Resource Distribution and the “Game Economy”

I’ve talked extensively about this topic elsewhere, so I’ll try and keep this (relatively) short and sweet. There are a couple points that need to be understood about resource distribution before I hit on other topics. This is a topic I’ve seen others interested in, so I’ll talk about what works, clear up some misconceptions, and outline some pitfalls.

Players will trade resources based on two factors: The difference between each player’s ‘access’ to a resource and how much each player (or group) needs that resource.

• Making a resource exceedingly scarce (for everyone) will not stimulate trade; instead players will hoard that resource.

• Likewise, when a resource is exceedingly common (for everyone), players will not trade in/for that resource because it is too easily accessible for the majority of players and thus has little value.

In short, players will trade resources that are easily ‘accessible’ to them for resources that aren’t. (If they want them)

With that out of the way, you can see that stimulating a game economy needs to be done in two ways; Creating resource disparity and creating demand for resources.

Demand for resources is based on the recipes used to craft the products that players need. Balancing this will largely depend on the specifics of the map but in general the staff need to make sure that the things players want to craft are created from a variety of materials. Adding resource sinks, particularly mid-end game ones will also be very useful, as it is a tool to add both new items players will want as well as introduce new needs for resources.

Making sure that different groups have wildly different access to resources will be very important to the game economy. The Nether is one of the largest offenders to this concept. With vanilla Nether, every single player has equal access to valuable resources on their doorstep. Removing the Nether completely and instead having a different system would be a good idea. I liked the portal system from Spera and I’ll talk about expanding and refining it in my next post.

A few things need to be mentioned before I wrap up this post.

In terms of the map:

On the large-scale, you don’t need to make sure every area of the map is “balanced” and all has their pros and cons. It is totally okay to have significant swaths of the map be poor in resources as long as the valuable areas of the map are evident and there is not too much scarcity overall that the game is too much grind. Land value also comes into play here; it comes from the relative resources of land. When all of the map has near equal pros and cons, none of it is valuable.

On the smaller-scale of specific resources, not every area containing that resource should be equal. If you want there to be competition for resources, then you need resource disparity to exist. It will work best when this is added in multiple ways: through the actual distribution of resources in the world, through resource sinks allowing for better resource extraction (specialization), etc.

One last note, I used the term “Resource Distribution” because it doesn’t and shouldn’t mean “ores and crops.” As was seen with the custom items in Spera that came from a variety of activities, from killing mobs to running the Dungeon. There are plenty of ways to add resources into the game.

I would also definitely recommend adding custom resources to the game similar to the ones in Spera. These could be procured either from slaying custom mobs, via crop control, coupled with normal resource collection, or in more unique ways. Combined with what we’ve seen so far, as well as most players’ interest in trade in game, I think we could see a lot of improvements to the game economy.

I’ll have at least 2 or 3 suggestions in my next post. The topics are how to better pull off the following ideas and the benefits that would come with doing so:

• Ancient portals to other dimensions

• Potion production overhaul