I wish we wouldn’t have posts like this that are just idle speculation about an area about which a good deal of expertise exists (virtual economies are built the way they are for a reason that generally has little to do with bits and bytes; there is plenty of specialized vocabulary about this, as DanielLC points out). Good posts should at least acknowledge that the expertise exists (which requires a bit of homework), and maybe explain some of the concepts if they are worth learning.
The vocabulary he linked to originates on tvtropes, not with anyone who has actual expertise in regulating game economies. There may be people with considerable expertise in this field, but if so, I doubt that’s the jargon they use, unless they picked it up from tvtropes; we certainly didn’t pick it up from them.
I do find it a bit hilarious how badly the economy of Neopets is managed. The administrators are completely blind to the realities of the system they’ve created, and the prices of goods on the site had increased in a range of one to three orders of magnitude while they were still reporting inflation levels in the single digit percentage range.
I wish we wouldn’t have posts like this that are just idle speculation about an area about which a good deal of expertise exists (virtual economies are built the way they are for a reason that generally has little to do with bits and bytes; there is plenty of specialized vocabulary about this, as DanielLC points out). Good posts should at least acknowledge that the expertise exists (which requires a bit of homework), and maybe explain some of the concepts if they are worth learning.
The vocabulary he linked to originates on tvtropes, not with anyone who has actual expertise in regulating game economies. There may be people with considerable expertise in this field, but if so, I doubt that’s the jargon they use, unless they picked it up from tvtropes; we certainly didn’t pick it up from them.
I do find it a bit hilarious how badly the economy of Neopets is managed. The administrators are completely blind to the realities of the system they’ve created, and the prices of goods on the site had increased in a range of one to three orders of magnitude while they were still reporting inflation levels in the single digit percentage range.