Economy

[Argent]

The horses in the adoption center are only 2 coins and players apparently start out with 10k coins and do not receive an allowance. I'm curious about how money matters will be handled on HWO, How much will things cost and how easy will it be to earn money?

[larissar]

Any values you see in the adoption center or in players profile aren't finalized. During testing we're focusing more on making sure things work and not necessarily on monetary restrictions. However we do have a number of plans in place in regularly monitor and adjust inflation. Admittedly we were guilting in the old game of not managing this very well but we've learned from our mistakes.

While there is no daily allowance there are a few ways outside of competitions, for players to earn money. Nearly every skill offers some way for the player to make money be it from selling crafted goods or offering skilled services. Players will also be able to setup their own stores to buy and sell items.

Nate is our Economic Guru and I'm sure she may chime in here too.

[Nate]

I've been quite concerned with inflation all throughout the development of this version of the game. Inflation kills economies all over the internet. Because of that, I've encouraged Larissa to institute a fixed pony token, meaning that there would be a fixed number of pony tokens per player. The number of them doesn't matter so much- 100, 1000, 1 million....the number doesn't matter so much that it matters that the number is fixed per player. The idea of it is that Horse World will have a central bank that reads how much money there is in the game, compared it the value it believes there should be. Prices of things throughout the game will change in order to bring the amount of money in the game closer to the value it should be.

The companion to this economy is of course building the rest of the game to keep money circulating. Even if there's some circulation failure, like one player getting it into their head to hoard their money, prices would be driven lower and lower so that everyone else who wasn't hoarding money could still play. There's still some details to hammer out, like what to do about the money in inactive accounts, but as long as the amount of money stays fixed we won't have inflation problem. As long as we keep inflation under control, the economy will be viable and new or less wealthy players will still be able to play.

[Nate]

Pretty much how I've encouraged to make Larissa make it happen is this: the games has a set amount of money per player. The amount doesn't matter, so let's go with 10,000 pony tokens. When a new player joins, they get up to 10,000 PT. It might be less, but it will never be more. As they play thorough the game, they will have financial transactions of two types: player-to-player and player-to-game. The player to player transaction neither destroy nor create money, so the inflation control system is not concerned with them. The player-to-game transactions, however, create and destroy money. Some examples of creating money would be finding items and show earnings. Some examples of destroying money are adopting foals and using game-owned vet and farrier services. Periodically the inflation control system will test to see how much money is in the game. It will compare this against how much money SHOULD be in the game based on how many players there are, and it will adjust prices accordingly. Too little money in the game would result in higher show earnings and/or lower costs of services. Too much money in the game would result in exactly the opposite: lower show earnings and higher costs of services.

As much of a fan as I am of a fixed PT, I am also a fan of economic stability. We'll probably only have one or two really strong methods of creating and destroying money and leave the other prices alone. The companion to the fixed PT is encouraging currency circulation in every aspect of the game. Currency doesn't do anyone very much good if they never need to spend anything to make money. Player skills are difficult to max out, there is a cap to how many horses a player can have, competition is heavily encouraged, and other things. Those factors are a strong drive to keep money circulating, and as long as we do that with a fixed PT, we'll have an economy strong and viable for a very long time.

Remember friends; inflation kills games!

[larissar]

Nate wrote two replies but accident and I couldn't decide which was better so both are posted

I also want to point out that where Nate refers to a fix quantity of pony tokens per player she actually means a fixed amount of money per player in the game as a whole. This doesn't mean each player has a limited amount of funds and can't get more or less. There is still the ability for players to become quite rich, and others to become poor. Nate is right about pretty much everything else, and I'll be making sure that we also keep the economy fun too

[Argent]

So if I'm understanding this correctly, essentially, there is a set amount of money allowed to be in circulation (a certain umber of "coins minted") and the only way to get more is to get it from other players -- with the exception of shows and such -- much like real life? Will there be interest applied to players' bank accounts?

[larissar]

You've got it. I haven't decided yet about bank interest. That's something we'll have to test out during alpha and beta testing to see if it has much of an effect to make the economy unstable.

[Argent]

It seems like you already have a bit of a fail-safe with the inflation control system.

Kudos to Nate for the excellent economic set up btw