Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 4

Again, the intro recap:

Part 4: Solutions and various money controlling mechanisms.

1. Hyperscaling - Making whatever money the player has obselete by scaling the prices.
   
2. Money Sinks - Making available convienient ways to get rid of cash like gambling.
   
3. Nickel and Dimes - By making boring processes of acquiring money have penalties to acquisition.
4. Supply Control - By slowly expanding the shop selection.

In Part 3, I described various problems of dealing with the player which stemmed from either poor price control, poor fiscal policies (monsters drop too much gold) and poor inventory control. Let's talk about a few common methods people use to fix that.

1. Hyperscaling

Let's say that in the beginning, you could buy a powerful set of armor for 100 gold. When the player moves on to the next area, however, you don't want someone who has saved up 1000 gold to be instantly able to buy everything in the next area.  However, you can't take away his hard-earned gold either.

What do you do? You hyperscale the prices.  If a piece of armor costs 100 gold in the first area then a common way to both reward and control players who have saved cash is to make that next piece of armor cost 1000 gold.

You see, the player could've saved up more than enough money to buy 10 pieces of armor from the first area. That's great and the player should be rewarded for his effort. So he is rewarded by being able to buy the next armor quicker... but at the same time you've quite covertly changed the spending power he has. He was infinitely rich before in the first area by being able to buy his armor 10 times over. Now he's essentially broke again.

And the cycle continues: The player gets rich in one area or zone and then he moves on the next zone. He finds that the prices are high compared to the previous zone and now, instead of being rich, he's only of average wealth.

You haven't taken any money away from the player but you can make sure that no amount of farming in an early zone can make farming in a later zone easy.

2. Money Sinks

A money sink is essentially a non-essential fun thing that is designed to bleed money away from the player.

Money sinks also make the players feel their money is more valuable as there are more things to spend it on.

There's a plethora of ways to do this, here's just a short list of the possibilities:

1. Cosmetic Goods: Dresses, Nice boots, etc.
2. Gambling for Random Items: A sick thrill in which you might get a really good item.. or not.
3. Temporary Bonuses: Teleporters, fast movement or just the ability to use something really powerful for a short while (Like strength potions or potions that increase speed)
   
4. Access to secrets like unlockable characters, new combinations to try out or bonus and optional areas.
   

3. Nickel and Dimes


This is a method where the most popular method of gaining money also comes with a cost. For example, if the player fights monsters to gain money then by making his armor and equipment slowly wear away so they can't be used forever is nickle and diming the player's money away.

The trick is to set up some sort of drain on the player's money if he is spending an excess amount of time acquiring money. By making weapons cost ammo to fire or by making potions and necessary mundane things cost a lot, the player's primary resource for acquiring money also has it's own costs attached to it and you can slowly bleed a player out.

Note that this should only be a serious drain if the player is hellbent on acquiring lots and lots of money. Players probably don't need to repair their armor if they are moving through the game at a quick pace as he's doing what we want them to do. By making weapons and armor wear out only if the player spends an excessive time slaying monsters, you can do a targeted bleed on the farmers. This would mean that durability should be a three mode model.

There's 'Good', which most weapons and armor should be in. 'Wearing out' which should happen after the weapons and armor has been used for a while and 'Broken' which should happen if the player refuses to repair his equipment.

4. Supply Control

There's more than one path to take in this instance. You can either give the player a very limited view of what he can buy in the game and thus cut off any motivation to go out and acquire a ton of money...

...or...

You can limit the amount of times the player can buy mundane things like healing potions and neccessary goods like ammo forcing the player to move from area to area because he can't find the neccessary items he needs to survive without progressing thruogh the game.