This article originally appeared in Massive quite a while ago… the mag seems to be undergoing some changes, including editorial turnover, alas.
Why Have Gold Anyway?
What with all the talk about RMT, how it affects a game, whether it’s something to be banned or embraced, and so on, it’s easy to lose sight of fundamental matters. Why is there gold in these games anyway? Should the games be about chasing wealth, or are we missing out on other styles of gameplay by focusing so much on acquiring shiny fake currency?
It’s worth stepping back and thinking about how these games work overall from a design perspective. After all, the games can mostly be boiled down into a pretty small and repetitive set of activities:
- A player meets some challenge – it might be easy, like just finding something laying on the ground and clicking repetitively on it; or hard, like killing a raid boss.
- The player then gets a reward.
Not to get all theoretical on you, but under the skin, most of the rewards are the same. Gold, skills, XP, items, and all the rest of the stats we track fall into just a few categories.
Some things you get and you can’t give away: skills, power increases tied to levels, soulbound items. These things might look very different on the surface, but really the difference between a soulbound item and a skill is zero; they’re both abilities that you pick up and can’t then give to someone else.
Gold and regular items are a different sort of thing. They’re transferable. That means that any gain made by any player actually theoretically increases the power of anyone in the game.
There’s little difference between currency and regular items, you see. It’s the transferability that matters. Transferability means that players can have exchanges. And a basic tenet of economics is that people trade for mutual benefit. In other words, every time two people exchange stuff, they are both better off afterwards.
This means that every time a game spawns something transferable, it’s actually giving a buff to the whole server.
All currency does is serve as a lubricant. It just makes stuff easier to trade. It doesn’t have any real use in and of itself; it just serves as a convenient way to count value. In fact, if it gets too inconvenient, then people just stop using it and switch to something else that happens to be common and come in convenient sizes and values. There’s a long history of player-invented currencies in online worlds arising when the official game money was too devalued to be worthwhile.
So, there’s problems with giving buffs to everyone on the server. Eventually, everyone is “maxed out” and the game content is pretty boring. This is what that term “mudflation” means. In the real world, this is a good thing – it means that your neighborhood is now wired for HD cable and high-speed Internet, plenty of electricity, and food teleported to your table. It’s a rise in the standard of living.
In a game, though, we rely on things being a bit hard. That’s where the fun comes from: overcoming challenges. So it’s no surprise that many designers prefer non-transferable rewards; they are individual markers of achievement, granted to one person. You see someone, and you know they are a badass, and they earned whatever it is they have. Even when groups help members get a particular piece of high-end gear, it’s a reward for an individual, not a group.
Given all the above, it’s easy to see where real-money-trade comes in. As long as there’s anything transferable, there will be people who want to get it in order to climb higher on the ladder. In fact, even if the world has nothing but non-transferable rewards, people will use the real world, which is full of transferable stuff, in order to make the trade. Basically, they will use whatever form of currency is convenient – be it real or made-up.
The rub in all this, of course, is that it means that everyone is always chasing this power-up, and cooperation is severely limited. Imagine a world where you’re encouraged not to mentor people or give gifts – we’ve been edging towards that in MMOs for years now. It’s a tribute to human instincts that players fight this in all sorts of ways (say, by giving out free buffs in towns). The core design philosophy in MMOs which rely heavily on non-transferable items is to help out only people you know, guildmates and groupmates. You help them by being there in the moment, assisting when they earn their non-transferable power-up.
In contrast, a core philosophy of a world with transferable stuff is that you can help out anyone, anywhere. Something that isn’t useful to you might be useful to someone else in a different situation. In the early muds, this was epitomized by the direct opposite to soulbinding: instead of just junking items, players could send it to the “donation room” instead, to be picked over by new entrants into the game. It was institutionalized hand-me-downs on a grand scale, like a virtual Goodwill system.
Are there kinds of games we’re missing out on by having everyone on this rat race? Sure. What about an MMO where everyone is in teams, and teams level up instead of individuals? It’s easy to ponder a game where we say that it’s OK for the standard of living to rise; picture starting in a prehistoric sort of world, and player achievement gradually raising the level of technology.
In the end, it may be that the thing we lose most in our battles against transferable items isn’t these alternate game styles, though. The thing at risk is a sense of altruism, because the games discourage us from helping out strangers. And that’s an odd place to be, in a medium that is all about the other people.
Related
something transferable, it’s actually giving a buff to the whole server.” Or, in English: “This means that every time you create a product or service that someone else wants to buy, it’s actually increasing the value of the universe.” From:https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/08/20/why-have-gold-anyway/
that previously had value to become worthless? Trading is just as hollow when the items are arbitrarily worthless as when they are arbitrarily valuable. I like Raph’s blog. I like that he’s willing to question assumed gameplay devices like levels andgold. But as a gamer I really can’t follow him on this journey. You can certainly
Without wandering too far in the direction of late night philosophizing helped along by some form of ‘social lubricant’….
One view of the world is:
“And a basic tenet of economics is that people trade for mutual benefit.”
and I would add that there is a strongly implied “…people ONLY trade…”
Another view of the world is:
“It’s a tribute to human instincts that players fight this in all sorts of ways (say, by giving out free buffs in towns).”
Which do you subscibe to as a game designer?
One thing I like about, say, City of Heroes or D&D Online is that the tradeable items are, for the most part, useful only to a particular level of character or higher.
That allows me, as a player, to hand down items knowing that there’s no “mudflation” possible other than what the developers themselves program into the game, in exchange for something I can use at my level, whether it’s Influence/Infamy or, well, gold.
The missing concept in games might actually be something like “retirement”. Once you hit a certain point, there really isn’t anything else for that character to do. This might be a good time to hand the character over to the developers for use as an NPC…
Just a thought.
Oh, and yes… money (even real world money) is valueless except as a medium of exchange. There’s no intrinsic value to any of it.
I’ve always been a little surprised by the people who seem to think that money, in and of itself, is worth anything.
I don’t think they are incompatible…
A strictly mathematical assessment of the world (which can be quite depressing) would say that the free buffs and the like are trades for mutual benefit. The benefit to the donor is social standing, or the overall improvement of the society they inhabit, which confers second-order benefits.
A more spiritual view of the world might conclude that the donor is acting for mutual benefit as well — they are trying to do good for the sake of their soul, because it’s the right thing to do and they want to be people who do the right thing.
There’s countless ways to interpret this. Me, I tend to think that most people are basically good and generous, but that circumstance is a HUGE modifier on people’s behavior.
I hate level limits on gear. 🙂
I read this and I was wondering why you felt this way. I feel the same way but I have very few concrete reasons for it.
I am a gm on a very very small, very very simple and very very barely alive online rpg.. So my basic reason for disliking level/stat requirements is that it reduces admin effectiveness by dividing the time they spend creating new things among players instead of having every addition benefit all or most players. I dislike adding concrete class systems and class-only areas for the same reason.
That’s really the only ideas I have on the matter, it’s an argument I have with players on a daily basis. Though why they want limits on things, I don’t know.
Don’t know if I’m allowed to respond to a comment and not the article as well, but the ideas are tangential to each other I think.
I read this and I was wondering why you felt this way. I feel the same way but I have very few concrete reasons for it.
I am a gm on a very very small, very very simple and very very barely alive online rpg.. So my basic reason for disliking level/stat requirements is that it reduces admin effectiveness by dividing the time they spend creating new things among players instead of having every addition benefit all or most players. I dislike adding concrete class systems and class-only areas for the same reason.
Also it requires basically grinding to certain levels to use the item, which is slow and boring. Though I do recall what you said in your “small worlds” presentation.. that grinds weren’t necessarily bad and were in fact necessary. But the difficulty should be in obtaining the item no?
So that’s basically the limits of my ideas on the matter. It’s an argument I have with players on a daily basis, thought why they want limits on things I don’t know..
Sorry about he double posts.. It wasn’t appearing and i’m not used to the site I guess..
Me too. But I hate levels, period. If a Legendary Blade of the Gods falls off the back of a truck, my character should be able to use that weapon immediately. Granted, my character shouldn’t be able to use the blade effectively until my character has received sufficient training… The gameplay experience just shouldn’t be locked into arbitrary measures of experience. Oh, and what the hell happened to thievery in games? I remember a time when you could actually STEAL ITEMS from OTHER PLAYERS. I feel sorry for today’s “rogues.”
There’s also the other side of things, in that in either game, you don’t get item rewards that are “level inappropriate”. You won’t find a +3 Flaming Burst Vorpal Sword in a 1st level adventure/instance.
I’d have to say that the best situation comes about when you’re playing in a pen-and-paper game, with a Game Master who is paying attention. Then if you get the “uber widget of all-creation” at least you know there’s a story purpose behind it, and if your GM is on the ball, you’ll also know you’re facing the right level of challenge for your characters.
It’s a limitation of the MM-RPG medium, really. The RPGA has considerable restrictions on trading items from one character to another in their pen-and-paper worldwide Living Greyhawk campaign; namely, it isn’t possible. Partly to prevent ‘cheating’, partly to preserve the challenge of the campaign.
Ideally, anyone ‘trained’ in the use of a piece of gear could use any version of that gear at any level; the problem with that is that it makes balancing the MMORPG difficult, if you can just hand down that massively powerful sword/armor/widget from your high-level character to your low-level character.
That’s the way I see it. I’d never institute item level limits in a campaign I run for a small, regular group of players, but when you’re talking tens of thousands of players spread across the globe, something has to give in order to make playing feel worthwhile.
Oh, mustn’t forget… the level restriction isn’t on owning the item, it’s on using the item. So a low-level character can still sell an item he can’t use to someone who can use it; altruism and generosity are still present. 🙂
When this statement:
Becomes true players will churn faster. It’s getting more obvious by the day in WoW that players rather quit than fail to belong to a guild where a powerup given to a friend can’t be reliably expected to help the guild over a reasonably long time.
I think i agree with Wolfe. If teams levelled instead of individuals, the drop-rate would be savage. Take a vacation? You’re out. Need to sort out life issues? You’re out. The sad thing is, there are many players who would try to avoid “letting down” their gaming group and thus put off RL issues of various descriptions, none of which would be great for the long-term benefits of online play.
I’ve never minded the lvl1 adventurer getting something really special – isn’t that what 99% of all fantasy consists of? The magic item or whatever comes along and the protagonist struggles to meet its power. When it sucks is when everyone has exactly the same stuff and everyone is “the hero”. I think this is damaging to both the psyche and the game in the long term and tend to prefer games like PlanetSide where you are a faceless grunt among many.
Hopefully a little more on-topic, there are and have always been games without “gold” as well as MUSHes without rewards and they’ve been minority interest to put it midly. The money will not follow them.
Over the long haul, there’s only one way to get rid of mudflation. And that can only be to get rid of the levels/xp mechanic and offer people the chance to simply to learn how to play your game in the manner in which they choose.
Wolfe’s right in that players do continue to find ways to help each other. But the guild case does drive towards the sort of “help only those you know” phenomenon.
Teams levelling instead of individuals doesn’t have to leave anyone behind, though, Rich… that very much depends on how the mechanics of advancement work.
“Once you hit a certain point, there really isn’t anything else for that character to do.”
Now whose fault is that? I’d say the game designers, for not designing a robust, non-achievement-based endgame. Isn’t there a way that players can contribute to the world and have fun without necessarily upgrading their character’s power?
Player-run shops and towns? World-oriented PvP to drive storyline (rewards would be incidental)? Customization of gear, look, home, etc? Once you max out your character’s abilities, you shouldn’t keep going up. You should go sideways. In as many different directions as you have time for.
Raph, as I recall, the original Star Wars Galaxies allowed Player A to train Player B in any skill known to Player A, generating “apprentice XP” for Player A that was required to gain the highest skill level in a profession. So no, you couldn’t exactly trade your own skills to someone else in a zero-sum way, but I think it would be fair to say that a mechanism for exchanging XP did exist. Where does something like this fall in the spectrum of transferability and altruism?
Rich, I’m also very interested in seeing a major MMORPG that eliminates the character level mechanic, although I still like the idea of an RPG in which there are a wide variety of character skills and content designed to highlight the use of those skills. To explore this idea, I’ve tried banging out my own design for such a game.
What I’ve found in running this design past various people is that objects in such a game become more important, not less important. When there are no character levels and character skills are non-transferable, those gamers whose definition of fun revolves around relative score versus other players or the gameworld will turn to extrinsic scoring markers like money and gear.
So eliminating character levels doesn’t seem to do anything about mudflation — it doesn’t affect whether or not the game has money and transferable gear. It might in fact make mudflation worse if, without character levels as a measure of standing, money and gear that can be handed down become more central components of play.
Which leads me to wonder: if gameplay-affecting behaviors like RMT and twinking depend on the movement of value, then controlling the transfer of value is only part of the issue — there’s another part, which is the accumulation of value.
High value objects can be created in a couple of ways: either a single item with significant in-game power is generated all at once, or a big collection of little objects (like currency) is accumulated over time. So what about addressing the accumulation side of the equation, too? What if you could accumulate, or transfer, but not both?
What if there were a bright-line test for value, where anything over the line could not be transferred but anything under the line could be transferred freely?
Individual high-value objects could thus not be transferred between players, nor could vast piles of currency. But basic items could be given away at will, as could small amounts of cash.
Assuming code could be written that effectively calculates value, would this be a better way of achieving the goal of altruism with minimal mudflation than the no-trade and soulbinding mechanisms currently being explored?
The common way to defeat the continued accumulation of transferable items/money is to use various means (decay, etc.) to remove them from the game, thus forcing people to continue to acquire new ones. The reason this isn’t very reliable in current MMORPGs is that no one seems to have found a way to do it yet on a large enough scale and still have it be acceptable to a large number of players.
I think part of the problem that most MMOs face is that they’re all item-centric. We build games where players collect “stuff” and then use that “stuff” to collect more “stuff”. Katamari Damacy, the MMO? I think there’s other ways to provide tangible rewards in a game without handing out continually bigger swords, shinier armors, and increasingly large piles of money.
Don’t get me wrong, the tangible rewards are important and I don’t think any game will ever get away with them. There’s nothing that’s quite the same as getting yourself a bigger boomstick to replace the pea-shooter you were using before. Like most things there will probably have to be a balance struck – some percentage of the rewards in your game are non-transferable, and some are. Some percentage are individual rewards vs. group or meta rewards. Some percentage of rewards are tangible (items, cash, etc) while some are intangible (titles, badges).
I think striking that balance is probably the part we continually strive for. The problem that faces most MMO designers is that there’s always the temptation to just do what’s easy and proven, and then deal with the problem of mudflation by introducing expansions that simply give it more room to grow, and make it seem normal.
…any game will ever get away with not having them.
One day, my fingers will be good enough to keep pace with my brain.
I think that there’s room for both. For example Horizons went partially this way with players as groups working on construction projects to open up new lands. This required both team construction and team combat as the constructors needed protection. My problem with raids is that they take dedicated chunks of intense time. Would be nice to see more focus on ‘slower’ forms of raid and larger group play where everyone can participate even if only for an hour. The problem is to work out a reward system that is repeatable – can’t open up new lands every day:)
The root of ‘mudflation’ (never heard this word before reading this entry) is, as inflation is, the result of too much stuff and not enough people. The non-virtual world has a simple way of handling this, the only way for more stuff to exist is for more people to appear and obtain it.
In the typical virtual world, this is not the case. Where did the goblin get the armor? Where did the bandit get the sword? Where does all this gold come from anyway? On a more fundamental level, where did the goblin come from? Nowhere, from code it comes and to code it returns, not needing justification or reason. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes, so game makers need only make everything come from somewhere.
Not an easy task, to be sure, since we really don’t know where our non-virtual world came from. Or what it is fundamentally. I think it would be sufficient to simply make sure that npcs get their equipment from somewhere. I’m mostly thinking a mine where other npcs slowly accumulate resources, and other npcs forge the items, and then npcs buy them with gold they made by doing things for other npcs. And then you can just make it so players can take over in any stage of this process, and poof. You have a game.
Difficulty ≠ obstacle. The “let’s just do what’s easy” approach is part of the problem. That’s why we end up with dozens of AAA ultrarealistic games with minimal ROI because following the technology curve is so much easier than redefining it. That’s why we have an excessive amount of derivative video games with roots in Tolkien mythologies because doing what’s traditional is better supported and easier than doing what’s not. I’m not saying that capabilities systems are nonstandard; indeed, they have a long history in games. They work, they’re fun, but they’re complex and require a lot of critical thought. It seems that most people just give excuses for not doing what needs to be done to create truly immersive experiences. /rant
“If you can just hand down that massively powerful sword/armor/widget from your high-level character to your low-level character” is nonsensical in a game where levels don’t exist. You don’t have “high-level characters” and “low-level characters.” You only have “your character” and its capabilities. From that point, you can easily see that if your character acquires a “powerful sword” and attempts to use it without sufficient training, both the effectiveness and the damage inflicted by the sword will be greatly hindered; therefore, a “powerful sword” is only “powerful” in name, and the actual power is a product of the capabilities of both the character and the sword.
Ultima Online uses a good example of this type of capabilities system.
Markimedes, mudflation is a very old term, (going back to the mud days, obviously).
As far as what you described, it is what UO’s resource system was intended to do, in a nutshell. You can find descriptions of it here on this site.
Morgan, I can see there’s a small disconnect between your definition of “level” and mine… I use level as shorthand for “character skill” as well as for “character level” sometimes.
I do recognize your point about being able to use only part of the item’s capabilities at lower skill levels; however that has the consequence of “needing” only one particular example of any item for a character. A “highly skilled” character trades the “uber widget” down to a “lower skilled” character and then… what?
Or perhaps you can do what the developers for SW:G’s NGE did, and make it so that weapon damage depended only on the “level/skill” of the character… something that was changed back after a few months due to players not liking it and saying so.
A Signature Item approach might also work, where you create/acquire an item and then upgrade it over the life of the character.
The balance issue isn’t a matter of technical difficulty… it’s a matter of developer time. There’s only so many hours in the day to track down bugs and create content, and only so much money you can afford to pay for a development staff.
Open, unrestricted item access works very well on the small scale, but poses problems on the large scale. I’ve seen it in MMORPGs, I’ve seen it in large organized pen-and-paper campaigns… Mention “Living City” to any long-time RPGA members you may know and ask them about item trading.
You have to remember that a developer isn’t developing for a small party with a very controlled subset of items, he’s developing for tens of thousands of people with time and energy enough to get access to the full set.
The thing is, every player wants their character to be “known” for something. Differentiated from the others. Because all the content is provided to all players equally (in theory), players go after anything that differentiates their character from the others. Items, badges, etc.
Sometimes I wonder if a game can be made more compelling simply by adding content that only a small subset of players can access. Everyone has the chance to get at and complete one of many unique adventures/missions, but only a few people will be able to solve, say, “The Caves of Fire and Air” or “Mr. Mysterious and the Hidden Circus of Doom”. Naturally, no player would be able to complete more than a few of these unique/restricted missions.
[…] Have Gold Anyway? – Raph Koster Monday, August 20, 2007, 08:10 PM – – MMOs I miss being able to write theory stuff like this. I've been working too god damned much between one thing and the next. Maybe on my ride to and […]
Actually that’s one of the reasons why class-specific content in some MMOs (EverQuest, etc) was so popular, at least in my opinion. Here was something I could do that people who didn’t play my class couldn’t do. It was more unique. It was for me. Individualized content is expensive, but it’s something that players love.
So, there’s problems with giving buffs to everyone on the server. Eventually, everyone is “maxed out” and the game content is pretty boring. This is what that term “mudflation” means. In the real world, this is a good thing – it means that your neighborhood is now wired for HD cable and high-speed Internet, plenty of electricity, and food teleported to your table. It’s a rise in the standard of living.
In a game, though, we rely on things being a bit hard. That’s where the fun comes from: overcoming challenges.
Of course, what’s missing from this is that, in the real world, there is a perpetual source of new challenges intrinsic in the complexity of the universe. That complexity is missing from MUD/MMOs: you simply do not see technological progress, and so the world is capped whether explicitly by levels or not.
And I really do mean technological progress. That is, progress resulting from the application of scientific knowledge. That is, knowledge gained through repetition and reenactment of phenomena. Or in our language, emergent knowledge. Not emergent behavior. Emergent knowledge.
But I guess you can’t. Because it’s a game, and a game can be mastered. It’s, *twists mouth*, a semi-bounded domain of contrived contingency.
[…] a nice article by Raph K on altruism and No Trade items. Worth a read:-https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/08/2…yway/#more-1334 Your browser does not support iframes. Iframes are a requirement to see a user’s […]
SWG had this feel for a short while after launch, as the first few generations of crafting tools/stations came about and people learned about resource values, gained experimentation points, etc. Ultimately it blew beyond its intended scale, but I suspect that is another symptom of such an early release (and large scale lot-swap agreements).
I agree with Ramsay here in not liking levels in general. I’ll also take ay I’m not fond of gear with character stat mods all over it. There should be a decent blend of character abilities and weapon abilities, each with mods affecting their own realms. Weapon mods that affect damage or speed, armor with greater protection or mobility vs. character mods that affect strength and intelligence. It seems rather limiting to tie appearance and stat balance together, the result being even less personalization and uniqueness. I’m of the opinion that your character’s strengths and weaknesses should be independent of the gear being used. I also prefer crafted goods over looted (though perhaps with looted sub-components/recipes offering slightly better end products to encourage crafter/adventurer interdependencies). After all, my definition of endgame is when you are basically done ‘progressing’ from a stat mod perspective and can now go out and make an impact on the game world as a relatively equal participant. This model of constantly introducing another mountain of levels and gear to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is getting stale, I fight 40+ hours a week to stay afloat in real life. I don’t need to pay $15/month for the virtual equivalent of that.
Thus ends my ranting on a week-old subject :9.
(by the way, as I’m writing this, I can’t help but notice the gold selling website on the bottom banner, grrr)
[…] had an interesting article up on his site recently, and since work has been kicking my butt lately, I hadn’t really had time to […]
[…] Koster’s Blog – Why Have Gold Anyway?. Raph thinks outside the box (as always), asking why these games have currency in the first […]
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[…] Why Have Gold Anyway?, Raph Koster suggests that transferable currency in online games is intended to foster a sense of […]