So probably I got two things wrong:
1. I thought of less buying power as 1 gold buys me a loaf of bread today; 1 gold buys me half a loaf of bread tomorrow
2. New players have less buying power compared to alts, and not in the sense that vendor prices have risen since, or the player to player market items got more expensive.

Right?

Typically, established players benefit lots from hand-me-downs on their alts, but folks truly new to the game don’t as much. The effects of mudflation start at the top of the level range, and are felt less and less as you go down the level scale. At the lowest levels, you often can’t quite feel it — but you can see it around you as alts benefit from it.

New users now have less “buying power” so to speak.

Isn´t it the opposite actually, or at least the same?

From your comments I infer that designers leave the early content, the content for new users, alone, as it is. This means that the mobs drop the same items and same amounts of currency and the vendor prices and items sold stay the same all the time. The grind thus is just the similar grind all high lvl players had to go through before, or am I missing something? At this stage, “purchase power” should be exactly the same back then and “today in the time of post-mudflation”.

Furthermore when there is player to player trade, the “purchase power” is likely to even increase, as former prize items are available for loot prices. Their value has deflated what effectively increases my “purchase power in potent items for my lvl”, right?

So where does the “less “buying power” come from?

Amaranthar: When speaking of “roleplayers”, do we tend to forget that in a deeply interactive world players would all become roleplayers to some extent or another? Or is this not accurate?

You may divide roleplayers and non-roleplayers into 4 rough categories:

1. true roleplayers: these assume a fictional personality and stick to it.
2. self roleplayers: these align their character to their personal self, but assume the fictional universe.
3. modal roleplayers: these only assume roleplay during events.
4. self players: these don’t roleplay per se, but accept the world as it present itself. That is, they interpret the symbols in context. If the fictional universe is close to their real life, they don’t destroy RP experiences for others too much.
5. ignorant players: these ignore the fictional context altogether and are interpreting symbols solely in terms of power.

Most players are a mix of 3/4/5… So well, you are somewhat right, but in order to have a consistent role-playing universe you need to limit 4 (inspire them to advance to 4/3/2 which is possible) and squeeze out 5 (which tend to be incapable or inherently unwilling to sustain a roleplaying environment).

[...] MMO Mudflation Thoughts First off you need to go read the post and comments on Raph Koster’s site in this mudflation thread to understand why I think the comments there can’t see the forest from the trees.  There’s a bigger picture to solving or curbing the problem of mudflation.  The problem with traditional approaches to solving mudflation is that they typically cause tangential effects in other game systems.  In order to truly reign in mudflation, traditional MMO game design needs to be rethought.  Short anecdote that I’ll return to later before I get started.  Four or five years ago, I had a chance to sit down with a couple of the old Kesmai guys at GDC.  At the time we were discussing EQ, Asheron’s Call and DAoC.  One of them remarked that MMOs do very little for the newbie experience and over time as mudflation sets in their new users were at a disadvantage.  An example from the old game Air Warrior, which I’ve never had the pleasure of trying, struck a chord with me.  Air Warrior required squadrons to continually recruit new members.  Apparently there was a mechanic in the game that made veterans seek out new members.  The thought here was that this might be a way to help solve mudflation.  The thought stewed a while and has since been added to the design of Ages of Athiria.  From the beginning Ages of Athiria has been designed to ward off the idea of mudflation.  Solving mudflation is not only impossible but its not even desirable.  A healthy economy should see inflation as time goes on.  What it shouldn’t see is double digit inflation, the likes of which happens yearly in every mainstream MMO on the market.  So with that in mind, how do we build a world where mudflation is controlled and tangential effects to other game systems are minimized?  You start by revolving game systems around the economy instead of wrapping an economy around a combat sim/leveling treadmill.  When you think about it, its more natural this way.  Money plays a much more central role in our lives than it does in these virtual worlds. The first thing we addressed was player ownership of stuff in the world.  Our design team loved the Shadowbane city ownership.  It’s the only game we’ve played where political boundaries really meant something.  Eve Online might also be like this but I’ve never played it so I can’t say.  We had to have player ownership of buildings and other major items. (boats, houses, caravans, shops, forges, …)  What we didn’t like was that something that was carefully constructed in four months of teamwork was torn down at 4 AM in two hours one morning.  This made us arrive at analyzing the game play surrounding protecting what you own, including oneself, PvP. First we thought PvP was something that no-one wanted but that thought never truly seemed right.  It’s PvE servers that are the aberration in the landscape of MMOs but they exist because people do not want to be forced into PvP without their consent.  Players tend to take their possessions and achievements seriously and when another player griefs them, they leave the game because retaliation is not permanent.  It’s funny that we let griefers inconvenience our players time but when the griefed ask us to step in and inconvenience the griefer’s time, we step back or implement half-assed bounty hunting code.  We do this because game moderators stepping in to enforce play doesn’t scale and gives off the appearance of favoritism.  Why not put code in place to allow the players to enact a limited form of permanent justice on griefers?  We did that with our permadeath system for criminal behavior.  The permadeath penalty is one of the punishments a player city can dish out for crimes against its citizens.  A lot more information can be found here because this design topic is too big to include in this post about MMO mudflation.  Trust me I am going somewhere with all this background so stick with me. At this point, we’d given the player something to own in buildings and items, told them it would be made part of the world history and everyday game play situations would involve their cities.  We’d given the player run cities a way to protect their citizens against griefing making ownership something much harder to take away.  Now we needed to give all these players something to do.  Adventuring had to be there.  Every MMO needs a combat game in my opinion.   Our combat system started with the idea that a player never has more hit points than they start the game with.  This freezes one aspect of the mudflation game in place taking it out of the equation.  It limits the top end of our itemization as well but that should not be a problem for us because we’ll have more than just adventuring in the game as end-game game play.  The only thing I am unsure about in our design is if players that have been trained through past MMOs to hit harder, crit harder and heal more will be able to find fun in a game where defending your hit points is more important than rolling huge crit numbers.  Will the occasional hit be just as fun as the 75% hit ratios we see today?  I’m not sure.  Anyway, back on topic; Our combat system uses a system of insurance for items.  If you can afford to insure it, then on death your items will not be left on your corpse.  Loss from death has to be real because it makes ownership more real.  Our death penalty will likely only be loss of items as that has the potential for the most dramatic impact on the economy.  This also opens up the idea of artifact items which cannot be insured.  Sure you can own the Sword of a Thousand Truths but you’ll be hunted for it.  Bet you’re glad you belong to a player run city that can enact justice on the person that just ganked you for your sword.  The thing to take away from this is that the adventuring game is intricately tied to the player run city game.  This interdependency is the primary way Ages of Athiria fights mudflation. You’re thinking that none of this has to do with mudflation and I’ll immediately beg to differ.  Fixing the hit points of a character affects itemization which in turn affects player power and more importantly player power bands.  It reduces the bands of player power from dozens to a number far less than that meaning that new players and old players can group together without the game play getting in the way too much.  Our skill system further reduces the gap between bands of player power.  There’s a reason for this and it begins to tie back into the anecdote above.  Defending a city is difficult if only a small fraction of your citizens can participate.  We recognized this early on and began to set in motion game play that would make a city significantly easier to defend.  We deliberately wanted the cities to stay up.  Our ongoing lore depends upon having player run cities large enough to have staying power so our game play design reflects this.  With more of a population’s citizens able to help defend a city, cities should live longer and prosper.  A prospering city is very currency hungry which leads me to my next point. The political game is all about your city’s circle of influence.  Circle of influence is something akin to what we see in the Civilization games and other RTS games.  It marks the economic/cultural border of your player run city.  Within these borders, your city can more readily control resources such as mines and forests through which players or NPCs can be hired/commissioned to extract resources from.  Our AI design for NPC merchants is such that they will seek out the best place to setup shop to sell their wares.  Since our NPCs use player market pricing as their basis for offering goods and services, they factor in the political game when evaluating which player run city they would like to go to to setup shop.  The bulk of the political game is played RTS style, managing incoming/outgoing NPC and PC business owners and steering your PRC toward a prosperous future.  Taxes, justice, military, businesses, inns and all sorts of city needs are all part of this political game.  All of this except taxes requires gold, lots of it.  Taxes are the way currency is drained from the player economy and wars/public works maintenance are the way most of it is expended.  The nice thing about wars and public works is that once the money is spent it’s gone from the game.  Building a campaign to destroy another city is a huge monetary commitment and enough of a drain for a fairly large number of people to remain humble.  Wars should keep money from being stagnant in the world.  If player run cities require so much cash just to operate, then how does the player base actually provide that cash without it becoming a grind? That takes me to our last game play item, businesses.  None of the MMOs out there today give you even the most rudimentary tools with which to conduct business.  Balance sheets, income statements, inventory counts and the rest of the business 101 items are no where to be found in the default UI.  As a trader in WoW I have no idea if I am profitable without take huge amounts of time tracking every click that results in a monetary transaction.  Businesses are a form of our organization code.  Guilds are too as are groups only businesses have the most features enabled.  You can learn more about the basic concepts here.  Businesses were designed with two things in mind, keeping the economy moving during lightly played hours and providing a player with a non-combat oriented fully designed game play mechanic.  The basic premise that led us to formalized businesses is the implementation of mandatory taxation of citizens that can be put in place by a player run city.  We were forced to answer all the questions of expenses and revenue and what was taxable and what was not.  We had to answer the gifting problem as well and close up some loopholes in traditional MMO design that would sink a mandatory tax system from the onset.  In the end, we have a robust design for running a business in our world.  We’ve even taken to the idea that this part of the game should be real time enabled on the web so that the economy has many more participants during the daytime hours when the server is more lightly populated by adventuring players. After all of this, I think we’ve arrived at a world realized enough to keep mudflation at bay.  Player run cities need taxes to wage wars and operate the political game that shapes the lore of our world.  Businesses need the safe haven that player run cities provide; players need the security against griefing which ultimately could result in loss of their prized possessions.  Community sized goals that require hoards of funding should create a scarcity issue between player wealth and city wealth, though businesses ease the burden of getting all that loot from adventurers into the city’s economy.  Adventurers need businesses for equipment, supplies, repairs and places to stay.  Cities need adventurers to keep the roads clear and the monsters at bay so that merchant caravans can be operated in formal trade networks. (The items are physically shipped with the player owned caravan as part of our dynamic questing system.)  The only thing we haven’t done is incorporate the idea from the Kesmai employee into the game mechanic and that is easy to do.  Businesses need new employees that will not cost them as much money to employ.  Player run cities also need new players to bolster their population numbers.  Population expands a city’s circle of influence making it stronger.  Population also generates more taxes which can be used for funding a military and paying for maintenance and upkeep of public works.  What I am hoping comes from all this interconnectedness is a stable, steady inflation effect.  The newbie experience should never be degraded because newbies are extremely important to the end game.  If only newbies were important to raiding level 60 content in WoW; imagine…  Varied game play, real loss and consequence, community goals, interdependent game play mechanics and the ever thirsty money machine of government should give us what we want.  There’s much more to this design that I lead on to in this post.  Head over to http://my.agesofathiria,com to read more on our design and how we think it will seriously curb the mudflation effect. I can only hope that one day we’ll get the chance to show the world we know what we’re talking about.  Filed under: Game Design, MMO [...]

RP is good for keeping things going in what would be an otherwise stale game but only if the players have the tools to do it. That’s why it doesn’t much come into play in games like WoW, because players don’t have the tools.

Even in games that provide some tools, like SWG, you still don’t have everything you’d really want. For example, I’m part of SWG’s largest roleplaying guild. We routinely have RP storylines going in game, which get written up after they happen and posted as stories for all to enjoy. Quite often we have to go co-opt some NPC bunker or whatever to use for our RP purposes, which means we have to sometimes break character to deal with the NPCs there so that we can tell our story uninhibited. There’s also stuff we’d like to be able to do, like dock with multiplayer ships in space to go onboard, that would help a lot with the RP.

Will RPers ever have all the tools they need? Probably not without a full suite of user content generation tools, and then you run into the SL problem – without some kind of oversight, you end up with a gigantic culture clash because people will rapidly start to push the borders of your setting’s genre. You’ve got one guy telling stories about princesses and dragons, while another has alien invaders from another planet landing on your world, and so on. It gets a little too diluted and confusing after a while.

On the item rarity thing and the Sleeper comparison – that is the problem. So if you use that concept, you need to do it enough that lots of players have a chance – instead of 25 items, maybe it’s 250 items. At some point you hit diminishing returns. Likewise, you need to make sure that it’s not always the same people getting the items as new items are added in. For example, let’s presume that Guild A finishes the raids first and gets copies of all the rare items. Later on, you ship an expansion, and Guild A is again at the forefront, and gets the rare items again. Everyone else is still shut out, because everyone wants the rare items from the new expansion, and most players probably aren’t raiding the earlier stuff now, they want to do the new stuff. So that’s the downside to rarity. However, I think it could still be a viable mechanism in a commercial MMORPG, if done correctly. (Side note here: The downside to owning rares in most Diku MUDs was increased rent – the amount of gold you had to pay to keep your stuff when you were logged out).

A couple of years in, those apparently fractal patterns show a definite repetition.

But it’s certainly a longer lifespan than levelling.

That’s just some plateaud players who haven’t figured out how to level up.

I’d love to chase a thief accross high rooftops in the image of movies and books, trying to avoid slipping and falling by the use of my movement controls and some luck chances, leaping from one to another by the skill of my hands, hoping to either catch him or outlast him, all the while hoping that town guards don’t end up arresting and fining me.

roleplaying is of course a game system that has fractal detail by nature

Not really. A quick trawl from some old SWG logs produced this little gem.

Coreena : Cade, help. Ramona has been kidnapped!
Cade : Forget it.
Coreena : You heartless pig!
Cade : Girl gets kidnapped three times every week, I reckon she likes it.
—Coreena adds Cade to /ignore —

A couple of years in, those apparently fractal patterns show a definite repetition.

But it’s certainly a longer lifespan than levelling.

It has essentially no effect. Raph is pointing out the “social” kind of mudflation. But WoW keeps the social aspects so chained down and bland that they basically have no real impact on the game. It preserves and defends it’s “game” aspects so that they are bullet-proof.

So even the negative effects are reduced.