Economy Design: Offline Activity

Section 1.11 of the Economy Design

In Rhizome's words:

When a player logs off from the game, her character stays in the world. What does that character do? When we role-play we often specify something for our characters to do rather than just disappear. It may be sleeping, tending a grove, hunting, whatever. The point is that in a world serious about RP there must be recognition that characters have lives beyond those time periods when their players are available to manipulate them. The basic notion of this offline dynamic, then, is to enable a player to specify activities a character will undertake while she is logged off and to receive benefits from those offline activities. This is relevant, in fact crucial, for the economy because one key possibility for characters to do while their players are offline is to work and earn money.

As a side note, I find joy in the notion that players will be working and doing other everyday sorts of things while their characters are as well. I can see that forging some interesting attachments between players and their characters. Anyway, on to more serious matters...

One reason why this should be an attractive idea, other than the realistic and deep RP value, is that it will discourage players from grinding and farming. If a PC can accumulate wealth while offline it will make waiting around for creatures and resources to respawn a poor choice of activity. In other words, we've created a situation where there are less returns for grinding, camping and farming. It would be more advantageous to seek out quest NPCs and to progress in an organization to achieve higher rates of quest rewards than to repeatedly kill monsters for coin. And that, in a sense, is what an economic design should be all about: influencing player behavior with regards to their attempts to achieve specific ends in a context of limited means. With this relatively simple system dynamic we've taken an innovative step towards one of our crucial objectives. And, it's a dynamic that will be attractive to players, to be sure.

One of the key strengths of the offline activity dynamic is that it is a very predictable and steady source of wealth into an economy. If PCs earn money based on their skills and abilities, and if those PCs are compensated for working standardized periods, then the rate of wealth into the economy, the “faucet rate” so to speak, can be easily estimated by simply knowing the number and skill level of each player in the world. Value added to the world can also be easily tracked by programs which monitor the payout of offline wages. 

Renumeration for work can come in a number of ways such as currency, items, prestige and skill progression.