If you’re interested in gold farming, MMO economies, RMT (real-money trading), and microtransaction models in virtual worlds, these are a few recent blog posts by prominent MMO developers that go into awesome depth on their own systems.  Free information this good isn’t easy to come by, so check it out.  Shockingly, even the comments on the posts are good.

Matt Mihaly (created some popular microtransaction MUDs; is working on a browser-playable MMO) started off the discussion in February by talking about the dual-currency system they use successfully in Iron Realms’ text-based games. In short, the dual-currency system allows your non-paying users to indirectly drive demand for your for-pay virtual goods (while not pissing off either paying or non-paying users).

Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad; recently worked on a canceled MMO at NCSoft and is now also working on a browser-playable MMO) recently wrote a response with a very similar system he developed independently. His goal was the sharp reduction of unauthorized gold selling (since that’s money you, the developer, could be getting by selling the gold yourself).

Finally, Matt responded with his plan for another dual-currency system in the upcoming Earth Eternal.  He walks through some theorizing about what will happen when gold farmers try to sell to the Earth Eternal audience.  (Iron Realms is small enough that it hasn’t had to deal with the problem.)  It all sounds good, but it’ll be fun to see what happens when theory meets practice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Game Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.