This may be jumping the gun a
little bit, not having fully described the features of virtual economies, but I
think a more concrete example may be useful for those who wonder what types of
events one could hope to study. In this post I look back to the release of the
Trials of Atlantis expansion of Dark Age of Camelot, where for a relatively
brief period the top end of a monetized economy devolved into a barter economy.
Prior to the release of ToA
expansion, there were relatively few very rare items that were considered very
necessary to compete. Those that existed were seldom available for money and
the more common needs a player might have amounted to a large one time expenditure
after reaching the maximum level to pay for equipment crafted by other players.
The most common normal recurring expenses arose from deaths or from expenses
related to sieges in Player vs. Player combat (buying siege engine materials
and door upgrade/repairs), the latter being significant, but generally borne by
a small subset of players. Players wanting to develop their skill in one of the
crafting professions also needed to sink a fair bit of money into materials,
which came from non-player merchants, but this was also a one-time expense that
did not need to be paid as a lump sum. In short, with few exceptions there was
little need to have a large amount of cash on hand.
Moreover, in those days Realm vs.
Realm combat, the principal activity for many players who had reached the
endgame, was not a good source of income. The amounts of money earned were
trivial. Later changes addressed this, but for the most part in pre-ToA DAoC
acquiring significant quantities of money was a very deliberate act.
The ToA expansion introduced a
powerful new type of item, artifacts, which required among other things that a
character turn in a set of three scrolls in order to be able to use. Some of
the scrolls were very common and easy to obtain while others, due either to
their high desirability, low probability to drop, or obscure and out of the way
source were fairly rare. In the initial phase, these were quite valuable. For a
few months, it was very difficult to buy these for money. Instead a limited
barter economy arose involving just the scrolls considered rare.
The rarest scrolls came to be
exchanged 1 for 1 as no character needed multiple copies of the same one,
except as a potential trade item. There were few or no other items of similar
value and thus it was difficult to arrange any remotely fair trade around them.
Thus the rare scrolls never had the opportunity to truly become a second
currency.
In the end the system was unstable.
Demand for the rare scrolls was not infinite, as each character needed them
only once so only growth in demand came from new characters nearing the end in
their gear progression. Supply grew much faster. Thus as we expect, the value
of each scroll fell and the list of rare scrolls that were difficult to obtain
for money or exchangeable 1 for 1 for other rare scrolls gradually shrank as
the less rare ones hit the tipping point where enough people could simply offer
money for them.
Longer-term changes to the game
made RvR a net profitable activity and the average player could be expected to
have a lot more cash on hand at any given time. New mechanisms for scroll
acquisition were also later added that significantly reduced their rarity, but
by the time both of those changes happened the barter system was long dead.
The interesting question is: Why
did the system arise in the first place? There are several factors that I
believe contributed. The pre-expansion economy did not have any items whose value
was comparable to new ones and most characters were well established and had
much of what they needed. The need to have money in that economy was limited to
characters who had freshly hit the maximum level and incidental expenses for
everyone else, which were relatively minor. Together with the unprofitability
of the dominant activity for much of the player base that had reached the
endgame this lead to an economy where there was not a lot of money lying around
waiting to be spent.
With the ToA expansion, there was
a variety of new items introduced to an economy where most participants did not
have enough cash on hand to buy some of the most expensive of the new things,
but they could find them directly. Moreover, the items in question were similar
enough that a 1 for 1 exchange between different rare scrolls seemed fair and
natural despite some differences in their actual rarity that would have been
evident had they been bought and sold for money instead. Had the new must have
items been more different, perhaps no barter system would have arisen.
The events in question happened
almost ten years ago now, so it would be unlikely that complete logs of trades
performed in those days are still around for study, but the nature of the
changes that gave rise to this temporary, limited barter economy have
doubtlessly been reproduced in other games. With better data some of the
anecdotal observations such as the pre- and post-expansion distribution of
money among the player base could also be quantified.
Game expansions frequently add
highly desirable items and commodities to a game (making owning the new content
“necessary” to compete helps sales) and assuming this happened because the game’s
pre-expansion money supply inadequate to deal with the new goods available
rather than some other idiosyncrasy inherent to DAoC, similar circumstances
should be expected produce similar results.
