I'm too often surprised at how little thought goes into the planning of online economies in MMORPG games.

Any market economy needs three things, Supply, Demand, and a Market. I'm going to use a sample game that has too much of the first, too little of the second, and none of the third. Guild Wars doesn't encompass all the problems of MMORPG economies, nor is every game as bad in these departments.

Guild Wars has two fairly distinct phases of the game, PvE and PvP. It was designed nearly from the beginning to be a PvP game with a sound PvE component used to unlock the goodies. As a PvP game it was first and foremost designed to do two things, achieve a balanced PvP game and get people competing at PvP as soon as they can walk. To this end, they set up low boundaries on entrance to PvP. The game as a whole is capped at level 20 for any character, an easily achieved feat. The inventory is also capped at very low limits. Few other games would imagine having the best weapons in the game doing at most 41 damage before modifiers (well D&D can get close), and only 3-4 sets of modifiers to choose from on any particular piece. They have achieved a strong ability to balance PvP through these limits and a smattering of others, limiting the sheer number of choices a player can make in PvP, but these are the important ones for the Economy of the game.

After a character has reached the level 20 cap and are properly outfitted with skills and items, they are generally able to enter and compete in the most difficult areas of the PvE game. They are able to become suppliers of top-end weaponry found in these areas. Initially, there would be more people needing top-end weaponry than suppliers, but as the number of level 20 suppliers has grown, the number of new characters needing new items has been steady. This is almost equivalent to the current American welfare problem, a growing number of elderly while the workforce has remained the same.

The problem is compounded by the few potential states of the equipment you can 'farm' in the game. A max damage sword with the best mods is exactly the same as another max damage sword with the best mods. Even the best mods are a generally agreed upon minority. The only difference available is prestige rare skins which add nothing to combat effectiveness, and the requirements to use the weapon which also don't bear on combat effectiveness. All this means that alot of characters are supplying very few choices of what a character can want or use.

This has drastic effects on the demand for various items. As prestige becomes the only differentiation between items, getting non-prestige maxed items becomes cheaper and easier. The cheaper an item is, assuming it is as effective, the higher its demand is likely to be compared with its expensive counterparts. In other words, most of the items being used by the suppliers and new blood in the games are the cheap knockoffs. Less effective items are even worse off, with the demand for a less than perfect item making it nearly worthless and certainly not worth the efforts to sell.

Meanwhile, the money in the economy is most easily made by supplying the prestige items. This forces supply into prestige. The prestige item of the week ends up being farmed faster than people who want to buy them, and the price drops dramatically, rarely ever recovering. This forces demand for prestige items to the next flavor item. "Keeping up with the Joneses," in this case is finding the next item that is really expensive that you'll get respect for owning. When the new item is found the price gets a small boost, then supply moves in to knock it back down hard.

The saving graces for the economy of the game were the consistent infusion of new prestige items with new expansions, and a constant increase in the number of weapons each player needed, or at least felt they needed. With the lack of future expansions planned for the first game of the franchise, this lifeline is now fairly well severed. Development has switched to the forthcoming Guild Wars 2.

All told this is an untenable system that is made only worse by the difficulty in dealing with the market to buy or sell your items. Instead of placing an item up for auction within the game, the player is forced into the much derided activity of standing around for hours selling their items. It is only worthwhile to stock items that are in high demand and high value, otherwise you stand for hours with little, if any, payoff. This forces the Prestige-of-the-Week system. Instead of prices quickly matching supply and demand for an item, there can be long lags that prevent an equilibrium from being found before the market forces change.

Please game developers, if you are looking to make an online game with any semblance of an economy you may want to hire someone who took some 9th Grade Economics, though preferably a bit more.

Seems like only yesterday I could sit, staring blankly at a screen for hours on end. Now my time is taken up with academics. Not school per se, but studying what I actually want to study outside school between books and internet sources. If I am having less fun, I'm feeling alot more sense of fulfillment. Just think how much time you spend in a day playing videogames. Now imagine just how much you could be learning or doing in that same time. I'm not saying that videogames are a waste. Far from a waste, in fact they are still my favorite art form, a sometimes bloody and gory, ever interactive art form. Videogames can foster creativity, and a real sense of what your morality may be in the real world (just don't confuse the two please). People just really need to remember that videogames are what you do when you finish your work or need a break, not what you do INSTEAD of work or study. I don't know what has prompted this change in my opinion, but it is almost as if I've grown up and turned away from my videogame fanatic youth. Of course if they ever come out with a videogame with the depth of thought of say a Brothers Karamazov, I'll be along for the long long long long ride. Till then Mario will just be my pastime break between my real passions of learning, procreating, and helping others.

I'm as annoyed as the next person about the new system of reviews on this site, but what really has me off my rocker is that now I'm limited in how I rate the games. I want people to know that I like Beyond Good & Evil better than Elder Scrolls 3, that I like better than NBA Street: Vol 2, that I like better than Rise of Nations, that I like better than Unreal. Under the new rating system Each of these games would receive a 9.0 due to rounding. I refuse to rate any more games until I can tell people that Civilization 4 in on par with Final Fantasy 10 at a 9.1 in my opinion, as opposed to being equally well liked as the 30-odd games I'd rate a 9.0 under the new system.