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From a design perspective do you see inflation or deflation as a biggest threat to an MMOs economy? And is one of the many aims of this policy of setting a real world price in UEC to combat gold farmer induced inflation?asked by Capstone

TL;DRRoughly ninety percent of commerce being AI-controlled lets the developers counter exploits and limits player influence, while buying UEC is meant to support the game rather than stop gold farmers, though some measures against farming are planned.

Obviously inflation and deflation is a threat to most economies we are on our side because I mentioned the nine to ten player to AI ratio so ninety percent of the universe is AI that obviously us as the game masters have an influence over. They trade, they go about their daily lives, they earn money, do all these things so it's actually a pretty good tool to make sure that if a player finds an exploit and does all this other stuff it won't totally create a new economy because ninety percent of the commerce is happening in the AI world and we have control over that so if we see something spinning out of control on the player side we could potentially counter it with the AI side. That's one of the ideas that not to be too beholden to say price fixing or any kind of machinations that players could get together and do. They will have the ability to affect to some form of the economy in a more localised fashion but since there are only ten percent of players overall in the universe they won't have the ability to affect the economy in a more overbearing or global basis. As far as real world price and UEC we're not doing a subscription fee so where we think we'll be earning money long term to pay for servers and adding new content besides new people joining and buying their game package is for the people that love the game but they just don't have thirty hours a week to be flying around doing stuff but they want to get that cool ship or that cool weapon so they'll be able to buy some UEC and that will get him there. That falls to the whole time versus money argument. So it's not so much to combat gold farmers and more one of the ways we'll be supporting the game once it's live. We will definitely be putting some things in there to make it difficult for a bunch of gold farmers to go and sell people UEC it's almost impossible to fully stop stuff cause people can build up an account and then just transfer the account and sell it, but you won't just be able to wire people money with no cost and no checks and stuff like that. So we'll see how it goes it's still early days and i'm sure there will be plenty of things we haven't realised that we'll have to adjust but that's part of the point of getting you guys in early.

10 for the Chairman›Episode 68·
Published on this date.28 Sep 2015
EpisodeEconomyNPCs & AI