A part of the problem with MMOs when it comes to player-run economies is that there's rarely any concept or mechanic for property rights and never one for wages. Most of the game world is treated as a sort of commons for all players with no way to lock players out of areas (and generally doings so is regarded as griefing rather than a legitimate way of playing the game), and the few that do allow for that, like EVE, don't use wage labor. The areas of nullsec owned by the player-run corporations might be able to effectively keep those outside of the owning alliance out, but within the alliance, there's usually either some kind of "keep what you make" rule or otherwise shit is just shared between members of the corp.
What's more, none of the MMOs I'm aware of operate on generalized commodity production. The basic functions and services of the game do not work on market principles. Most of the shit it takes to get to start playing the game doesn't cost anything and doesn't demand that the player sell their labor as a commodity to anyone else. What's more, there's typically NPC vendors who sell necessities at fixed prices and will buy your shit at similar fixed prices, meaning the players isn't completely beholden to the player-run economy to get along.
Leo Smith
I mean, doesn't Cockshott's plan already do this?
Ayden Jones
Just run a fucking autoarky in nullsec. Jesus.
Henry Baker
That's part of what made BDO so interesting to me, was that it did take pains to attempt modeling this. It's a very gamey-sort of interpretation (naturally), but an interesting sort of gamey. Much of the games items and goods can't be made by the player. Instead, you have to have workers make these things for you, in workshops you "rent" via allocation of resource points. Resource points are accrued through questing, and have a cap at 300, where the experience needed to gain more points starts to shoot up exponentially.
Players can do things like mine or, fish, that sort of raw material gathering, but by and large you have to have your workers do it. Workers take RP too iirc, so you have to distribute them according to what you need (mining iron ore for example) or refining it (into ingots) or forging it into weapons or whatever. The player can do simple things like smelting and wood cutting, but for production of finished goods, you have to have the requisite level workshop and the workers to operate and supply it. Workers and players both have a certain amount of stamina that when expended can't be replenished except by waiting/resting, or in the case of workers by providing them with food or drinks that refill their stamina (or boost results or whatever other effect).
Much of the later game involves player run guilds fighting over access to resources and control of regional points. A guild controlling a town for example gets discounts on what they buy and sell, and also get a percentage of all the tax on all the transactions within that town, which if its a major city or trading hub can be substantial due to the fact that players generally can't trade or sell items between them. Any sort of economic transaction between players has to go through the auction house, which takes a 30% cut of any sale. It also has a floor and ceiling for prices that shift based on what sold last and for how much. If items sell at the max price for example, it pushes the ceiling and floor upward, and vice versa if sold at the min price.
It's actually a really fascinating sort of system and reading about how they had to develop it to prevent early adopters from locking out newcomers sheds some interesting light on the free market and its effects on simulated economies like this one. You're right about these economies having shortcomings in function and representation, but I think that's a sacrifice to the god of gameplay and fun–for weakminded nerds that don't enjoy spreadsheet simulators, anyway.
EVE Online is studied by economists due to its completeness.. Raw materials are extracted from the environment, these can be processed in various ways to produce more complex commodities which are used for various purposes by the 30,000 or so players who are online at one time.. These commodities are then traded on an open market or at a contractual level between cooperating players.. Most of the community has pretty AnCapish sympathies.. "Communist" factions are rare.. Miners, often regarded as the bottom of the economic and social and military hierarchy, have tried to syndicalize many times, but so far it has proved fruitless because to their inability to punish a fairly sound equivalent of "scabs".. It actually illuminates the retardation of militant communism quite nicely: large numbers of unskilled/unemployed/unintelligent people will never win against small groups of skilled/professional/intelligent people. All successful enterprises in EVE have historically been accompanied by a leader, skilled professionals, initial specialization [a.k.a. having specific goals], and substantial money capital or social capital. The most successful enterprises have had all these along with large numbers of goyim/proles [as communists you should know the routine here: grunts in EVE online create surplus value for their leaders through their labor] and superior memetics [essential to military victories in the game]. I think it's a fairly good simulation of an economy and a human behavioral sink. It's missing a stock exchange [corporations are never "made public"], true human desperation [people can just quit the game if they get raped, which they do a lot] and true human fear [it's a video game].
It's free, make an account and go to Jita and make some observations…
