Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
If I may impose on you for a bit, I'm kinda curious to hear if what I posted above about video game vs. real world economies makes any sense? I don't have an economics degree so it's mostly my own general experience and deduction.
Sure, it’s generally on the money. Real economies have laws on monopolies and things that obviously don’t impact video games. And as it’s not real money and many people don’t see their time as money it’s far more volatile. Time is your only real overhead vs a business having to pay materials, suppliers. A shop keeper may cut their price to match their neighbours but neither of them are going to make it non profitable for themselves because otherwise what’s the point?

For instance take those new housing cabinets you can buy from a housing vendor for 12,000. People bought them and tried to sell them for 1 mill then 20,000 now they’re on the MB for 6,000. The players are making a 6k loss on them if they’re selling them at all. That’s not going to happen much in real life because the sellers will go bust. Perhaps a company will gamble on a product but it will all be acceptable loss planned out ahead of time. Breaking even wouldn’t be uncommon but they’d rarely sell for a loss.

Real businesses also don’t have to worry about bots (although you could argue that China and many third world countries effectively are ‘botting’ with mass production and cheap labour.. but again there’s laws to protect economies against this).

You could certainly have a more realistic economy in an MMO but there would have to be rules because while one player is willing to cut the price in half and other players are willing to sink to his level, it’s always going to shrink.