Proposal Discussion Economy - limited credits

Yellonet

Yellonet
Ladies, gentlemen,

Perhaps this has also been discussed before, but I did not find anything about it in the DDA thread about trading.

I would like the credits in game to be of a limited amount, as in real life, there's just so much money to go around. Basically, the game should not allow for everyone to become rich.

Why?
One of the key dynamics of the gameplay is the flow of money, be it either for legal trade or services, or for less-legal things like piracy.
If everyone is allowed to be rich at the same time, this dynamic disappears, and the motivation for lots of gameplay dies.
With unlimited money, everyone playing the game can (and will?) after playing a while(hopefully quite a long while) become very rich.
One of the key features of the game is the different possibilities to make money. Money that will then go towards getting better equipment, paying for fuel, liquor, pleasure slaves and whatnot.
However, I believe that when too many people are rich some of the motivation for these players will disappear, and the dynamics living Elite universe will stagnate, because if you have more money than you can spend you won't have to do anything to make more money.

How?
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure this is a feasible thing at all.
But, what I imagine is that the total credits in the universe is set to some arbitrary amount per player, so that if everyone had an equal part everyone would be not very well off, almost poor, but not quite.
As I understand it we will have a much more dynamic market in the release game than what we have now, but adding this restriction might make the distribution of wealth between players more interesting as well.

Obviously FD will have to monitor the economy, and perhaps inject money into the system if things start to look bad.

What I'm not sure about is how, if at all, it would be possible to separate the wealth of players with the wealth of planets and stations, because a few thousands of players economy should hardly influence the economy based on billions and billions of people on the planets.

Oh well, I'm just throwing this out there for discussion, maybe something interesting will turn up :D
 

Gwydion

G
I'm sorry but no. This will lead to a play to win scenario. I shouldn't be penalized, by limiting the amount of money to be earned by the amount of time I have to play, above and beyond normal that is.
 

Jexter

Jexter
Well since there's no way for players to buy things from each other it would be rather pointless. As the npc markets/shipyards etc are the only place to buy equipment there won't be things like inflation.

In games like Eve Online which have a (almost) purely player driven economy the devs are constantly regulating things like mineral abundance and mission rewards etc so the cash flow doesn't get out of hand.
 

Bromley86

Bromley86
Aren't you asking for inflation? Because as time goes by players will generate wealth (mining, cargo sales at profit). Therefore, to maintain this notional target amount of total wealth FD have to reduce the value of players' credits.

That means a pulse laser on release will cost more credits to buy a year later. That means new players either have to grind for longer than those on release or are encouraged to either spend real money for credits. Doesn't sound good.
 

Tacheel

Tacheel
Yellonet said:
Ladies, gentlemen,

Perhaps this has also been discussed before, but I did not find anything about it in the DDA thread about trading.

I would like the credits in game to be of a limited amount, as in real life, there's just so much money to go around. Basically, the game should not allow for everyone to become rich.

Why?
One of the key dynamics of the gameplay is the flow of money, be it either for legal trade or services, or for less-legal things like piracy.
If everyone is allowed to be rich at the same time, this dynamic disappears, and the motivation for lots of gameplay dies.
With unlimited money, everyone playing the game can (and will?) after playing a while(hopefully quite a long while) become very rich.
One of the key features of the game is the different possibilities to make money. Money that will then go towards getting better equipment, paying for fuel, liquor, pleasure slaves and whatnot.
However, I believe that when too many people are rich some of the motivation for these players will disappear, and the dynamics living Elite universe will stagnate, because if you have more money than you can spend you won't have to do anything to make more money.

How?
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure this is a feasible thing at all.
But, what I imagine is that the total credits in the universe is set to some arbitrary amount per player, so that if everyone had an equal part everyone would be not very well off, almost poor, but not quite.
As I understand it we will have a much more dynamic market in the release game than what we have now, but adding this restriction might make the distribution of wealth between players more interesting as well.

Obviously FD will have to monitor the economy, and perhaps inject money into the system if things start to look bad.

What I'm not sure about is how, if at all, it would be possible to separate the wealth of players with the wealth of planets and stations, because a few thousands of players economy should hardly influence the economy based on billions and billions of people on the planets.

Oh well, I'm just throwing this out there for discussion, maybe something interesting will turn up :D
Click to expand...

I think in the real world the idea that there is a fixed amount of money, i don't believe that is true any more.

We are a long way from the days where a dollar was a federal reserve bond equating to an amount of gold in a safe somewhere. Or so an economist on the radio was saying anyway.
 

StarTux

S
How can we request such a change, a large one at that, based upon such a limited dataset?

Fuel costs alone will account for a fair bit of credits being swallowed up, and this isn't likely being taken into account.

There's a whole load of content, much, much more than we've so far coming down the pipe along with more mechanics for the game.
 

ste

S
The reason why everyone gets rich in the game is because their entire pay is basically savings. Apart from fuel, and the odd ammo refill there is zero cost of living.

No food, no living costs, no bills, no taxes. Theres no outgoings, only ingoings.

There is no way you can put a ceiling on earnings, the only thing they could do is simulate a cost of living which they wont do.

They need to make earning money harder to balance this. Thats why having extreme cargo holds is probably a bad idea. Its verging on an unlimited money cheat.
 

Tacheel

Tacheel
ste said:
The reason why everyone gets rich in the game is because their entire pay is basically savings. Apart from fuel, and the odd ammo refill there is zero cost of living.

No food, no living costs, no bills, no taxes. Theres no outgoings, only ingoings.

There is no way you can put a ceiling on earnings, the only thing they could do is simulate a cost of living which they wont do.

They need to make earning money harder to balance this. Thats why having extreme cargo holds is probably a bad idea. Its verging on an unlimited money cheat.
Click to expand...

Hmm they could build this into ship maintenance, the wear and tear part - not repairs, part of the maintenance cost being the stocking of food supplies etc on the ship. When you maintain your ship they could even mock up some sort of fake itemisation to give you the feeling its more then just paint touch ups.
 

ste

S
Tacheel said:
Hmm they could build this into ship maintenance, the wear and tear part - not repairs, part of the maintenance cost being the stocking of food supplies etc on the ship.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was kind of thinking something like that, I doubt they will do that tho. Some people may end up going negative.

Go exploring and you come home a week later to realise you got 2 million debt and the wife has maxed out the credit cards.
 

starry

S
Even if the supply of money was limited, I would think there'd still be enough to make every player rich without much of an impact on the galactic economy.

e.g. There are apparently about 12 million millionaires in the world right now. I know a net worth of 1 million isn't very much, but it's not totally insignificant either and that's just one world.
 

Tacheel

Tacheel
ste said:
Yeah, I was kind of thinking something like that, I doubt they will do that tho. Some people may end up going negative.

Go exploring and you come home a week later to realise you got 2 million debt and the wife has maxed out the credit cards.
Click to expand...

Lol - the idea of buying a luxury item entertainment slave early on, and later in the game you get a bill like this and a rathier porkier photomessage.
 

ste

S
I would like it to be more difficult to become rich, but you already have people moaning now how long it takes to 'grind'. So if anything I only expect richness to be more accessible to all.

Say the most expensive ship is 10,000,000. Alot of people could get that in a week or 2, then theres no real reason to earn money anymore. As soon as you get to the lacon you start hemorrhaging money, you could earn 1million an hour, thats even more than whole of the over paid england squad earn in a month.
 
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ste

S
A game which has an intended lifespan of years, ongoing, it should not be possible to max out in a week.

You need plenty of long term goals and incentives.

It should be an on going struggle to make it more interesting.
 

Fenris Wolf

Fenris Wolf
Don't forget that at the moment we are in a closed system with a market that has been artificially boosted so that people can earn huge amounts of money.

I feel it will be a lot more difficult to do so when the full version goes live.
 

Adept

Adept
The proposal doesn't make sense. The players are a few hundred thousand / a few million pilots in a universe of a hundred billion humans. A limited credit pool among the human players would just not work right, and also creates artificial constraints and competition. No thanks.
 

Tek

Tek
ste said:
No food, no living costs, no bills, no taxes. Theres no outgoings, only ingoings.
Click to expand...

By requiring fuel for our ships they will have effectively added "food consumption" to the game. There is always talk of requiring food in WoW type MMO's but the idea rarely gets implemented because it makes the game too realistic. Our characters will have the "food requirement" which will make travel/exploration more difficult and also keep our wallets at a more middle-class-person level.
 

Yellonet

Yellonet
starry said:
Even if the supply of money was limited, I would think there'd still be enough to make every player rich without much of an impact on the galactic economy.

e.g. There are apparently about 12 million millionaires in the world right now. I know a net worth of 1 million isn't very much, but it's not totally insignificant either and that's just one world.
Click to expand...
Those people can only be rich because other people are poor.

This is by no way exact, but I found figures stating that for 2006 the gross world product was around $46,000,000,000,000. If we assume that we now have $50 trillion and divide that equally to all 9 billion humans, we each get roughly $5,500. Not exactly a furtune.
 
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