Think tank: Clans and Economies

Supply and demand is the core of every single economic system that has ever existed and will probably remain that way for a long time. Just implement that idea in game and you'll be fine. That means that you need staff monitoring the players to see what they want and what they don't want. If every player in game wants a special sword made from a rare substance then that is your demand right there. High demand, low supply = high profits and rare. Low demand with high supply is the opposite. Defining supply and demand for every single item coded in game would open up the economies of a lot of games.

#datbrokecrosstho

Or actually allow good players the opportunity to claw their way up the political chain. One big mistake made at Arm was making templars into these noble priests that serve their King. That's so ludicrously bad compared to darksun. In DS templars serve their own selfish interests. They aren't all nobles, in fact the highest ranking templars often started as commoners and worked their way up, proving their usefulness to their king.

It's not like economies would be difficult to code provided you planned for them from the start. You'd just make it so every time something were sold or bought it would be tracked as part of a running average. Players could be randomly assigned a modifer at login the determines how many VNPCs they represent. Some portion of VNPC simulation would also be done in the background, as well as having hard caps, to prevent people from gaming the system or impoverishing themselves.

In fact knowing that tektolnes is dead just makes Arm looks even more ludicrously designed.

The greatest problem in Armageddon is that all clans have gained a monopoly on each commodity (whether that commodity be clothes, jewelry, silk, spice, mercenaries, mages) and so they have no ability to succeed or fail. Regardless of what any PC leader does, the clan will continue on just as it has since around 2008 (if not earlier) without any meaningful change to it's status. Back in the day the T'zai Byn was exiled from Allanak and forced to operate out of Red Storm. In today's game of Armageddon this will never happen. Clans are simply too big to fail and so PCs cannot have any meaningful impact on a House's status.

Hope people don't mind me discussing AthasMUD in this thread. If you do let me know and I'll edit it out of this post.

I believe Armageddon has a primitive form of this. In AthasMUD we'll be doing something similar with each item having a material type. Each marketplace (with NPCs flagged as belonging to a particular marketplace) will have a rarity value for each material type. So in Tyr Iron is common and as such the price for all iron items would be modified by being multiplied by 1 for NPCs flagged as belonging to the Tyr marketplace. In Urik obsidian would be really common and so the price for all obsidian items would be modified by being multiplied by 0.75. Assuming we stick with the modifiers from the Dune Trader supplement the modifier would range from 0.75 (for really common) to 10 (for really rare).

We'll be keeping this modifiers in a database so they can be dynamically altered by staff, allowing us to react to in game events fairly quickly.

Tying this in to players and clans, if a player of a merchant house manages to negotiate a contract that allows them to increase the export of iron from Tyr then the rarity modifier for iron goods would be decreased in Urik. Future PC nobles and templars would be free to but a stop to the deal and cause the rarity in Urik to increase once more (unless of course said House was stockpiling iron in an undisclosed location to prepare for the eventuality of the deal being stopped).

These two comments have inspired me to re-examine how we were planning on having the marketplace operate and we've added an additional modifier to the price of goods to account for player and virtual supply and demand. When these additional modifiers will be ready to implement is still a question (it's not a priority at this stage). But as mentioned in this post we are putting the infrastructure there so that when we do get around to implementing it, we won't be trying to retrofit it to an existing system.

When items are bought and sold their material type will be tracked in a database and it will increase or decrease the price of all goods of that same material type in that marketplace. Coupling this with having NPCs having a small cash pools (that regenerate quickly) we are hoping to be able to avoid having to implement a "NPCs can only buy 5 copies of any given object" and instead have the marketplace more closely resemble supply and demand by increasing or decreasing the price that goods are bought and sold for based on how much of that material is being stored and waiting for people to buy it.

How much price variance will occur is something we'll likely have to tweak. We could have it be "prices can vary from 0% to 100% of the base price" but once you start introducing multiple marketplaces then you can create very easy to abuse scenarios. Instead we'll likely have a smaller variance (e.g. prices range from 80% to 20% or 60% to 40%. Once a marketplace has reached 20% or 40% then everyone stops buying objects of that material type until the game resets or the supply decreases). The exact values are not decided and will likely be tweaked as we monitor the player experience and get it in line to something that is sane and fun.

Another variable we're hoping to implement will be the virtual supply and demand. So in Tyr the virtual supply and demand for iron will even out. While in Tyr the virtual supply of obsidian will be 0 and the demand for obsidian will be 10*. Whereas in Urik the virtual supply of Iron may be 5 but the virtual demand for iron will be 40. In this way, iron will quickly get gobbled up in the Urik market while there is a demand for obsidian in Tyr, it's nowhere near as high.

The code shouldn't be much harder to implement then Armageddon's current system. But we're hoping it will be more dynamic.

* This is not a real value but is simply to illustrate the point.


I was pretty shocked to learn this in Dark Sun. Needless to say we will be sticking with the Dark Sun canon in AthasMUD which we're hoping will alleviate the "templars get bored and constantly store" problem Armageddon has.

That said, I don't understand why people can't aspire to become a templar in Armageddon. It's not like templars need any special training. Not really. Their coded power doesn't come from their advanced slashing skill, but comes from their political might and their spellcasting. Neither of these should be impossible for a noble to acquire. Furthermore, it is Armageddon canon that family members of the Great Merchant Houses can become templars (i believe a PC may have even succeeded once way back in the day before my time). And yet this has all but been forgotten by modern day Armageddon staff and players alike. You want something for PC merchants to do? Dangle the ability to become a templar in front of them. Built in plot right there.

Unfortunately such a massive change to the status quo of Armageddon doesn't seem likely. Fortunately it could be possible for other MUDs to be setup like this! (Dunno if we will or not. It'd depend on the size of the playerbase most likely).