How will new players perceive this game? (A pessimistic outlook)

[Teroril]

i do see what you mean by it will not fix inflation, but it would level it out. i'll use the cost of buffalo skins on my server for example.

a few months ago a buffalo skin you could purchase in wards for 8k. by the time you bought the dye and chips you could make sell them for 8k each for dyed buffalo leather. you would make a decent profit and the next crafter would make a decent profit off it when they resold the next item in wards.

now the same skin sells for 20k. that increased 12k per skin or 3k per leather however you want to look at it now has the cost of what was 8k for a buffalo leather gone up to around 12k. this also turns around to an increase for the crafter that was buying the skin to make the next item.

if the npc has the skin for a reasonable price say 8-10k which is what the skin was and it is an easy item to get then it would cut the cost of that item in wards by half. we mention the gathering classes, but in most cases alot of the inflation and price gouging has came from the gathering class and as long as raw materials continue to increase the crafting classes will have to continue to raise prices to match.

The reason economies in online games don't work in the same way as in the real world, is because exploitation doesn't exist. There is no world system in which you can underpay some demographic to process whatever good you're selling. So profits are pretty slim. Also, everyone are on the same terms when it comes to production (aside from getting the skill level), so there is no economy of scale. Basically. Most of the incentives that drive competition aren't present in most mmorpgs (besides EVE Online).

And without competition, optimization of markets won't exist, so there is no "invisible hand" to direct the market. This is why making an in-game economy work seems almost impossible.

Maybe, what we need is some reverse Keynesian ingenuity from the developers. Creating incentives to buy from NPCs, when prices are high. But, the main dilemma we're facing in any MMORPG is the paradox of printing money, to create growth. In the mid-term, it creates inflation, because there are too many bills in circulation. So maybe what we need is regulation of gil coming into the market (in this case, the players' hands) through flexible monetary rewards and NPC prices.

Edit: Speaking of Keynes. What we really need, is incentives to spend money within the game, one way or the other, so players don't hoard cash, effectively creating the higher prices.

One suggestion could be to make NPC prices be dependant on how many gil a player has. The more gil the player has, the more expensive the items from the NPC will be. This will create an incentive for players to not hoard. The level of price increase will determine the equivalence of money in each players' hands on average. Of course, players might just start trading... But why not make a flexible tax rate, depending on the amount of money an item sells for? This might require a more advanced algorithm depending on the quality and level of the item sold (so high level rare items aren't sold for less than they are worth).