Shattered Kingdoms

I was explaining SK to a friend and was talking about the great community, great diplomatic aspect, unrestricted pvp, heavily enforced, and well played roleplay(which is the only real restriction on pvp), and I wanted to talk about the economy but I feel there is no player-run economy.

All money seems to go to NPCs. We have religion/cabal based bank accounts now, but none of it really affects a world economy.

I noticed the economy on WoW servers from the auction house. The price of an item on one server would be different on another server due to increased amounts of gold flowing around.

So, has anyone ever considered how to implement a world economy on SK? Or is there an economy already going that I am not seeing? Is gold commonly being exchanged from player to player? I think this would be an excellent addition to our already rich atmosphere. Something like an auction house would be a great start in my opinion. Anyone else have an thoughts?

The economy works globally right now. There's a limit to the amount of gold in the game. Right now the players have the majority of that gold. I'm thinking there's got to be a way to get people to start spending their money. Especially tribunals, cabals, and religions. Religions don't have much way to spend their coffers right now. Factions have a way to spend their money, but I don't think they have to spend very much to really stay in business. They have quite a buffer. The tribunals do have a way of influencing the economy. It just isn't of much use to them to do so. If every law NPC in a kingdom had its hit points reduced or increased in relation to the economic status, then there'd be some real impetus to spend coins. I know of lots of ideas, but Dulrik is specific about what he wants to include in the economy. Actually the things he's done are a great foundation for additional trade and economy items.

The economy of each kingdom is actually determined by the players. I have no idea how it works, but from what I gather the state of the economy is dependent upon how much is bought from and sold to a kingdom (kingdoms can be in a repression due to this). Money dropped by NPCs may be determined by this (?).

Also, the prices in shops are determined by players. The more an item is bought, the more expensive it becomes. The more an item is sold to a shop, the less money one receives from the item.

Edit: Achernar answered so much better and faster than me.

Thats cool that you guys are thinking about it. I like the idea of the guard gaining and losing hit points based on the economy. I was talking more about a free-trade type of thing I guess. Something with inflation and such that directly affect a player's pocket, but there is nothing really being traded. I am talking about maybe potions, herbs, scrolls, maybe even some trade skills or something where players have a reason to interact in a market-atmosphere.

Now that I say that I seem to remember someone mentioning tradeskills are in the works. Is that right? I've been away from SK for about 5 years now, so I might have missed this discussion. If tradeskills are being worked on I imagine an economy will follow out of the natural flow of things.

Does Dulrik want to directly control the economy or is he open to let it flow on its own?

Tradeskills seem to be one of those things that are constantly being talked about being put it, but since they'll take a lot of work and coding, it probably won't happen for a really long time (I'd be really happy if I was wrong, of course). I know it's been spoken about in threads since I started playing three years ago.

There is a certain degree of supply and demand among players that is determined by the number of playing certain classes. For example, lack of scouts makes herbs and skins become very valuable. But there isn't a coded system. I suppose that would be true of any game where there are certain classes who can produce things which other classes want/need.

I think a good step would be having a banking type system where players can store items: scrolls, potions, skins, herbs, things of that nature. One who wanted to be a merchant could buy these things from players, and re-sale them to others. Though, I'd imagine such a bank system has not been implemented because of a fear that players would start hoarding certain items to keep them from other players, right?

That and players being forced to interact to trade things promotes opportunities for RP.

Right. Anyone can sell things. Just become a salesman. I could see there eventually being a tradeskill that involved that lets a person have a storefront. That might be neat as a tradeskill. Along with a way for various types to create items for trading.

My only beef with the salesman thing is you can only care X number of items, or X weight, yanno? There is no way to store things. Ontop of that, if someone wants something you have there are other ways of getting it rather than paying. I guess you could just do business with the good guys, but you don't always get a choice with the baddies, yanno? I just think having a place to store things would be beneficial to the salesman/woman.

An economy is not the same as an auction house. While I admire the WoW auction house system as being very effective at redistributing goods for money, it intentionally divorces itself from its own world. The going rate of items on the auction house have no impact on the price that you can get for that item from NPC shops. WoW doesn't care, because WoW is not about role playing or trying to tell stories within the world. The WoW economy is more about spending $ for GP on websites and this is a directly attributable to there being no currency limit in their world.

I have been focussed on modeling real economic principals on SK. There is only a certain amount of coinage in the world. As it moves among various kingdoms, those kingdoms will experience inflation or deflation based on the amount of currency they have in relation to the whole. In kingdoms where there is a lot of currency, the NPCs will also spawn with more money in their pockets and vice-versa.

More recently, I have added the demand side of the "supply and demand" principle. If an item is repeatedly sold, but not bought, then it is not in demand which indicates that it is currently priced more than it is worth. Shops adjust to this by continuing to lower the price of the item.

None of this is "controlled" by me or other immortals. It is completely controlled by the collective actions of the player-base. When you hoard money (currently over 60% of all currency is in player hands), you make it harder for everyone to earn additional money. This ought to sound familiar, because this is exactly a big part of the problem of the current global economic recession. US consumers are now afraid to spend any money, which means that companies that depended on them for sales start to go out of business, which feeds into an even deeper recession.

I do have ideas about how to model supply as well and this would tie into crafting and trading systems. The outline of the idea is that items would be composed of components known as commodities. You could break an item down into it's component commodities through certain skills. Because commodities are generic, we would allow them to be stored by players in a warehouse that is similar to the bank. They could also be sold at a kingdom market. Shops would fulfill orders to buyers by drawing on the amount of commodities available at the market. This creates the supply factor, because if the components necessary for an item are not available on the market, the item will cease to be available for purchase at the shop. As a kingdom runs low on a commodity, it's price increases at the market. Because you can store commodities, selling at the appropriate time could be profitable.

There are still some unsolved problems with the idea. The biggest hurdle is coming up with a list of commodities and how to create recipes for all the thousands of items that are already in the game.

At any rate, I hope that this explanation has shown that there is indeed an economy in SK and that we have tentative ideas for more.