I've had this weird idea rattling around my brain for a while now.
I would like to build a basic game on Hive that has a decent player economy and lots of trading happening. How exactly I'd go about doing that is a bit expansive, but at this point AI coding has gotten so good that I've run out of excuses to just keep sitting on my hands. Multiple people on Hive gave me advice and tips yesterday on how to interact with Claude, Cursor, and other AI to hit the ground running and get the most out of my tokens. A couple of these people just started coding this year with AI and the testimonials are nothing but glowing. "A life-changing experience" even.
In any case one of the "easiest" ways to create a thriving economy in a video game is to create an MMO. With thousands of people inside of a single game it becomes much easier for players to trade and specialize their role within the ecosystem. Of course, creating a massively multiplayer online game is not exactly a small project. Certainly it's doable if you keep it as basic as possible but there are always numerous unforeseen obstacles within any programming endeavor. The question I have to constantly ask myself is how can this project get simplified down as much as possible without stripping its own spirit?
I'm thinking it might actually work as a single player game.
It sounds like such a weird nonsensical thing to say, "Let's build a single player massively multiplayer game!" How is that not a paradox? But at the same time there is some merit to it. There have been so many times I've played a multiplayer RPG and all I did 99% of the time was run off by myself and play the game solo. Why not just take it one step farther and just make the game single-player altogether?
For me the most intriguing part of an RPG is the economy that forms around it.
The game itself is a bit like a slot machine:
- You kill baddies.
- The baddies drop loot.
- The loot is random and better for someone else.
- You sell the loot for gold.
- You use the gold to buy what you need.
Of course there are a couple of big problems when it comes to a system like such as this one. The most glaring is the currency itself, in this case gold. Where does "gold" come from? How does it enter the economy? How does it leave the economy? How do you stop bots or gold farmers from hyperinflating the asset over time?
One easy solve to this problem is to not use gold at all and replace the entire in-game currency with a crypto like HBD. That would pretty much solve all the aforementioned problems. A more complicated way might be to make sure gold emissions are low and not based off of killing the baddies that respawn for free. If I'm being honest I've yet to see a good solution to the problem of Sybil attacking video game economies. It's gotten so bad that many game developers decide to scrap it entirely and make it so trading it largely worthless in the first place, which is a bit of a tragedy if you ask me.
So the idea I'm having is a game balanced and tailored for single player on the battle/gameplay side but the economy between the players would be massively multiplayer. The game would essentially be impossible to beat alone without interacting with the economy. Still not 100% sure if this style would have any merit but I find the idea somewhat interesting nonetheless.
It certainly would be a lot easier to maintain the timing in a turn-based strategy game if players were largely not able to interact with one another in the combat system. Hard to have a turn based game and make moves at your leisure when other players are waiting on you and trying to act while you're in the bathroom. At the same time it would be very easy for players to interact within an economy because you could filter most or even all of the trades through an auction house.
Eve online?
Just recently this video popped up in my feed about the economy of Eve Online and I was compelled to watch the 38 minute clip. This is a game that's been out just as long as World of Warcraft, but I never played it (too busy playing World of Warcraft). Honestly after watching this video I'm almost a little bit annoyed that I never tried this game because the economy side is pretty epic. The trading UI was even modelled after the NASDAQ stock exchange, so you know they were taking it very seriously.
The main plot points I learned from this video, in terms of building a virtual economy, is that you have to be worried about certain caveats. A "realistic" economy is not always the best economy. The real world can be kind of boring and games are supposed to be fun. In terms of Eve Online, the economy was so efficient that all the "jobs" (farming) you could do in the game were reduced down to a money per hour value. Players would tend to pick the highest money per hour "job" they could accomplish, even if the task was monotonous and not really fun to do.
I believe the solve to this problem is obvious: the most profitable activity in an MMO should often be playing the MMO in the way it's meant to be played. That means taking risks, testing your skill, and interacting with the strategic aspects of the game rather than grinding some low level baddie over and over again for some random resource. This is much easier said than done of course, as economies often tend to be unpredictable, volatile, and dynamically changing entities. Still, it's certainly something to keep in mind.
Another huge plot point in Eve Online is the reinforcement that hardcore permadeath is definitely the way to go if you want to prevent hyperinflation within the economy. Apparently some of the ships in this game cost thousands of actual dollars if you were to buy them on the gray market. Battles between big corporations fighting for territory can cost insane amounts of money because if your ship is destroyed it's gone forever.
If you are curious about the legendary battle that put EVE Online on the map for massive financial damages, it was the Bloodbath of B-R5RB in January 2014. Triggered by a clerical error where one alliance forgot to pay their in-game sovereignty bill, it resulted in $300,000 to $330,000 USD of real-world equivalent losses and 75 Titans destroyed.
Wow, what a story.
And the last thing I learned from all this is that often the most profitable players tend to be ones that leech value from the rest of the player-base. Not so different than the real world I suppose. In Eve online the most profits are acquired by big "corporations" imposing taxes on their members, and even more money can be made by successful commodity traders. Government and Wallstreet? The parallels to the real world are staggering.
Conclusion
Good MMO economies tend to be a microcosm of the real world. In fact many studies have been done on game economies and how they strongly correlate to the real world. We are just humans after all interacting in a smaller but just as valid economy between other humans. That's kind of the entire point of an economy.
As I continue to grapple with this issue in real time I've been cordially invited to a Github repository where I may actually be able put these theories to test. I guess it's time to get to work.
I believe most idle-gatcha games are in this category. Your interactions with other players are mostly divorced from other players.
Arena? Well you set up a line-up and they attack that line-up. You don't interact directly.
Leaderboards? Yes, you race on the leaderboards, how do you pass them? By interacting with the game, not interacting with the players.
Hm yeah interesting I haven't really pondered the similarities.
I played WoW solo for years, I found it much more fun that way, ofc, you needed to join PUGs for certain things like instances and final quests, but I found I could largely take that or leave it as my mood suited. I lived in the AH alot :-)
Just don't make the same mistakes they did with the real world auction house in diablo 3. It might be a good idea to make a deep dive into that so you know exactly how and why it went south. Eve Online has always intrigued me. The idea that it is a whole world and economy unto itself is amazing.
Interesting that you bring that up because the D3 RMAH was... kind of my idea :D
It was around that time that I was pitching so many ideas to my friend that worked at Blizzard and a lot of my ideas were implemented (So many Starcraft 2 ideas).
I begged and pleaded for them to make all items in D3 BIND ON EQUIP and my friend was like nah we don't like that. It created item hyperinflation. Once a good item enters the economy it will literally never leave because it will just be resold over and over and over again.
There was also clear and blatant corruption in the background. The search functionality in the AH was trash so devs that could tap into the backend and search it with custom algorithms made an absolute killing until the entire thing blew up.
I never really played the Starcraft games, but I played most of the other ones from Blizzard. I was always more into Command and Conquer for that kind of gameplay. That is pretty cool that you had a hand in all of that.
I sound like a crazy person when I say this but like half of the changes from SC1 to SC2 were my idea lol. I really wanted to see SC2 but he was like, "how would we change it enough to be a new game" and I was just listing stuff off for literal days. It was so surreal when the game came out because it felt like I had somehow spoken it into existence. Of course I didn't have anything to do with the storyline, single-player campaign, world-building, and stuff like that.
I'm pretty sure my friend pitched them all as his idea and leveraged his career a bit, which is fine obviously, as the ideas were worthless without someone to pitch and implement them. He's been retired for a while now... wonder how he's doin.
We also talked about D3 a lot (making custom resource pools like League of Legends / WOW did) and I even pitched the pilot idea for Overwatch (an upgraded version of Team Fortress with custom heroes).
Haha, yeah, that's a pretty big brag for some stranger on the Internet! :) Still pretty cool though, the specific details make it more than believable for me.
yeah i was going to start listing them but refrained
there might even be evidence that it happened on some long-lost archive server
I remember I sent him an email with one of the ideas: "it would be really cool if there was an upgrade for something like a zergling to move while burrowed". So he emails me back and says, "they didn't like that idea". Fair enough. Game comes out and TWO units can move while burrowed. I was like lol wtf. Did it need to be someone else's idea after denying the first pitch? Was my friend bullshitting me? I have no idea haha.
Haha, it's funny how stuff like that happens isn't it? Like I said, I don't feel like you would take the time to create that level of detail if you were just making it up, so you have totally convinced me!
The main reason most game economies go tits up is almost always unilaterally bots and sybil attack. It is a higher priority to sell the game and turn a profit for the corporation than to ensure the sanctity of the in-game economy. Banned a cheater? Let them pay another $60 for a new copy of the game and they can start cheating all over again. Cheater wins, corporation wins; everybody's happy! Except for the actual players of course.
It's like when a bank gets a fine but the fine is less than the profit extracted.
There is zero incentive for the cheater to stop.
Especially true because cheaters are banned in big batches so they are actually allowed to keep cheating even after they've been caught (they will be banned during the next banning wave). The reason to do this is that if you ban them in real time it's far more likely they'll figure out exactly how they got caught and then tip off all their other cheater friends so that they don't get caught. This is actually a huge business and there are literal gangs of hackers that make money together doing this. Those gangs even have enemy gangs and will rat each other out and make sure the rival gang can't get an "unfair" cheating advantage lol.
The real solution to all of this is for the community to regulate itself. I want to make an invite-only system where the community has to vote to let you in, and someone (or multiple people) have to vouch for you. If you get banned for cheating it looks bad on them as well. The community and players need to be the police of the server and not some centralized company hiring some underpaid game-master who doesn't actually give a shit.
That is a cool idea. I think there have been a few "proof of virtue" blockchain projects like that in the past, but I don't think any of them were tied to a game. I'd definitely be interested in what you come up with. The whole idea of spending 99% of your time playing alone in a MMORPG is me to a "T". I remember when D3 first came out and you had to be online to play, I was so annoyed. Now D4 is even worse in that you can't even pause the game because it is always connected.
I wish you the best of luck on your passion project. It sounds like something I would like. I basically played solo for my entire time at RuneScape (1) and FFXIV unless forced not to. Coming up with a viable model for your prospective game's economy will be challenging. It brings to mind when they implemented the Grand Exchange feature into RuneScape. I think that's like the auction house idea you mentioned. That's what I imagine when I think of a solo RPG with an MMO economy.