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?
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?
The game itself is a bit like a slot machine:
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.
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.
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.
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.
