Steve Salyer: A developer whom I admire often says that the Holy Grail of game design is to encourage emergent behavior. I can't think of any more successful expression of emergent behavior than the secondary market. It wasn't intended, it was created by gamers, millions of gamers are involved and the market is approaching a billion dollars. There is no question the secondary market helps people to play the games the way they want to play.GameSpy: One reader wrote: "Commercial farmers supply good to the market but do not consume goods in the same proportion as regular players. Therefore, the market for items farmed is warped in one direction, and the market for everything else is warped in the other." Care to comment on this?
Soon, "investing in gold" may mean something completely different.
Steve Salyer: Actually, I don't think the consumption habits of any small segment of an economy matter all that much. It's the overall supply and demand which drives value. As long as items are obtained properly, meaning someone did the "work" necessary to get the item (not cheating, using code to create them out of thin air), the economy continues to be based on an underlying "work" standard. I believe the real culprits which warp game economies are cheating, hacking, and exploiting.
Every gamer knows that when in-game currency is in short supply, each unit of currency has a high value (which incentivizes farming). Over time, currency becomes more available and price inflation happens in the games. It happens naturally, regardless of the activity of farmers as the average player level goes up and the average length of time played increases. As a gamer, I notice that I'm paying more for the items I want to buy but I'm also getting more in-game currency for the items I'm selling. Bottom line, the per unit value of the currency drops, which disincentivizes working to get more of it ... there is less profit, and less farming. As the available inventory is absorbed by demand, the cycle starts over again. It seems like a pretty good self-correcting mechanism to me. I've watched many farming groups move out of games where the returns are too low.
