SmartMuffin posted...
From: whatisurnameplz | #023
Smuffin would be pissed about the game makers interfering with the market.
Damn right.
Although you can't really apply actual economic laws to these games because scarcity does not exist in MMOs. There is an infinite supply of gold available from nearly all simple tasks, so supply and demand really doesn't work correctly.
I wouldn't particularly agree with this. Scarcity pretty unquestionably exists in many markets. There are some commodities that you could say have an infinite supply because people could just go mine more ores and create it, but... that's not any different than the fact that in real life there is more oil out there than is currently being drilled.
In regards to there being an infinite supply of gold, that doesn't quite break things as you intend. It requires time and effort to earn this gold and it's on a level that the average player is not going to get all the gold he needs to buy everything that he wants. Thus, scarcity exists. There are also gold sinks that take money out of the economy. This gold creation even has a real world equivalent; governments printing money and lending it out. The only effect that this gold creation has is that it causes inflation, just like it's real world equivalent.
I wouldn't say the MMO markets work EXACTLY like economic principles... but neither do real markets.
--
The batman villians all seem to be one big joke that batman refuses to laugh at - SantaRPG