The worst virtual economy ever?

[Anonymous No.503840]

I suppose /biz/ would like to hear about virtual economies, so I'd share this here.

When Gary Schofield took over Gaia Online, he thought that selling items that generated random amounts of in-game currency (gold) for real money is a good. The result: the prices of almost everything began rising.

Several users complained, but management ignored them. People were about to hit the gold cap of 2.147B, and staff responded through upgrading the system from 32-bit to 64-bit so that they could cram in more zeroes. Now, Gaia Online is as hyperinflated as Zimbabwe, yet gold generator sales seem to continue indefinitely.

If you suddenly became in charge of Gaia's virtual economy, how do you plan to restore the economy to normal levels?

Also, how scenarios like this are handled in other games?

[Anonymous No.503842]

Plenty of currency sinks and two way in-game/RL money exchange of some sort. Just look at how the EVE Online economy works.

[Anonymous No.503848]

>>503842
IIRC, Gaia has the following gold sinks:

-Marketplace transaction tax (a fee to be deducted from ever successful transaction, used to be 2% of the item's price, then was raised at 3% and eventually at 5%)
-Dedicated sink events, where users are asked to spend gold for reward items
-Lotteries (discontinued sometime in 2012)

However, more gold (mostly from the gold generators) is being dumped into the system than all the sinks could handle.

Maybe a revaluation would be the way out, but that may or may not work considering that the prices of less popular items did not inflate as much as the more popular ones.

[Anonymous No.503853]

And one more thing: since you mentioned two-way conversion of in-game money to RL money (like premium PLEX to regular ISK & vice versa in Eve), Gaia doesn't allow that. I guess that conversions from Gaia gold to Gaia cash won't happen in the meantime due to the very unstable value of gold.

[Anonymous No.504091]

>>503853

i don't believe that you can convert two-way in EVE.

[Anonymous No.504107]

God I love games with their own fucked up economic systems. So much fun to play with.

[Anonymous No.504170]

>>504091
of course you can

[Anonymous No.504304]

we can all agree though that valve is the best at printing money

[Anonymous No.504314]

>>504091
>i don't believe that you can convert two-way in EVE.

Of course you can.

GoonSwarm had one of their CEOs run off with the corporate account and sell it for $20,000 USD. His email was hacked and pics of his dick were leaked to the internet. Later, the same guy got sued for shady legal practices.

[Anonymous No.504322]

>>503840
Allods Online.

Some girl in my guild had roughly ~$10,000 spent on ingame items that make you stronger(runes).

Pretty sure her rich as fuck businessman boyfriend bought her those because she sounded incredibly hot in ventrillo

[Anonymous No.504361]

>>503840
Biologically engineer a virus like Ebola to wipe out the Goyim along with it's debt.

[Anonymous No.504391]

>>503840
Back to 'normal' levels?

'Normal' was when the game had an ISOLATED economy.

The game is different now - you can create gaia gold (by buying an object with FIAT that makes the gold).


to return to previous levels - well stop allowing the creation of gold..
and then say if there used to be 1 billion of gold and now 10 billion - that 10 gold now = 1

but whats the point - money is abstaction and a social construct so just keep it as it is.. to stop the inflation further just stop/limit the FIAT purchasing of gold creating devices.

[Anonymous No.504690]

>>504304
$400+ for a single virtual item in Steam's cash shop? Gaia Online sold some items for $1000 each.

>>504322
How did that affect other players?

[Anonymous No.504706]

>>504690
Terribly.

She had no skill or technique whatsoever but it didn't matter because of how retardedly OP her abilities were simply because her boyfriend could afford to drop $10k on a game.

There was a player on the other faction with a lot of money spent too, good gear and was pretty good skillwise and they would run around in our faction's capital and tank dozens of players

[Anonymous No.505236]

>>504391
>stop allowing the creation of gold..

this could get you in legal trouble though

people bought gold creators with real money from you. if you just disable them, you could be sued for fraud.

[Anonymous No.505255]

>>504706
http://backpack.tf/profiles/76561197976968076

This guy has spent over $66,000 on his inventory for Team Fortess 2. Most of the items are cosmetics and don't even give you an advantage in the game.

I just don't understand how one can blow so much money on a single game. He's not even an employee for the company that makes the game.

[Anonymous No.505351]

>>505255

Worth doesn't equate to spent

My own steam account is probably worth like 12k but I've not put it more than it cost to buy the games

[Anonymous No.505515]

>>505236
Who would sue them? More users hate the gold creators.

And some former employees knew that selling those items indefinitely would hurt the economy when they tried selling them for the first time in 2008.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/?mode=view&post_id=19877719&u=8357925

And whenever they're present (both the old gold creators and the new gold creators made under Schofield), those items were sold only for a limited time.

From 2009 to mid-2013, Gaia didn't sell gold creators.

>>504391
Someone in Gaia's upper management is a huge proponent of gold creators, however.

[Anonymous No.505581]

>>505351
>Worth doesn't equate to spent
You're right, I wasn't thinking.