"Web"steading

[Minsc]

It'll get caught up in the whole day trading of bitcoin and you need something super popular to stabilize the price.  If Diablo 3 had decided to use only bitcoin instead of only PayPal, then that would've done it.

Hmmm... considering your avatar is a furry, perhaps you should play on that.  The ideal furry place is where they can roleplay, yiff, and then do really disturbing & bizarre yiff stuff, and then they can leave the world and claim they merely like the art and only 1% of furries are into yiff and they're just a dignified furry not into that.

That would not -stabilize- the price. First it would move it way up as people discovered the development. Then up more as people speculated on how many other large games/companies would accept coins. Then down if time passed and more did not or up if even more if others were getting in.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for stability.

It should.  Make online games that are item based where you have to treadmill for items and gold.  Then have a system where they buy and sell virtual items, real estate, and characters with bitcoins.  The more it is used for commerce, the more buffers keep the Gox stuff from controlling the price.

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[BitterTea]

It should.  Make online games that are item based where you have to treadmill for items and gold.  Then have a system where they buy and sell virtual items, real estate, and characters with bitcoins.  The more it is used for commerce, the more buffers keep the Gox stuff from controlling the price.

That's because the designers don't care or understand how real economies work, and mostly care about the game being fun and keeping people playing. You sound a bit like Krugman or Greenspan saying that destroying the excess houses built during the housing bubble would have solved our financial problems (kept home prices propped up).

I recommend reading this very interesting article: http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency

[JeffK]

It should.  Make online games that are item based where you have to treadmill for items and gold.  Then have a system where they buy and sell virtual items, real estate, and characters with bitcoins.  The more it is used for commerce, the more buffers keep the Gox stuff from controlling the price.

That's because the designers don't care or understand how real economies work, and mostly care about the game being fun and keeping people playing. You sound a bit like Krugman or Greenspan saying that destroying the excess houses built during the housing bubble would have solved our financial problems (kept home prices propped up).

I recommend reading this very interesting article: http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency

Designers absolutely care and know how economies work, which is exactly why things like gold sinks exist - to offset the imbalances that simple supply/demand can cause. They have to pull a certain amount of gold from the environment to make it playable and control in-game inflation, CPIs, most importantly compensate for uneven and unpredictable player base growth or shrinks

[memvola]

SL is not a game. To make something a little more like a game, I propose adding the concept of raw resources. Whether you copy or build from scratch, you need to buy materials first. Not to design though. This would also help with creativity and enable better in-game relations.

[TiagoTiago]

Some years ago SL used to charge people for the components of the objects they create; not a new idea, and they moved away from it already.

[TiagoTiago]

I don't think making it a game should be a goal at all, it should be a platform, where if people want they can create any sort of game they feel like creating, but if they wanna do other things they won't be restricted to working within and around "game rules".

[mizerydearia]

Perhaps something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_massively_multiplayer_online_games#Free_play_with_micro-transactions ?

[memvola]

Some years ago SL used to charge people for the components of the objects they create; not a new idea, and they moved away from it already.

FWIW, I was imagining a game mechanic rather than a revenue stream. So these resources need to be gathered somehow. This would make the system more of a simulation than an interface. Then we'd see which economic/social model would survive. Not a new thing of course and probably not suitable for the topic.

[Rassah]

Some years ago SL used to charge people for the components of the objects they create; not a new idea, and they moved away from it already.

FWIW, I was imagining a game mechanic rather than a revenue stream. So these resources need to be gathered somehow. This would make the system more of a simulation than an interface. Then we'd see which economic/social model would survive. Not a new thing of course and probably not suitable for the topic.

I was actually thinking of charging for actual resources. CPU cycles cost electricity, and storage of textures and objects requires physical disk space, so costs hard drives. In a way it's like virtual world real estate and resources. Actually it's exactly virtual world real estate and resources.

[TiagoTiago]

I think, at least at first, pricing should be modeled after webhosting, VPS services and things like Amazon's EC². Makes more sense than trying to come up with formulas to convert inworld abstractions into real life costs.