March 1999
- Storytelling vs simulation, Koster, Raph
- Storytelling vs simulation, Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
- Storytelling vs simulation, Mik Clarke
- Storytelling vs simulation, J C Lawrence
- Storytelling vs simulation, Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling vs simulation, J C Lawrence
- Storytelling vs simulation, Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling vs simulation, Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- OT: MUSH semantics (was: Influential muds) T. Alexander Popiel
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Koster, Raph
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Matthew Mihaly
- Generic event handling Adam Wiggins
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Ben Greear
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Matthew D. Fuller
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Nathan F Yospe
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Jason Spangler
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Oliver Jowett
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Oliver Jowett
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. J C Lawrence
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- ADMIN: Kanga.Nu outage and other news -- please read J C Lawrence
- Elder Games Martin C Sweitzer
- Elder Games Adam Wiggins
- Elder Games Koster, Raph
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Martin C Sweitzer
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Kylotan
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Kylotan
- Elder Games Koster, Raph
- Elder Games B. Scott Boding
- Elder Games Wes Connell
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Matthew D. Fuller
- Elder Games B. Scott Boding
- Elder Games Michael Hohensee
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Elder Games Chris Gray
- Elder Games Chris Gray
- Elder Games J C Lawrence
- Elder Games Nathan F Yospe
- Elder Games J C Lawrence
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections) Matthew D. Fuller
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections) Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Matthew D. Fuller
- Naming and Directories? Adam Wiggins
- Naming and Directories? Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Nathan F Yospe
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Nathan F Yospe
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Jon A. Lambert
- Naming and Directories? Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Naming and Directories? Ben Greear
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Jo Dillon
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Jo Dillon
- Naming and Directories? Jay Carlson
- Naming and Directories? Jon A. Lambert
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Balancing a Mud Martin C Sweitzer
- Balancing a Mud Neerenberg, AaronX
- Balancing a Mud Mik Clarke
- Balancing a Mud Martin C Sweitzer
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connec Marc Bowden
- ADMIN: Signature length J C Lawrence
- distributed, _untrusted_ servers Oliver Jowett
- OT ADMIN: Web links to MUD-Dev J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
-- forwarded message --
From: mwilley@my-dejanews.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
Subject: Re: MUD Economies
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 1999 16:54:42 GMT
In article <36dfaca7.3875372@news.uk.ibm.com>,
scatter@thevortex.com (Scatter) wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Mar 1999 17:46:54 -0500, cercocebus@mindspring.com
> (Siobhan) wrote:
>
> >I am interested in ideas which other admins out there have about generating
> >economies on their MU*s. On ours, we've come to something of a glass ceiling
> >in terms of having a use for gold beyond buying a selling equipment. I was
> >hoping those who have had experience with things like player-run shops,
> >player property, trade, or other things might lend us some of your wisdom.
> >We've tried reducing the amount of gold in play, but players still accumulate
> >vast sums due to sheer amount of time spent on the mud. Anyone have some
> >ideas about developing and implementing some more sophisticated economies?
[WOW! A real topic on r.g.m.admin! Who wudda thunkit?]
> The usual model is the 'faucet-drain' where there is a method by which
> value trickles into the world and a method by which it trickles out
> again. Ideally you need to make it trickle out at the same rate it
> trickles in. You have the faucet without the drain - value trickles in
> in the form of equipment loaded into npcs, and is converted into gold
> through selling. There is no drain.
>
> What is needed is a way to pull that value out of the world again,
> something to make players convert that gold into something
> insubstantial - either buying something temporary that can disappear
> and needs to be bought again, or things like services which are
> useful.
The 'faucet-drain' model of mud economies is a common topic on the MUD-Dev
list at kanga.nu, which is a source I'd highly recommend if you're interested
in breaking new ground.
I'm trying something different with an economic system on my new project,
that I hope will clear up some of the underlying problems with typical mud
economies. I think the most basic problem is that we're looking at economics
in a sideways manner in most muds: "value" is a fixed attribute of an object,
expressed in a single form of currency. Our current system at least
addresses the second type: we have different currencies for each of our
cosms, and a currency tracking system that adjusts their exchange rates based
on supply and demand. What I intend to do is to use a similar system to
encompass the whole economy, tracking supply and demand for a large range of
objects and adjusting their value accordingly. I hope that this will level
out the bumps in the faucet-drain system.
My "faucet-drain" model, then, has three parts: the faucet, the drains, and
the tracker (which I've called the Resource Handlers, or RHs). The faucet is
easy to identify - any time an in-game object is cloned. It's the
responsibility of any in-game object to notify the local RH that it has been
created, and passing certain data to the RH: the materials it is made of, and
the mass of each material used.
The drains are any method which remove an in-game object from the game world.
Again, they're not difficult to identify - any time an in-game object is
cleaned up. The drain notifies the local RH of the materials reclaimed by
that drain, if any. For instance, a shop can attempt to "recycle" an item,
trading it back to the RH for it's value in raw materials (probably to clear
shelf space for a more valuable item). The material reclaimed from that is
dependant on the skill of the recycler (i.e. the local blacksmith for a
sword), the axioms of the RH (a higher tech level can recycle more kinds of
materials than a lower one), and a few other factors. Alternately, an
"off-screen cleanup" (removing an object from memory not because it's been
destroyed, but because it's not been touched in too long) credits the RH with
the complete value of it's materials - it's not gone, it's just "off-screen".
That allows the object to be restored in it's last location without making
odd workarounds for the RH.
The RHs are a collection of local economic trackers. They use an abstract
system to track the supply and demand of resources: Instead of trying to
track the total amount of stuff in the world, they define 0 as a balance
between supply and demand, and try to keep the resource totals at 0. A
negative resource means that demand is greater than supply, making values
higher. A positive sum means supply is greater than demand, lowering
resource values. An RH uses it's calculated resource values to "buy" and
"sell" raw materials from the world. (They make a slight profit on each
transaction, preventing players from manipulating the RH into producing
infinite wealth.) When a resource is negative, the RH notifies a class of
AGENT NPCs of it's demand, and they can attempt to obtain that resource from
the environment to sell to the RH. There are a number of types of AGENTs that
I've worked on, from miners to farmers to shepherds to craftsmen. I'm
currently trying to work out systems where players can be agents (that aren't
painfully boring, ridiculously easy or ludicrously profitable).
Similar tracking functions in the RH can be used to track population growth,
which I'm planning to use to allow populations to expand and contract. I'd
been planning to use something simple to figure population growth rates (a
direct correlation to food supply, similar to Civilization), but my wife has
been talking to me about simulations she did in college for bacterial growth.
It sounds interesting.
(There was also a problem I cleared up earlier, where NPCs who have never
been created before have to pay for resources they use during creation with
money they haven't earned yet. Their starting resources and cash have to be
taken as a loss by the RH, representing whatever number of years they were
supported by the society before becoming adults (cheezy, but effective). The
RH draws a low-interest loan from the Bank when it needs cash, and repays
that loan with it's profits from resource sales. The Bank is the object that
determines currency exchange rates - this has been accomplished in the past
by expressing object values in Generic Currency Units (GCU), and tracking
each currency's value in GCU. With multiple currencies associated with
multiple RHs, we can factor in values of the RHs to currency values as well,
like their cash and resource supplies/deficits.)
[Blatant plug: We're still looking for development help for the DS2 project.
If the above sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to help develop and
code, contact me!]
---
Visit us at Dreamshadow today! - dreamer.telmaron.com 3333
http://homestead.dejanews.com/dreamshadow/DreamshadowMain.html - (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- Potential New Laws Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Mud Economies (A simple idea) Wes Connell
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) B. Scott Boding
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Mik Clarke
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) B. Scott Boding
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Martin Keegan
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Wes Connell
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Brandon A Downey
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Adam Wiggins
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Martin C Sweitzer
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Quzah [softhome]
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Richard Woolcock
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Christopher Allen
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- On the topic of Mud AI Leif Hardison
- On the topic of Mud AI Nicholas Lee
- On the topic of Mud AI Andrew Norman
- Unicode, ascii and names Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) T. Alexander Popiel
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Renaming objects. John Hopson
- Renaming objects. David Bennett
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) Petri Virkkula
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Robert Green
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Adam Wiggins
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Robert Green
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Christopher Allen
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Mik Clarke
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Chris Gray
- OT: just a little something... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- (fwd) implications J C Lawrence
- Downtime J C Lawrence
- Getting Started with Mud Server Stormblade
- Getting Started with Mud Server Ross Nicoll
- Getting Started with Mud Server Jim Clark
- Getting Started with Mud Server Ben Greear
- Getting Started with Mud Server Chris Gray
- Getting Started with Mud Server Jo Dillon
- Getting Started with Mud Server Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Terms Ola Fosheim Grøstad