Share your crazy stories about MMO economies

[DC]

MMO economics can be pretty wild, and often all it takes is one player or a bug of some kind to throw an entire economy out of balance. Do you have any interesting stories to share about MMO economies?

[Syntax]

RuneScape, I remember that they changed an item to be worthless to suddenly worth like 10K of in-game currency (not much, but with people who had >100) it really caused issues where people became millionaires overnight for a stupidly common item.

[Empire]

One major issue with MMORPG economies is that resources are so easy to harvest, gather and sell. Or use to craft and then sell that. Crafting is also extreamly easy.

To make the resources more valuable and less likely to ruin economies, resources should be much harder to gather, and much less abundant. Chopping an entire tree shouldn't take 10 seconds and shouldn't yeild a ton of wood. If chopping a single tree in a game took 10 mins and still yeilded the same amount, you'd have much less people doing it and much less inflation of that resource.

[Justin11]

On 10/21/2022 at 12:08 PM, Empire said:

To make the resources more valuable and less likely to ruin economies, resources should be much harder to gather, and much less abundant. Chopping an entire tree shouldn't take 10 seconds and shouldn't yeild a ton of wood. If chopping a single tree in a game took 10 mins and still yeilded the same amount, you'd have much less people doing it and much less inflation of that resource.

The harder it is to gather resources the more likely you have it only in the hands of a few people who could decide to sell it at an outrageous Price unless you are suggesting that resources should be made too hard to gather and yet too low in value to even bother about gathering them.

[killamch89]

16 hours ago, Justin11 said:

The harder it is to gather resources the more likely you have it only in the hands of a few people who could decide to sell it at an outrageous Price unless you are suggesting that resources should be made too hard to gather and yet too low in value to even bother about gathering them.

To be fair, some MMORPGs do have a gathering system like this and it feels like an infinite grind just to craft a few common items.

[Justin11]

17 hours ago, killamch89 said:

To be fair, some MMORPGs do have a gathering system like this and it feels like an infinite grind just to craft a few common items.

That's true , but then it defeats the purpose since the resources are common and working your hands off trying to get them in-game becomes more like a Waste of Time.

[Scorpion]

Absolutely! In one MMO, a rare item duplication bug flooded the market, crashing prices and changing player dynamics overnight. Wild times!