Plays with YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits

Name: MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits
Description: An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

Extra Credits Explainers

Open on YouTube First HN thread

1 HN user recommended this explainer in 1 different month between 2016 and 2020.

2007–2026

1 recommendation 3 citations HackerTube score 1

Cited in game-economy threads as a clear explanation of why vendor-sellable loot causes hyperinflation and how designers counter it.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

Pull quote: “Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances” (HN, 2016)

Also tagged: game economy design, mmo, inflation, virtual currency, gold sinks, game design

What Hacker News said

4 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Recommends sdrinf November 2016 under Hammercoin – A Bitcoin-fueled game

Explains why vendor-sellable items cause hyperinflation and how to avoid it.

Read the full comment

Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways to avoid it: [this video] | When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item for double the price. Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it. The game looks really promising, and I'd love to grind a few hours in it as it stands, but I'm not sure if dropping a bitcoin dependency into it won't sink it prematurely.

View on Hacker News

Citations, criticism and jokes

Cites it stcredzero December 2016 under Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports

Covers pegging in-game currency to real money to counter inflation.

Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. [this video] My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.

View on Hacker News

Cites it stcredzero December 2016 under Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports

Explains anchoring in-game currency to prevent inflation.

Anchoring the in-game currency is one of the main strategies for preventing in-game currency inflation: [this video] Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?

View on Hacker News

Cites it geek_at December 2020 under Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

Cited about time spent balancing in-game economy.

until you have an established player base and are using 95% or your time for balancing and the economy ( [this video] )

View on Hacker News