Bahamut.Celebrindal said:
»Bahamut.Celebrindal said:
»I used to wonder how it was feasibly possible for entire countries to run to the point of literally trillions of dollars in debt
Overspending on military?
Nah, y'all. It's the complete lack of understanding of how currency is given value; how ANY debt, be it personal or national, is addressed; and what changes inflation in EITHER direction.
I was aware of the stupidity of people who spend a $1200 gov't check on a video game and then complain the government won't let them work...I just didn't know about the lack of basic economic policy understanding.
Value = effort. It's plain and simple.
The value of the dollar is the sum total of the combined effort of the people who use the dollar.
Not true in the least. Those who had to live in Weimar Germany post WW1 or in some eras of Sub-Saharan African Kingdoms (pre-democracies in some countries such as Nigeria) worked their *** off, and certainly valued trying to feed their children. But a lack of a concrete value to stabilize that currency made all the best intentions of the world not matter worth a damn, to the point of wheelbarrows of "money" had to be used for a single loaf of bread.
That's the greatest fear many "small government" fans in the US have right now- that the US dollar is not backed by a hard commodity, only "The Full Faith And Credit" of the United States. And really, that just means "we got big guns and can blow your ***up if you ever say our money is garbage". At the end of the day, things are just more stable when the world knows even if your country goes to hell, the money of that country can be exchanged for actual ounces of gold, or pounds sterling...hell make it backed by fat purple chickens if your country has enough fat purple chickens, whatever. Just make it backed by something more than the paper its printed on.
...and this is the problem for long-term economic stability in an MMO. There is
never anything concrete backing the value of currency. If a game can remain 100% RMT-free, then what establishes the value of a game currency is TIME. One human who is generating their own currency values that currency based on their personal time to generate it-such as time taken away from "enjoying" the game to farm. If RMT enters the game, the value of that time is turned into the dollar point placed on one's real-world hours vs the amount of gil one can make in an hour.
If you can make 2million gil in one hour, and worked a job paying $20/hour, that gil is now valued at $10/million in your mind. If you can find a website selling it for $8/million and you have no qualms against buying it, you're gonna. If it was being sold at $15/million, you probably don't.
So there ends up being two choices. Game currency is never given a concrete value, so prices inflate over time for two reasons- either players improve their methods of farming thus increasing their gil/hour income, or there is less over time to spend gil on, increasing the volume of it in the game while not giving more things to spend it on, reducing the value of each "gil" because now it takes more to buy the same things.
Or, game currency IS given value by either a 3rd party (RMT) or in-game sales of a fake money for real money (p2w). The end result is the same- it attaches a real world value to a pretend situation. Then, that real world currency is what is actually connected to a commodity.
In the 3rd party scenario, due to competition the real-world amount attached to that game currency is in constant flux and is constantly being devalued. This means you can buy more game currency with the same amount of real currency, but once in game, that currency does less because EVERYONE can do the same. In the p2w scenario, values are more stable due to only one source- it would function in a way like a Treasury. But, due to this being a
GAME and many of their customers are desiring to ESCAPE the trapsings of the real world, the cost of this stability is loss of membership.