Economy design of Pirates of the Burning Sea

[Harkins]

The game Pirates of the Burning Sea has an economy that sounds a lot like an MMO version of Elite or a Dopewars door game. Players are pirates, merchants, etc. in a Caribbean world and can sail around fighting and trading. I ran across a couple blog posts on how they designed their economy and it sounded like it could work for a PBBG as well:

• http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10253
• http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10274
• http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=11108

In short, building a ship requires trade goods like a tiller or sails. These are made up of other trade goods like finished wood planks or cloth that are themselves made up of trade goods and so on down to the base-level resources like iron ingots or lumber. Players are involved at every point to produce the goods from resources or lower goods using stored turns ("labor") and to ship the goods around (by buying and selling and trading).

[codestryke]

Really interesting set of articles.

I saw one problem with implementing this in a PBBG. The idea is great but would need to be scaled down drastically but with the ability to add to the production ladder later in the game as more people started to sign up.

Where they started large and scaled down to make things more efficient a PBBG, with it's limited number of initial sign-ups compared to a fully graphical MMO, would need to go the other direction. I wonder then too if you start large and inject the materials needed into the auction houses so the foundation is already there, or start small and add foundations as the player based grew?

One problem I can see with starting small (we are assuming a persistent play game). A player has done all the things necessary to construct uber weapon X. They log off for the eve with the intent of creating Uber Weapon X tomorrow. Said developer uploads a patch saying Uber weapon X now requires a new item in the ingredient to produce. That production is player controlled, it's new, so that production hasn't even started. Our player logs in, cannot create the weapon and creates a voodoo doll of the developer and continually pokes it with needles and screaming "ALMOST THERE" until his frustration subsides

[JGadrow]

One problem I can see with starting small (we are assuming a persistent play game). A player has done all the things necessary to construct uber weapon X. They log off for the eve with the intent of creating Uber Weapon X tomorrow. Said developer uploads a patch saying Uber weapon X now requires a new item in the ingredient to produce. That production is player controlled, it's new, so that production hasn't even started. Our player logs in, cannot create the weapon and creates a voodoo doll of the developer and continually pokes it with needles and screaming "ALMOST THERE" until his frustration subsides

I would think this is always a possiblity. However, if you have a particular day that you apply updates on (an idea borrowed from WoW) you would eliminate some of this as players would know when updates are going to be applied. Additionally, the developer probably knew this change was in the works and could have notified his community before applying the update. That would also help to alleviate this issue. So, really, these issues *should* be easy to resolve.

[Harkins]

I dunno, if it's too large and complex for the playerbase I'd just add NPC merchants that buy goods from players (and lower their buying price after each purchase) and sell the intermediate/high-end goods to players (and probably keep their prices constant). Then players can start producing goods at any level and have some market and they'll be able to build even the high-end stuff (in this case, ships).

Then make it so that players could "buy out" the NPCs for less than the normal cost of setting up a store. As the playerbase grows the NPCs will quietly disappear.

[jannesiera]

I only read the first artcile yet, but I thought I would post a response already.

For me a player controlled market is anything but new. Miniconomy.com is a realistic economic based game where players produce everything themselves. So it is in the game I'm developping right now. (I refer to the Miniconomy website and my blog if you want to know more, see sign for link)

Using this system in a PBBG would be, on first sight, be a matter of keeping the "fun". The big difference with that game and a PBBG, is that there is no simulation in a PBBG. No visuals.
So it may work as an economic system, but it might be boring for the player. Some times things are very intresting to the designer, but will have an other effect on the players themselves.

A little bit more off-topic then, a thought that I had. I've read several articles on game economics etc and I always notice they're based of existing systems in the real world. I miss some creativity there. The great thing about making online games are the possibilities, which are in this case not being explored enough, in my opinion.

But it's late and I'm going to bed now .

[codestryke]

After doing this for many years I can honestly say that MOST people don't read the game news, developer notes or anything like that. So when a change is rolled out most of the player's will be surprised and didn't know it was coming. Even if they do know the change is coming it does upset the balance and when you are talking about a player run economy that could sway heavily with the number of player's actively playing the impact could be quite an annoyance to the player base.

My partner and I were discussing, like Harkins pointed out, an NPC or game controlled economy to allow it to strive even though there might not be enough producing said goods. I wondered two about the article, they pointed out the port auctions that were player controlled but then had two global ports. I wonder if those were ports that provided the goods but were controlled by the game.

Finally as for pulling from real-life I guess I'm just not that creative enough to think of something out of the box. So I myself default to real-world examples for games and can say that player run markets tend to be quite popular on our games (except one where your money can be hi-jacked by a virus and thus there can be no money gain if you are infected LOL)

I do though enjoy the topic of discussion

[Scion]

If you guys have never tried it out then i can suggest taking a look at the game ChosenSpace

It has been a while since i played it but it has this very same process of multiple layers of goods required to produce ships....ie for ship design X you need a class X engine...which requires 2 tonnes of electronics, 15 tonnes of this metal, 5 tones of that metal, 3 ellucide wafflers...ellectronics require the raw ingredient silicon, metal, plastics and can only be produced at a factory facility of class M.....plastics require fossil fuels and a refinery.......well you get the picture.....

All facilities for producing goods are player owned....but during the ramp up process there were plenty of admin facilities scatered around that could be used for a fee....

As an economic simulation it works fairly well....at the time i was playing it there were some issues with raw resource availability and different groups and or factions stockpiling the rarest resources, there was also an issue with inflation, as in addition to the manufacturing there was the ability to transport trade goods between NPC'S (planets in this case) which caused an uneven flow of in-game currency into the game.

Renaisance Kingoms is another one that springs to mind where a smaller scale version of that approach is used, same too with another space bassed game Pardus.

The biggest problem i can see with these systems is making sure that you have your sources and sinks balanced. otherwise with the effect of inflation it can make starting the game later on a very daunting task.

[Harkins]

Scion: Thanks for the link, I'll have to check out ChosenSpace. I love it when people implement my ideas even befor eI have them so that I can find out if they're good without all the work.

[Harkins]

I wasn't able to log into ChosenSpace (registration form too buggy), but I found the info on the wiki for anyone who's interested:

• http://v2wiki.chosenspace.com/index.php/Manufactory
• http://v2wiki.chosenspace.com/index.php/Components
• http://v2wiki.chosenspace.com/index.php/Parts

[Helderic]

Thanks for the links, food for thought. This reminds me alot of Guild 2 if anyone has played it.

[Sunchaser]

Thanks for the link to the pirate game, I am trying to build a crafting system, and their idea are very interesting