough real gems in there that people would go to play them. It could have been the indie devs playground...

So many of the testers were up in arms that someone might build something nice in an instance without digging for rocks first...