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dentin · 06-30-2009, 09:44 PM

Alter Aeon handles its gold economy fairly well, after many years of tweaking. It uses several of the ideas listed below, but the foundation of it is accurate gold tracking:

- All gold sources and sinks are tracked and understood
- Run time gold stats are available just as a sanity check on things
- 'dangerous' or unexpected gold changes are logged
- Large gold changes, even valid transactions, trigger notifies just in case
- There's a single global value representing all gold in circulation

Just tracking the flow of gold through the system was useful, but completely ineffective in managing the economy by itself. While active immortal intervention on a continuous basis can use these numbers to keep the economy under control, it's a complete waste of time for an immortal to do so. We have machinery for tasks like this.

Therefore, we don't bring immortals or builders into the picture, and most gold drops are calculated. Adding this helped tremendously, but was still insufficient. In the long run, we ended up with several layers that at last appear to be stable.

- Mobs drop gold based on their death or theft rates; object gold is similarly modified with every looting of a treasure object. The purpose of this dynamic feedback is to prevent one source from dominating or becoming the 'easy gold'.

- Large quantities of gold are taxed. Characters holding more than a million gold are taxed on the amount above a million gold, to the tune of about 2% per week. The purpose of the tax is to prevent packrats from accumulating unlimited sized hoards.

- Clan and guild bank accounts can only hold a limited amount. Since the very existence of the clan indicates that gold is being paid in dues, this limited amount is fairly high (on the order of 50 million gold.)

- Player shops can hold an unlimited amount, but generally shops have high rent rates, so gold turnover has so far not been a problem there.

But by far the most critical part of the system is the global offset controller. This control system monitors the total quantity of gold in existence, and subtly tweaks the gold sources based on that value. The short-delay term of the control system looks at local deviations from the long term expectation, and fairly aggressively modifies the global gold sources. This short-delay term can change total gold influx on the order of 50% in a one week period if necessary.

As the total quantity of gold in existence changes, the long-delay term of the control system slowly adjusts the set point for the short-delay calculations. If a large amount of gold is in circulation, the short-delay set point will be lowered, globally lowering the input of gold into the system.

The net result of all this is that we have a system that allows for fairly substantial deviations in the short term, but always returns to long term stability. Total gold in circulation has varied by approximately 10% (peak of 528 million to trough of 482 million) over the last two years, and I no longer hear the once-common complaint that gold is worthless.

Just FYI.

06-30-2009, 09:44 PM	#10
dentin Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Home MUD: Alter Aeon Posts: 245	Re: Creating an economy Alter Aeon handles its gold economy fairly well, after many years of tweaking. It uses several of the ideas listed below, but the foundation of it is accurate gold tracking: - All gold sources and sinks are tracked and understood - Run time gold stats are available just as a sanity check on things - 'dangerous' or unexpected gold changes are logged - Large gold changes, even valid transactions, trigger notifies just in case - There's a single global value representing all gold in circulation Just tracking the flow of gold through the system was useful, but completely ineffective in managing the economy by itself. While active immortal intervention on a continuous basis can use these numbers to keep the economy under control, it's a complete waste of time for an immortal to do so. We have machinery for tasks like this. Therefore, we don't bring immortals or builders into the picture, and most gold drops are calculated. Adding this helped tremendously, but was still insufficient. In the long run, we ended up with several layers that at last appear to be stable. - Mobs drop gold based on their death or theft rates; object gold is similarly modified with every looting of a treasure object. The purpose of this dynamic feedback is to prevent one source from dominating or becoming the 'easy gold'. - Large quantities of gold are taxed. Characters holding more than a million gold are taxed on the amount above a million gold, to the tune of about 2% per week. The purpose of the tax is to prevent packrats from accumulating unlimited sized hoards. - Clan and guild bank accounts can only hold a limited amount. Since the very existence of the clan indicates that gold is being paid in dues, this limited amount is fairly high (on the order of 50 million gold.) - Player shops can hold an unlimited amount, but generally shops have high rent rates, so gold turnover has so far not been a problem there. But by far the most critical part of the system is the global offset controller. This control system monitors the total quantity of gold in existence, and subtly tweaks the gold sources based on that value. The short-delay term of the control system looks at local deviations from the long term expectation, and fairly aggressively modifies the global gold sources. This short-delay term can change total gold influx on the order of 50% in a one week period if necessary. As the total quantity of gold in existence changes, the long-delay term of the control system slowly adjusts the set point for the short-delay calculations. If a large amount of gold is in circulation, the short-delay set point will be lowered, globally lowering the input of gold into the system. The net result of all this is that we have a system that allows for fairly substantial deviations in the short term, but always returns to long term stability. Total gold in circulation has varied by approximately 10% (peak of 528 million to trough of 482 million) over the last two years, and I no longer hear the once-common complaint that gold is worthless. Just FYI.