In "Longwinded pie-in-the-sky post about MUD economies" chrome wrote:
> At the moment, leaning towards self-tuning, but suspect that the end result
> of attempts towards tuning won't be completely successful.
If I understood what you're planning, I doubt you'll get enough
transactions to generate a meaningful average. In other words, the
player's input will not be stable, and will tend to drive the values
off the scale.
I once coded my stock market so when it got to 0, everyone lost all
their shares. This was a very unpopular "feature". I suggest a market
that swings up and down a bit, and allows player to interact by
waiting for better prices to sell, or perhaps being forced to take a
loss due to circumstances, etc., but always returns to a preset
average value.
My gut feel is, if your economy needs people on to work, then it
might have problems. How many people is enough? If there's an
'enough', doesn't that mean there must be a 'too many'? And as a
purely practical matter, if you need people to make it work, how
will you tune it?
Otherwise, I like John Mariotti's approach. It's sort of like
Disneyland. You generate the appearance of a 'working economy',
which will actually seem more realistic than a 'real' one, given
the scale of the setting. True, it's a lot of work, but it can
be very rewarding.
I wince while writing such discouraging opinions as this. I spent a
lot of time trying to spite older coders who told me things couldn't
be done, and it was good for me. :) Some people think reinventing the
wheel is a waste of their time on this planet, others think it builds
character, but here, I fear you'd be reinventing a flat tire.
Sandi
"I have not yet begun to code!"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] blades.inetsolve.com 3333
